Idiomatic Confluences: Xenisms in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and Kamila Shamsie's In the City by the Sea (1998)

Abstract

The Pakistani-born British novelist and journalist Kamila Shamsie has acknowledged Salman Rushdie's influence on her work. It is therefore not surprising that Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and her debut novel In the City by the Sea (1998), have a lot of points in common, even if their genres are somewhat different. This paper proposes to study the different ways in which the authors incorporate foreign words and expressions or xenisms within their English texts. After a brief analysis of the points these novels have in common, I propose to study in some detail the literary devices used by both writers, through their use of xenisms, to both educate and entertain their Western readers as well as make them familiar with some aspects of South Asian culture and way of life, especially, in the case of Shamsie, her vision of Islam. It is also my contention that both are using intercultural elements of language as a strategy not only to promote the vernacular Hindustani to Western readers but also to revive and enrich the English language by incorporating these xenisms into it, inventing an original confluence of languages. And with the language it is the English novel itself which is being rejuvenated by writers coming from the fringes of the ex-British empire and becoming even more multi-cultural.

Keywords

• xenisms
• Rushdie
• Haroun and the Sea of Stories
• Shamsie
• In the City by the Sea
• new post-colonialism