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Hanif Kureishi has disavowed being influenced by Salman Rushdie as a novelist: "His writing is not like my writing in any way. We're quite different" (qtd. in Ashraf). Nevertheless, Kureishi's second novel, The Black Album, reveals several traces of his friend's monumental The Satanic Verses. Most obvious are the overt references to the controversy surrounding the publication of The Satanic Verses. The Black Album is set in the late 80s at the time of the fatwa, and Kureishi's characters argue about Rushdie's book, which, in one of the narrative's climaxes, is publicly burnt by a group of fundamentalist Muslim students at a nondescript college in the slums of northwest London. Moreover, The Black Album reinscribes some of the main themes of The Satanic Verses. Like Rushdie, Kureishi is concerned with the plight of the migrant denied a unitary identity because he is shunted back and forth between two cultures (each of which is itself internally divided and subdivided) and invited to adopt a variety of sometimes contradictory subject positions. Such a dilemma is painful, even potentially tragic, but Kureishi shows that it also contains possibilities for growth and creativity. What Rushdie has said of The Satanic Verses is also ultimately true of The Black Album: it "celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure" ("In Good Faith" 394).
In addition to analyzing some of the intertextual links between Kureishi's novel and The Satanic Verses, this essay will chart the process whereby the young protagonist of The Black Album, Shahid Hasan, comes to accept the fluid, mongrelized condition of both the self and society at large and to reject the purity of a dogmatic, totalizing religious faith; furthermore, the essay will examine the curious split between the narrative content of The Black Album (which could be labeled postcolonialist and postmodernist) and the narrative form (which, unlike that of The Satanic Verses, is linear, unself-conscious realism). Whereas Kureishi's screenplays (particularly Sammy and Rosy Get Laid) are formally fragmented, elliptical and, in places, surrealistic, in The Black Album he relies on a traditional set of narrative methods which, by their nature, presuppose a stability...