Breath and belonging: Atmospheric violence in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses

This essay argues that forms of atmospheric violence in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses reveal a critical link between the individual’s ability to breathe freely and belong in metropolitan spaces. I employ the term “atmospheric violence” to bring together a literary understanding of atmosphere as creating conditions of narrative possibility (Taylor, 2016) with Peter Sloterdijk’s (2016) writing on the distinctly atmospheric nature of twentieth-century terror. I argue that attempts to partition and unequally distribute air between different social groups in the novel reveal breath as a determining factor of who belongs where in the postcolonial metropole. I claim that the novel’s opening scene of aerial terror, the Bostan AI-420 bombing, creates an atmospheric shift that sets the narrative conditions for the remainder of the text. I then close-read the Brickhall protest sequence, focusing specifically on the burning down of the Shaandaar Café, which, I argue, reveals the fatal consequences of trying to separate air between different social groups. The fire, I claim, stages a broader question about the function of breath in determining the individual’s status of belonging. This article concludes by considering how air and breath might feature in a framework of belonging that challenges a reliance on racial, bodily, and economic exclusions.