Salman Rushdie’s knife | Responding to violence through art

On August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie, 75, was attacked and stabbed multiple times by a 24-year-old man while on stage before a literary conference in Chautauqua, New York. Hit in the neck, left hand and abdomen, the author lost an eye. He came within a hair’s breadth of losing his life.

“I don’t believe in miracles, but my survival is miraculous [traduction libre de l’anglais, comme tous les extraits dans ce texte] », he writes in the book Knife (The knife), which will be in bookstores on May 8 in Quebec in French version, by Éditions Gallimard. It is the moving story, in the heart of darkness – as Joseph Conrad would say – of this attack that he no longer feared and of the long healing process that followed it.

“I still see the moment in slow motion,” writes the author of Midnight’s Children, powerless actor in this chronicle of a foretold death. The assailant who jumps from his seat in this 4,000-seat amphitheater and runs towards him brandishing a knife. Rushdie who, facing forward, mechanically raises his left hand. An attack involving 15 stabbings in 27 seconds, until spectators intervened.

Why didn’t I defend myself? asks Salman Rushdie, who will be 77 in June, today. “Why now, after all these years?” », he thought at the time, when he thought his end was near. For him, the subject was closed, he wrote. He was convinced that everyone, like him, had moved on. The sad reality caught up with him, 33 years after Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa which sentenced him to death for the satirical passages of Satanic versesconsidered blasphemous by the spiritual leader of the Iranian Islamic Revolution.

During the approximately 10 years when Salman Rushdie lived in England under constant police protection, with a price on his head, he often imagined his assassination in exactly this way. But as his assailant rushed at him in the summer of 2022, he had the impression of seeing “a murderous ghost from the past” emerge, he writes. An anachronistic vision. “However, as the attentive reader will have guessed, I survived,” explains the writer of Indian origin, with his deadpan humor and his usual wit.

Rushdie refuses to name his assailant, a radicalized young man born in New Jersey – awaiting trial after pleading not guilty to attempted murder – who confessed to New York Post having read only two or three pages of his novels. The famous writer imagined a fictional dialogue with the one he designates by the letter A (for ass) and who only knows Rushdie from what he has seen in lectures on YouTube.

This is a chapter that breaks in tone with the rest of this biographical essay written to the “I”, unlike Rushdie’s 2012 autobiography, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, with the title inspired by the pseudonym under which he lived in the 1990s and which he borrowed from his two favorite authors, Conrad and Anton Chekhov. It is about the motivations of the attacker, his lack of remorse and religion.

This attack, Rushdie said, “has nothing to do with The Satanic Verses “, but reminds everyone of the religious decree of Rouhollah Khomeini, which he had almost succeeded in forgetting in 20 years of “banal life as a writer” in New York.

“The excrement hit the ventilation system,” he writes, stylishly twisting a well-known expression.

Salman Rushdie says that just before going to Chautauqua, west of Buffalo, where there was talk – a sad irony – of the United States’ status as a refuge for writers facing persecution, he had a premonitory nightmare. He dreamed that he was murdered in a Roman arena.

The evening before the conference, he gazed at the sky above the lake, thinking about Journey to the Moon by Méliès, depicting the moon landing of an oblong-shaped shuttle puncturing the right eye of the Moon. The next day, Rushdie suffered the same fate. However, he is wary of prophecies, he specifies: “I had some problems with prophets in my life and I don’t apply not for this type of job. »

This type of humor typical of Rushdie lightens the story of the attack of which he was the victim, of his convalescence and his recovery, whose detailed description of the assault and his medical treatments made me think of the Flap of Philippe Lançon (survivor of the terrorist attack against Charlie Hebdo).

It is a story in which a muted anger emerges, which becomes both darker and more blue over the course of its approximately 200 pages. Rushdie, a scholar who multiplies literary and cinematographic references, as well as French expressions (in the original English version of the text), could not help but imagine, thinking of his lost eye, the most famous scene of the Andalusian dog by Luis Buñuel.

The knife is dedicated to the men and women who saved Rushdie’s life, starting with his friend Henry Reese, the host of the Chautauqua conference, a septuagenarian who was the first to step on stage to contain the assailant . The knife, writes Rushdie, is a metaphor for hatred which is overcome by love, notably that which he received, after the attack, from numerous strangers and politicians such as Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron. We can also sense his pride (I wouldn’t dare say his vanity) in having aroused the emotion of illustrious public figures.

If there is an injunction in this book, it is to live and love. Also, much more than a fight against obscurantism and religious fundamentalism, The knife is a long love letter to Salman Rushdie’s fourth wife, the novelist, poet and photographer Rachel Eliza Griffiths, 30 years his junior.

Their meeting, at a party in 2018, is worthy of a romantic comedy. Rushdie, stunned, he says, by the beauty of his interlocutor, smashed his glasses by hitting his nose on a bay window. He was thrown to the ground, his face bleeding, but this time with a happy result: his future wife accompanied him home to ensure that he had no after-effects.

Writing this book, the novelist explains, was his way of responding to violence through art, by refusing to be reduced to the status of victim, in order to be able to move on. “It’s my way of appropriating what happened to me, of making it mine, of making it my own work,” he writes. “Art is not a luxury, it is the very essence of our humanity and it requires no particular protection other than the right to exist. »

Knife, Meditations After an Attempted Murder

Salman Rushdie

Penguin Random House

240 pages