Salman Rushdie and Sir David Hume

Nathan Galloway 
EN376
11/20/19
Imaginary Homelands
Salman Rushdie, an Indian writer living in England, examines the mixed outcomes of creating an imaginative homeland in his essay Imaginary Homelands. He comes to the conclusion that these piecemeal ideas of home have great importance as a data point of home, but he warns about the use of a singular writer’s representation of home when it is applied to the general population. This conclusion is very important and is still needed almost forty years after Rushdie published his essay. However, one of the most essential building blocks of his argument is his understanding of the philosophical empiricism. 
David Hume, one of the founders of western Empiricism, argues in his book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, that all of our essential knowledge comes from our sensory experiences. I bring Hume’s argument up because Rushdie has elements of his argument that follow in close parallel to that of Hume. Rushdie’s image of the broken mirror, “some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost” cuts to the core of human understanding (Rushdie 11). If all of our knowledge about the world comes from what we see, taste, hear, smell, and touch and not from some innate knowledge of our world, then this broken mirror is all we will ever have. Our lives are a pilgrimage to complete our own mirror with pieces we choose, and pieces thrust upon us. 
This conclusion may seem daunting, but Rushdie offers consolation to the fatalism that can develop from this broken mirror image. Rushdie tells us that these mirrors are like ancient pots and the remains that make them up are vital to figuring out the lives of our ancestors (Rushdie 12). When we make our own mirrors, we show the world as we see it. When the broken mirrors of an entire civilization are respected, the rest of the world see what it might have been like to live their lives.
In my own home, broken mirrors are everywhere. In Baltimore, there is a gap between the number of mirrors from the white community and people of color. As a member of the white community, I need to find more mirrors that reflect experiences that are not my own and even show how my experience has been damaging to others. Finding these mirrors is not enough, however. Once these experiences are found in writing or oration, they need to be listened to and valued. This past weekend as the Ignatian Family Teach-In in Washington D.C. I was exposed to the difference between proper advocacy and damaging white saviorism. Advocacy is not standing for someone, or in this case writing/telling the story of someone else. Proper justice work is done when you stand with someone. 
This idea of standing with not for another group of people is a core argument of Rushdie’s. He even turns this idea on cultures themselves saying that each person’s experience is only valid as a representation of that singular experience. So, one representation of India does not stand for all of India. It can only stand with the millions of other experiences of the sub-continent. 

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