Knife by Salman Rushdie: “So it’s you,” Salman Rushdie recalls as a man in black, a “squatting bullet,” sprinted toward him on the stage of an auditorium in Chautauqua, N.Y., on the morning of Aug. 12, 2022. Rushdie thought, Here they are:
Knife by Salman Rushdie #1
Over three decades ago Iran’s former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa or a religious death sentence ordering the death of Rushdie and everyone involved in the publication of his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. It has been at least two decades since Rushdie stopped running. He lived almost every day in New York. Socially, he became a recluse but was also seen in dive bars.
The Man in Black seemed like a ghost from the past, a time that Rushdie thought he had largely forgotten.
The irony of that August morning is that Rushdie was at Chautauqua to participate in a discussion about protecting the world’s writers from harm. His attacker was like an aggressive fish. He also had a knife. Rushdie, too stunned to defend himself, raised his left hand. At first, some in the audience thought the fight was a performance.
Rushdie describes what happened next in his honest, insightful, and gripping new memoir, The Knife by Salman Rushdie: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. The man in black, stabbing wildly, had 27 seconds alone with him. Rushdie points out that this is long enough for me to read one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, including his favorite, no. 130. He won’t print the poem, but I will create a feeling of endless horror.
His Assailant was eventually defeated. Blood was everywhere, pooling. Rushdie’s clothes were cut off. His legs were raised to allow the remaining blood to flow to his heart. He remembers feeling humiliated. “In the case of serious injuries, the privacy of your body ceases to exist,” he writes. The reader takes it as a good sign for Rushdie’s health and the tone of this humane and often humorous book, that among his first thoughts was, “Oh, my nice Ralph Lauren suit.”
A member of his surgical team later told him: “When you were brought in from the helicopter, we didn’t think we could save you.”
Even though it was terrible, he was lucky. The doctor says, “You’re lucky, the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife.”
This is Rushdie’s second memoir. His first, “Joseph Anton,” was published in 2012. Joseph Anton is a detailed book about friendship and the many people who have embraced it. It was also a book about divorce. He was in the process of separating from his second wife, the writer Marianne Wiggins, when the fatwa was announced, and his third marriage to Elizabeth West also fell apart during the book.
On the other hand “Knife by Salman Rushdie” is a love story. Rushdie recounts meeting, courting and marrying the American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, three decades his junior. She is now Lady Rushdie; her husband was knighted in 2007 for his services to literature. Their story gives this memory a boost. At first, recovery and rehabilitation will be challenging.
Knife by Salman Rushdie #2
A few nights before he was almost killed by a stranger with a knife, Salman Rushdie dreamed about a famous fighter from ancient Rome trying to stab him. He had similar dreams ever since the religious leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa or a death threat after the publication of his book The Satanic Verses in 1989. Back then he would imagine “my killer standing up in some public forum and coming for me.” When, on the morning of August 12, 2022, in Chautauqua, upstate New York, on stage to speak (of all things) about the importance of protecting writers from harm, he saw a figure in black rushing toward him, his first thought was ” So it’s you.” and his second, more confused though, was “Really? It’s been so long. Why now, after all these years?”
In his 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton, Rushdie expressed his post-fatwa disorientation by writing about his experiences in the third person, as if the trauma had happened to someone else. As he says, it’s an I-story (and also, since he’s lost his right one, an eye-story): “If someone hurts you 15 times, you’ll feel it like the first person.” Joseph Anton (the Christian name of his literary heroes Conrad and Čechova) was a code name he adopted in while hiding.
Here, he avoids using the name of the attacker. He refers to Hadi Matar as “A”, short for Assailant or would-be assassin. There is also a hint for comparison to the other attackers (Asse) – like the Islamist terrorists who attacked and even murdered people associated with Rushdie. Just like other attackers, Matar barely knew the book “The Satanic Verses” he admitted only reading a few pages. After being charged with attempted murder and grievous bodily harm, Matar pleaded not guilty. The bail was refused, and the trial would happen eventually.
When the attacker lunged at the stage with a knife, some in the audience thought it must be a fake attack staged by the writer – a kind of safety stunt rather than an actual attack. But over the next short time, or to be precise 27 seconds, before he was tackled by brave audience members (even including the host Henry Reese), the attacker stabbed Rushdie 15 times in the eye, neck, arm, and chest.
As Rushdie lay on the floor and watched the pool of blood around him, he thought he was dying. One of the people who helped save him was a retired firefighter who pressed his thumb to his neck to stop blood flow.
Rushdie does not remember being angry with “A.” But the happiness he had felt the night before, standing in the summer moonlight with his new novel finished and corrected, was destroyed. Worse, he’s dragged into the past by a man “who tried to execute a death warrant three decades ago”—as if his 16 books since The Satanic Verses didn’t count, as if the “plain old novel” had become a theological hot potato. He wonders why he froze when A lunged at him. Maybe he should have run away or fought back. But how does a 75-year-old in shock fight a 24-year-old with a knife?
To identify his injuries, a crowd of helpers, including two doctors, cut open his clothes (“Oh, I thought, my nice Ralph Lauren suit”). He was lifted onto a stretcher and transported by helicopter to an extreme trauma unit in the neighboring state of Pennsylvania. Eight hours before the operation, his vision was blurry. And then, on heavy painkillers, he had visions of buildings made up of alphabets. When he came to his senses, he was on a ventilator (“like having an armadillo’s tail shoved down your throat”) and had parts of his body stitched together; luckily, he didn’t see the “bulging boiled egg eye,” which was hanging from his face.
Statements of support came from Presidents Biden and Macron, “grumpy phrases” from Boris Johnson and nothing from India. Most encouraging were the love messages from friends: live, live, he urged himself. His sister and sons flew in from London. Above all, there was his wife “Eliza,” the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, whom he had met five years earlier. When mesmerised by her beauty and following her to the balcony, he slammed his face into a sliding glass door (“She knocked me out “). They had been together ever since, married for the past 11 months, and have lived more privately than he was used to until now.
The doctors had no hope. Eliza was warned that he wouldn’t make it. But she took command at his bedside, staying with him 24/7 and documenting his recovery on phone and camera. Within ten days – arm in a cast, his liver healing, and fluid draining from his lungs – he was walking with a walker. The doctors were amazed. It was a kind of magic, a miraculous return from the brink of death.
He was taken to a rehabilitation centre in Manhattan and hoped for a stable recovery. But there were setbacks: dizziness, low blood pressure, urinary tract infections, terrible nightmares. The police outside his door laughed hoarsely all night, and at 5 am, the bandage was changed. Then came the shock of seeing myself in the mirror for the first time—”this one-eyed stranger with wild hair.” He felt bedridden and mad—rushdie’s mood shifted when he received an early bound copy of his new novel, “The Winning City.” The books closing lines are “Words are the only winners,” seemed to be a powerful message of hope.
More challenges came: seven months of working with a manual therapist, right eyelid suturing, and a prosthesis was fitted in his mouth to make eating less unpleasant. He doesn’t claim to be brave and briefly flaunts that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. The circle has come full circle.” He was given a second chance through love, luck, and surgical skills.
This is “a book I’d much rather not have to write with one eye and one and a half hands.” But he uses it to let others know what has happened and as a love song for Eliza. The book is not just about the attack. Rushdie also explores other writer’s who were a victim of violence (Samuel Beckett, and Naguib Mahfouz: “What was that, a club?”) and reflects on his own past including his difficult relationship with his alcoholic father.
There is also a chapter in which he has four imaginary interviews with his attacker, who described Rushdie as “insincere.” Rushdie asks him if every dishonest person deserves to die. The answers are grumpy: “You don’t know me, you’ll never know me,” says A.
“We are different,” says Beckett’s epigraph, “we are no longer what we were before yesterday’s misfortune.”
But Rushdie’s triumph could not be more different. Despite his terrible injuries and the threat under which he still lives, he remains unbowed to himself, as passionate as ever about art and freedom of speech as “the essence of our humanity.” It’s terrifying but heartwarming, a story of hate defeated by love. There is also room for a few jokes. He was overweight before the stabbing; after hospital and rehab, he finds he’s lost 55 pounds, though it’s “not a diet plan that should be recommended.”
Knife by Salman Rushdie #3
In the final installment of Salman Rushdie’s autobiographical nonfiction, The Knife by Salman Rushdie, there are surprising details about a man who attempted to assassinate the writer on August 12, 2022, at the Chautauqua Amphitheater in New York. Rushdie does not want to call the 24-year-old Lebanese American fanatic who tried to kill him by name but by the initial letter “A”. This can mean Assassin, Assailant and Ass. The policeman who arrested the attacker found many knives in a bag that was hidden near the stage. Rushdie is justifiably upset when he learns of this and wonders why. It seems that the man approached the attack like a job, bringing the whole toolkit, which, in his case, were variants of the weapon he had chosen for the act. It made him feel professionally equipped for the job. He left the final choice to how he visualized his crime scene.
Literature: a double-edged sword
However, it turns out that the assassin is not skilled enough. A doctor at UPMC Hamot, the hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, where Rushdie was first admitted, told him he was lucky because the attacker “had no idea how to kill a man with a knife.” The young man who set himself up as the chosen one to avenge what he considered an insult to his religion turned out to be an amateur. However, his amateur rage was enough to cause considerable damage to his victim’s body. Rushdie was lucky to survive not only because the murderer did not carry out his intentions perfectly.
The Knife by Salman Rushdie lingered in Rushdie’s mind as both a real thing and an idea, a metaphor. He wrote:
“Also, the tongue was a knife. It could open up the world and reveal its meaning, inner workings, secrets, and truths. It could cut from one reality to another… The language was my knife. If I were unexpectedly caught in an unwanted knife fight, it might be a knife I could use to defend myself. It could be the tool I use to remake and reclaim my world.”
Literature is a double-edged sword that wounds and unwinds, winds and unwinds, and penetrates a vulnerable language. Knife by Salman Rushdie is a non-violent object, but no less sharp and risky. The knife of literature transforms the nature of the instrument, turning it into a paradoxical act(presence of multiple knives): a wounding tongue to deliver its wounds.
Violence is a blunt force, a silencing act. It seeks to crush any response, any counter-narrative. In contrast, a response allows for thought, imagination, and exploration. It’s this kind of response that Salman Rushdie achieves with “Knife by Salman Rushdie.” This book isn’t about vengeance. It’s not about “an eye for an eye.” Instead, Rushdie uses the power of literature as a healing tool, a way to open minds and foster understanding.
Rushdie confronts a dilemma that many modern thinkers face: the tension between reason and everything else. This “everything else” includes intuition, memory, dreams, and even faith, aspects of life that defy pure logic.
A premonition-vision
Two nights before Rushdie left for the fateful Chautauqua show, he had a dream in which a gladiator speared him in a Roman amphitheater. Rushdie took this as a “premonition” and did not want to participate in the program. But he was concerned about money, which made him decide otherwise. After Rushdie escaped the jaws of death, he imagined the self, or “me,” as something distinct from his body. Because he did not believe in the soul’s immortality, he re-evaluated his idea of human beings having a “mortal soul”. Rushdie recalls his immediate feelings after the attack:
“Through the glass, I saw darkly. I heard indistinctly. There was a lot of noise. I knew I was surrounded by a group of people towering over me, all shouting simultaneously.’
He goes on to describe how his memories of the pain differed from what a group of people, including doctors, remembered about the event:
“Members of this group told reporters that I was moaning in pain, that I kept asking: What’s wrong with my hand? … In my memory, strangely enough, there is no record of pain… It is as if a contradiction has arisen between my “outer”, worldly self, which was waiting and so on, and my “inner”, within -myself, which was somehow detached from my senses and was, I think, close to delirium.”
When Rushdie regained consciousness at UPMC Hamot, he had “visions” that were architectural:
“From the alphabet, I saw huge places and other amazing buildings getting built. The building blocks of these fantastic structures were letters as if the world were words, made of the same basic material as language.”
He saw visionary similarities between Sheesh Mahal, Hagia Sophia, Alhambra, Fatehpur Sikri, Agra Red Fort, and Lake Palace of Udaipur.
I remembered a fragment of a verse from the Bible: “…and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions” [Joel, 2:28].
Rushdie’s premonition was also a vision. Some force beyond rational consciousness was using his unconscious mind to warn Rushdie that his life was in danger. The visions in the hospital triggered the painkillers. However, the exact nature of the visions was close to the fantastical elements and preoccupations of Rushdie’s fiction. These architectural beauties resided in the subconscious mind of the writer’s imagination. Under exceptionally traumatic conditions, the body creates space for dislocations to maintain mental health. Rushdie’s description of his outer and inner self is a defense mechanism of the mind protecting memory against pain. In a state of confusion, Rushdie believes that his senses have overpowered reason and are not functioning. It leaves the preservation game in the hands of the mysterious cooperation between the conscious and the unconscious. Confusion is a vortex where the madness of shock dissolves to preserve reason’s fate.
Rushdie reflects on his dilemma after realizing that he has survived the impossible:
“Of course, I meant freedom, whatever that hackneyed word meant. But I also wanted to think about miracles and the intrusion of the miraculous into the life of someone who didn’t believe it existed, yet spent his life creating imaginary worlds in which it did.”
The fantasy trope that Rushdie used memorably in novels such as Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015) derived from, among other things, an acknowledged debt to the Arabian Nights. They often served as a political allegory. He described Shame, a satirical novel about Pakistan, as a “modern fairy tale.” Suspension of disbelief is a literary technique to explain or evade situations in a specific historical and political context of the story that goes beyond logic.
Rushdie admits that he thinks about miracles but calls himself a non-believer in miracles. The problem is heightened when Rushdie’s African-American wife, Rachel Eliza Griffith, tells him (as others do), “A greater power protects you.”
Although Rushdie ignored his suspicion, the mysterious force that warned him also saved him. What do you call this power? More importantly, the uniform nature of something that functions as a protector against intense harm needs to be acknowledged. This power of intuition inhabits a space inside and outside and cannot be located or named.
Conclusion
Knife by Salman Rushdie is a thrilling exploration of contemporary society woven through the lives of its diverse characters. Set in New York, the novel explores the themes of identity, politics, and the complexities of human relationships. At its core is the mysterious figure of Nero Golden, a wealthy immigrant with a mysterious past. As the narrative unfolds, secrets are revealed, and tensions rise, culminating in a gripping tale of power, betrayal and redemption. Rushdie’s masterful prose and intricate narrative captivate readers and invite them to ponder the blurred lines between reality and illusion, truth and deception, in a world shaped by the sharp edges of a knife.