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“Except for my right eye, my body has basically recovered.” The 76-year-old Indian-British novelist Salman Rushdie appeared on the big screen, his right eye covered with dark lenses, his face With a smile.
In the summer of 2022, Rushdie was assassinated and seriously injured on the podium of an educational institution in New York. This incident shocked the literary world and society, and once again aroused global attention on issues of speech, creation, and the safety of writers. Last weekend, Rushdie connected to the South Bank Center in London from his home in New York to tell live and online audiences about the nightmare experience, which inspired him to write his memoir “Knife”.
Rushdie’s assassination case has not yet begun, but the source of his repeated death threats over the past three decades can be traced back to his 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses” (The Satanic Verses). In this novel, which was shortlisted for the British Booker Prize, Rushdie fictionalized an experience about the revelation of the “Prophet Muhammad”. The plot was regarded as a blasphemy against the teachings and history of Islam, and aroused the anger of Islamists. . The publication of this novel was not only widely boycotted by Islamists, but also directly led to many threats and acts of violence against Rushdie. The former Supreme Leader of Iran even issued a reward for assassination. The media has reported several cases in various countries around the world. The attempted assassination of Rushdie occurred. Rushdie has faced constant threats to his personal safety over the past three decades, but he has also become a symbol of “creative freedom” in Western society. This time he connected to London to describe the contents of his assassination memoir “The Knife”. Rushdie was reminded of his statement at the end of the novel “Victory”: “Words are the only victors.”
Rushdie was born in Mumbai, India, educated in England, has dual British and Indian citizenship, and currently lives in New York, the United States. He has published more than 10 novels to date, including the masterpiece “Midnight’s Children”, which won the British Booker Prize for Fiction, and “Shame”, “The Satanic Verses”, “The Moor’s Last Sigh” and “The Last Sigh of the Moor”, which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. “Quikot”, his creations are influenced by Indian mythology, and his style is mostly a combination of magical realism and historical novels. Rushdie’s works have been translated into more than forty languages. In 2023, he was listed among the “Top 100 Most Influential People” of the year by Time magazine. In the same year, he published his latest novel “Victory City” which he had written before his assassination.
Rushdie said with a smile that he was surprised when many military doctors told him that he had basically made a full recovery. He said that he later learned from media reports that the entire process of his assassination lasted only 27 seconds. Rushdie was stabbed more than a dozen times in the face, neck and abdomen. During that time, Rushdie remembered that he did not lose consciousness. He knew that he fell down and the knifeman was straddling him until someone pulled him away and saw “a lot of blood, or… flow out of one’s own body.” Bystanders later told Rushdie that he had been screaming in pain, but his own memory thought he was silent. He vaguely remembered that more and more people gathered around him, and people quickly ran onto the stage to try to control the assassin. While waiting for emergency treatment, someone kept pressing the aorta in his neck with their fingers. Then the helicopter came, followed by eight hours of major surgery.
In the six months after the injury, Rushdie said that he could not think about writing at all, let alone the experience of being assassinated. However, one day, when he sat down at his desk again, he suddenly felt that “it would be too ridiculous to write some other unrelated fictional plots now. People and myself would feel that I was avoiding the problem.”
In “The Knife”, readers can read Rushdie’s usual sharpness of writing: “I can’t warn myself, it’s too late, I can only tell the story… While the man is sleeping, the future rushes towards him, but strangely However, what really comes to me is the past, my own past. In death, we all become the same person as we were the day before, forever trapped in the past tense. This is what the knife wants. The cage that imprisons me is not the future, but the resurrected past, trying to drag me back.”
But in addition to such literary introspection, readers also need to face the author’s cruel and detailed description of self-injury and surgery. Part of the reading experience is comparable to “Emergency Room Story”. Regarding the detailed confession of this part, Rushdie explained: “Since you have to write, let’s write it all.” He believes that since Rousseau set the precedent for autobiographical writing with “Confessions”, he also set a goal of being as candid as possible. This rule: “It doesn’t matter if the truth is very uncomfortable. It was indeed a bit like stripping off one’s clothes in public… I wrote about it in every detail, just to let the reader go through what I went through.”
But among the mainly realistic memoirs, there is an exception of 30 pages: In this chapter, Rushdie used his imagination to fictionalize a conversation between himself and the assassin “A”. He explained that the man had already had 27 seconds of celebrity and he would not let him have a seat in the book, so he only used one letter as a reference. Rushdie said he even wanted to sit down with the knifeman and ask him a few questions. He remembered that the Irish writer Samuel Beckett was assassinated on the streets of Paris. He later attended the assassin’s trial and asked him “why” in person, but the other party only gave vague answers.
Rushdie felt that just saying “I’m sorry” couldn’t solve the problem. He thought he might as well fabricate a conversation and try to get into the assassin’s mind, from which he might get more answers: “In my opinion, this matter Something was missing: This guy was 24 years old, had no criminal record, was not on any terrorism watch lists, was just a young man from New Jersey, and later said he only read two pages of one of my books and thought I was ‘hypocritical’. It’s still far from attempted murder. If I set up a character’s motivation for murdering a stranger in a novel, the publisher would definitely find it unconvincing. But in reality, he knew the murder happened. Will it ruin my future as well as his own? Why should I do it anyway?”
The Rushdie assassination trial will probably begin this fall. Rushdie said that he is not afraid to face the assassin and testify in court: “It is him who should be afraid.”
In his memoirs, Rushdie also wrote about the meticulous care given to him by his fifth wife, American writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths, during the recovery process: “She didn’t Ken went to the nearest hotel to rest and never left my hospital bed for a minute while the doctors and nurses reported to her, as did the police and the FBI. On the other hand, she never let me witness her own emotions. Breaking down, I owe her so much.” Rushdie admitted that he felt stronger with her by his side: “I had been in love for five and a half years before the incident. I never thought that the romance novel would develop into a murder novel. Now that love is back, this book is also possible A happy ending.”
Rushdie said that writing this memoir was not a process of “self-healing.” He quoted Susan Sontag’s view in “Metaphors of Illness” and believed that writing is writing, and treatment is assisted by professionals. But after writing this memoir, Rushdie felt that he had at least regained the right to narrate, instead of being a helpless person lying in a pool of blood: “Now I am the one writing about the person lying in a pool of blood, and that is my own story”.
Despite this, the opening chapter describing the assassination process was very difficult. Rushdie could only write a little bit every day. Every time he came out of the studio, his wife would say, “You look so bad.” But he said that from the time he was assassinated to the time he was waiting for recovery, he never felt angry: “From the first day, I was all about getting well in good health and trying to move forward instead of looking back. Anger only pulls me back into the past I want to escape from.”
(This article represents only the author’s personal views, editor’s email address:[email protected])
