Survivor

I could not wait to read this book. Rushdie has written 22 books in his 77 or 78 years of life, and of those, only 2 have been non-fiction – Joseph Anton, and now Knife. These are the only 2 books I feel I can accessibly read since I do not quite comprehend magical realism, and since Joseph Anton was so masterfully, brilliantly, delightfully written, I was all eagerness to read this second Rushdie non-fiction.

It did not disappoint.

This is not going to be a short review, even though the book was not long, just over 200 pages. But it is impossible not to quote Rushdie at length, because few if any could tell it better than he can. As I read this book, it comes home to me again, as it did when I read Joseph Anton, how fortunate we the readers are when two huge talents coincide in one person – that sparkling clarity of thought, originality of thought-processing, and high level of intelligence, with that remarkable facility with words, that mastery of language, that craftsmanship combined with articulateness – both of which must be present to produce literature at the highest levels. All that said, I will just be pulling out a few salient points from Knife, I certainly will not be covering all its contents in this review.

In an interview with John Wilson (In This Cultural Life), Rushdie tells us that he did not wish to write Knife, but the experience of getting stabbed 15 times and almost dying, was ‘getting in the way’ of everything else, and the only way of getting past that was to go through it. He says writing Knife was not exactly cathartic, but it was a way of ‘handling the subject’, of ‘dealing with it’, and that there was ‘no alternative’. Three months after the attack, when Rushdie was able to sit at his desk again and try to resume work, he wanted to write another novel, but

it felt absurd. I can’t write this, I told myself. However much I wanted to focus on fiction, something immense and non-fictional had happened to me […] Until I deal with the attack, I wouldn’t be able to write anything else. I understood that I had to write the book you’re reading now before I could move on to anything else (p129).

But even when he was still in Hamot trauma unit, the very early days after the attack, wife Eliza and Rushdie were already documenting all of this story, not necessarily thinking it was to be made into a book, but understanding fully the importance of having these photographic and video recordings. It was day 3 after the attack, still in the trauma unit, when it became clear he would live, when his brain had begun to work, and his first coherent thought was “We need to document this” (p60), he said to Eliza, and she immediately agreed. Rushdie explains that this is bigger than himself, it is about the larger subject of freedom.

At that point [in the trauma unit], I had not decided to write this book. We were making our video, audio and photographic record of what was happening to me – to us – but we hadn’t even thought whether that should remain private, a sort of diary for ourselves and maybe the family, or whether it could have a more public life (p65)

Rushdie realises however, there are three important figures in the story, himself, Eliza and the ‘A’ – whom Rushdie will imagine in order to get inside his head,

more interesting to me than confronting him in his black-and-white prison jumpsuit and listening to his ideologue’s black-and-white ends-and-means garbage (p65)

(More on this further along!)

In an e-mail, Susan wrote, “What a cover!” She is right to draw attention to this compelling image, which is also an item which Rushdie ponders over, again and again. (Oddly enough, the assailant brought several knives in a bag, not just the one.) Rushdie reflects on how the knife was used on him, how it failed to kill him, how up close and intimate a weapon a knife is, also, how multifaceted with multi-uses, unlike a gun which is designed solely for violence and damage. In the book, as he returns to New York for rehab, Rushdie is left alone a little from time to time, and begins to muse. He explains how language is a knife in being able to cut open the world and reveal its inner workings, secrets and truths, cutting from one reality to another, able to “call bullshit, open people’s eyes, create beauty”;

“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, to rebuild the frame in which my picture of the world could once more hang on my wall, to take charge or what had happened to me, to own it, to make it mine.

Or was that just a consoling lie I was telling myself? Just meaningless bombast?” (p85).

Rushdie also ponders on his would-be assassin, which he refers to as ‘the A.’, not wanting to give him too much power or prominence,

He’s just a dumb clown who got lucky” (p70)

At first he wants to meet this man, face to face, but then he realises this A.’s level of intelligence did not appear to be high,

his powers of self-expression lacked a certain sophistication. It was my unkind guess that this was not somebody who lived an examined life. […] I decided that I didn’t need to hear his cliches. It would be better for me to make him up (p65)

And that of course, is a stroke of genius from Rushdie – that in making him up, he has taken back the power of controlling the narrative, controlling history, and erased the voice of the ‘A’ completely, and with that, his self hood and agency. Truly, language is a knife indeed, able to cut someone out very effectively, and in that sense, cut them worse than dead; out of existence.

It is amusing how the ego is also not much affected by the attack. In the very early days after the attack, Rushdie was conscious but could not talk. He writes unforgettably of how being on a ventilator

was like having an armadillo’s tail pushed down your throat. And when it was removed it was like an armadillo’s tail being pulled out of your throat” (p52)

In this condition, when he could still only wriggle his toes to signal understanding and presence, he tells us of the messages he received, many, from all over the world, of love and support. The first two messages he reproduces in this book are from President Biden and President Macron. The generous interpretation would be that perhaps the messages from friends and family are too intimate to write into a book for publication.

However, Rushdie notes that along with the outpouring of love he received, and support, even from those like Boris Johnson who had previously disparaged him, “now found some grudging platitudes”, Rushdie notes that

India, the country of my birth and my deepest inspiration, on that day found no words (p55)

It is clear this hurts.

The hostility emanating from India and Pakistan and from South Asian communities in the United Kingdom was much harder to bear. That wound remains unhealed to this day. I have to accept that rejection, but it’s hard (p91).

There are even voices expressing pleasure in this assault, but as Rushdie explains

if you are turned into an object of hate, there will be people who hate you (p55).

“Why didn’t I fight? Why didn’t I run? I had just stood there like a pinata and let him smash me. Am I so feeble that I couldn’t make the slightest attempt to defend myself? Was I so fatalistic that I was prepared simply to surrender to my murderer?

Why didn’t I act?” (p11)

Rushdie asks what he imagines everyone is asking, and he tells us others tried to answer for him, that he was 75 and the A. was 24, what could he have done? Perhaps he was in shock.

I don’t really know what to think or how to reply. On some days I’m embarrassed even ashamed, by my failure to try to fight back. On other days I tell myself not to be stupid, what do I imagine I could have done? (p11)

Rushdie does point out however, that context matters, and we expect certain activities within certain frames

Violence smashes that picture. Suddenly they don’t know the rules – what to say, how to behave, what choices to make, […] Reality dissolves and is replaced by the incomprehensible. Fear, panic, paralysis take over from rational thought. […] Our minds no longer know how to work (p12)

and that’s perhaps as close as we can get to why Rushdie did not fight back, did not know how to or even that he should fight back.

Rushdie has also reflected on whether by coming out of hiding, reclaiming his life – deliberately, with crafted public appearances in New York, well publicised

“Was I wrong to make this new, carefree life for myself? With hindsight, shouldn’t I have been more cautious, less open, more aware of the danger lurking in the shadows? Did I construct a fool’s paradise for myself and find out, two decades later, just how big a fool I had been? Had I, so to speak, made myself available for the knife? (p93)

But as you would guess, he does not regret having had

close to twenty-three years in New York living a full, rich life (p94)

Moreover, he also tells us the story of Nobel Prize winner, Naguib Mahfouz, who in 1994, walking to his favourite Cairo cafe for his weekly meeting with fellow writers and thinkers, was attacked and stabbed in the neck, and stabbed repeatedly by an assailant because Mahfouz had written in opposition to the fatwa against Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Perhaps he is driving home to us readers the point that cultural terrorism will always be a threat, with which we have to live, rather than from which we should try to hide.

Rushdie writes so vividly about ordeal of being hospitalised, of “beginning to go a little stir-crazy”, when kept in the hospital bed,

trapped in a bed that had an alarm switched on so it would scream if I tried to get out of it unaided. This did not feel like freedom. My whole world had shrunk down to the size of this screaming bed, and hospital beds were not really for sleeping in. They were for keeping you in your place while people came in and out at all hours to check your vital signs, draw blood, feed you medication, and ask you how you were feeling (p84)

Many of us who have had experience of being hospitalised would identify acutely with this experience and frustration. He writes movingly and unsparingly of how awful the physical experience was, not only of the assault, but of the treatments, the trauma, the healing, the pain, the horror, the indignities (such as of finding he could not urinate), as well as the mental and emotional anguish.

This novel is in part a paean of praise to his fifth wife, Eliza. That he is madly in love with her is obvious, particularly as he has to work very hard to refrain from sentimentality and saccharinity when he depicts their life together in the 2nd chapter, just called ‘Eliza’, a time and a relationship which he just characterises as ‘happiness’. We can probably forgive his excesses, of how in his eyes she is perfection, in all arenas, without flaw, she is all things wonderful, she is beautiful, loving, rooted, practical, strong, selfless, etc. etc.  Rushdie also wants us to understand his family adore him. How Sameen his sister and Zafar his son were at his bedside, along with Eliza, at once, and that his other son, Milan’s “only thought was to get to my bedside as fast as he could” (p75) even though he had an acute fear of flying and he was in the UK. (Milan took a passenger liner that took 7 days to sail from Southhampton to New York.)

The craftsmanship of Rushdie is also in how he can tell a story we already know, suspensefully. The novel begins with the attack itself, Rushdie sets the stage within a couple of pages, and launches at once into a detailed account of the attack from his point of view. No prevarications. It is satisfying for the reader who of course is longing to hear it from where he stood, how he felt, what he saw, his eye witness testimony, the blow by blow account of the attack, how he was treated, the urgent dash to the nearest trauma unit, the multiple surgeries, the high drama of it all.

Rushdie’s narrative run up to the assault is just exceptional writing: there is a 2 page run up – from that summer in 2022, when Rushdie and Eliza were in “Milan, Sardinia, Capri, Amalfi, Rome, Umbria” (p43), the roll call of names gives us the sense of movement, progress, journey, followed by a short mention of what they did or saw or ate in each place, just the highlights. Then they came back to America, “our old life had twenty days to run” (p45), and so the tension increases as the narrative picks up pace too, the events quickening as they shorten in mention, the sentence lengths also shortening, making one’s reading pace pick up as D-Day approaches. In my first reading, I actually felt my pulse quicken too, with anticipation perhaps, though anticipation suggests something positive, which is not quite right. With growing tension, then, perhaps. Then Rushdie suspends the moment, with words like ‘meanwhile’ and tells of other plans, other parallel lines in his life, creating that moment of calm before the storm, leading up to

Everything felt good.

Then the world exploded. (p46).

To write 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 (p129)

In the 6th chapter of his book, titled ‘The A.’, Rushdie ‘records’ a conversation that never happened, the interview of himself with his assailant or would-be assassin. He imagines this taking place in the Chautauqua County Jail. It is what Rushdie does best, fictionalising life. He imagines himself talking to this young man, trying to draw him out, trying to understand him, understand what makes him tick, understand his motive for the assault.

Although the encounter is well written, it is nevertheless ever so slightly disappointing, because here I think Rushdie’s imagination fails him a little. He casts this A. as a man who is incapable of taking on board broader ideas beyond his ideology, who rejects doggedly and with the language of jihadis in fact as we have heard it reported so often, anything outside what they have learnt is the Islamic way. Rushdie puts into the mouth of the A. very stereotyped pronouncements,

Rushdie’s depiction is of an archetypal loser-loner isolating himself in his mother’s basement playing computer games and watching Youtube videos of his beloved Imam Yutubi for 4 years, before deciding that since nothing in this life matters except to serve God, he may as well kill Salman Rushdie and earn eternal reward

“When you are burning in hellfire I will be in the perfumed garden. I will have my attendant spirits, my beautiful houris” (p147)

– more stereotypes of how, supposedly, jihadi-types think and speak.

In this account, Rushdie positions himself as the skilful interlocutor, leading the dialogue, he approaches from a number of angles, he offers philosophical positions to counter and undermine the A.’s ideas, he is patient and articulate and non-defensive. While the A. by contrast is simplistic, reduced to very few words, very short sentences, reduced to cliches and sometimes bad language, framed as a fundamentalist, unrepentant, limited, an object of pity at best. He is certainly a straw man, not a human being, but a caricature of what perhaps popular imaginations would conceive terrorists as being – humourless, unattractive, morose, even. Clearly incompetent to boot, since Rushdie is still alive. Perhaps Rushdie’s reductive depiction of the A. was not a lack of imagination, but his revenge. He believes that narratives endure

The battleground is not only on the battlefield. The stories we live in are contested territories too (p181).

Knowing the power of narrative, and believing in its centrality in the fights going on right now in the world against false narratives which are the ‘ugly dailiness of the world” (p180), Rushdie erases his A. (and by the way, in this book, he once writes of him as ‘my A.’ , not just ‘the A.’) entirely, by taking over his whole representation and setting it out for posterity:

it’s happening in my head, so it’s not over until my head says it is. You don’t even have to think of things to say. I’ll put the words into your mouth” (p163).

History is written by the winners, and as a survivor of such a horrific attack, Rushdie probably with some justification expects readers should indulge him in this imagined ‘record’ of the conversation, which, as he knows, will become the version that will prevail. His A. is silenced, and in another sense, annihilated, even more thoroughly than murdering him would do; a very fine revenge indeed. (For the record, I personally think there is poetic justice in this!)

At some point of the ‘record’, Rushdie does try in his own way to understand what drives the A. because without some form of rationale, there is no closure for him. (Incidentally, Rushdie rejects this term, ‘closure’, just as he rejects the notion of forgiveness too, writing he neither forgives nor not forgives the A.) Rushdie imagines himself saying to the A,  

I see you now, at twenty-four, already disappointed by life, disappointed in your mother, your sisters, your fathers, your lack of boxing talent, your lack of any talent at all; disappointed in the bleak future you saw stretching ahead of you, for which you refused to blame yourself. But you needed to blame, you wanted very much to blame […] all that lifetime of blame in my direction, and it settled on my head… (p160)

He also posits to the A. that he has played so many video games that reality and fantasy may have become blurred for him, and that he may not have been sure he was really going to try to kill despite all the premeditation and preparations, until

your running feet took you across the point of no return and there was no way to stop. […] There was me and there were all your other realities too, your loneliness, your failures, your disappointments, your need to blame, your four years of indoctrination, your idea of the Enemy, I was all those things […] I’m sure you were scared. You were scared to death. Because the one who had lived in fictions was you, and now you were facing the consequences of being led by your fictions into the real world. Which is to say towards murder, and toward your own ruined life” (p161)

Rushdie has the A. receive this with silence.

In the last chapter, Rushdie and Eliza go back after a year to the amphitheatre in Chautauqua. It is a form of exorcism for them both, possibly. At any rate, they found it a healing experience. Rushdie also wanted to visit the Chautauqua County Jail where he knew the A. was incarcerated while awaiting trial.  He pictures the A inside, in his prison uniform, where he hoped the A. would spend a “substantial portion of his life”

“l felt foolishly happy and wanted, absurdly, to dance” (206)

And if it feels like crowing or gloating, who could deny Rushdie the pleasure of feeling the victor, the one who triumphs, the survivor who has lived to fight on? And indeed, Knife is about a form of redemption. Rushdie asks himself, how will his life proceed after this near-death experience? And his answer is to fight back the trauma and nightmares, to resume living, writing, working. He has refused to go back to the ‘bad old days’ when he was made invisible, where airlines were too afraid to carry him, when hotels may not want to accommodate him. In what he calls his ‘second chance life’, a life he identifies as having been “transformed by the violence unleased by a false narrative” (p181), he could not now live for private pleasure alone, but has to join in the war ongoing on so many fronts “against the bigoted revisionism that sought to rewrite history” (p181), whether in India, America or Britain, are the places he mentions by way of example. “In this struggle, too, I would – I had to – remain involved” (p181).

Rushdie does a great job in this book in personalising the attack – as he said, unlike in Joseph Anton which was written in 3rd person, Knife felt very personal indeed, as it must when one has been at the receiving end of 15 knife stabs and near murder – and yet placing this attack on him in the larger picture of the attack on art, on freedom of speech, on freedom per say. Necessarily perhaps, it is not as brilliant a read as Joseph Anton, but it falls very little short. Rushdie’s inimitable style is always a joy, and I for one, even if I have not managed to understand any of his works of fiction which I have attempted to read, am deeply grateful he has been spared to write on, long, it must be hoped, into his old age.

[For another take on this book, see Reeta’s review]

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