San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
18 months later, a promise not to be silenced
When author Salman Rushdie was knifed onstage on Aug. 12, 2022, at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, N.Y., he was poised to deliver a talk on safe spaces and the need for free thought and expression for artists working in perilous times. “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” is his step-by-step account of that day and its aftermath, a whorl of medical procedures and waking nightmares that by all accounts Rushdie should not have survived.
“In death, we are all yesterday’s people, trapped forever in the past tense,” he writes. “That was the cage in which the knife wanted to put me.”
Isolation and exile are subjects with which Bombay-born Rushdie, 76, is very familiar. He lived with the threat of imminent danger following the 1988 publication of his fourth work of fiction, “The Satanic Verses,” a take on the life of the Prophet Muhammad. Rushdie characterizes that book as “a quarrel between those with a sense of humor and those without one.” The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was among those not laughing: Shortly after its publication, he ordered his flock to seek and destroy the author for a $3 million bounty. The fatwa, as it was known, sent Rushdie into high-security hiding for years.
Though there was no clear motive for the attack in Chautauqua, “Knife” is nevertheless a reckoning of the before and after of a cataclysmic event. Rushdie suspects religious fanatics remain inflamed. Reports that the assailant was taking cues from online haters, movies and video games have yet to be proved in court (the trial was postponed). Yet motive is but one of the mysteries pursued in “Knife.” As Rushdie lays out the journey of his bodily and emotional recovery, he deduces pretty quickly that it’s not revenge or justice he seeks; rather, it’s getting back to his writing life, defending artistic expression, and to the home he shares in New York City with his wife, poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths (the couple paired in 2017).
“I was happy, we were happy, for more than five years,” he writes. “Could our happiness survive such a blow?”
Griffiths endures her own trauma and sleepless nights following the attack, as do Rushdie’s grown children and immediate family. In addition to six weeks of hospitalization, family love and support are central to the story of his healing, and he’s forthright about his affection for his caregivers. Griffiths’ close circle, poets Tracy K. Smith and Safiya Sinclair, are mentioned, and Rushdie fondly wrests support from the words of his colleagues — living and deceased — Martin Amis, Paul Auster and Raymond Carver. But there is no love lost nor any forgiveness for his attacker who he’s chosen to identify only as “The A … My Assailant or would-be Assassin …”
“This ‘A’ hadn’t informed himself about the man he decided to kill,” writes Rushdie. “By his own admission, he barely read two pages of my writing and watched a couple of YouTube videos of me, and that was all he needed.” A fictional jailhouse meeting becomes an obsession for Rushdie, and its dialogue comprises a chapter.
There are elements of a whodunit as Rushdie replays the attack in his mind and on the page. Reliving the moment is part post-traumatic stress and part of its cure, and he is unabashed in describing his disorder. And then there are the unassailable contradictions and coincidences in Rushdie’s life and art that had to be confronted before he could return to being, well, Rushdie.
“I don’t usually think of my books as prophecies,” he writes. “I’ve had some trouble with prophets in my life, and I’m not applying for the job.”
In the book’s early pages, he makes clear his disbelief in premonitions and visions, though he had several, just hours before the attack. But here’s the spoiler: Having survived his stab wounds, and relearning to walk, write and return his bodily functions to normal, Rushdie lives to storytell. Despite losing his right eye to a knife that missed his brain by centimeters, and some of his ease of mobility, he is once again the man who refuses to believe in “evidence of things unseen.” There was no white light experience for him, nor has he had a change of heart in his status as a nonbeliever, as an atheist. His only allusion to anything magical is the power of the mind.
“The imagination sometimes works in ways that the imagining mind can fail to understand,” he writes.
Rushdie’s familiar flights of fancy, what he calls his free associative mind, and his fluidity with language remain intact. He retains the ability to spin a tale just 18 months after an attempt on his life, and he remains playful yet dead serious about his position on free expression and his disdain for the contortions of the U.S. Constitution and free speech (he’s an American citizen).
A few months before he was attacked, Rushdie addressed an international gathering of writers at the United Nations. He revisits the speech in “Knife.”
“So we must work to overturn the false narratives of tyrants, populists, and fools by telling better stories than they do, stories within which people want to live.”
“Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” isn’t so much about pondering imminent death than it is an affirmation — an insistence — on returning to life.