Salman Rushdie's memoir of the knife attack that nearly killed him includes an imagined jailhouse conversation between the author and his attacker Hadi Matar.
Matar rushed onto the stage of the Chautauqua Institution in western New York to try to end Rushdie's story with a frenzy of violence. Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini tried and failed to do the same shortly before he died in 1989 when he called on Muslims to kill Rushdie because he found the novel “The Satanic Verses” insulting. Which makes the empathy and rigor that Rushdie brings to his fictional interview of Matar -- to telling a story of Matar -- all the more striking. Empathy, rigor and humor.
"I do not want to use his name in this account," Rushdie writes in "Knife." "My Assailant, my would-be Assassin, the Asinine man who made Assumptions about me, and with whom I had a near-lethal Assignation ... I have found myself thinking of him, perhaps forgivably, as an Ass. However, for the purposes of this text, I will refer to him more decorously as 'the A." What I call him in the privacy of my home is my business."
Some people hide behind their humor, using it to keep others at arm's length. I have always felt that Rushdie, in contrast, makes himself vulnerable with humor in his fiction. And it's just one of the ways he makes himself vulnerable, and thereby connects with readers, in the memoir he called "Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder."
Matar stabbed Rushdie more than a dozen times -- in the head, neck, torso and left hand, blinding his right eye and damaging his liver and intestines. From jail, Matar told the New York Post that he believed the author had attacked Islam.
Matar attacked as Rushdie was preparing to talk with Henry Reese, co-founder of a Pittsburgh nonprofit that helps exiled writers. Reese also was injured on the stage of the venerable literary institution.
The title of the memoir in which Rushdie recalls that attack is a weapon. But “Knife" is not a book about violence. It's about survival, life, love, truth and art. With dad jokes.
Rushdie had supported a plea deal that would have saved him the ordeal of facing Matar in a courtroom. Matar, though, insisted on a trial, which was held earlier this year.
I would have felt vulnerable in the same room with an attacker. In news accounts of Rushdie’s testimony, during which he was close to Matar for the first time since the attack, I saw another aspect of the author’s propensity for joking: Humor as courage.
"I was very struck by his eyes which were dark and seemed very ferocious to me," Rushdie testified in Chautauqua County Court.
A defense lawyer objected. The judge struck the answer from the record.
"Okay, not ferocious," Rushdie said dryly.
The prosecutor then asked how Rushdie came to his conclusion about his attacker's ferocity.
"He struck me a number of times, another half a dozen times," Rushdie said. "At some point I thought I was dying. That was my immediate thought."
During cross examination, one of Matar's defense lawyers asked Rushdie how he was able to testify about the number of times he was stabbed.
"I wasn't counting at the time," Rushdie said. "As I said, I was otherwise occupied. But afterwards I could see them on my body. I didn't need to be told by anybody."
For the fictional aspects of his memoir, Rushdie turned to TV dramas to concoct a setting for his conversations with Matar. He places himself in a Chautauqua County Jail cell at a metal table with his attacker, who is handcuffed and shackled. Prisoner officials and federal agents are watchful behind a one-way mirror.
In one of the imagined exchanges in "Knife," Rushdie asks the A if he has a girlfriend.
"What kind of question is that?"
"An ordinary question to ask an ordinary guy. Have you ever been in love?"
"I love God.
"Yes, but human beings? I know you told me about your houris in Heaven. But Heaven is still some way away. No houris anytime soon. Anyone down here?"
"None of your business."
"I'll take that as a no. How about a boyfriend? I heard you talk about your admiration for the real men in Lebanon. How about real men in Jersey?"
"Don't be disgusting."
"So -- another negative. Just to check: never? Nobody in your whole life? You're arousing in me an unexpected emotion."
"What emotion?"
"Pity."
I was astonished. Rushdie brought such grace to constructing a conversation with someone who had tried to kill him.
The imaginary Matar is guarded and defensive as Rushdie questions him about faith and human connections. The fourth and last fictional encounter ends with Matar declaring to Rushdie: "You don't know me. You'll never know me."
Rushdie responds:
"There's a thing I used to say back in the day, when catastrophe rained down upon The Satanic Verses and its author: that one way of understanding the argument over that book was that it was a quarrel between those with a sense of humor and those without one. I see you now, my failed murderer, hypocrite assassin, mon semblable, mon frere. You could try to kill because you didn't know how to laugh."
In real life, the trial ended with jurors finding Matar guilty of attempted murder in the attack on Rushdie and of assault for the stabbing of Reese. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison for attempted murder and seven for assault.
"Knife" ends with a lesson for any of us who have traumas to face, even if they are more quotidian than Rushdie’s. As a writer and a reader, it also was for me testament to the power of words, whether describing fact or creating fiction, to help us navigate our relationships to others and to ourselves.
As he wraps up his memoir, Rushdie describes returning to the Chautauqua stage. He stood there and "realized that a burden had lifted from me somehow, and the best word I could find for what I was feeling was lightness. A circle had been closed, and I was doing what I had hoped I could do here -- I was making my peace with what had happened, making my peace with my life."