How Salman Rushdie’s new memoir, Knife, is a writer’s act of reclamation

A year ago, in September 2021, he had married the multi-hyphenate Rachel Eliza Griffiths (45) — poet, novelist, photographer, visual artist, and Rushdie’s fifth wife. The spectre of death threats, and the infamous fatwa, in the wake of his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, was a thing of the past. After all, he had lived in the US — freely, and without fear — since 2000: falling in and out of love, dealing with divorces, partying at late-night hotspots, preparing himself for remarriages, and, yes, doing what he does best, telling tales.

In May 2021, he had published Languages of Truth, a collection of eclectic and erudite essays written — with characteristic candour — between 2003 and 2020, and replete with riffs on his roots, his false starts as a writer and anecdotes about his literary heroes, like Eduara Welty and William Faulkner, whom he envied ‘for their ability to mine a tiny piece of the earth for a lifetime of masterpieces.’

His own life, he reflects in one of the essays, has been more peripatetic than theirs. ‘And perhaps as a result my literary beginnings were slow and filled with error. It took me a long time to find my way,’ he writes, underlining how as a migrant writer, he could not take a patch of the earth as a given and mine it for the entirety of his career, like Faulkner and Welty did.

The ground beneath his feet

“The migrant has no ground to stand on until he invents it. This too increases his sense of the precariousness of all things and leads him toward a literature of precariousness, in which neither destiny nor character can be taken for granted, nor can their relationship,” he writes. Perhaps it is this sense of precariousness that makes him respond strongly to novels like The Confidence-Man (1857), the final novel, and a satire on the American Dream, by Herman Melville, featuring an elusive and slippery protagonist. Or to other ‘protean fictions’ such as Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), an alternative history of the US of A, in which the Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite Charles A. Lindbergh defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt for the presidency in the middle of World War II. 

Roth’s novel, he writes, reminds us of Jorge Luis Borges’ description of history as ‘a garden of forking paths’ and that ‘although things did go one way they might have gone another and who would we be then, how differently might we have thought or acted, might not our destinies have shaped our characters rather than the other way around?’ According to him, a prerequisite for being a writer is an understanding of one’s self, and it’s harder to reach that understanding when ‘your self is spread across the world.’

Until 2022 — the year of the near-fatal attack, in which Rushdie lost vision in one eye and feeling in some fingertips, due to which he has been finding it increasingly difficult to write — Rushdie’s years as a writer were enviably productive: Between The Satanic Verses and Victory City, he wrote, among other books, six novels: Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990, for children), The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), Fury (2001), Shalimar the Clown (2005), The Enchantress of Florence (2008), Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015), The Golden House (2017), and Quichotte (2019) — imaginative feats, all. 

Answering violence with art

If the attack had not happened and Rushdie had not been partially blinded and paralysed, he might well have written another novel after Victory City. Writing fiction in an age of non-fiction (when ‘fiction itself seems to have turned away from fiction’) is his little act of defiance. He has a firm belief in the relevance of literary fiction of the kind he has championed, in which the real blends with the fantastical, and which stands in sharp contrast with the kind of fiction popularised by the likes of Stephenie Meyers, Suzanne Collins and Dan Brown. That, to him, is the other kind of fiction, in which ‘fictiveness’ is alive and well: ‘it’s always twilight, people are playing hunger games, and Leonardo da Vinci is just a code.’

Serious fiction, he writes in an essay in Languages of Truth, has turned toward realism of the Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgård kind — ‘fiction that asks us to believe that it comes from a place very close to if not identical to the author’s personal experience and away, so to speak, from magic.’ Referring to the writers mentioned above, he asserts: ‘The purveyors of schlock fiction in books and in films as well have understood the power of the fantastic, but all they are able to purvey is the fantastic reduced to comic-strip two-dimensionality. For me, the fantastic has been a way of adding dimensions to the real, adding fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh dimensions to the usual three; a way of enriching and intensifying our experience of the real, rather than escaping from it into superhero-vampire fantasyland.’

An act of reclamation

But the attack has disrupted the birth of the next Rushdie novel —exuberant and sprawling, boisterous and phantasmagorical.  At least for now. Speaking about how writing can be a death-defying act in February this year, Rushdie told David Remnick of The New Yorker that he has been struggling to write fiction, as he did in the years immediately after the fatwa. Earlier this month, it was announced that his memoir of the attack, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, will be published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in April 2024. The memoir, written in first person, is an act of reclamation (from the jaws of death) for Rushdie, an affirmation of his commitment to the power of written word, an act of catharsis. “This was a necessary book for me to write: a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art,” he told Remnick.

When he had finished Joseph Anton, Rushdie felt a deep ‘hunger’ for fiction: “And not just any old fiction, but fiction as wildly fantastic as the memoir had been determinedly realistic. My mood swung from one end of the literary pendulum’s arc to the other extreme. And I began to remember the stories that had made me fall in love with literature in the first place, tales full of beautiful impossibility, which were not true but by being not true told the truth, often more beautifully and memorably than stories that relied on being true. Those stories didn’t have to happen once upon a time either. They could happen right now. Yesterday, today, or the day after tomorrow. One of these wonder tales is from the Kashmiri Sanskrit compendium, the Katha Sarit Sagara or “Ocean of the Streams of Story.” The title inspired his children’s book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which is dedicated to his son, Zafar.

In a rare public appearance at a press conference at the Frankfurt book fair last week, he said that the memoir may not be the easiest book in the world to write, but it’s something he needs to get past in order to do anything else: “I can’t really start writing a novel that’s got nothing to do with this,” he said. “So I just have to deal with it.” Unlike his 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton (the two words in the title serve as hat tips to two of his favourite writers, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov), in which he chronicles the pain and the agony of living in hiding after the fatwa, and which is written in third person, Knife will retain the rawness and the immediacy of the attack in the first-person: “When somebody sticks a knife into you, that’s a first-person story. That’s an ‘I’ story.”

‘Words are the only victors’

At the Frankfurt fair, Rushdie — a longtime advocate of writer’s freedom — also underlined how if authors are only allowed to write characters that mirror themselves and their own experiences, the art of the novel will cease to exist. “If we’re in a world where only women can write about women and only people from India can write about people from India and only straight people can write about straight people … then that’s the death of the art,” he said. Never the one who overstates the power of literature, he said in an interview. “What writers can do — and what they are doing — is to try to articulate the incredible pain that many people are feeling right now and to bring that to the world’s attention.”

It was on February 14, 1989, Valentine’s Day, that a BBC journalist had dialled Rushdie and informed him that he had been “sentenced to death” by Ayatollah Khomeini, who accused the writer of being “against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran.” Rushdie writes in Joseph Anton: “It was the edict of a cruel and dying old man. But he also knew that his old self’s habits were of no use anymore. He was a new self now. He was the person in the eye of the storm, no longer the Salman his friends knew but the Rushdie who was the author of Satanic Verses, a title subtly distorted by the omission of the initial The.”

He adds: “The Satanic Verses was a novel. Satanic Verses were verses that were satanic, and he was their satanic author, “Satan Rushdy,” the horned creature on the placards carried by demonstrators down the streets of a faraway city, the hanged man with protruding red tongue in the crude cartoons they bore. Hang Satan Rushdy. How easy it was to erase a man’s past and to construct a new version of him, an overwhelming version, against which it seemed impossible to fight.” He found that he couldn’t think ahead, that he had no idea what the shape of his life ought now to be, or how to make plans.”

Over the course of 33 years after the fatwa, Rushdie managed to find his way back — gloriously. By taking control of the story of his life in Knife, he will only show in real life what Pampa Kampana says, towards the end of Victory City, as the Vijayanagara Kingdom lies in ruins. “Words are the only victors.”