Surviving the Attack: Salman Rushdie’s Miraculous Rescue and Reflections on Life

by time news

2024-04-28 19:36:41

“What should you say to a man who tells you that he prefers to obey God than men and is therefore convinced that you deserve heaven by cutting your throat? » (Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary.)

It is a long cohort of fire and blood, which runs throughout Western history and comes to beat us: the war to the death of fanatics against the sowers of freedom.

At the dawn of the present day, the scourge of vigilantes fighting against all dissenting religious ideas met the reformer Jean Huss (in 1415), Etienne Dolet (in 1546), Giordano Bruno (in 1600), all delivered to the ransom for crime. heresy. The same murder, transformed into a fight against freedom of speech and publication, took down Marat in 1793, as well as the politician Paul-Louis Courier in 1825.

The massacre continued into the twentieth century, with Federico Garcia Lorca executed by the Spanish Phalangists in 1936; it culminated in the assassination of thirteen Jewish poets under Stalin in 1952; the Algerian poet Mouloud Feraoun was executed by the OAS in 1962; an unbalanced man kills John Lennon in 1980; Japanese translator of Satanic Verses Hitoshi Igarashi paid with his life in 1991; Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz was rescued in Cairo in 1994 and had a narrow escape; filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed in 2004 by an Islamist; write the Charlie Hebdo it was destroyed in 2015 by the same desire for revenge and purity; and, almost two years ago, Salman Rushdie escaped a violent death. He has just written about it in a book entitled The knifeand what a book!

August 12, 2022. Chautauqua Amphitheater, New York, 10:45 am Salman Rushdie takes his place on the podium to talk about welcoming writers under threat in their own country.

“At that moment, I saw the man in black crawling towards me down the aisle located to the right of the seats. Black clothes, black mask on his face, he became menacing and focused, a real missile. I stood up and watched him approach. I didn’t try to run away. I was scared. (…) My first thought when I saw this murderous figure rushing towards me was: “So you are. You are there.” (…) My second thought: “Why now? Seriously ? So much time has passed. Why now after all these years?”

I can distinguish between all stages of his frantic race. I see myself getting up and turning towards him. I raise my left hand in a sign of self-defense. He thrusts the knife into it. Then I received numerous blows, to the neck, to the chest, to the eye, everywhere. I feel my legs give out and I fall. »

The attack lasted twenty-seven seconds. Rushdie is seventy-five years old.

“I remember lying on the ground and seeing the pool of blood flowing from my body. “That’s a lot of blood,” I said to myself. And then I thought: I’m dying. »

No, the great man is not going to die.

It was not fun. Hiding nothing from us about the clinical protocols under which his body was torn apart, his book is a moving account of this miraculous rescue, where everyone played their part, starting with himself, the nursing staff of two hospitals America, his family in London, his friends. from all over the world and, above all, his wife, Eliza, poet and photographer, “made of beauty and terror”, who will bring him back from the edges of hell through the power of love.

Coming to himself again, Rushdie is overcome by visions of palaces, of large structures made of the letters of the alphabet. He sees in a dream the knight’s game of chess against death, i The seventh seal by Ingmar Bergman, a slightly later dream of Raft of the Medusa, by Géricault, where all the castaways are Surrealists who tear each other’s eyes out. On the bed of suffering, the man-writer makes it to the tips of his nails, dreams, imagination, attention to everything, he carries this mirror of himself to the edges of his life, as a special envoy for the purposes of. pain and evil.

His book is a great guide, in the war of stories that pit lies and propaganda against the dreams of human consciousness, to move forward against the horrors of our time, in the face of sectarianism, populist, religious and imperial retreats. everywhere.

Salman Rushdie, human brother.

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