By Sneha Maria Tijo
The news that came on 12 August 2022 from the Chautauqua Institution about the knife attack on Salman Rushdie shocked the world. It was a grim realisation that the world was still not safe for Rushdie thirty-three years after the Valentine’s Day gift of hatred he received from Ayatollah Khomeini for publishing The Satanic Verses (1988). Words of love and support poured in for the author (unlike in the past, when the world was divided considering whether he brought it upon himself by daring to write the book), even from people who were his foes or non-admirers before. Knife: Meditations on an Attempted Murder is essentially the story about how this love and support won over the hatred and ignorance.
The work is more than a 224-page account of what Rushdie calls the “27 seconds of intimacy” between him and the assailant, and the toll it has taken on his life and of others dear to him. We get a glimpse into the brilliant mind of Rushdie and how he can (through Free Association) draw us into different pockets of examples, across time and space. Be it the moon he was looking up to before that fateful day and taking us through the ‘lunar lineage’ of Bisnaga Empire (ref Victory City) to the story of Armstrong’s “Good Luck Mr Gorshy” to Italo Calvino and to Melies’ A Trip to the Moon. This is his genius: to lead the reader, swirling through time, by weaving intricate worlds of ‘magical reality’.
Knife: Meditations on an Attempted Murder opens with a quote from Samuel Beckett: “We are not merely more weary because of yesterday, we are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.” This in a way sets the tone for the pages to come, essentially a meditation on how things changed after 1989 and now after 2022. He makes it clear how he wants to be remembered as: a Writer. He doesn’t want the fatwa or the attack to define him. But things have inevitably changed, and one feels the frustration in the words about the same.
But many things remain unchanged, astonishingly. Talking about Rushdie, Martin Amis had said, “I would, by now, be a tearful and tranquilized three-hundred-pounder, with no eyelashes or nostril hairs.” Knife is a testament that nothing has stopped the writer from doing his job and he has his humour intact. He never mentions the other guy involved in those 27 seconds by his name:
I do not want to use his name in this account. My Assailant, my would-be Assassin, the Asinine man who made Assumptions about me, and with whom I had a near-lethal Assignation…I have found myself thinking of him, perhaps forgivably, as an Ass. However, for the purposes of this text, I will refer to him more decorously as “the A”.
The trial of the attack is yet to happen, and Rushdie has not met the A again. But in the true Rushdie fashion, we are welcomed into a fictional meeting (interview?) between himself and Mr A. And as silly as it sounds, I am willing to believe that this is exactly how those four sessions would’ve gone. One can argue that it may not be the best approach to reference The Princess Bride and Jodi Picoult in an interaction like this. Nor is it possible to imagine how a conversation with the person, to whom he has never spoken and knows very little of, might go on. But considering the A was ready to kill a man after reading just two pages of their work and watching a couple of YouTube videos, every imagined conversation seems fair and good if that gives a sense of closure for the author.
There was a wait of three days after Chautauqua, on the day of the birth of Saleem Sinai, until it was confirmed he would live again. The descriptions of the attack are too brutal, and the effects of the stabs and slashes cost him an eye. But he finds the mind to season the situation, however dire and on edge, with humour. When a doctor announces himself as the champion at draining fluids, our writer muses: “I didn’t know there was a championship? A World Series of fluid draining? A Super Bowl of fluid draining? Who would perform the halftime show? Muddy Waters? Aqua?” And then wisely admonishes himself with a “Shut up, Salman.” Clearly, nothing is beyond humour; one just need to have the right tune to it, and timing.
Back to his book and the recovery, it would take a bit of effort to ignore the ‘miracle’ it was – too many ‘what ifs’ lining up which could’ve taken the situation to a ghastly turn. And there is a whole other list of ‘may be’ premonitions, too: the dream of the gladiator stabbing him in an amphitheatre the night before being the most eerie, and the image which led him to write Shalimar the Clown, of a dying man lying on the ground and another standing above him with a bloodied knife. And to think of the opening sentence of The Satanic Verses: “To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.” It is tempting to wonder for a second, whether it is all just a coincidence, and with this context, it makes perfect sense why he thought if his books saved him.
Then there is the ‘medical miracle’ and the miracle he found in the kindness and bravery in the people present that day (to whom the book is dedicated to), who didn’t hesitate to act and hold off the armed assailant. Maybe this is the strongest form of love humanity can show towards another person who will never even know your name, to put your life in danger. In a world where people are ready to kill a person for no reason, what keeps the hope of humanity going is the fact that there are people willing to risk their life to save another, without batting an eye, without any promise of rewards.
What led Rushdie to write this book is the hatred of the assailant, and the antidote to it is friendships and love, as cliche as it sounds. Eliza (Rachel Eliza Griffiths), his wife, holds the love part, and he unexpectedly reveals the detail of their private relationship, which was thrust into the public eye after the attack. It seems fair to tell the whole story in their own terms, rather than let others speculate.
On the friendship front, two names appear most prominent: Martin Amis and Andrew Wylie. Other than the devastating account of the attack and his time in recovery, the departure of Amis is another blow that really stings. Wylie, who is known in the publishing world as The Jackal, is what Rushdie calls as his longest partnership, remains his companion through the second bout of mishaps regarding The Satanic Verses, and is the one who encourages him to write the book.
It is not politicising the issue to say that the assault was an attack on the very ideals of literature and free speech. We must analyse the current state of freedom, to speak and write and protest, without being passive bystanders when the Left and Right abuse it for their own political interest. The Left seems a bit abashed nowadays on the true idea of free speech, and the Right has jumped in to rewrite the (US) First Amendment Right as “a kind of freedom for bigotry.”
The news of the incident saw an outpouring of support from many corners, but India (the country that was the first to ban The Satanic Verses) remained silent. So did Pakistan. Some conservative outlets welcomed it even.
Salman Rushdie’s image is seen as someone who stands against Islam, but this is far from the truth. Here are his own words from the book, in his fictional meeting with A:
What if I said to you, at the heart of the book I wrote, which you hate even though you only read two pages of it, is an East London Muslim family running a café-restaurant, portrayed with real love? What if I told you that before that I wrote a book in which I placed a sympathetically drawn Muslim family at the heart of the narrative of Indian and Pakistani independence? What if I said to you, when plans for a mosque near the 9/11 Ground Zero site were opposed by some New Yorkers, I defended the mosque’s right to be there? What if I said to you, I have consistently opposed the present Indian administration’s sectarian ideology, of which Muslims are the main victims? And what if I said to you, I once wrote a book in which the condition of Kashmiri Muslims, and of a young Kashmiri man who turns to jihad, was sympathetically portrayed?
But still, surprisingly, the narrative otherwise persists.
Why do organised religion hate words and art so much? Because art is what sustains the world, what encourages us to think more about our passions, to reject the conventional and the orthodox, and to experiment. It nudges and pushes us to think for ourselves. Those institutions which live off the fear of people’s uncertainty and use words of the supernatural to dictate the lives of others, there may not be a greater enemy than art for them. Apart from religion, any state or institution which has shunned or silenced voices of its poets, writers and artists, has had harmful ideas on the future for people under their rule. The very fact that the populists brand art and literature as the luxury of the elite is because they fear it. But thinking on our own and creating ideas is the very soul (for lack of a better word) of humanity.
The years of Joseph Anton put Rushdie in years of hiding. These years were also difficult for the people around him. Should they be afraid to be in the same restaurant as Mr Rushdie as their life was also under threat for being near him? These were not entirely irrational questions, considering the fatwa was not still retracted. And Rushdie was just coming back to a normal life. In an interview just weeks before August 2022, given to Stern magazine, he seemed to believe that the days of hiding were long gone:
A fatwa is a serious thing. Luckily we didn’t have the internet back then. The Iranians had to send the fatwa to the mosques by fax. That’s all a long time ago. Nowadays my life is very normal again.
Salman Rushdie has become someone who knows the value and price of freedom, not just of speech, but to just be free. “I achieved freedom by living like a free man,” he says, on why he put himself in the limelight, to be in the attention of people – the parties and the book tours – rather than shrinking to the shadows. It was his way of saying, “Look at me, I am not going to shut down myself just because someone doesn’t approve of what I write.” The aftermath of The Satanic Verses controversy was not all heroic victory over censorship. Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of the book, was found slain with multiple stab wounds in July 1991. Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator, was stabbed in his apartment a week before. And William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher, was shot in 1993. The latter two fortunately survived the attacks.
The event at Chautauqua was supposed to be “about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm.” Knife: Meditations on an Attempted Murder is Rushdie’s effort at taking control of the situation in his own terms. Language is his weapon, his knife, and he uses it to cut through the nonsense and create art, as a response to the violent knife attack, he was caught up in.
Whilst accepting that the crisis the world is in – the attacks democracies and the fundamental rights faces from every side of politics and the culture wars – he remains hopeful, for art has survived those who attempted to oppress it. But art requires us to stand up against bigotry. Literature has a transformative potential; however small it may seem. In the end, it is words that inform us, and challenge our preconceived notions. Knife is a reminder that we ought to not be silent.
Bio:
Sneha Maria Tijo is pursuing Development Studies at IIT Madras. Her main interests are international relations, literature, cinema and history.
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