(New York) This is his way of regaining “control of the story”. The writer Salman Rushdie recounts in The knifememoirs which come out Tuesday, 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 ignited part of the Muslim world with the publication of “The Satanic Verses” in 1988, leading the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to issue a fatwa demanding 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.
The knife appears Tuesday in the United States and Thursday in France, published by Gallimard.
“27 seconds”
The fatwa condemning the novelist to death has never been lifted. Before his attack, many of the translators of his book were attacked. One was even killed: the Japanese Hitoshi Igarashi, victim of several stabbings in 1991.
Over the years, Salman Rushdie told ABC he thought the threat had finally disappeared.
However, he said on the show 60 Minutes of CBS having had a nightmare which turned out to be premonitory, a few days before the conference. In this dream, someone attacked him with a spear in a Roman amphitheater.
Shaken, he thought about giving up going to the festival, before changing his mind.
In his book, he does not mention the name of his assailant, he says.
“He and I had 27 seconds together,” the duration of the attack, he told CBS. ” That’s all. No need to give him more of my time.”
“Last jolt”
Regarding the attack itself, Salman Rushdie recalls, in an excerpt from his memoirs cited by the Guardianwho he thought was dying.
It wasn’t “dramatic or particularly gruesome,” just “factual,” he wrote. But he felt a “profound loneliness” at the thought of dying far from his loved ones.
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.”
Today, he wants to believe that the attack he survived will be the end of a long and agonizing saga.
“I hope this is the last twist in this story,” he said.