Salman Rushdie begins his book Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder with this Samuel Beckett quote. “We are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.” Many of you will understand this, especially if you have lived a long life.
Rushdie, however, has been visited by 2 major traumas. In 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on his life for insults to Islam in his book Satanic Verses. He was immediately forced into hiding with 24-hour security. Then on August 22 2023, he suffered an assassination attempt by an unknown assailant.
Before that day Rushdie was a famous writer who, on that day was to give a speech at the Chautauqua Institute about how to keep writers safe from harm. Ironically, one of the things that we learn is that there was no security at this conference.
A young man stormed the stage and before anyone could stop him stabbed Rushdie 16 times. This young man was quiet, by all accounts unassuming, but was fed and stoked by online Islamic fundamentalist groups all over the world. Rushdie calls them group think manufacturers. They claimed him. He found a place to belong.
The last thing that Rushdie remembers seeing with his right eye was a man rushing to him on his right side – a man with black clothes and a black facemask. The last thing that he remembers thinking was “So it’s you, you are here.” It took 27 seconds before anyone came to Rushdie’s aid and he says in retrospect, he was ashamed that he had a ‘rabbit in the headlights’ reaction. He froze and so did many others. Rushdie believes that those few people who did come on stage to help him are the heroes of the day.
Then came the long recovery. He so deftly and even humourously records the many insinuations that his body experienced in hospital. Here his brilliance as a writer makes it all come alive. Being on a ventilator was like having an “armadillo’s tail down your throat.” He even summons up humour when he says that what makes hospitals happy is when a patient says that s/he has had a bowel movement. And the number of serious conditions that arose from medication complications was an eye opener.
Of course, these are just the physical details of his recovery. Because Rushdie is richly imbued with many cultures and mythologies, his emotional tableau is rich in detail. Thoughts and quotations are plucked out of history. The book literally resonates across time and is a conduit for reflection and connection.
In the end, this is a book about the triumph of love over hate. His wife Eliza, his children and a few close friends give love as their medicine. He continually bows down to the power of this love. One of the most moving moments in the book was when he described how on day seven of his recovery, a very large crowd, organized by PEN, gathered on 5th Avenue to “Stand with Salman”. This man, who has always been a proponent of free speech, was their hero. He was able to view it with his good eye on a computer screen. It is a passage that will bring tears to your eyes.
Knife is a metaphor for hate, which he believes will be overcome by love.
