On August 12, 2022, at the Chautauqua Cultural Center in southwest New York State, when the British-American writer of Indian origin had begun to speak in front of several hundred people, a man burst out of the crowd to come and stab him around fifteen times.
With his knife, the man hit him in the right eye, the jaw, one hand, the neck and the chest before being immobilized by a few members of the public who had the reflex and the courage to ‘to intervene. “So it’s you.” Here you are,” he then thought when faced with this messenger of death. Also aware of the “anachronistic” aspect of this irruption, as if the past returned through a back door, carrying a butcher’s instrument in his hand.
Thirty-three and a half years after the famous death sentence pronounced against him by Ayatollah Khomeini. As a reminder, too, of the ten years that he had lived in hiding under the protection of the British secret services – this difficult period which had preceded his exile in New York, as recounted in Joseph Anton (Plon, 2012).
The longest 27 seconds of his life.
By a miracle, the author of Midnight’s Children survived this attack, but he left an eye — and a little self-esteem. A permanent cockade which reminds him and reminds everyone today of the sometimes high price of freedom of expression.
Salman Rushdie publishes The knife, his “reflections following an assassination attempt”, a book through which he relives the events in slow motion, recounts the days which preceded it and evokes the slow rehabilitation which he had to go through to return to us, its readers. A story that is sometimes lively, sometimes unbearable, often shot through with the humor that characterizes it.
“Writing this book was above all a way of regaining control over the story,” explains Salman Rushdie in an interview from France, where he is on a promotional tour. Regain control over yourself, over history, simply speak out again. “As the attack had been an attempt to deprive me of it, writing this book gave me the impression of regaining control,” continues the 76-year-old writer.
The knife, for the title, quickly appeared obvious to him. “That was the only word I had before I started writing the book. » For obvious reasons, he recalls, since without this knife, the book would not have existed. “But also, as I tell it, because it’s my way of fighting back. It’s a bit as if this book was my knife, my weapon, my way of fighting the attack against me. In a metaphorical way, we can say that the book is itself a knife. »
Language like a knife
And for the writer, language can also be a knife. “It was the only gun I ever owned,” recalls Salman Rushdie. A weapon that I have used for 50 years and that I have used, I believe, reasonably. Even if it is not exactly a weapon, an instrument capable of hurting someone, it is in any case a way to win an argument. »
Writing fiction after this attack seemed impossible to him. He had to, says the novelist, get rid of this story, like a poison to be evacuated from his nervous system. “I felt like it was an obstacle. Before we can find our way back to storytelling and try to make sense of the madness of the world again. And to make sense of this particular act of madness. It was too big on my mind for me to put aside. »
Writing this book, the writer acknowledges, was also a kind of therapy that allowed him to move on. “I especially didn’t want this thing to occupy my imaginary space in the future. I wanted to take stock of it, for myself and for the readers, and then turn the page. »
He mentions in The knife the context of this savage attack, its course – what he was told and what he can remember -, his hospitalization for six weeks, his post-traumatic disorders, his pain and his mourning.
One of the most regrettable aspects of this event, says Salman Rushdie, is that it plunged back The Satanic Verses (Christian Bourgois, 1989), his “poor pernicious book”, as he speaks of it, at the heart of a story of scandal. We remember, of course, that it was this book which earned him an Iranian fatwa in 1989, to which were added multiple murder attempts against him, several deaths during demonstrations around the world, as well as assassinations or attempted murders against publishers and translators.
All this for a novel, his fourth, that very few people have actually read. Starting with the attacker himself, who by his own admission had only read two or three pages, in addition to having watched a few interviews with Salman Rushdie on YouTube, before planning his action.
A book that Salman Rushdie says he has since sought to “bury” under other books, and more books, “until people start to see the writer again, and not just the individual who makes the news “.
Fantastic love story
Another event that occurred without warning, like an accident, was his love at first sight in 2017 with the African-American writer and visual artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, his wife 30 years his junior. A story that he also tells in The knife, a tribute to his partner, who quickly went “into superhero mode” after the tragedy. But also because she filmed and interviewed him throughout his convalescence. A documentary, he assures us, should also see the light of day.
“Love gives strength,” believes Salman Rushdie. All kinds of love. That of my wife and my family, but also that of people I don’t know and will never know. A huge wave of solidarity and affection came towards me. It gave me strength, it helped me. »
“It’s probably the best love story I’ve ever written,” he adds, laughing. There’s even a happy ending, whereas many of my books don’t have one. »
At the heart of the book, a short climax, Salman Rushdie imagines a conversation with his attacker, a man he refuses to name, to whom he attributes a vague resemblance to the tennis player Novak Djokovic. “The Fool who imagined things about me,” he wrote. A radicalized American born in California to Lebanese parents, who was 24 years old at the time and living in New Jersey. The suspect, Hadi Matar, who pleaded not guilty to attempted murder, has since been imprisoned awaiting trial.
“I liked the contrast,” explains Salman Rushdie, “between these imagined passages and the scrupulous non-fiction that forms the majority of the book. For me, this is the part that was almost the most interesting to write. I tried to get into his head. It was a big question mark for me. » It was also a way of making a character and enclosing him in a book.
And what’s next? Carry on, said Rushdie. Respond to “the lying stories of oppressors, populists and fools” with better stories. And remind the world, as in the myth of Orpheus, that “song is stronger than death”.