On Reading Haroun and the Sea of Stories

A poet’s work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep.
Salman Rushdie


The battle lines have been drawn. The forces of shadows, silence, and submission are poised to take on those of light, cacophony, and pluralism in the theater of war.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories was Salman Rushdie’s first book to appear in print after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—in February of 1988—pronounced a fatwa against the writer, condemning him to death for having offended the Prophet Muhammad in The Satanic Verses.

Overnight, Rushdie became the world’s best-known author. But as a result of the threat, the Mumbai-born writer was forced into a life of seclusion; and I believe that it is safe to assume that, often, he must have yearned for the days of anonymity.

Nevertheless, out of this turmoil—and as a way of explaining the situation to his son, Zafar—came Haroun.

This novel for young readers is a highly inventive fable. The linguistic experimentation of Rushdie’s work and the zaniness of its characters reminds the reader of Alice in Wonderland. In Kahani, the land of the imagination, where tales float about freely, there are some who wish to abolish creative expression because its lack of restrictions threatens the monolithic, single-voiced world in which they’ve chosen to live. As a result of their fear, they start to poison the sea of stories. Thus, as Lewis Carroll's lead character does in Wonderland, the situations Haroun faces can be disturbing.

But opposed to the forces of orthodoxy and unquestioned submission to authority are those who live in a society where individualism and freedom constitute the most highly valued traits. Their problem is that because of the wide spectrum of strongly held opinions, their debates about how to best engage the enemy always result in bedlam. And due to this, in the most critical moments of the narrative it appears that the adherents of personal liberty will be unable to defeat their singularly unified enemy.

Ultimately, however, the magic of freethinking and of the imagination swells like a tidal wave to crush the dogmatic and inquisitorial forces of their adversaries. And in spite of the difficulty the supporters of self-determination have in reaching an accord, in the end, through the vitality of their ideas, they prevail over the agents of conformity and tradition.

At the conclusion of Salman Rushdie’s work, perhaps the most important lesson readers will extract from Haroun and the Sea of Stories is that—although the slightest trace of dissent can give rise to feelings of despair in a free world—after the dust of war has settled, the society that will triumph is that one that's brave enough to draw upon the creative ideas of its citizenry, and then wait patiently until consensus is built.