Honorary Degree Citation
by James DiedrickMr. President, I have
the honor of presenting Salman Rushdie for the degree of Doctor of Humane
Letters.
Salman
Rushdie has delighted, provoked, and inspired readers worldwide for four
decades. A native of Bombay and a citizen of the world, his eight novels
embrace what he has called “hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the
transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human
beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs.” In his fiction, which has
been translated into 37 languages, Mr. Rushdie transforms the migrant
condition, characterized by disjuncture and metamorphosis, into a compelling
metaphor for the human condition.
Midnight’s Children, Mr. Rushdie’s stunning epic of modern India, is
one of the most
important novels to come out of the English-speaking world in the last
century; it is to modern India what Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum is to
modern Germany or One Hundred Years of Solitude is to Colombia.
Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize—a British award akin to the
Pulitzer—in 1981, and the “Booker of Bookers” in 1993 for being the best
novel in the twenty-five year history of the award. In Midnight’s
Children, as in much of his fiction, Mr. Rushdie performs a
near-miraculous juggling act, employing and celebrating European and Indian
cultural forms and traditions even while critically examining the influence
of European culture on colonized societies.
In 1988, Mr. Rushdie’s novel The Satanic
Verses won the Whitbread Award and unleashed an international furor. In
response to the novel’s criticism of fundamentalist Islam, Iran’s Ayatollah
Khomeini issued a fatwa, or religious edict, condemning Mr. Rushdie
to death. Mr. Rushdie was forced into hiding for nearly 10 years, but
nonetheless published two important novels, including The Moor’s Last
Sigh in 1995. He also wrote a number of essays on intellectual freedom
during this period, and has continued to articulate his strong views on the
subject since then. The government of Iran lifted the fatwa in 1998.
In addition to
Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, Mr. Rushdie has
published the novels Grimus, Shame, Haroun and the Sea of
Stories, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet,
and Fury. He is also the author of a book of stories, East, West,
and four works of nonfictionThe
Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey;
Imaginary Homelands; The Wizard of Oz; and Step Across This
Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002. He is the co-editor of
Mirrorwork, an anthology of contemporary Indian writing, and he filmed
The Riddle of Midnight, a documentary recording the “shattered dreams
of Independence” through the eyes of his generation.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature,
Mr. Rushdie has also been awarded Germany's Author of the Year Prize, the
Budapest Grand Prize for Literature, the Austrian State Prize for European
Literature, and the Mantua Literary Award. He holds honorary doctorates at
five European and two American universities and is an honorary professor in
the humanities at M.I.T. He has been awarded the Freedom of the City Award
in Mexico City, and holds the rank of Commander in the Order of Arts and
Letters -- France's highest artistic honor. Mr. Rushdie has lectured at many prestigious educational
institutions, including a March 2003 visit to the University of Michigan
during the North American premiere of a Royal Shakespeare Company stage
adaptation of his book, Midnight’s Children.
Mr. President, Salman Rushdie . . .
