Freedom of expression: “‘Live!’ it whispered inside me. >Live!

After the knife attack, Salman Rushdie’s life hung by a thread. The doctors who performed emergency surgery gave him little chance of surviving. On August 12, 2022, he was sitting on a podium in Chautauqua, a small town in the far south of New York state, when 24-year-old Hadi M. from New Jersey rushed towards him and then stabbed him 15 times.

Rushdie now says that afterwards he hovered between life and death and dreamed of “The Seventh Seal”, Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film, namely the scene when the returned knight plays chess with Death and the end of the game as far as possible delayed: »That was me. I was the knight,” writes Rushdie in his new, autobiographical book “Knife,” in which he deals with the terrorist attack in literary terms.

It is a very personal book. The 76-year-old writer, who now lives in New York, reports on his fears, his panic, but also his hopes and intimate relationships and his family life, especially his love for his wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths. On 250 pages he tells in detail and chronologically about the attack and the subsequent events, about his medical history and about the necessity of writing it all down. For him, this was the way to “acknowledge what had happened, to regain control, to own what had happened and not to be a mere victim. I wanted to respond to violence with art.”

He succeeds in this book, which sounds rather conciliatory for long stretches and is free of resentment. The author can’t help but always refer to the perpetrator as “A.” like asshole, as he explains at the beginning. He dissects the events like with a sharp knife. He describes in detail how he was surprised on stage (“I just stood there and stared at him, standing there rooted to the spot, a rabbit idiot in the headlights”), how the perpetrator stabbed him again and again, how he fell to the ground A scuffle ensued, spectators provided first aid and overpowered the assassin. Rushdie was conscious the entire time until he was finally taken to the hospital and underwent several hours of surgery. He had serious injuries to his chest, neck and arm area and he lost his right eye, which the perpetrator had stabbed into with the knife. He couldn’t move his left hand for months.

After the call for murder in Tehran by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 to kill him because he had insulted the Prophet and Islam with his novel “The Satanic Verses,” Rushdie had been one of the most closely guarded people in the world, but had been in the last Over the years, people have moved increasingly freely and therefore less protected. And then, after more than three decades, he was almost murdered during a panel discussion that was supposed to be about protecting persecuted writers. »Why after all these years? The world had certainly moved on, this chapter had long since been closed. However, what was coming and approaching so quickly was some kind of time traveler, a murderous ghost from the past.

After the attack, the security precautions in his everyday life were increased again, as before. What was new was that airlines now took him with them when he was able to travel again after months. That wasn’t always the case in the 1990s. Rushdie emphasizes that this attempted assassination changed his life forever, and not just because he lost an eye. He now feels “a deep longing for the irretrievably lost past from which the knife cut me off, a past that left me with pain for which there was no healing.”

The trial of his assassin Hadi M. will take place later this year. He doesn’t yet know whether Rushdie will attend to confront him. He would certainly like to speak to the young man who tried to kill him and who, after his arrest, was astonished to find that Rushdie was still alive. In “Knife,” the writer Rushdie conducts a fictional dialogue with him and questions him about his motives and his ideas about religion, morality and politics. In these 25 pages of dialogue you can read, above all, what Rushdie wants to say to the perpetrator, including that in his novels, especially in “Midnight’s Children” and in the “Satanic Verses”, he makes very differentiated statements about Muslim people and their religion have written.

But “Knife” is not a defense or an accusatory essay on the subject of freedom of expression. Nevertheless, it is a combative book that is directed against ideologues and despots, whose hateful messages currently seem to be becoming more and more dominant for many people. “So we have to strive to write better stories than the false narratives of tyrants, populists and fools, stories that people want to live in.” Because “Knife” is, above all, the book of a successful fight for survival. “‘Live!’ it whispered inside me. >Live!

Of all people, the atheist Rushdie is now repeatedly asked whether he believes in miracles because he was able to survive the assassination attempt – which he of course denies, but refers to narrative works in which magic and sorcery repeatedly play a role. »I think of art as a waking dream. And fantasy can bridge the gap between dream and reality; it allows us to see the real in new ways through the lens of the unreal. No, I don’t believe in miracles, but yes, my books do.”

In “Knife” Rushdie reports not only on the assassination attempt, but also on his youth, on his drinking father and on the great love of the past few years, on life in New York, which he values ​​so incredibly, on his friendships with the writers Martin Amis and Paul Auster. In this respect, this book is also a surprisingly personal portrait of this artist. Let’s see whether “Knife” fulfills its purpose for him as a writer, as he explained it, and whether he can devote himself to other topics after this processing. Shortly before the assassination attempt, he had read Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” and Franz Kafka’s “The Castle” in preparation for a novel “about an enigmatic, mysterious college.” You can be excited.

Salman Rushdie: Knife. Thoughts after an attempted murder. Ad English v. Bernhard Robben, Penguin, 256 pages, hardcover, €25.