Who what am I?

Man of Fayum - Anne Ziemienski

            This mosaic titled Man of Fayum, by Anne Ziemienski ties itself intrinsically with explicit themes in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Firstly, the entire novel is set up like a mosaic; Saleem’s stringing together of bits and pieces of stories to form the entirety of his tale is exactly how the fragments in the image above come together to form a coherent picture. At very first though, my mind went to thinking of Saleem’s tale as a puzzle, where you don’t put the pieces quite in order, but you get the full image in the end. But the more I thought of it, the more I realised it wasn’t really a puzzle, because the pieces didn’t fit cohesively. The story bits form a picture at the end, but you’re left with the feeling that something fell through the cracks. Unlike a puzzle, there is clear distinction of separation within the stories, of Saleem and the midnight’s children, of past and present, of the partition and fragmentation of the whole of India, and lastly, of separation within Saleem himself.

            Saleem, like the Man of Fayum, is a whole made of individual pieces. He is made of stories and events, people and places, past and present, the whole of India contained within him.       

“Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each “I,” every one of the now-six-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world” (440).

To me this quote encapsulates the theme of fragmentation and the struggle of part versus whole, and self versus other in the text. Not only that, but it also perfectly reflects the parallels between the text and the above image. Taking the Man of Fayum to be Saleem, then every single square is an “everything that went before”, a “been seen done”, an “I.” There is no Saleem without these pieces and without Saleem these pieces are just there, incoherent specks upon a plane. “To understand me you’ll have to swallow a world” (440), to see the picture, to understand it, we have to take in all the individual parts of it together, if we break them away, the image changes, and so does then the story.

            So then, Saleem’s end does not in fact signify the end of a story so much as it does the beginning and change of many other stories, many other images. Like the man in the mosaic, Saleem is quite literally cracked, so when the point comes where he can no longer keep the pieces together and lets them go, lets himself go, he disintegrates. Breaking away, the pieces that once made him go back out into the whole of India, to become part of someone else’s cracked self, someone else’s mosaic.  

Curated by: Paula Febles Bustillo

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Rushdie, Salman. Midnight's Children: A Novel. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006. Print.

Ziemienski, Anne. "Man of Fayum." The Art of Anne Ziemienski, Mosaic Art Gallery. 2013. Web. 28 Apr. 2014.