Rushdie: I’m just not ‘write’
‘PTSD’ & trouble composing after attack
Author Salman Rushdie spoke out for the first time since being brutally stabbed last summer at a literary event in western New York, saying he suffers post-traumatic stress from the “colossal” attack that left him partially blind.
“There is such a thing as PTSD, you know,” he told The New Yorker in his first interview since he was stabbed 15 times by a lonewolf Islamic fanatic, who copped to the attempted assassination last summer in a jailhouse interview with The Post.
“I’ve found it very, very difficult to write. I sit down to write, and nothing happens. I write, but it’s a combination of blankness and junk, stuff that I write and that I delete the next day. I’m not out of that forest yet, really.”
The heinous attack on Rushdie, 75, came after the author of “The Satanic Verses” had gone into hiding for a decade over Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa calling for his death in 1989 and labeling the book blasphemous.
A so-called Iranian charity organization has a long-standing multimillion-dollar bounty on the author’s head, and other writers, translators and publishers associated with Rushdie’s novel have been killed or injured in connection with the novel, according to US officials.
Rushdie, an Indian native, was reportedly hospitalized for six weeks following the attack at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, NY. He had stayed at his New York City home since being released, leaving only for frequent doctor visits.
Lost sight in eye
The author of 21 books — who had reportedly lost sight in his right eye — wore glasses with a blacked-out right lens when he met a reporter at his literary agent’s Manhattan office last month.
Rushdie had also lost more than 40 pounds since the stabbing and suffered nerve damage in his left hand. He spoke fluently but with a drooping lip, and had visible scar tissue on the right sight of his face, according to the piece, which was published Monday.
“Well, you know, I’ve been better,” he said when asked about his spirits.
“But, considering what happened, I’m not so bad. As you can see, the big injuries are healed, essentially. I have feeling in my thumb and index finger and in the bottom half of the palm. I’m doing a lot of hand therapy, and I’m told that I’m doing very well.”
“I’ve always tried very hard not to adopt the role of a victim,” he said. “Then you’re just sitting there saying, ‘Somebody stuck a knife in me! Poor me.’ . . . Which I do sometimes think,” he said through laughter.
Rushdie told the outlet he could no longer type “very well” because of a “lack of feeling in the fingertips,” and added that sleeping was also a struggle.
“There have been nightmares — not exactly the incident, but just frightening. Those seem to be diminishing. I’m fine. I’m able to get up and walk around,” he reportedly said. “When I say I’m fine, I mean, there’s bits of my body that need constant checkups. It was a colossal attack.”
Rushdie had been defiantly living a public life without security in Manhattan in recent years despite the fatwa and bounty still on his head in connection with “Verses,” which was banned and panned by some fundamentalists over its supposed insulting depictions of Islam.