I heard an author interviewed on the radio. He described a character he had invented, a guy named Quixote (by the way, that’s the key shot), who himself had been invented by another character in the same book (Quichotte), who had already been invented by the author. The characters have families, each with a child, one imaginary, the other -well- imaginary, but at least in possession of a formally and formally imagined birth, the other the product of parthenogenesis.
All of these people, both the real-imaginary and the imaginary-real, live in the United States, among other places, a country that, to the extent of places, is regularly imagined and sometimes described. The author’s point, if it could exist in the singular, is that it was time to update the idea of Miguel de Cervantes, who four hundred years ago imagined a character named Quixote (key-ho-tay) emerging from the pages of a discarded Arabic text discovered in a second-hand stall in the Toledo market. By the way, that’s Toledo, Spain (population 84,282, taking up 232.1 square kilometers and 89.6 square miles, if you will). Or so they tell us. But he made it up, along with the popular culture-driven cultural craze of said Quixote (key-ho-tay) which demanded that he set off dressed as a movie star to do good in the world. Geddit?
Quixote proceeds in a parody of said key-ho-tay from one end of the United States to the other, accompanied by his real-imaginary and imagined-real playmates, old flames and the not-quite-imagined but seemingly unattainable beauty, Salma R, between them. They get up for something good, but they observe and relate efficiently. They interact with their relatives, mostly from Bombay, and with their acquaintances, who most often abuse them because of the color of their skin, which is brown, and consequently accuse them of being terrorists, bombers, jihadists or just general extremists before drawing their weapons. This makes our characters, both real-imaginary and imaginary-real, suffer important but mild identity crises. More accurately, their identities would be in crisis if they could ever find them or even define what they were looking for in their continuous search for said qualities. First rule: carry a weapon. Self defense. Get retaliated first. Rule two: read the book.
As I sit here in my room (population one), I imagine my rather privileged position. There can’t be many critics of a Don Quixote parody who can also claim to have written one. In pursuit of him, Donald Cottee, my own imaginary key-ho-tay, examines his identity and origins from the perspective of a second-hand Swift Sundance parked at a Benidorm campsite. In his radio interview Salman Rushdie, from now on called ‘the author’, spoke of his own origins.
The author went to Rugby public school – to our American friends public here means the exact opposite, private – blame the English – and sang Christian hymns in his Muslim voice at school assemblies. Also, for Americans again, rugby with a capital R is a city (population 100,500) and not to be confused with the sport of the same name, team population 13 or 15 depending on social class, whose name in fact is often spelled capitalized, first invented on the same premises, school, population 802, established 1567, not village, origins questionable, but probably iron age. It has progressed.
But he and his family, meaning the author Rushdie, and therefore their combined roots, were also from Bombay, if you’re English or maybe Portuguese, which most English people don’t appreciate, or from Mumbai if you’re Indian, but there is no such language as Indian, so this term must be applied to the residence. But of course the author Rushdie was not residing in Mumbai-Bombay at the time, hence his presence at Rugby (public school, where public equals private) where he tried to find out where and who he was.
And so to the United States where you are lumped together with others whose skin is dyed, colored (not orange or red, unless you’re Indian, but that’s another story) or brown, let’s call it black, by another broad church (C sometimes ) of people, whose skin is pink, red, but not Indian, or even orange, let’s call them white, who, if they live in New Jersey, need regular checkups to make sure they haven’t morphed into mastodons. Geddit?
Add to this heady mix an opioid manufacturer, fentanyl for sublingual use, just to be precise, terminal cancer, several close shaves involving gun owners trying to retaliate first, and plenty of run-ins with popular culture, Hollywood-Bollywood and similar, and you get to where you’ve been all along without consulting a map or making a plan. And we haven’t even mentioned a Dr. Smile or a Mr. DuChamp yet. Get it? Read the book. it’s splendid fun. Political. Perceptive. Now there is a word.