The Moor's Last Sigh

Must we die before our souls, so long suppressed, can find utterance -- before our secret natures can be known? To whom it may concern, I say No, and again I say, No way. When I was young I used to dream . . . of peeling off my skin plaintain-fashion, of going forth naked into the world, like an anatomy illustration from Encyclopaedia Britannica, all ganglions, ligaments, nervous pathways and veins, set free from the otherwise inescapable jails of colour, race and clan. (In another version of the dream I would be able to peel away more than skin, I would float free of flesh, skin and bones, having become simply an intelligence or a feeling set loose in the world, at play in its fields, like a science-fiction glow which needed no physical form.)

- A paragraph from Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh