Salman Rushdie's "Knife": Conjoined contradictions

For decades, Salman Rushdie has resisted allowing enemies to define him. The Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa declaring that Rushdie should be assassinated after publishing The Satanic Verses sent the author into hiding, but for more than 20 years Rushdie has lived openly and peacefully in New York, aware of the lingering threat but not constrained by it--until August 2022, when a would-be assassin stabbed Rushdie fifteen times with a knife before an auditorium full of onlookers in Chautauqua, New York. 

If his life is a book, writes Rushdie, "The attack felt like a large red ink blot spilled over an earlier page. It was ugly, but it didn't ruin the book. One could turn the page, and go on." 

Going on is exactly what Rushdie is trying to do in his new memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. He had hoped to return to writing fiction, but he found that he could not write anything else until he wrote about the attack: "To write would be my way of owning what had happened, taking charge of it, making it mine, refusing to be a mere victim. I would answer violence with art."

Knife is divided into two sections, The Angel of Death and The Angel of Life, and the book immerses readers in both the horrors of violence and the healing power of love, along with other linked contradictions exposed by Rushdie's experience. For instance, Rushdie praises the onlookers who rushed to his aid after the attack:

I didn't see their faces and I don't know their names, but they were the first people to save my life. And so that Chautauqua morning I experienced both the worst and best of human nature, almost simultaneously. This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason...and we also contain the antidote to that disease--courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.

This horde of people devoted to his safety multiplies as he enters first a hospital and then a rehab facility, where he endures the humiliations of losing autonomy and agency over his privacy, his career, and, of course, his body:

In the presence of serious injuries, your body's privacy ceases to exist, you lose autonomy over your physical self, over the vessel in which you sail. You allow this because you have no alternative. You surrender the captaincy of your ship so that it won't sink. You allow people to do what they will with your body--to prod and drain and inject and stitch and inspect your nakedness--so that you can live.

But even as he is dependent upon a hovering host of health-care workers, he finds that "When Death comes very close to you, the rest of the world goes far away and you can feel a great loneliness."

That loneliness leaves time for the author to mull over his peculiar relationship with his attacker, whom Rushdie never names but instead refers to as The A. In the twenty-seven seconds it took The A to stab Rushdie (in his eye, neck, chest, and hand), attacker and victim existed within what Rushdie calls "a profound conjoining." In an imaginary interview, Rushdie tells his attacker, "You put on the mantle of Death itself, and I was Life." Rushdie thinks of his attacker as a failure, a nothing, a hapless clown, but this haplessness is an advantage; one of Rushdie's doctors tells him, "You're lucky that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife."

But there are many types of knives. The A's knife may have severed the author from his world, but Rushdie refuses the role of victimhood, instead wielding his own weapons:

Language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back. It could be the tool I would use to remake and reclaim my world, to rebuild the frame in which my picture of the world could once more hang on my wall, to take charge of what had happened to me, to own it, to make it mine.

He does this best while describing the attack and his long journey toward recovery as well as the role of his family and friends in carrying him through this journey. Despite the inciting act of senseless violence, Rushdie considers his story one in which "hatred--the knife as a metaphor for hate--is answered, and finally overcome, by love." In the end he travels back to the scene of the attack to convey an important message to his absent attacker--and anyone who might sympathize with the attempt to use violence to silence stories: "We're back, and after our encounter with hatred, we're celebrating the survival of love. After the angel of death, the angel of life."