Cover of The Satanic VersesThe Carnivalesque Phantasmagoria Ride of Religious Fury
by Theo Cecil DeCelles
Welcome all to the roller coaster mutant ride somewhere past the crispy zesty rainbow. I present to you the most thrilling ride here at Six Six Six Flags called Rush to Die inspired by Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Was the rainbow you just walked over on a wobbly catwalk real or was the rainbow just a cheap Disneyland rip-off that uses lasers and poof? As you can see the thrill ride appears to be quite dangerous but folks don't be daunted. Over there is an optical illusion where you riders might derail and crash into a jailhouse hell called British Immigration.
There at British Immigration, amusement park employees wearing Nazi uniforms claiming authentic English ancestry are torturing the new English immigrants with pitchforks. "How dare they let in these devilish rogues into the purest land in the world, even if we can't decide if we are Norman or Anglo-Saxon, these tinted skinned aliens are probably in line with the third coming of the Antichrist that was a Paki, he turned our tasty fish and chips into chips and curry," they may say. If the roller coaster actually doesn't derail, you will find the ride soaring into the clouds where you will see mirages of robotic goddesses hanging from wires. Some will declare, "How do they do that? Are helicopters jangling the three Arabian goddesses Lat, Manat, and Uzza?" Ah, the world of illusion is quite mysterious. Even prophets, messengers, and businessmen cloying for the top know how to deceive the masses. Anybody can convince anybody of seeing mesmerizing mirages of authoritarianism with film effects, sponsored by Coca-Colonization.
Once you descend with the Angel Gibreel out of the clouds, the ride stops and you will need to walk into a floating ancient maze made out of sand. Sandcastles in the sky get me high. There is a replica of a temple in Jihilia. In the temple there are three hundred and sixty idols including images of al-Lat (The Goddess), al-Uzza (Strong), and Manat (Fate), and Allah (The God). They will not be singing the song It's a Small World. The devilish at Six Six Six Flags will never dare torture you with a song so sweetly passive-aggressive than all of hellfire. There in the temple you will see such Earthly beauty that even you, the flocks of moral aptitude, will be tempted. To the left al-Uzza will mesmerize you with the morning and evening star. Beside her, the springtime sun will rise above al-Lat. Manat is the goddess of death. I quite like her. The moon will rise above her, and if you dare violate any graves that she protects, beware you will be cursed. To the right is Allah and what does he look like? You will have to go on this ride to see. You will be given a choice, shall you go with the goddesses, or shall you go with Allah? To the left or the right, and why can't it be in between? What would the world have been like if Islam submitted to three goddesses and a god? What if the ancient tribe of Quraysh didn't stop circling the Ka'bah in Mecca with chants to the three goddesses only to submit only to Allah? What if those who submitted never would have destroyed the temples of the goddesses? Should have, would have, could have, there are too many haves in those questions that it bores me, now onward to the more theoretical part of the thrill ride for the brainy. Trust me it's a scream!
The Goddess al-Lat
From the temple you will slide down a giant golden slide to view a large movie screen that we cosmopolitan infidels of the West shudder in fear when seeing the now dead Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini with his manly finger of righteousness pointing to the heavens as he sermons "Death to America with love!" Beside him is an automaton of Maggie the Bitch. Margaret Thatcher will spout how the winner of the Man Booker Prize shows how the Commonwealth of Nations can write quite well. Then Maggie will start arguing with the giant screen of Khomeini. She looks quite dour as she waves her fist at him. Although, rumors are that General Aladeen is jealous that the Irananians get all the attention, and he yearns to replace the gigantic screen of Khomeini to advertise the Republic of Wadiya instead. Iran's current leader the handsome international playboy of the Middle East, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is rumored to have purported in a Hustler Magazine gossip column that "General Aladeen needs to learn that being a religious dictator doesn't have to be an actual dictatorship, all you have to do is know the right people that know how to give the right type of death sentences to foreign nationals." I wouldn't know whether if the story is true or not because I don't read Hustler Magazine because I don't like the advertisements.
We spent millions of dollars on this amusement park ride. You will then enter a plastic spaceship designed by Japanese anime and manga students. After the spaceship lands you will be beyond all the rainbows, beyond Saturn's rings, deep in a land called The Transit Lounge. A transitional world of liminal space. The things that inhabit the liminal space can be individuals or groups. If they are individuals then they stand outside society like footy hooligans and prostitutes. Life after death is not fair, Spoono's dreaded buddy Farishta mutates into an angel and Chamcha mutates into a freakish demon in the "in-between" world. See Chamcha the goat-man! The West sees his subhuman goatiness as so grotesque that he has to be hidden in an attic like a terrorist, but he was perhaps quite scarier before the mutation if you ask me. Being a Muslim man that is in love with being English but detests his former Indian identity is never easy to view. Don't run away when you see Chamcha magically mutate right before your eyes into a goat-man, and as his penis pulsates bigger and smaller, his horns will grow and retract. But hey, I know what you are thinking, it ain't that kind of ride.
Bollywood womanizer with bad breath Gibreel Farishta is so revered and romanticized, being rich and all, that he is exulted to the same league of the holy men, he is as holy as the ascetics, he might even be higher than those Jains that walk around naked covered in ashes and refrain from sex, and oh, that Bollywood lad Farishta is so spiritual, because India is nothing but the land of spirituality and hashish, thus Farishta's mutation grants him a halo (especially since he returns home to mother India to revive his acting career). Growing an elephant trunk would have him permanently typecast as Ganesha, but his mutation that the industrious west creates as a stereotype, which dehumanizes as well as exults, doesn't quite help Farishta's acting career. Yes sir, some have said that seeing the Angel Gibreel on a movie screen moralizing about the sins of mankind was just a bit too kitschy in an era when the Hindu gods and goddesses have onscreen powers more dazzling than Superman, Batman, and the Jedi all combined.
While in The Transit Lounge refreshments are served for a price. While there you will see an African woman's black skin mutate into translucent glass but will be shattered by the Nazi amusement park employees. See the African wild woman trying to pick her shattered life off the floor probably in the way Humpty Dumpty tried to frantically put his shell back together again before giving up. Religious fraternities, ethnic minorities, social minorities, Non-reservation Native Americans, transgender and immigrant groups are all betwixt and between and all of them exist in the freak show of The Transit Lounge. A liminal space becomes a liminal state when one is between wakefulness and sleep. In the surreal world of The Transit Lounge you are in the dream of somebody else. Who dreams the dream for other people's dreams? Perhaps it is Farishta's dream when he is 'halfway to sleep" (113). Perhaps it's the Angel Gibreel's dream, because "Gibreel in his dual role is both above-looking-down and below-staring up" (114). Angels are everywhere in The Transit Lounge as they are intermediaries in the liminal space between heaven and hell.
The three Arabian goddesses are there in The Transit Lounge waiting to entertain all of you with belly dances, along with all the other intermediaries as animatronics. You will see fantastic creatures on Mount Coney that looms menacingly sublime in the middle of The Transit Lounge. Rushdie is influenced by The Wizard of Oz, so as to appease the ticket paying masses, The Transit Lounge has been designed to be halfway between Oz and Verses, you will see monkeys with wings, trees with faces, munchkins, melting witches, a wizard and speaking lions, and you will also see a manticore, a throbbing goat-man/devil, Allah, djinns, a lecherous speaking wolf, angels and winged Goddesses as fantastical creatures galore!
Theorist Mikhail Bahktin is right-o when he says that Rushdie is carnivalesque. Indeed-o in regards to the Fatwa, what Khomeini actually did was make Rushdie even more famous, and readers bought the New York Times #1 Bestseller to read what all the fuss was about. The spirituality of the novel was ignored. Islam is criticized and celebrated as a powerful religious faith in The Satanic Verses, but many curious minds want to know... Curious minds bought The Satanic Verses to analyze the blasphemy, and any spirituality that the novel espouses will always be overshadowed by the controversy. So as you exit The Transit Lounge, look out for the amusement park employees, many that are actual illegal aliens as they make the amusement park more profitable, they are dressed in real saris and turbans beating effigies of flaming Salman Rushdie's with wet mops. Some have accused the set designer of making a poor replica of Salman Rushdie saying he looks quite weedy like a scarecrow. Throwing shoes at any of the Salman Rushdie effigies is against amusement park regulations.
Mahound's faith in Allah is so great that when Abu Simbel the Grandee of Jihilia's wife named Hind challenges Mahound for Allah to concede by having the three Arabian goddesses become daughters of Allah, or to be subservient intermediaries, or lesser than a male god (115), he faces his people and tells them that the acceptance of the three goddesses was an error, and that God is one. Mahound's faith in Allah is strong enough that he even fights the Angel Gibreel in the nude even after the angel cops a feel (125). It is the nature of the author to express the shadows between darkness and the light where novelty is created in the novel. As you make your way past the park employees, make sure you buy some gift shop souvenirs in The Transit Lounge airport that will fly you to no place like home on Bostan, Flight AI-420. Enjoy the movie that will be playing on the flight that will put your minds into a liminal state. We will play the film The Wizard of Oz paired with the film soundtrack of The Wall album by Pink Floyd. Far below the amber-scotch clouds you will see nothingbutsea.
The liminal effects will be strong enough just as in the novel where Rushdie invents hybrid words as butterfly words metamorphose, “Notsleep” (114) is not just a stylized way of writing, words are morphing, becoming new, and in many cases are actually better as one word rather than three or four words. We must thank the immigrants that improve and reinvent the English language.
Three terrorists will have a debate as they hold all of you as hostages. Two males and one female, and the female will say, "Even if the English language is becoming mongrel and diverse, we must examine the holy trinity of what the first world thinks about being purely English, or even purely European, or purely all-American, the analysis of three stereotypes that western society targets us people from the third world are: stinky, primitivism, and threatening. In the name of the father of stereotype number one, we from the third world are thought to STINK and they say we are unclean for we do not shower and must use deodorant, the smell of manure and wild nature mixed with exotic spices of cardamom and curry follows us everywhere we go. In the name of the son of the three stereotypes, a primitivist stereotype that targets we the third world immigrants as ANIMALS, some of my subhuman sisters have hooves and some of my brothers have tails. In the name of the holy ghost of western stereotypes about we the third world exiles, immigrants, refugees, etc. are that we are DANGEROUS and must be kept confined in a sanatorium should we infect the rest of their society with our mongrel ways. (171) Stink Animals Dangerous S.A.D.
This ride is scary, watch out for the bomb that the hijacking terrorists will detonate, I hope that you don't panic when you unexpectedly drop from the sky in a simulation of falling from a plane, and please don't vomit, amusement park rides are not for the wary. Vertigo can be uncomfortable and thrilling simultaneously. This amusement park is a simulacra of heaven and hell. Funtoosh! "Life always changes after the fall" and everybody knows that Shaitan knows that, and that is why The Great Satan, we the people of the fallen United States are just one of many leaders of world change. Being a devil's advocate by questioning power has never been easy. Now if you excuse me, I'm on my way from Six Six Six Flags to Coney Island.
Source: Rushdie, Salaman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2008
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