“And if I ever think of you in the future, it will be with a dismissive shrug. I don’t forgive you, but I don’t deny you my forgiveness either. You are simply too insignificant to me.”
In his recently published book “Knife”, the Indian-American writer Salman Rushdie tries to classify what happened on August 12, 2022 in an educational center in Chautauqua, New York: During a discussion, 24-year-old Hadi Matar ran into the then 75-year-old year-old and stabbed him around 15 times. Rushdie was so badly injured that he struggled with death for days. He lost his eyesight and the stitches injured several organs, his left hand and his face.
Rushdie’s world “exploded,” he writes. In 1989, Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced him to death by fatwa because of the book “Satanic Verses.” Nothing had happened for 30 years, and now a man who hadn’t read two pages of the book attacked him. According to Rushdie, his victory was life, the meaning that the attack gave him, his defeat: now he is once once more only defined by the fatwa.
Image: APA/AFP/HANDOUT
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Image: APA/AFP/HANDOUT
The book climbed up the bestseller lists immediately following it was published and is still there. Rushdie uses his own means to defend himself once morest Matar, whom he “appropriately” only refers to as A. in the book. (Because: “I find myself just calling him ‘asshole’ in my head, forgive me.”)
Language can also be a knife, writes Rushdie: “Language was my knife. If I unexpectedly found myself in a knife fight, language might have been the weapon with which I might defend myself.” The author wants to respond to violence with art.
And he does it brilliantly. He describes movingly what the attack did to him, his wife Eliza and his family, and how he struggles to give what happened the appropriate meaning. He describes the happy life before and how he tries to fight his way back to it. “Our happiness was no longer that cloudless happiness we had known before,” Rushdie writes last. “It was an injured luck. (…) Nevertheless, it was a strong luck.”
Salman Rushdie: “Knife – Thoughts following an Attempted Murder”, Penguin, 255 pages, 26.50 euros