Of course I had to read Salman Rushdie's 'A Sackful of Seeds' published in The New Yorker on December 5, 2022. This is an excerpt from his new novel titled 'Victory City' (2023) due to be released in February, or about now since the book's reviews are out.
This new novel is meant to be an epic, a story of two forgotten kingdoms, of adventure and love and myth. Set in 14th century India, nine-year-old Pampa Kampana becomes the vessel for her namesake goddess. Her tale spans 250 years. The New York Times's review on 27 January, 2022 wrote,
In “Victory City,” a new novel by Salman Rushdie, a gifted storyteller and poet creates a new civilization through the sheer power of her imagination. Blessed by a goddess, she lives nearly 240 years, long enough to witness the rise and fall of her empire in southern India, but her lasting legacy is an epic poem.
“All that remains is this city of words,” the poet, Pampa Kampana, writes at the end of her epic, which she buries in a pot as a message for future generations. “Words are the only victors.”
Framed as the text of a rediscovered medieval Sanskrit epic, “Victory City” is about mythmaking, storytelling and the enduring power of language. It is also a triumphant return to the literary stage for Rushdie, who has been withdrawn from public life for months, recovering from a brutal stabbing while onstage during a cultural event in New York last year.
This excerpt in The New Yorker follows the part of Pampa Kampana's life as she witnessed the mass suicide of her town's womenfolk and her own mother in a giant bonfire, and the exact moment that the goddess Parvati—Pampa taking possession of her voice and sharing the human body. Pampa the human has now become a prophet and a miracle worker.
Pampa took refuge with a monk for the next nine years. The supposedly philosophical monk wasn't that firm ideologies and morals; he sexually abused her too. But she didn't utter a word. She didn't speak again till nine years later. At age eighteen, Pampa spoke, and advised two brothers Hukka and Bukka Sangama to go to the sacred place where Pampa's mother died, and from a sackful of seeds, they grew a city, people and soldiers.
Coming toward them through the crowd, dressed in an ascetic’s simple saffron wrap and carrying a wooden staff, was Pampa Kampana, with whom they were both in love. There was a fire blazing in her eyes.
“We built the city,” Hukka said to her. “You said when we had done that we could ask you for your real name.”
So Pampa Kampana told the brothers her name, and congratulated them. “You’ve done well,” she said. “They just needed someone to whisper their dreams into their ears.”
Everyone came from a seed, she added. Men planted seeds in women and so forth. But this was different. A whole city, people of all kinds and ages, blooming from the earth on the same day, such flowers have no souls, they don’t know who they are, because the truth is they are nothing. But such truth is unacceptable. It was necessary, she said, to do something to cure the multitude of its unreality. Her solution was fiction. She was making up their lives, their castes, their faiths, how many brothers and sisters they had, and what childhood games they had played, and sending the stories whispering through the streets into the ears that needed to hear them. She was writing the grand narrative of the city, creating its story now that she had created its life. Some of her stories came from her memories of lost Kampili, the slaughtered fathers and the burned mothers; she was trying to bring that place back to life in this place, to bring back the old dead in the newly living, but memory wasn’t enough, there were too many lives to enliven, and so imagination had to take over from the point at which memory failed.
“My mother abandoned me,” she said, “but I will be the mother of them all.”
No comments:
Post a Comment