Salman Rushdie: The Jaguar Smile

‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘it certainly does.’

She went back to my question. ‘No, they can’t give in. The war must go on. It’s difficult to know what to do. The revolution exists. It has to exist, or there’s no hope. But what problems! What difficulties! What grief!’

She had started crying again, and was fighting against it. I pretended to think it was just her heavy cold.

I was surprised and touched by the force of what she’d said, this sweet middle-class woman with her affluent complaints, whose mother might have lived if it hadn’t been for the shortages. ‘It has to exist, or there’s no hope.’

We parted in Madrid, and returned to our separate lives, two migrants making our way in this West stuffed with money, power and things, this North that taught us how to see from its privileged point of view. But maybe we were the lucky ones; we knew that other perspectives existed. We had seen the view from elsewhere.

The translations on this page–this page, this page–this page, this page, this page–this page, and this page are taken from Nicaragua in Revolution: The Poets Speak , ed. Aldaraca, Baker, Rodríguez and Zimmerman, MEP Publications, Minneapolis (with, in some cases, some small changes made by myself); that on this page from Nicaragua in Reconstruction and at War , ed. Marc Zimmerman, MEP Publications. I have also quoted from Risking a Somersault in the Air: Conversations with Nicaraguan Writers , by Margaret Randall, Solidarity Publications.

I should like to thank all those, in London and in Nicaragua, who gave me invaluable assistance and advice, most particularly Nicaragua’s Ambassador to the UK, H.E. Francisco d’Escoto; Biddy Richards; my interpreter, Margarita Clark; and, of course, Sra. Rosario Murillo and the ASTC.

I can find no adequate words of thanks for the hospitality I was shown by the people of Nicaragua.

SALMAN RUSHDIE is the author of nine novels— Grimus, Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the “Booker of Bookers”), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury , and Shalimar the Clown —and one collection of short stories, East, West . He has also published four other works of nonfiction: Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz, Mirrorwork , and Step Across This Line .

“Written with a novelist’s eye for irony and metaphor… [Rushdie] is able to make us see that the factual reality of this country already verges on the surreal.”

“To say of The Jaguar Smile that it is a work of art is to take full note of its literary allusions, its uncompromising sensitivity to death and destruction, its ready political eye for the funny and grotesque, and above all its understated and gripping eloquence.”

“A look at intelligence struggling, with limited success, not to be entirely extinguished in the service of faith … an account of the confusion any one of us might feel if we visited Nicaragua and gave it a chance to affect us, because it is an inescapably affecting land, crashing through abrupt change that escapes the easy categories of ideologues … good reading.”

“The account that emerges… is, as one would expect, quickened by a novelist’s eye.… Compelling.”

Grimus

Midnight’s Children

Shame

The Satanic Verses

Haroun and the Sea of Stories

East, West

The Moor’s Last Sigh

The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Fury

Shalimar the Clown

Imaginary Homelands

The Wizard of Oz

Step Across This Line

SCREENPLAY

Midnight’s Children

Mirrorwork (co-editor)

2008 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright © 1987, 1997 by Salman Rushdie

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Viking, a division of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., and in London by Pan Books in 1987.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Marxist Educational Press for permission to reprint the English translations of the poems that appear on this page–this page, this page–this page, this page, this page–this page, and this page. All translations were originally published in Nicaragua in Revolution: The Poets Speak , edited by Brigit Aldaracia, Edward Baker, Ileana Rodriguez, and Marc Zimmerman (Minneapolis, MN: Marxist Educational Press, 1980). Reprinted by permission of Marxist Educational Press.

eISBN: 978-0-307-78666-1

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Mario, who has been a stalwart friend and ally to me, has this at least in common with Daniel Ortega: that they both vociferously opposed the death threat of the 1989 Khomeini fatwa against my novel, The Satanic Verses . I should say, for the sake of objectivity, that it is Mario’s view, expressed on a French TV programme in which we both participated, that as I have grown older I have grown more politically sensible and therefore more conservative. I fear he may be right. I fear he may be wrong.