RUSHDIE WRITES BACK

‘Knife’, on aftermath of a near-fatal attack, shows there can be no resistance greater than a writer picking up the pen again

AWRITER, BY all reckoning, is a dangerous creature. He knows how to use his words to thrust and parry, cut or feint. But most of all, he knows how to live — and nearly die — on the razor’s edge, and live again to tell the tale. In Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder, Salman Rushdie’s memoir detailing the aftermath of the near-fatal attack on him in Chautauqua in upstate New York in August 2022, the writer rises once again, battered but indomitable, to exhort more urgently than ever for the artiste’s right to freedom of expression. The transformative power of his stories has been a threat to the autocratic and the unimaginative since the time of his fatwainducing Satanic Verses (1988) but Rushdie’s steel remains steadfast: It refuses to be recast. “Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist,” he writes.

From the poet Osip Mandelstam, incarcerated during the Great Purge of 1937 under Stalin, to Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, from poet Frederico Lorca, arrested and killed during the Spanish Civil War under the orders of General Franco’s right-wing regime, to artist MF Husain living out his exile in Dubai and Qatar, to Gauri Lankesh being murdered for her refusal to back down, it is a right that Rushdie and other artistes before him have clung to through days and years of persecution and censorship. It has rendered them vulnerable — Rushdie, 76, writes how one of his first thoughts after the attack was “Why now? Really? It’s been so long”— but the art that comes out of this resilience is forged in fire, brave and unrelenting, eschewing the comfort of the safety net. They contain multitudes, speak truth to power, even if there is a personal cost to be borne. In Knife, Rushdie speaks of coming face to face with hatred and finding his way back to love. As the opening line of Satanic Verses goes, “‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die’.”

The freedom to create, to explore, and to dissent is the bedrock of a flourishing culture. It compels one to engage with contrarian voices, even those that defy one’s comprehension or compassion. In an age of increasing censorship and attacks on creative freedom, Rushdie’s return is a reminder that the right to express oneself, even when it provokes or offends, is the cornerstone of a truly open and democratic society. That there can be no resistance greater than a writer picking up the pen again.