” What can I do ? It’s like having an incurable disease that I carry around and that constantly comes to haunt me. A kind of herpes! Salman Rushdie told me, shrugging.
Posted at 6:30 p.m.
It was ten years ago, in a hotel room in Toronto. We were alone, alone. Without more security measures, despite a fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeini who in 1989 made the author satanic verses a person sentenced to death – accompanied by a bonus then estimated at 3.3 million US.
Salman Rushdie lived as he saw fit, freely and courageously. One did not notice in him the scars of this constant threat which weighed on his person for more than two decades. Although he had escaped, according to his own estimates, about twenty assassination attempts, I met a phlegmatic gentleman, affable and charming, with a lively look and a fine sense of humour. A magnificent survivor.
On Friday morning, what many had feared for 33 years happened. Salman Rushdie, 75, was attacked and stabbed by 24-year-old Hadi Matar while on stage before a literary conference. Injured in particular in the neck and abdomen, bleeding profusely, he was transported by helicopter to the hospital where he would have been operated on urgently in the afternoon. At the beginning of the evening, we still had no details on his state of health.
Rushdie was in Chautauqua, a small town in upstate New York, to discuss in front of some 4,000 spectators the status of the United States as a haven for exiled writers and artists at risk of persecution. Sad irony.
Salman Rushdie was 41, in September 1988, when he published his fourth novel in England, on uprooting and immigration. His title, satanic versesalludes to a legend according to which verses removed from the Koran would have been inspired in Muhammad by the devil.
It was quickly banned from publication in India, the native country of the British writer. On February 14, 1989, a fatwa (religious decree) from Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, “supreme guide” of the Iranian revolution, considering satirical passages in the book to be blasphemous, condemned Rushdie to death and forced him into hiding.
For almost a decade, his head put on a bounty, wearing wigs to go incognito, Salman Rushdie lives in dozens of secret homes in Britain under police protection, fearing for his safety and that of his loved ones. Only in 1989, he changed his residence more than 50 times…
“I was not used to seeing four armed men in my kitchen, it was almost claustrophobic,” he wrote in his autobiography, whose title, Joseph Anton: A Memoirrefers to the pseudonym under which he lived in the 1990s and which he borrowed from his two favorite authors, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.
“I decided to write an autobiography because my life has become interesting,” he explained to me in September 2012, a week before the book was published. I thought there was a story to tell there. But autobiography is not a genre that interests me. I never believed that I would submit to it. I didn’t think anyone would be interested. I ended up doing it. It was worth it”.
In this exercise of introspection of more than 600 pages, which he confessed to having found liberating, it is a question of his childhood in Bombay — he was born two months before India’s independence —, the advantages and difficulties of his pariah status on his love life (he was married four times, including to supermodel and host Padma Lakshmi), and of course this fatwa that made him famous.
It was from a BBC journalist, on the morning of Valentine’s Day 1989, that he learned, like many, the meaning of this term from Islamic law, which he was discovering and which would henceforth stick to his skin. “How do you feel when you are condemned to death? she asked him point-blank.
When I met him at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Salman Rushdie had been living openly in Manhattan for a decade. He was at TIFF on the sidelines of the gala evening devoted to his first feature film as a screenwriter, the adaptation of his book Midnight’s Children, directed by Canadian filmmaker Deepa Metha. His second novel, inspired by his childhood, won him the prestigious Booker Prize in 1981 and launched his career.
Despite conflicting information, the fatwa against Rushdie was never lifted. In 1998, the Iranian government, under pressure from Washington, declared that it no longer supported it and gave up enforcing it. On the other hand, the decree, which would be supported by an Iranian religious foundation according to the New York Timesis still in effect.
We did not know more about the motivations of the assailant of Salman Rushdie on Friday. It is, without a doubt, an attack not only against a man and against a writer, but against art and against freedom of expression, which cannot be tolerated.
“A book is the product of a pact with the Devil which reverses the Faustian contract, writes Salman Rushdie in satanic verses. The Dr Faust sacrificed eternity for two dozen years of power; the writer accepts the ruin of his life, and gains (only if he is lucky) perhaps not eternity, but, at least, posterity. Either way, the Devil wins. »
Hoping with all my heart that, this time, it is the writer who wins. A writer always survives, even an incurable disease.