2024-04-17 09:00:42
The author, targeted by a fatwa from the Islamic Republic of Iran, publishes the story of the attack he suffered in 2022 and his return to life.
“I couldn’t write about anything else.” This is how Salman Rushdie recounts the writing of The Knife, an account of the stabbing attack that almost cost him his life in 2022 and its aftermath. On the occasion of the release of the book, this Thursday April 18 at Gallimard, the American-British author gave a long interview to France Inter:
“I had some ideas for books I could write but they seemed stupid, compared to this subject,” he explains.
“I quickly realized that until I took care of this I couldn’t do anything else. It became an urgent matter to do it.”
A life under protection
The attack took place on August 12, 2022, in the middle of a literary conference on the shores of the American Great Lakes north of New York. A man rushed at Salman Rushdie, knife in hand, and stabbed him multiple times over 27 seconds, seriously injuring him in the face, neck and abdomen.
The writer notably lost the sight of one eye; he only ever appeared with glasses where the right lens was smoked.
This attack, perpetrated by a young 24-year-old American of Lebanese origin, a sympathizer of the Islamic Republic of Iran, acts as a painful reminder of the fatwa issued by Tehran in 1989 against the writer, due to the publication of his book The Satanic Verses. A condition which forced him for a long time to live in hiding and under police protection, going from hiding place to hiding place.
“For more than 20 years I have lived in the United States. I no longer had to think about the fatwa and all that. I was able to have a life as a writer, I wrote a lot of books… and it’s as if I was being brought back to my past, as if this attacker was a time traveler who had arrived from a distant past and was trying to make me return there,” he confides.
“A collision between the forces of life and those of death”
The result was the writing of Le Couteau, which initially “unusually exhausted” him before he found “a sort of flow”; “The book flowed out of me, and it got easier and easier.”
The author dwells on the symbolism of this assassination attempt: “It’s a very intimate attack, a knife attack. It happens very close to you (…) I felt that what was happening What was produced was, in a way, a figure representing death in front of my face, which represented life. A collision between the forces of life and those of death.
He also talks about the assailant’s young age (“He wasn’t even born at the time of the publication of The Satanic Verses”) and his murky motivations:
“He gave a very strange interview from prison to a New York newspaper. Among other things, he said that he had almost no knowledge of my work, he saw a few videos on YouTube and that was enough for him to commit this act”.
“Very moved by the words of President Macron”
And to have a few emotional words for the people who did not hesitate to intervene at the time of the attack to save his life, despite the danger represented by the attacker:
“The subject of this book is a conflict between the best of human nature and the worst. On one side beauty, love, art, freedom, and on the other side violence, fanaticism, and ultimately imbecility The book became like a portrait of these two realities in conflict with each other.
“I had a lot of support (…) I must say that I was very moved by the words of President Macron.”
Prophetic nightmare
Salman Rushdie also speaks of this premonitory dream, which occurred two days before the attack, in which “a gladiator armed with a spear attempted to attack (him) in a Roman amphitheater”:
“I knew that the place where I was going to speak was an amphitheater-shaped space. I told myself that I didn’t want to go there anymore. Then I told myself that it was a dream, that I had promised to go there, that people had bought tickets… and I left my dream aside.”
Having become, despite himself, a figure of freedom of expression since the fatwa which fell on him, he concludes: “It is a bad time for freedom of expression in many parts of the world, sometimes due to regimes authoritarian, sometimes because of progressive right-thinking which has sided with censorship. The attack comes from all kinds of directions, and it is difficult to defend this principle but it is necessary to do so. “
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