Salman Rushdie in his new book describes his assassination attempt two years ago in New York.
The summer of 2022 reminded him of nothing Salman Rushdie the long suffering he had suffered after the release of The Satanic Verses in 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a death warrant against him. On the contrary, he was having one of the best periods of his life and was eagerly awaiting the publication of his 21st book, “City of Victory” (to be published in Greek in 2025 by Psychogios Publishing).
An exciting time
Everything would turn upside down on the morning of August 12 when the 75-year-old British-Indian author took to the stage of the Chattaqua Institute’s auditorium to speak about the importance of providing writers with safe conditions. The reason was the creation of shelters in the US for writers whose safety is threatened in their country of origin. Shortly after his appearance Rushdie a man was thrown onto the stage from the audience who moved menacingly towards him. In the twenty-seven seconds it took for the would-be assassin to be removed, the writer had been stabbed so many times that it was almost certain that he would not survive.
In the years that followed the fatfa (order to kill him) o Rushdie he often imagined an invisible assassin rising up in some public forum and heading his way just as it eventually happened to him in real life. “So my first thought when I saw the murderous figure rushing towards me was: So it’s you,” he writes in his book “Knife”, the chronicle of his assassination attempt that has just been released. As it turned out, the would-be assassin was 24-year-old Hadi Matar from Iran, who neither knew Rushdie’s work nor could adequately explain why he attacked a man he had never met before. It was a vague sense of insult to Islam that armed his hand.
His description Rushdie from the position of a man who sees death approaching is shocking. “I just stood there, staring at him, boned like a hare in a dead end,” he writes. Many times after the incident he wondered why he did not try to defend his life. “I really don’t know what to think and how to respond. Some days I feel embarrassed, even ashamed, because I didn’t fight back. Other days I tell myself not to be a fool: what do I imagine I was capable of doing?’ he wonders. It is also shocking that while she was being attacked, the security of the building did not intervene (it was never adequately explained why), while some of the spectators thought that what was happening before their eyes was a kind of performance aimed at further highlighting the issue of authors’ safety.
Writing as therapy
As in “Joseph Anton”, in which he describes his life after the issuance of the fatfa (the book is written in the third person), so here too Rushdie speaks personally, but this time in the first person and through the ego. His traumatic experience, an intense physical experience as he describes it, prompts him to reflect on the whole spectrum of his life. Thus, he refers to his difficult relationship with his father (“he had become, among other things, an angry becry”), his brothers and children, his relationship with his current wife, poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who stood heroically at his side, in his fear while he was covered in blood that after the attack he would die away from those he loves.
THE Rushdie he writes courageously about the most difficult moments of his life: his time in hospital, the emotionally painful loss of his eye due to the attack, the humiliation of not being able to control his body, his near-opioid addiction, his phase of restoration. “Our luxury was to sleep late without being woken up by the nurses for a blood draw at four in the morning or the nurses at five or the doctors at six” he notes.
As he describes, he received a huge wave of support from fellow artists and readers from all over the world. “A lot of people said they were praying for me. Even though they knew I was an atheist bastard” he writes. In this chronicle, his experiences are intertwined with his reflections on blindness, on the boundaries between public and private, on freedom of expression. The most difficult part seems to have been for Rushdie the one in which he has a mental conversation with his would-be assassin. There is revealed – not only through the words but mainly through their absence – the terror of death. This book was apparently his way of dealing with post-traumatic stress. As he writes: “I don’t like to think of writing as therapy—writing is writing and therapy is therapy—but there was a good chance I could feel better through telling my story from my perspective.”
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The book “Knife: Thoughts after an assassination attempt” by Salman Rushdie is published by Psychogios publications, translated by George Blanas
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