By Rashida Murphy
“All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.”
T.S. Eliot
Salman Rushdie’s 2017 novel, The Golden House, has an Australian hypnotist in a transnational cast of characters ranging from Mumbai ex-cons to Belgian filmmakers in New York. It is a typical Rushdie novel, full of verbal pyrotechnics and not-so-obscure political references, but it is the Australian character I puzzle over. Nothing wrong at all in placing an Australian in the heart of Manhattan. But one that speaks with a Kiwi accent?Rushdie’s hypnotherapist speaks in a grimly unfunny and terribly clipped way that mocks the Kiwi accent, not the Australian one. Especially when you consider that Rushdie was in a brief relationship with Australian writer Robyn Davidson in the 1980s, you wonder if the gaff is deliberate or an oversight. And whether, in a convoluted way, Rushdie is attempting to reverse centuries of negative portrayals of brown people in white fiction.
