Things I’ve learned from Salman Rushdie

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/07/2024 (467 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In April, I read an Associated Press article in the Free Press headlined “Has Salman Rushdie changed after his stabbing?”

It was a fair question and one many people were interested in having answered, but the question burning in me — then and now — turns that headline on its ear: has the attack on Salman Rushdie changed us?

Have we learned anything from the experience of a writer whose life has literally been on the line for his work, and for the rights of free speech and self-expression, since Feb. 14, 1989?

Much has been written, including by Rushdie himself, about the date a fatwa was issued and a bounty placed on his head by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses.

Thirty-three years later, on Aug. 12, 2022, when the author was stabbed multiple times by a would-be assassin in Chautauqua, N.Y., I had just finished reading Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet. For days and weeks after, I compulsively scanned news sites for any word of his condition, my brain stuttering a mantra: please let him live.

Because I realized then that Rushdie’s well-being — his continued defiant life and creative work in the face of the constant threat of death — was bigger than one man’s existence; it was a potent and inspirational symbol of freedom. As Rushdie was recovering and undergoing physio in New York, I was reading The Satanic Verses and wondering what all of the hate was about. It is a dense book to be sure — multilayered, probing, playful, hypothetical and exploratory — but I found it difficult to believe that his writing, masterful as it is, could have triggered a death sentence, not just for the author himself, but for its publishers and translators.

But the black arrows were indeed coming for them, Rushdie recalls in his memoir Joseph Anton (2012), coming for him and others, and who knew where and when they might strike:

“When it begins it’s just about him; it’s individual, particular, specific. Nobody feels inclined to draw any conclusions from it,” Rushdie writes. “It will be a dozen years and more before the story grows until it fills the sky, like the Archangel Gabriel standing upon the horizon, like a pair of planes flying into tall buildings, like the plague of murderous birds in Alfred Hitchcock’s great film.”

In Joseph Anton (the pseudonym Rushdie used in hiding), he describes finding a new sense of liberty in the United States. But in 2002, Rushdie goes back to London, England — a place where he had spent much of the previous decade living under police protection. And on one particularly auspicious day he is told the threat against him in the U.K. has eased dramatically. At the end of Joseph Anton, we see Rushdie stunned and relieved with this news, as he walks out of a hotel and hails a cab. The simple gesture says so much: the autonomy to choose one’s own path, to strike out on one’s own in public without fear, to get in a taxi and just go.

But for Rushdie, those murderous birds were still circling, and would arrive in the form of a 24-year-old man from New Jersey clutching a knife. The author was stabbed on stage 15 times in 27 seconds, blinding him in one eye and wounding him in the face, head, hand, neck, chest and thigh. Rushdie had been about to give a speech on the importance of keeping writers safe. In Knife, his compelling recounting of the 2022 attack and its aftermath, he writes:

“Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist. It accepts argument, criticism, even rejection. It does not accept violence.”

Back in 1994, at the fifth anniversary of the fatwa, several world leaders made statements. I was pleased to learn that Canada’s then-foreign affairs minister, André Ouellet, was among them, noting “the fact that Rushdie has survived is a hope for freedom in the world.”

Had Rushdie been killed for his art on Aug. 12, 2022, as was his attacker’s intent, that hope and freedom would have been dashed, the bitter shards scattered on the ground beneath all our feet.

In The Satanic Verses, Rushie wrote that it is “A poet’s work …to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.”

Are we awake yet? The black birds of oppression, censorship and crippling fundamentalism are still circling. Will we decry them?

Pam Frampton is a freelance writer and editor who lives in St. John’s.

pamelajframpton@gmail.com

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