About movers, Salman Rushdie

Ex. 1 pg. 177
1. The narrator is the novelist: he is a first person narrator.
2. His theory is that the resentments migrants engender is connected in some way to the conquest of the force of gravity.
3. The narrator compares gravity to trees.
4.Salman thinks that roots are a sort of conservative myth, used to keep us in our places.
5.The two ways human being looks for freedom are: to fly and to flee.
6.He supposes that pharmaceutical companies create an anti-gravity pill.
7.Airline companies would go broke overnight: manufacturing pills could make possible personalized international travels.
8.It would be necessary to devise water proof flying garments.
9.
10.The best thing about migrants is their hopefulness, the worst one is the emptiness of one’s luggage: meaning-drainded mementoes.

Ex.2 pg.178
The speaker experienced both conditions of emigrant and newcomer: he emigrated from India and moved to England and Pakistan.

Ex. 3 pg.178
The whole text is built upon the metaphor of roots that explain the connection between gravity and belonging. If gravity would not exists we would all be migrants.

Ex. 4 pg.178
Both gravity and belonging are observably phenomena which exist: feet stay on the ground and we don’t know the origins of this phenomenon and and we neither don’t know why we feel a sense of belonging for our birthplace.

Ex. 5 pg.178
In the third paragraph the speaker plays with the concepts of anti-myths of belonging and gravity imagining a anti-gravity pill that will allow people to fly around the world. He ironically imagines devices useful to these travels, too.

Ex. 7 pg. 178
I think the narrator is in favour of migration. All the concept of anti-gravity pills, the sense of belonging and the metaphor of roots make me think he thinks that migration is a good “phenomenon”. He also tells the reader what are for him the pros and contras about migrants people, and he ends his reflection telling “We have floated upwards from history from memory, from Time.” With this line I think he wants convey the idea that all of us are migrants trough time, history and memory even if we don’t move physically.