It’s not easy to tell stories in today’s world. This world increasingly prefers online rumor to knowledge, amnesia to memory, apathy to empathy, uniformity to diversity, dogma to doubt, tyranny to democracy and, above all, , to stories silence.
Anyone who has devoted his or her life to books and literature knows this: freedom of expression is the essential oxygen for writing, dreaming, exchanging across borders – but stocks of this first-class product necessity are at their lowest. Like a fish in a very polluted river, the writer is reduced to swimming frantically in search of the last pockets of oxygen, or to putting his body in slow motion to take refuge in pessimism and weariness.
Writing as resistance
When, like me, you come from one of those regions of the world that have been shaped by various waves of authoritarian populism, ultranationalism, extremism and chauvinism, in one of these seriously injured democracies, you are well placed to know that words weigh heavily and that, fundamentally, all literature is resistance.
From politics to sexuality to history, there is no longer an easy topic to write about. To tell the truth, we felt it for a long time. Yet it was an absolute shock when, on August 12, a 24-year-old extremist stabbed one of the world’s most important novelists, essayists and intellectuals, Salman Rushdie, multiple times. He survived, but at the cost of injuries that will leave his life turned upside down, and a trauma that will probably never heal.
There are two readings of this terrifying event. It can be seen as an isolated act, in which case it is necessary to focus mainly, or even exclusively, on the author and his novel. The Satanic Verses, which has scandalized since its very first publication. It is the reading that makes this attack a good part of the neck