You already know the story. Someone writes something. Someone else finds it offensive. Then that someone else kills that someone. Very familiar story. Another utterly unoriginal narrative non-fiction.
Mr. Rushdie has survived, quite miraculously, or perhaps magically as he himself has been employing the usage of it in his writing for all his life. Blending of the magical with the mundane has been his most precious trope and now that magical has touched him. Perhaps not so magical in the sense of Mr. Geronimo or Saleem Sinai but in the sense of being unusual, being extraordinary. After all, he wasn't supposed to survive. The twenty-seven seconds he had with his assailant or the assailant had with him was brutal, bloody and vicious. It needed some doing on the doctors' part to make him a whole again but they were doubtful of being able to save him. So in all accounts, it was extraordinary, miraculous, as he firmly affirms in his second memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Penguin Random House, 2024), the sort of book which no author would ever want to feel the need to write.
It is sometimes imperative to separate the art from the artist, to judge independently of an artist’s life but in Rushdie’s case it’s hardly possible. He has always wanted to simply be a writer but the controversy around The Satanic Verses blemished him in ways that made it almost implausible to isolate him from all the furor surrounding him. However much he or anyone else wants to escape the ineluctable, it’ll always shadow him and his legacy, as he puts it in Knife, he’ll always be the guy who got knifed for writing. But if we keep all the furor aside, we still see Rushdie standing tall with his sheer literary might. There are not many authors writing like him in the present English language.
On 14th February of 1989, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued an order calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, the farthest thing from love that could happen to anyone on the valentine's day had happened to him -- he had become an effigy of hate. The declaration forced him to resort to hiding, and after a decade of hiding, he moved to New York and gradually started to embrace public life. Amidst all these, he kept writing, the only courageous thing he thought he could do. But since the controversy, he couldn't simply be a storyteller anymore. He himself has become a story, a controversy, an affair; the Rushdie affair.
He has written profusely since then -- more than a dozen books since the decree and four of which have been nominated for the Booker prize. He is the most nominated author of Booker's history; being nominated seven times and winning it once (1981) and also winning the Booker of Bookers (1993) and the Best of the Booker (2008) for Midnight's Children.
Everything was quite normal for him since moving to New York. He let down the guard, mingling with people and living like a free man for almost two decades and not like someone who was under a death threat and a massive bounty on his head. In August 2022, he was poised to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm in a literary event in Chautauqua in upstate New York. Just after he got onto the stage, he was brutally attacked with a knife by an extremist intending to fulfil the fatwa issued by Iran's supreme leader. The specter which shadowed Rushdie for the last three decades, ineluctable now, finally materialized itself in front of him and his reaction at seeing that haunted past coming alive was, "So, it's you."
Mr. Rushdie's right eye has been permanently damaged as the knife went all the way to his optic nerve. His left hand perilously injured, neck and face slashed and the wild stabbing, slashing of the knife scarred him in ways that are never going to go away or completely heal. It isn't remotely comical unlike The Satanic Verses which was. As Rushdie put it, "...it was a quarrel between those with a sense of humor and those without one." Evidently, the would-be assassin, one from the later category, tried to kill Mr. Rushdie because he didn't know how to laugh.
As the title suggests, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder is a harrowing book but as always Rushdie's humour is still palpable throughout it. A considerable amount of jeu d'esprit is evident in the chapter titled "The A." in which Rushdie imagines a conversation between him and the attacker, describing him in alliterations as his assailant, his would-be assassin, the man who made assumptions about him, and with whom he had a near-lethal assignation. Rushdie never names his assailant and calls him only as "the A" throughout the book.
Knife is dedicated to the many men and women who helped to save Rushdie's life -- doctors, nurses, a certain fireman, his loved ones and everyone else involved
In one of his short stories, titled The Old Man in the Piazza, Rushdie writes, "There is also the invisible frontier between action and observation. There are those who do, and then there are those who watch them do it. The audience sits here; the stage is over there. The fourth wall is a powerful force." There is no fourth wall here. Here, Rushdie is directly addressing and performing all the tricks. No mask tries to hide the subjectivity this time. Rushdie's first full-length autobiographical work Joseph Anton: A Memoir (Jonathan Cape, 2012), was written in the third-person, Knife not so. He is blunt and personal this time, "When somebody wounds you fifteen times it definitely feels very first-person. That’s an 'I' story."
Knife is chaptered into two parts; one is The Angel of Death and the other is The Angel of Life. It is not just a memoir of a near-death experience and it's not that the specter of death flies all over the book. In Joseph Anton, Rushdie detailed his life and loves until 2012. In Knife, he details his newfound love with poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Theirs is a heartfelt story. For Rushdie, falling in love again after all his previous encounters with love, was haughty, his friends reminded him, so did Eliza's friends to Eliza but they have kept on going as "boats against the current." Along with a heartfelt paean to Eliza, Knife is dedicated to the many men and women who helped to save Rushdie's life -- doctors, nurses, a certain fireman, his loved ones and everyone else involved.
For Mr. Rushdie, this book is a way of processing the horror he endured
For Mr. Rushdie, this book is a way of processing the horror he endured. It’s as if Rushdie is saying, you employed a knife, I’m employing language, let’s see whose weapon can cut deeper. Rushdie's last novel, Victory City (Penguin Random House, 2023) was a testament to the power of words. In Victory City, an empire rose and fell, eventually nothing of that world remained extant but the words, the poem that the protagonist conjured, remained. Here too, the gashing, slicing and slashing are but ephemeral.
What's the point of writing if a poem cannot stop a bullet or a novel cannot defuse a bomb? Rushdie says, we have to keep singing the song of truth irrespective of the present outcomes. That's all we can do, after all. Orpheus' severed head kept on singing, and as long as Mr. Rushdie's head is there, he's determined to keep on singing.
Mr. Rushdie has never truly been apologetic of what he writes. Though just after the controversy, he was pressured into issuing a timid, self-abasing apology which did not take long for him to regret over and he'd never stooped that low again, saying he wished he had written a more critical book. His stance remains the same in Knife too -- "If anyone’s looking for remorse, you can stop reading right here." His tone throughout the book is defiant, and even if he's not physically his old self anymore, his usage of literary devices, employment of literary and film trivia attest to his unremittingly sharp mind.
Najmus Sakib studies Linguistics at the University of Dhaka. Reach him on X at @sakib221b.