Creator Salman Rushdie spent years in hiding after Iran’s chief Ayatollah Khomeini known as for his assassination in 1989, declaring Rushdie’s novel, “The Satanic Verses,” blasphemous and an insult to Islam. After 10 years Rushdie got here out of hiding and moved to america, the place he felt protected. Then, on Aug. 12, 2022, at a literary competition in Chautauqua, New York, he was attacked by a knife-wielding assailant. Rushdie was stabbed 15 occasions and practically died. He misplaced his proper eye within the assault. He has come to phrases with the try on his life the one method he is aware of: by writing about it in his new e-book. “Knife” comes out this week.
Rushdie learn a number of excerpts from “Knife” for 60 Minutes.
“I might reply violence with artwork,” says creator Salman Rushdie. He initially did not wish to write his new e-book “Knife” concerning the assault, however he felt he wanted to personal what occurred, refusing to be a sufferer.Â
“It doesn’t matter what I’ve already written or could now write, I am going to at all times be the man who received knifed. The knife defines me. I am going to battle a battle towards that, however I believe I’ll lose,” he writes.Â
a”There was nothing supernatural about it. No ‘tunnel of sunshine.’ No feeling of rising out of my physique,” writes Rushdie, describing his near-death expertise in 2022 in his new e-book. “In actual fact, I’ve hardly ever felt so strongly linked to my physique. My physique was dying, and it was taking me with it.”
“I don’t wish to use his identify on this account,” the creator writes of his 24-year-old assailant. In “Knife” Rushdie refers back to the attacker as “the A.” After the assault, he realized the assailant had solely learn a few pages from his e-book, “The Satanic Verses,” in response to the New York Put up.Â
“So it is you. Right here you’re.” These had been Rushdie’s first ideas as a person with a knife rushed in direction of him earlier than stabbing him.Â
“It’s stated that Henry James’s final phrases had been ‘So it has come ultimately, the distinguished factor.’ Dying was coming at me, too, however it did not strike me as distinguished. It struck me as anachronistic,” says Rushdie.
Whereas speaking with 60 Minutes’ Anderson Cooper, Rushdie defined: “It felt like one thing popping out of the distant previous. And attempting to tug me again in time.”Â
“There was the knife within the eye. That was the cruellest blow, and it was a deep wound. The blade went in all the best way to the optic nerve, which meant there can be no chance of saving the imaginative and prescient. It was gone,” writes Rushdie.
After being stabbed 15 occasions, Salman Rushdie’s face was slashed open. In his new e-book “Knife,” he writes his face regarded like “a sci-fi film particular impact.” He describes his eye as bulging out of its socket and hanging down on his face like a big soft-boiled egg. He writes: “the swelling was so unhealthy that the docs did not even know, in these first days, if I nonetheless had an eyelid. (I did.)”
Within the days after the assault, he did not acknowledge his personal reflection. “The lips of the person within the mirror don’t transfer. There’s a slash throughout the highest of his brow,” Rushdie writes. “Now he’s the person past the mirror and the mirror is behind him and darkish. He’s the stranger who has to play his half.”
If Salman Rushdie testifies towards his assailant in courtroom, that is what he plans to say: “I discover I’ve little or no to say to you. Our lives touched one another for an on the spot after which separated. Mine has improved since that day, whereas yours has deteriorated. You made a nasty gamble and misplaced.”
“The very last thing my proper eye would ever see: I noticed the person in black working towards me down the right-hand aspect of the seating space. Black garments, black face masks. He was coming in onerous and low,” writes Rushdie in his new e-book, “Knife.” “I did not attempt to run. I used to be transfixed.”
