Rushdie recalls a traumatic event

Prof Akshey Kumar
Name of Book : “Knife: Meditations
After an Attempted Murder”.
Author : Salman Rushide
Publishedby : Penguin Random House India Ltd.

On the morning of 12 August, 2022, 76-year old Salman Rushdie was getting ready to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution, in Chautauqua town in upstate New York, about “the creation in America of safe spaces for writers from elsewhere.” As he took the stage and had barely been introduced, a 24-year-old man from New Jersey in “black clothes, black face mask,”Hadi Matar, charged at him with a knife. Matar, a Lebanese American Muslim, was moved to violence against Rushdie because of his critique of Islamic fundamentalism. In the twenty-seven seconds before this assailant (who is simply referred to as “The A.” in the memoir) was subdued, he stabbed Rushdie repeatedly around fifteen times leaving him bleeding on the floor, close to death. The knife went through Rushdie’s left hand, abdomen, neck, and right eye.
Rushdie’s2024 memoir, bluntly titled Knife, is a recounting of his arduous and miraculous physical and psychological recovery after this life-altering incident. The memoir is equally divided into two parts, part one titled “The Angel of Death” and part two “The Angel of Life.” The four chapters in part one are titled “Knife”, “Eliza”, “Hamot” and “Rehab.” “Homecoming”, “The A.”, “Second Chance”, and “Closure?” constitute part 2, “The Angel of Life.”
While the memoir recalls a traumatic event in the author’s life, what it also reveals is an author with his wit and sense of humor still intact no matter his wrecked physical state. For instance, in a macabre fashion, Rushdie refers to the wound in his eye as “the cruelest blow,”and writes that his ruined eye, “bulged and hung like a large, soft-boil edegg.”Although in this death-like state, when a doctor asks someone to cut his clothes to gauge the extent of his injuries, a bloody Rushdie’s first thought is, “Oh… my nice Ralph Lauren suit.”
The memoir also expresses gratitude for the saviors of his life: firemen, surgeons, nurses, physiotherapists, and other individuals and friends. In fact, the memoir is “dedicated, simply, to the men and women who saved my life.” The most prominent of these people is his wife Eliza, the Black American poet and novelist (Rachel Eliza Griffiths). In a complete chapter dedicated to her, he tells his readers about how their “meetcute” and how he fell in love with her. Besides his love for Eliza, the memoir talks about his love of literature and free expression. And it equally makes clear his hatred for dictatorship, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation.
Salman Rushdie needs little introduction in the South Asian subcontinent or in the West, Whether as an award-winning writer, as a prominent advocate for free speech, or as someone with vocal political and sometimes controversial political views. In the U.S., Rushdie is a Democrat, who supported Barack Obama, voted for Hillary Clinton, and was a supporter of Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential elections. On politics in India, he has been firm in stating that religious sectarianism and political authoritarianism go hand-in-hand, and violence grows asdemocracydies.HehasalsobeencriticaloftherevocationofthespecialstatusofJammuandKashmirin August 2019. On the subject of Palestine, Rushdie has made the controversial statement that if a Palestinian state ever came to being, it would resemble a Taliban-like state run by Hamas.
Optimism and resolve are also evident in Knife when Rushdie writes, “One has to find life. One cannot just sit about recovering from near death. One has to find life.” “I’ m going to take back as much of my life here as possible, as soon as I possibly can.” Rushdie is philosophical to the core when he makes statements such as:
i) The truth has many enemies. Those who know the truth know also that it is precious, so many people want to make it cheap. Many want to persecute the possessors of the truth (Chapter 7, Second Chance)
ii) The art challenges orthodoxy. To regret or verify art because it does that is to fail to understand its nature…art is not a luxury. It stands out the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection, except the right to exist (Chapter 7, Second Chance)
iii) Respect for religion has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion’.Religions, like ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, fearless disrespect (Chapter 8, Closure ).
Knife has garnered a wide range of responses so far, some more adulatory than others. It has been described as a raw memoir in its rarest form; a fleeting, deeply personal account of endurance and survival; and an amazing testament to Rushdie’s humanity. Sudeep Sen, writing in The Hindustan Times (May 4, 2024) described it as”disarmingly raw, emotional, urgent and honest.”
He also referred to Knife’s architectural structure as arresting; and described it as riveting and magnetic pulling at your heart strings. It’s about affirmation, about optimism, about the never-say-die spirit. Writing in The Guardian (April 21, 2024), Rachel Cooke, while calling Knife “extraordinary” also added, “If he appears before us as a courageous person, a true he roof free speech, he is still a bit of as no band a show off. The amour-propre that was often on display in Joseph Anton, his 2012 memoir of the years when he was in hiding, has not gone away.” Similarly, Dwight Garner’s review in The New York Times (April 15, 2024) praises Knife for being “candid, plain-spoken and gripping” while simultaneously noting that it was not Rushdie’s “most elegant book,” and comparing it not so favorably with a memoir by another writer who was the survivor of a similar attack. Knife “does not have the emotional, intellectual and philosophical richness of the journalist Philippe Lançon’s memoir “Disturbance” (2019), about surviving the 2015 Charlie Hebdo magazine attacks by thugs claiming allegiance to Al Qaeda.”
In his memoir, Rushdie recalls the strong messages condemning the murderous attack on him from prominent world leaders, including President Biden of USA, President Macron of France, and even Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister of England (who had not taken kindly the knighthood conferred on him for service to literature in 2007). He, however, laments that India, the country of his birth and his inspiration, on that day, found no words.
Regardless of his motherland’s ambivalence towards him, Rushdie’s strong attachment to his country of birth, and his muse, India, is reflected in the memoir. India is undoubtedly very close to his heart which is reflected in his writings, from the widely acclaimed novel Midnight’s Children (1981), a fable about modern India, to the recent Victory City (2024), set in southern India, and describing an epic tale of a woman who breathes a fantastical empire into existence. Knife is replete with references to India, which showcase Rushdie’s knowledge of and love for his country of origin.
Towards the end of his memoir, in the chapter titled “The A.,”Rushdie imagines a conversation with his assailant that never occurred. By refusing to name his as sailant, Rushdie takes away any power from him turning him into an insignificant nobody. He engages him in concepts and the meanings of words as he tries to get to understand what compelled him to attack Rushdie. The assailant had made a statement in a New York Post article, stating that “everybody” knows that Rushdie was a “disingenuous person.” So, Rushdie asks the assailant what he means by that word “disingenuous” (The A. responds: “it means that you pretend to be telling the truth which you’re not”). Then, Rushdie asks The A. to explain what he meant by the word “everybody.” The A. responds, “Everybody is all good people. People who know the Devil when he comes to trick them. People who know right from wrong.” Through the imagined conversation, Rushdie tries to get into his attacker’s head to understand the radicalization of young men like him on online platforms such as YouTube and steadily exposes the contradictions and limitations of his thinking.
The memoir ends with Rushdie revisiting the site of trauma, the Chautauqua Institution, and feeling a “lightness” of being (in a new Ralph Lauren suit, he tells us!),a steady coming to terms with what had happened. Unambiguously titled “Closure?”, the question mark in this final chapter of the memoir leaves no doubt that Rushdie is letting his readers know that there is no such thing as closure even as he acknowledges that the passage time of time has deadened the pain and allowed him to feel almost “whole” again, and that the writing of Knife has been therapeutic. Knife is a short and engrossing memoir, an important cultural document, and definitely worth a serious read for anyone interested in Salman Rushdie’s oeuvre, free speech, and resilience in the face of fanaticism and tragedy.
(The author was formerly with Apeejay School of Management, New Delhi)