Salman Rushdie’s ‘Knife’ answers violence with art

Shelley Walia

On February 14, 1989, Khomeini announced that “Salman Rushdie, and all involved in the publication of ‘The Satanic Verses’, who were aware of its contents, are sentenced to death”. Many western nations, in protest against the fatwa, withdrew their ambassadors from Iran. But a few months later, most of the countries began to concede that the book was offensive to Muslims. There was a move to withdraw Rushdie’s security as it was a waste of taxpayer money. Norman Tebbit, the Conservative Party chairman, held Rushdie responsible for grievously offending the sentiments of British Muslims. Without having read the book, many became Rushdie’s adversaries and never realised that the book is, in fact, unequivocally hilarious without any evidence of being irreverent.

Though Rushdie found himself sadly disowned, his views on free expression and his determination to persevere as a novelist in the face of terror, remained ever so strong and engaging. For him, “if you are afraid of the consequences of what you say, then you are not free”. He did not despair then and he did not despair now. What kept him going was his credo of uncensored championship of artistic freedom, underpinned by his undying wit and humour, bizarrely apparent in his first response while being attacked: “Oh, my nice Ralph Lauren suit.”

Rushdie went about his life over the last three decades fearlessly attending public functions, while the spectre of the fatwa virtually faded from his mind, till August 12, 2022, when he lay dying after the harrowing attempt on his life by an Islamist zealot in an amphitheatre in upstate New York where, ironically, he was to speak on the security of writers. His autobiographical non-fiction, ‘Knife’, is a candid rendition of that morning when he saw his eyeball dangling on his cheek “like a large soft-boiled egg”, with a horrifying 15 stabs on his body executed within 27 seconds.

Rushdie survived and through him, art survived. Telling his story, he writes, “would be my way of owning what had happened, taking charge of it, making it mine, refusing to be a mere victim. I would answer violence with art”. His agonising recovery is the price he paid for his words and his art which, according to him, “is not luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist”.

His survival, therefore, was the survival of imagination and human spirit. Symbolically, his literary response remained alive, disallowing the knife to bring about the finality of death, and instead create a space to further explore, unfold and visualise the power of the word and its capacity to become an extra-potent deterrent. Unreason interlaces with reason, the phantasmagoric intermingles with the unbearably palpable, and the inner eye opens to compensate for the loss of the physical eye. Despite the physical and emotional toll, his typical prose and sharp vision remain undiminished.

‘Knife’, as a metaphor, therefore, transmutes into both an idea and a reality: “Language, too, was a knife. It could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths… Language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back. It could be the tool I would use to remake and reclaim my world.”

Describing his disturbed state of mind post the attack, Rushdie visualises the ‘I’ standing disengaged from the exterior world. His inner being begins to find an association with the premonition he had two days before the attack, a vision of being charged by a gladiator. “So it’s you,” Salman Rushdie recalls on the morning of August 12, 2022, when a black-clad man, a “squat missile”, dashed towards him. The gladiator, the Shia Muslim fanatic and Khomeini coalesce into a derisive hallucination.

In his delirious state, he dreams of the vast reservoirs of the creative mind and revisits the architectural beauties and the fantasies of his delirious world. The conscious joins hands with the unconscious, facilitating him to realise: “What I meant, of course, was freedom, whatever that much-battered word now meant. But I also wanted to think about miracles, and about the irruption of the miraculous into the life of someone who didn’t believe that the miraculous existed, but who nevertheless had spent a lifetime creating imaginary worlds in which it did.”

This is the paradox of his life both as a writer and as a wounded “perforated” being trying to find his own brand of fantasy to defy the real world. Possibly, he will come around someday to acknowledge the existence of the miraculous. And when his fifth new wife tells him, “Some greater force protected you”, we, who by now know Rushdie’s lively and feisty disposition, can imagine him slyly smiling to himself and wondering how ‘the godless bastard’ like him survived the terrible trauma. As he says, “The targets of violence experience a crisis in their understanding of the real.” However, the crisis he has self-assuredly faced, and his struggle to write about it, have abetted him in “making my peace with what had happened, making my peace with my life”.