Imaginary Homelands by Salmon Rushdie

            Using metaphors and repetition, Salmon Rushdie uniquely unfolds his life story and what he makes out of it. Communicating through this short experience, he allows us to feel "out of place". Being foreign and an immigrant, he wants us to relate to exile. We do not belong. Taking a look at page 85, paragraph 1, we can observe an example of his usage and repetition. This repetition of a "lost" home and "lost" city is what he uses to enforce a feeling of loneliness. The metaphors such as page 88, paragraph 5, "The broken mirror- and page 89, paragraph 2, "The broken pots of antiquity," gives us a feeling of destruction and devastation. Why so much negativity? What is he trying to tell us? He hints, from this, that he didn't have such a great past; he had lived a troubled life, and by sharing his experience, he wants us to understand that he lived a dangerous life full of risk and loneliness.
             We portray a world as the way we see it in our everyday lives; forgetting our fretful past but the descriptive details he provides unfurls his life to us, as if we are in his body, giving us a sense of "his reality." Such details may be detected on page 85, paragraph 1, as he precisely describes "an old photograph in a cheap frame" of a "1946 house." He describes it as a "three storied gabled affair with tiled roofs and round towers in two corners, each wearing a pointy tiled hat." Other memories such as page 89, .
             paragraph 1, the "neon Jeep sign Marine Drive, toothpaste ads for Binaca- and the jingo, "Esso puts a tiger in your tank," allow us to picture ourselves in that particular past moment and that particular place. Reading along the lines of his vivid, yet disturbing choice of negative words, we find ourselves wrapped in his emotions and encountering his experiences with him, feeling as if we are the one in his shoes.
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