Salman Rushdie - Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

When she stood up at last she was different again, no longer a princess or even a daughter but a dark queen terrible in anger, golden eyed and trailing clouds of smoke from her head instead of hair. Geronimo Manezes, waking up in his armchair, understood that this was what his life had always had in store for him, the uncertainty of being, the bewilderment of change — he dozed off in one reality and woke up in another. The illusion of Ella Elfenbein’s return had both unnerved and overjoyed him and it had been easy to sink towards belief in it but his portage to Peristan had fatally undermined that and now the sight of the Queen of Qâf revealed in angry beauty finished off Ella’s ghost. And in Dunia too, Skyfairy the Lightning Queen, there was a change of heart. She had seen Ibn Rushd reborn in Geronimo but the truth was that she was leaving the old philosopher behind at last, recognizing that that antique love had turned to dust and its reincarnation, while pleasing, could not rekindle the old fire, or only momentarily. She had clung to him for a moment but now there was work to do and she knew how she would try to do it.

You, she said to Geronimo Manezes, not as a lover might address her lover but as an imperious matriarch, a grandmother with hair growing out of a mole on her chin, for example, might address a junior member of her dynasty. Yes. Let’s start with you.

He was a boy in shorts shuffling his feet before his grandmother and answering her in a scolded mumble. I can’t hear you, she said. Speak up.

I’m hungry, he said. Is it possible to eat first, please.

A few words about ourselves. It is hard for us as we look back to put ourselves in the shoes of our ancestors, for whom the arrival in the midst of their everyday life of the implacable forces of the metamorphic, the descending avatars of transformation, represented a shocking disruption in the fabric of the real; whereas in our own time such activity is the commonplace norm. Our mastery of the human genome allows us chameleon powers unknown to our predecessors. If we wish to change sex, well then, we straightforwardly do so by a simple process of gene manipulation. If we are in danger of losing our tempers, we can use the touch pads embedded in our forearms to adjust our serotonin levels, and we cheer up. Nor is our skin color fixed at birth. We adopt our hue of choice. If, as passionate football fans, we decide to acquire the pigmentation of our favorite team, the Albiceleste or the Rossonero, then hey presto! we colorize our bodies in blue and white stripes, or dramatic red and black. A woman artist in Brazil long ago asked her countryfolk to name their own skin colors and produced tubes of paint to represent each shade, each pigment named as the possessors of the color wished, Big Black Dude, Light Bulb, and so on. Today she would run out of tubes before she ran out of color variations; and it is widely believed and generally accepted by all of us that this is an excellent thing.

This is a story from our past, from a time so remote that we argue, sometimes, about whether we should call it history or mythology. Some of us call it a fairy tale. But on this we agree: that to tell a story about the past is to tell a story about the present. To recount a fantasy, a story of the imaginary, is also a way of recounting a tale about the actual. If this were not true then the deed would be pointless, and we try in our daily lives to eschew pointlessness whenever possible.

This is the question we ask ourselves as we explore and narrate our history: how did we get here from there?

A few words, too, on the subject of lightning. Being a form of celestial fire, the thunderbolt was considered historically to be the weapon of powerful male deities: Indra, Zeus, Thor. One of the few female deities to wield this mighty weapon was the Yoruba goddess Oya, a grand sorceress who, when in a bad mood, which she often was, could unleash both the whirlwind and the sky-fire, and who was believed to be the goddess of change, called upon in times of great alteration, of the rapid metamorphosis of the world from one state to the next. She was a river goddess too. The name of the river Niger in Yoruba is Odo-Oya.

It may be, and it seems to us probable, that the story of Oya had its origin in an earlier intervention into human affairs — perhaps several millennia ago — of the jinnia Skyfairy, in the present narrative known mostly by her later name of Dunia. In those ancient times Oya was believed to have had a husband, Shango the Storm King, but eventually he disappeared from view. If Dunia had once had a husband, and if he had been killed in some previous, unrecorded battle of the jinn, that may account for her fondness for the similarly bereaved Geronimo. That is one hypothesis.

As to Dunia’s power over water as well as fire, it may well have existed, but it is not a part of our present narrative and we have no information about it. As for the reason why she was partly responsible for just about everything that happened to people on earth during the time of the strangenesses, the tyranny of the jinn and the War of the Worlds, however, that will be made plain before we’re done.

When African traditions made their way into the New World on the slave ships, Oya came along for the ride. In the Brazilian rites of Candomblé she became Yansa. In syncretic Caribbean Santería her image was merged with that of the Christian Black Madonna, the Virgin of Candelaria.

However, Dunia, like any jinnia, was far from virginal. She was the fecund matriarch of the Duniazát. And as we well know by now, her descendants too had the gift of lightning in their hands, although almost none of them knew it until the strangenesses began and such things became thinkable. In the battle against the dark jinn, this lightning became a crucial weapon. And so it was that lightning freaks, a group accused during the mighty paranoia of those days of being behind the disruptions that became known as the strangenesses, in fact became the prominent and eventually legendary front line of the resistance to the Zumurrud gang of dark jinn as it set out to colonize, even to enslave, the peoples of the earth.

And just a very few words about the Zumurrud project. Conquest was something entirely new for the jinn, to whom empire does not come naturally. The jinn are meddlesome; they like to interfere, to lift this one up, to cast that one down, to plunder a treasure cave or throw a magic spanner in a rich man’s works. They like the making of mischief, mayhem, anarchy. They have traditionally lacked management skills. But a reign of terror cannot be effective through terror alone. The most effective tyrannies are characterized by their excellent powers of organization. Efficiency had never been Zumurrud the Great’s long suit; scaring people was his game. Zabardast the sorcerer jinni, however, turned out to be an excellent nuts-and-bolts person. But he wasn’t perfect, and nor were his lesser cohorts, and so the new scheme of things was (fortunately) full of holes.

Before they returned to the lower world Dunia opened the secret doors in Mr. Geronimo’s head that led to the jinn nature hidden within him. If you could cure yourself of the weightlessness plague and bring yourself back to earth without even knowing who you were, she told him, then imagine what you’ll be able to do now. Then she put her lips to his temples, first the left one, then the right, and whispered, “Open.” Immediately it was as if the universe itself opened and spatial dimensions whose existence he had never known about became visible and usable, as if the frontiers of the possible had been pushed outwards and much became feasible that had been unfeasible before.