RKS Literature: I WANT TO BE IN AMERICA (Salman Rushdie)

I want to be in America, America where everyone’s like me, because everyone comes from somewhere else. All those histories, persecutions, massacres, piracies, slaveries; all those secret ceremonies, hanged witches, weeping wooden virgins and horned unyielding gods; all that yearning, hope, greed, excess, the whole lot adding up to a fabulous noisy historyless self-inventing citizenry of jumbles and confusions; all those variform mangling’s of English adding up to the livingest English in the world; and above everything else, all that smuggled-in music. The drums of Africa that once beat out messages across the giant landscape in which even the trees made music; for example when they absorbed water after a drought, listen and you’ll hear them, yikitaka, yikitaka yikitak. The Polish dances, the Italian weddings, the Zorba slithering Greeks. The drunken rhythm of the salsa saints. The cool heart music that heals our aching souls, and the hot democratic music that leaves a hole in the beat and makes our pants want to get up and dance.

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