N the title of his 
book. Imaginary 
Homelands, the author 
Salman Rushdie 
recalls returning for 
the first time, after 
several years of abs 
e n c e t o m e c i t y of 
his birth, Bombay, 
to which he refers, almost sadly, as 
'my lost city.' During his trip Rushdie 
visits the house where, in 1947, he 
was born, before his family moved 
'across the borders to that unnameable 
country', and before he was 
sent away to England never to return. 
He does of course return, in a manner 
of speaking, to a house that he imagined in 
monochrome, his memory formed largely by 
an old black and white family photograph 
upon which he had called time and again in 
his expatriation and upon which he had come 
to rely with certainty greater than faith. He 
returns to the site of his childhood and discovers 
something he most certainly would have 
stumbled upon again and again as he prepared 
himself for his homecoming, and would 
have repeatedly and off-handedly swept away 
as we all are wont to, a source of profound 
trepidation, something greater than loss, 
namely, the fear of loss. As he weighs the 
rather strange relationship between him and 
the city of his birth, excited yet deeply frightened 
and uncertain, like one about to meet a 
long-lost love on whom they had walked out, 
he is drawn to find what memories of him the 
old love had retained, had allowed to remain, 
had saved from obliteration. He turns to the 
telephone book to see if the city still rememman 
Loyalties 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 1 GLENPORA r.vi. 
bered him and his family, and sure enough it 
did, more out of that indifference which all 
memorials and monuments possess, than any 
special concern for one, undistinguished family 
out of a million, and this in the most 
appropriate medium of all inert memories; the 
telephone book. While the returnee cowers in 
trepidation and writhes in the grips of emotion, 
the city betrays nothing, gives little, 
recalls only partially. On the tablet of the city's 
mind we are only a record, nota recollection. 
Our bond with the site of our nativity is 
a largely one-way affair. It is an ambivalent 
bond borne out of a one-sided loyalty and a 
proclivity to possess, a desperate striving to 
belong, to lay claim to something that lays no 
claim in return. Severed from the womb and 
the body that bore us and hauled into the void 
of life and existence, we crave to attach 
ourselves to something, a monument, a location, 
an event; we crave an anchor which we 
readily find in the contours of the house of our 
upbringing, in the streets of our childhood, in 
the city of our birth. But the city has a different 
desire and a different response, for we need 
the city more than the city needs us. In his 
essay Rushdie quotes L.P. Hartley where he 
writes that the 'past is a foreign country, they 
do things differently there.' We may in fact 
paraphrase Hartley and say that the past, 
including the city of our birth, the geographies 
that define our beginnings and for 
which, ever so often, we are called upon to 
die, is in a significant sense a foreign country 
where we never belonged. It is a place to 
which we are tied not by a mutual care or love 
but by trepidation, by a profound fear on our 
part of the loss of the familiar. The idea of our 
city's special love is a fiction of our own
©Jennifer Bishop, American Photography - 1 1th Annual Edition African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 1 GLENDORA r^
making, a necessary justification for our possessive 
fixation on it. The conviction that we 
own the city, that in losing our place to others 
or to distance we lose that which belongs to 
us, that to which we have an exclusive right, 
derives in no small measure from the wish not 
to compete for the attention of something 
whose love we crave, but fear, even know, 
that it does not love us back. It is as much a 
craving to own as it is an appeal to be owned. 
And as for city, so for country In time, this 
apprehension transforms into a romantic longing 
in the hold of which we are blinded to the 
specifics of our relationship Everything takes 
on a different hue; the ugly turns unique, the 
trivial symbolic. We argue the illogical, defend 
the indefensible, stake out the frontiers 
and keep out others. We weep at the sound 
of the anthem and worship the flag. We 
descend into the habit of kissing the earth. 
And there is no love more blind than the love 
of country. We spend our lives in the shadow 
of the knowledge that the city may not remember 
us, that upon our departure the city will 
forget.
Which is why after departure we 
crave, yet fear, to return. Rushdie returns to his 
father's former house in Bombay and finds, 
also, that memory is an untrustworthy friend, 
especially memory committed to print. Where 
he had been led to expect monochrome, to 
wish for and desire monochrome, he is met 
with the dazzle of colours, and his fear returns 
to him, coupled now with a confirmation of 
the loss which he had feared. Where he had 
expected the straight he is met with undulations, 
the simple replaced by the multiple, 
quiet displaced by life, recollections thrown 
into doubt. Memory had manufactured for 
him, in the safety of time and distance, a false 
vision of the familiar with which he must now 
be met or else is left lonely and betrayed. In 
the end, excitement is dislodged by bitterness, 
by a certain hollowness within not unlike 
the god-hole Rushdie would describe years 
later in a different context, a touch of disappointment 
with ourselves but more so with the 
site of our pilgrimage. It is a strange, mixed 
feeling when we return to meet an old love. 
The smile is never truly free, the first handshake 
never firm, and the hole in the heart that 
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we bring with us is never completely filled. 
Often we find there is more than time between 
us and the one we come to reclaim. Yet, this 
encounter is the beginning of recovery from 
our feeling of unbroachable tragedy. Departure, 
and return, are our best cures for the 
irresoluble attachment to the geography of 
our beginnings. By leaving, by venturing 
beyond the borders of the familiar, we put our 
fear, and our love, to test. We bring our 
attachment into crisis. 
An Igbo aphorism has it that the travelled 
youth is endowed with greater wisdom 
than even his gray-haired countryman father 
In Jonathan Swift's 1726 classic, Gulliver's 
Travels, the protagonist, Lemuel Gulliver, after 
a shipwreck on the high seas finds himself 
in an epic and enriching adventure of eight 
years that takes him to four kingdoms and to 
peoples and cultures of statures and virtues 
never before known to his English sensibilities. 
Yet it is his return to London at the end of 
this journey, upon which he is forcibly consigned 
to an asylum and made to prove his 
sanity and wholesomeness under the rigours 
of the rule of reason, that proves the most 
revealing and rewarding lesson of all his 
adventures. Upon return Gulliver discovers 
the opposite of something which hitherto he 
was wont to take for granted, namely the right 
to country. Feted by the benevolent giants of 
Brobdingnag and tested by the philosopher 
horses of Houyhnhmland, Lemuel Gulliver 
returns to his country to find he is the stranger 
in a savage nation where reason is placed at 
the service of brutal power. He survives the 
dangers of a distant world and returns with 
the certainty to find love and unconditional 
acceptance in his own country. But the city of 
his birth is a lesson in the profound uncertainty 
of all claims to geography. 
Far more than endow us with wisdom, 
therefore, departure, and return, reveal to us 
also, the folly of unquestioning love of home 
and country, and the possessive bigotry that 
is bred from it. While our lives in expatriation 
may yet be ruled by the craving to return and 
reclaim, return confronts us with the loss we 
feared, and places us on the path to recovery, 
for in revealing the imaginary nature, and 
ultimate futility of our claims, we are made to
question the foundations of our love and 
loyalty, and of our tenacious defence of 
territory. Distance and its negation become 
the cycle we must follow in order to discover 
an original truth, one which, though it leaves 
us with the sadness of unrequited love, ultimately 
sets us free. Rushdie refers to Bombay 
as 'my lost city' and in this recognizes that the 
Bombay of his loss is a city of the imagination, 
an indefinable construct unto which his desires 
and projections are latched, he recognizes 
also, that bonds that are manufactured 
in the confines of the imagination must equally 
find their unravelling in the seamlessness of 
the imag ination, outside the pressures of rhetoric 
and passion 
Swift s moral tale, too, is an investigation 
into the geographies of the imaginary 
where, outside the reign of reason and convention, 
our true migratory nature finds sanctuary. 
There are we able not only to play out 
the distortionary configurations of our fictions 
of peculiarity but also to supersede them. 
Lemuel Gulliver's fantastic journey emerges 
from the imagination yet stimulates the disentangling 
powers of real distance and removal. 
In the landscapes of the imaginary 
where our fictions of ownership are formed, 
there, too, are we allowed to question the 
certainty of our affiliations to mine under the 
foundations of our convictions, and to expose 
ourselves if only for an intermission, to the 
possibility of a fundamental infidelity in the 
bond between us and the physical geographies 
that we claim for ourselves. There the 
monochrome of memory invites us not to latch 
unto and battle for the supposed truth which it 
decidedly betrays, but to construct a new 
reality, to build a new world on the uncertainties 
of the imagined, to realise how city and 
country and place are all of our own making 
and therefore loose without permanent anchor. 
In the temporal ambience of its appearance, 
Swift's interrogation of the certainties of 
geography was, perhaps, ahead of its time, 
located at the exact media between 
Copernicus's challenge to the dogma of our 
planet's peculiarity which, a century later, 
would bring Galileo before the Inquisition, 
and Rushdie's return to the lost city of his birth. 
In all three instances, however, what is shared 
is the ability of the transcendent spirit to reveal 
the fictiveness of our claims over territory. 
Corpenicus made the leap beyond the ideological 
restraints of a domineering faith and 
the physical constraints of rudimentary science, 
and in his monument of removal from 
the immediate perimeters of his location confirmed 
our inconsequence in the vast patterns 
to the universe. Through Lemuel Gulliver, 
Swift transported rationalist England beyond 
the strictures of its bondage to myopic logic to 
discover not only the existence of territories 
outside the cartographic confines of a North 
Sea Isle, but the presence in those territories, 
also, of knowledge and cultures to challenge 
it's claims to a superior disposition. 
In both cases, the reaction of those not 
enamoured of the revelatory benefits of translocation 
is to submit to the fear that the 
anchors of their faith and loyalties are about 
to unhinge, that ideas and delineations which 
they had hitherto taken for certain are under 
threat of exposure. The consequence of this 
fear is a blind resistance, and a battle to 
restore the fictions of certainty. Under the 
guise of loyalty to city and nation, this struggle 
to hold unto territory and geography calls 
upon the instruments of power and human 
regulation in order to expunge the body of 
threat and shut the window on the world. 
Today we find this in the fierce individual and 
legislative struggles against digital subversion 
of territorial cartographs and borders 
and affirmation of interzonality through the 
thoroughfares of the information super highway. 
We find it in the increasing appearance, 
even along those thoroughfares, of 
struggles of regulation that negate the very 
idea of interzonality and instead reaffirm 
territorial claims. 
In the end our greatest hope lies, it 
seems, in the individual will to depart, to allow 
ourselves beyond the border, like Rushdie, 
and Gulliver before him, and upon return to 
discover, and acknowledge, the fictionality of 
assumed geographies and imagined affinities, 
this way opening ourselves, the doors of 
our consciousness, to the bountiful revelations 
of a seamless world. GR 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol 2/No- 1 GLENOORA