In Victory City, Salman Rushdie’s novel published earlier this year, Pampa Kampana, fictional poet, princess and the book’s protagonist, deliberates on the nature of hubris and the only thing that outlives it: “I have lived to see an empire rise and fall./ How are they remembered now, these kings, these queens?/ They exist now only in words/ While they lived, they were victors, or vanquished, or both./ Now they are neither./ Words are the only victors. What they did, or thought, or felt, no longer exists…/ All that remains is this city of words.” A year into a near-fatal attack that left him with grievous physical injury and probably a far more insidious psychological scar, Rushdie has announced a resurrection of his city of words. Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, to be published in April 2024, will document the aftermath of the assassination attempt and the 76-year-old’s slow waltz back to life.
A memoir is an intimate narrative, meant as much for an audience as for its author. Written after a considerable passage of time, it offers solace for the injustices and failings of the past; documented in the immediate aftermath of life-changing events, it can be an act of resistance. Rushdie, of course, has never been short of courage. Like the proverbial phoenix, he has risen over and over again from the ashes, to make his voice heard. If that first image of his in The New Yorker six months after the Chautauqua attack was validation of his ability to cock a snook at authoritarianism, the three harrowing decades he spent, some of them in hiding, after Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against him following the publication of The Satanic Verses (1988) were proof of his faith in, and activism for, freedom of expression.
To live a life shadowed by violence takes its toll. But a storyteller, Rushdie writes in Joseph Anton, his 2012 memoir in third person chronicling his life after the fatwa, always knows how to put the broken pieces back together: “This in the end was who he was, a teller of tales, a creator of shapes, a maker of things that were not. It would be wise to withdraw from the world of commentary and polemic and rededicate himself to what he loved most, the art that had claimed his heart, mind and spirit ever since he was a young man, and to live again in the universe of once upon a time, of kan ma kan, it was so and it was not so, and to make the journey to the truth upon the waters of make-believe.”
