The Moor's Last Sigh

In 1995, the Booker-prize winning British-Indian author Salman Rushdie published his fifth novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh, a sprawling epic that covers over 600 years of history and four generations in the life of a Bombay family. Rushdie is probably best known for the violent reaction to his novel The Satanic Verses, which is a brilliant and complex deconstruction of the foundation of Islam and the formation of national identity. Upon its publication, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, declared a still ongoing fatwā ordering Rushdie’s execution. Reward money for Rushdie’s assassination was increased as recently as 2016, and he has survived several attempts on his life.

The Moor’s Last Sigh is a novel in which ancient history, modern life, fantasy, tragedy, and satire form overlapping layers of multiple meanings. Rushdie is purposefully imitating an artistic technique known as the palimpsest, in which one artwork or piece of writing is partially scraped away in order for another work to be laid over it. One way to get a sense of the way the novel creates these layers of meaning is to look at the title. The “Moor’s Last Sigh” refers to a variety of moors and sighs. It is the defeated sound made by the real historical figure Muhammad XI (or Boabdil to the Spanish), the last Moorish sultan on the Iberian Peninsula, when the newly powerful Catholic kings of Counter-Reformation Spain betrayed and defeated him in 1492. It is also the gasp Othello, Shakespeare’s Moor of Venice, makes before taking his own life. It is at the same time the title of two artworks in the novel that depict Boabdil leaving. And finally, of course, it is the novel itself – the last breaths of our narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, whose nickname is “the Moor,” as he tells his story and dies.

The novel’s present is exactly 500 years following Boabdil’s loss. In the novel, Moraes Zogoiby is distantly related to Boabdil, who was called elzogoybi, meaning unlucky in Arabic. Before we get to the Moor himself, we first learn about several generations of his family. Just as Boabdil ruled over a multiethnic and multicultural kingdom, Andalusia (now Granada), so the Moor is descended from a richly diverse set of ancestors. On his mother Aurora’s side, he is descended from a Portuguese-Catholic-Indian family cursed by his great-grandmother to always be divided. Meanwhile, the Moor’s father Abraham comes from a family of Indian Jews and is connected to every aspect of Bombay’s criminal underbelly.

From this mixture is born the Moor, an in-between boy who has a rare genetic condition that causes his body to age twice as fast as normal and whose one arm ends not in a hand but in a giant club-like fused fist. The sped-up growth is a metaphor for India, a country forced to adapt and modernize faster than it is prepared to. Moraes comes to hate and fear Abraham, who is basically a completely irredeemable evil villain who eventually adopts another young man as his heir and disowns the Moor. Aurora is a distracted and neglectful mother, but she is also a successful and extraordinarily gifted artist who creates complex collages where she embeds the attention and love she can’t quite show her child in real life. Her art tends to feature the Moor, particularly in a collection of paintings called Mooristan where lots of disparate elements unite into a messy but pleasing unity. Although most of these paintings seem optimistic, the last one is called “The Moor’s Last Sigh” and portrays the Moor as a shadowy figure lost in a kind of hell – a depiction that turns out to be prophetic.

Because of his illness, the Moor stays mostly in his house where one of his governesses seduces him when he is 8 (but physically looks 16). In general, keeping the Moor’s physical and actual age separate becomes very difficult as the novel continues – something Rushdie intentionally plays with. Soon, the Moor discovers that his passion (literally) is storytelling – when he tells stories he becomes deeply aroused.

He becomes romantically involved with Aurora’s rival painter nemesis, Uma Sarasvati, whose influence drives a wedge between Moraes and his mother. Aurora kicks him out of the house. Then, after a mix-up with poison and decoy capsules, he ends up in jail for Uma’s murder. He is released because he figures out the nature of his other talent besides storytelling – the club fist is an extraordinarily (supernaturally) powerful weapon. He is so effective in subduing people in close quarters combat that he is recruited by the fundamentalist Hindu politician Raman Fielding (based on the real Bal Thackeray). They beat up anyone who opposes Hindu prominence, especially Muslims. Aurora protests their demonstrations, but accidentally falls to her death during one protest. Eventually, Fielding’s activities antagonize Abraham’s criminal empire, and Abraham has Fielding murdered.

Tired of Bombay, Moraes goes to Andalusia, where he battles Vasco Miranda, another painter-enemy of Aurora. Miranda has stolen all of Aurora’s Mooristan paintings and the Moor hopes to get them back by breaking into Miranda’s castle-like fortress. His quest fails, and Miranda imprisons him in the fortress dungeon. The only way the Moor can stay alive is by writing down his life story – which he has been doing and which is the book that we have been reading. In Miranda’s prison, the Moor encounters the Japanese art historian Aoi Ue. She is being forced to peel back the palimpsest layers of the last Mooristan painting, under which is a portrait of Aurora herself. It turns out that not only is Miranda jealous of Aurora’s artistic skill, but he has also been her lover many years earlier and is still in love with her. Through the Moor’s forward-moving manuscript and Aoi Ue’s backward-moving undoing of the artwork, Miranda hopes to find the true Aurora. Instead, though, he dies and kills Aoi Ue.

The Moor realizes that he is now 36 years old, meaning that his body is 72 and close to death. The book ends with more of the kind of literary allusions and historical references that it started with. This time, Moraes is linked not only with Boabdil, but also with Dante going through the inferno of tourists, Martin Luther with pages of his life story rather than the theses that started the Reformation, and of course Jesus persecuted by the authorities.