Salman Rushdie says writing Knife allowed him to alter his relationship to the assault. “As a substitute of simply being the one that received stabbed, I now see myself as the one that wrote a ebook about getting stabbed,” he says.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths/Penguin Random Home
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Rachel Eliza Griffiths/Penguin Random Home
Salman Rushdie says writing Knife allowed him to alter his relationship to the assault. “As a substitute of simply being the one that received stabbed, I now see myself as the one that wrote a ebook about getting stabbed,” he says.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths/Penguin Random Home
Two nights earlier than he was stabbed onstage at a literary occasion in 2022, Salman Rushdie had a nightmare. In his dream, Rushdie was in an historical Roman amphitheater, rolling round on the bottom whereas a gladiator with a spear stabbed down at him.
“It definitely felt very vivid and really precise and really scary,” Rushdie says. “I used to be rolling about in mattress and thrashing round, and my spouse needed to wake me up.”
His rapid impulse was to cancel his upcoming look on the Chautauqua Establishment in upstate New York, however then he rationalized his worry away: “Folks have goals. You do not run your each day life due to having a foul dream. And so I made a decision I’d go,” Rushdie says.
Rushdie is not any stranger to dying threats. After his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses was revealed, Iran’s chief, the Ayatollah Khomeini, declared the ebook blasphemous in its therapy of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, and issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s dying. Confronted with the risk, Rushdie, who grew up in India in a secular Muslim household, stayed out of public view for years.
However after years of being surrounded by safety, Rushdie had resumed regular life. Then, on Aug. 12, 2022, a 24-year-old man within the viewers rushed the stage at Chautauqua. In an assault lasting 27 seconds, the person stabbed Rushdie a number of instances, severing all of the tendons and a lot of the nerves in a single hand and wounding his neck, chest, thigh and eye.
Mendacity in a “lake of blood,” Rushdie believed he was about to die. He was hit with a sense of loneliness: “Dying within the firm of strangers — that was what was going via my thoughts,” he says.
Rushdie says he is disinclined to imagine in miracles, however he struggles with how else to elucidate his survival.
“Lots of the docs who I’ve been concerned with within the final 12 months and a half are usually not solely shocked that I survived — which they’re — however they’re shocked that I’ve recovered to the diploma that I’ve,” he says. “Miracles are throughout me, it appears.”
In his new ebook, Knife, Rushdie writes in regards to the assault, the harm to his physique (together with the lack of sight in a single eye) and extra existential questions on going through dying and discovering his identification in an altered physique and frame of mind. Rushdie says he was initially reluctant write in regards to the Chautauqua incident, however he is glad he did.
“It modified my relationship to the occasion,” he says. “As a substitute of simply being the one that received stabbed, I now see myself as the one that wrote a ebook about getting stabbed. And so it feels prefer it’s again in my very own authorial area, and I really feel extra answerable for it. And that feels good.”
Interview highlights
On how he had stopped worrying in regards to the fatwa previous to the assault
I would been residing in New York Metropolis for near 24 years, and through that point I would achieved a whole lot of literary occasions, readings, lectures, festivals, and so forth., and so they had by no means been the faintest hint of an issue. So I would sort of instructed myself that that point had gone, however sadly, I used to be mistaken. All I ever needed to do, Terry, was to write down tales. And if I’ve received a number of extra years left to write down a number of extra good tales, then that’ll do for me.
On not holding onto anger in regards to the assault
One of many issues that I feel has been very unusual for me is that the emotion that I have not actually had within the aftermath of all that is anger. And it is as if one thing in my head tells me that anger could be a manner of being caught within the second. It could be a manner of not with the ability to get previous it. And so I haven’t got anger. I assume someplace deep down I’m fairly livid with numerous individuals, notably the gentleman with the knife, however it does not appear productive to me to linger on anger.
On writing about each violence and hatred and therapeutic and love
After I began fascinated with scripting this ebook, you realize, I requested myself, “OK, there’s clearly this assault and I need to speak about that. However past that, what is the ebook about?” And I got here to really feel that it was about myself being in between two forces. One is a pressure of violence and hatred, and the opposite is the pressure of affection and therapeutic. …
The primary pressure was clearly embodied in my assailant, and the second pressure was embodied in my spouse, Eliza, the author Rachel Eliza Griffiths. And I imply, since I did not die, I will say that the pressure of affection and therapeutic overcame the pressure of violence and hatred. However I felt that that triangle was what the ebook was about, that the ebook was about three individuals. It was about me and him and Eliza. And so I needed to write down about love, and in a extra open and direct manner than possibly that I’ve ever achieved earlier than.
On the hallucinations he skilled whereas on a ventilator
I used to be hallucinating palaces made out of alphabets. … I used to be seeing structure, palatial structure, of which the constructing blocks have been all letters. … There have been letters floating within the air between me and different individuals within the room. I keep in mind when the ventilator was taken out I mentioned to Eliza and her household, I mentioned, “Why are all these letters in your garments?” … It does point out to me the extent to which the world of books is the world wherein I stay.
On how being attacked modified his understanding of dying
I feel what it did is 2 issues that it, to start with, gave me a sort of familiarity with dying. I sort of know the way it goes now. I did not get to the ultimate observe of the music, thank goodness. However I sort of perceive how the tune goes. But additionally what it did, what it has achieved, is to present me an enormously elevated appreciation of life. The rationale I quoted, one level, a poem by Raymond Carver, written after he was instructed he had nearly no time to stay, after which he lived one other 10 years and did a few of his greatest work. And he mentioned he felt like all that point that he wasn’t speculated to have, he describes it as gravy. “Each day is gravy.” And I sort of really feel like that now. I really feel like these are days I wasn’t speculated to have, and but right here I’m, having them, and day-after-day is a blessing.
Sam Briger and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan tailored it for the online.
