Opinion The Express View on the return of Salman Rushdie: A writer’s courage

In novel after novel, the magical realism of Salman Rushdie unfolded, in urgent and vivid prose, through portents and an opposition of alliterative archetypes: Speech and silence (Haroun and the Sea of Stories), revelation and its revisions (The Satanic Verses) and the history of a Subcontinent through “knees and nose, nose and knees” (Midnight’s Children). In August last year, a man with a knife sought to silence the writer on a stage in New York. He failed. Now, with an image and a sentence, Rushdie has spoken again.

In his first interview since the attack, Rushdie told The New Yorker magazine that some nights before he was scheduled to speak at Chautauqua Institution in New York state, he dreamed of a figure “like a gladiator” attacking him with a sharp object. Like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, he ignored a vision; unlike him, he survived. But what is most striking is the lack of rancour in the writer, who had to spend six weeks in hospital after the attack and lost vision in one eye. “I am lucky,” he said, and expressed gratitude for the support he received. He does not regret the years he spent in the open, writing 17 novels and living his life rather than cowering under the shadow of a fatwa. The fatwa against Rushdie by the clerics in Iran, the bounty placed on his head and finally, the attack, continue to represent what is broken in the world. A fracture of morality and conscience, from which Hadi Matar emerged to strike at Rushdie, and the very idea of the writer, with a blade.

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Explained | As Salman Rushdie returns, undefeated and with a new book, details emerge of the attack that almost killed him

The image that accompanies Rushdie’s interview is a powerful one. The right lens of his spectacles is darkened to cover the injured eye. A scar on the same side bears witness to a trauma both deeply personal and political. All of it in black and white, with a sharp contrast that makes every wrinkle, laugh line and the grooves created by a lifetime of furrowed brows visible. Rushdie, typically, had to show a bit of irreverence, even to his own myth. He tweeted an image, with colour of not-so-great quality, saying “this, more prosaically, is what I actually look like”. And if there was any doubt left as to what courage looks like — in the face of governments, theocratic, dictatorial or even democratic, and fanatics — look again at the photos: In both, there’s a twinkle in the eye that hints that the writer, and his sense of mischief, are alive and well.