It’s his way of regaining “control of the story”. The writer Salman Rushdie recounts in The knifememoirs which come out Tuesday in English, the attack which almost killed him in 2022, the last episode of a life under threat since his Satanic verses.
One summer day, in the middle of a literary conference on the shores of the American Great Lakes, north of New York, a man rushes towards Salman Rushdie. Knife in hand, he stabs him multiple times, seriously injuring him in the face, neck and abdomen. The writer notably lost the sight of one eye.
“The book, in itself, is about a knife, but it itself is also a bit of a knife. I don’t have any guns or knives, so that’s the tool I use. And I thought I would use it to fight,” the American-British, born in India, explained to the American channel ABC.
“It became my way of controlling the narrative, so to speak,” he added.
The man who turns his life upside down is a young American of Lebanese origin, sympathetic to the Islamic Republic of Iran. A “brutal” reminder of the fatwa issued by Tehran in 1989, the novelist declared last October, during the international book fair in Frankfurt, Germany.
The writer had set a part of the Muslim world ablaze with the publication of Satanic verses in 1988, leading the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to issue a fatwa calling for his assassination.
For a long time he had been forced to live in hiding and under police protection, going from hiding place to hiding place.
” Why now ? »
The knife appears Tuesday in the United States and Thursday in France, published by Gallimard.
The fatwa condemning the novelist to death has never been lifted. Before his attack, many translators of his book were attacked. One was even killed, the Japanese Hitoshi Igarashi, with several stab wounds in 1991.
Over the years, Salman Rushdie thought the threat had finally disappeared. ” Why now ? Really ? “So much time has passed,” he says he thought when his attacker descended on him.
He also says he had a nightmare which turned out to be premonitory, a few days before the conference. In this dream, someone was attacking him “armed with a spear, a gladiator in a Roman amphitheater.” He thought about giving up, before changing his mind.
The knife does not mention the name of his assailant. The author calls him “the Fool who imagined things about me”. And he imagines long conversations with him, to try to understand his action.
“Last jolt”
Of the attack itself, Salman Rushdie recalls thinking he was “dying.” “I didn’t experience it as a tragedy or a particularly horrible thing. It just seemed likely,” he says.
At first, he explained to CBS, he did not even want to write about the attack, so as not to be reduced to this event as he may have been after the Satanic verses and the fatwa.
“But it became clear that I couldn’t write anything else. I had to write about that first,” he said. “And then it became a book that I really wanted to write. »
In the story, the reader can only be struck by the lightness of the device to protect the writer from his attacker. “No security personnel were present in the amphitheater that morning – why? I don’t know. He was therefore able to rush towards me without hindrance,” he emphasizes.
The book concludes with a return to the scene of the attack, this time without an audience: “I stood at the very place, or what I considered to be the exact place, where I had collapsed. I felt, I admit, a little touch of triumph at being there. »