RKS Literature: Celebrating Non-Belongers (Salman Rushdie)

But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-believers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves, we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or movie theatre, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our places of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveller, the gangster, the runner, the mask; if we did not recognize them in our least fulfilled needs we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.

Salman Rushdie, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”, 1999