“What should you say to a man who tells you that he prefers to obey God rather than men and who is therefore sure of deserving heaven by slitting your throat? » (Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary.)
It is a long cohort of fire and blood, which runs throughout the history of the West and comes to strike us: the war to the death of fanatics against the sowers of freedom.
At the dawn of modern times, the scourge of vigilantes fighting against all dissident religious thought struck the reformer Jean Huss (in 1415), Etienne Dolet (in 1546), Giordano Bruno (in 1600), all delivered to the redemptive stake for crime of heresy. The same homicide, transformed into a fight against the freedom to speak and publish, mowed down Marat in 1793, as well as the polemicist Paul-Louis Courier in 1825.
The massacre continued into the twentieth century, with Federico Garcia Lorca executed by the Spanish Phalangists in 1936; it peaked with the assassination of thirteen Jewish poets under Stalin in 1952; the OAS put to death the Algerian poet Mouloud Feraoun in 1962; an unbalanced man kills John Lennon in 1980; the Japanese translator of Satanic verses Hitoshi Igarashi paid with his life in 1991; Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed in Cairo in 1994 and narrowly escaped; the filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed in 2004 by an Islamist; the writing of Charlie Hebdo was decimated in 2015 by the same desire for revenge and purity; and, almost two years ago, Salman Rushdie narrowly escaped a violent death. He has just written about it in a book entitled The knifeand what a book!
August 12, 2022. Chautauqua Amphitheater, New York, 10:45 a.m. Salman Rushdie takes his place at the podium to talk about the reception of threatened writers in their own country.
“At that moment, I saw the man in black rushing towards me down the aisle located on the right side of the seats. Black clothes, black mask on his face, he arrived menacing and focused, a real missile. I stood up and watched him approach. I didn’t try to flee. I was petrified. (…) My first thought when I saw this murderous figure rushing towards me was: “So it’s you. There you are.” (…) My second thought: “Why now ? Really ? So much time has passed. Why now after all these years?”
I can distinguish each step of his frantic race. I see myself getting up and turning towards him. I raise my left hand in a gesture of self-defense. He plunges the knife into it. Then I received numerous blows, to the neck, to the chest, to the eye, everywhere. I feel my legs give out and I collapse. »
The attack lasted twenty-seven seconds. Rushdie is seventy-five years old.
“I remember lying on the ground and looking at the pool of blood draining from my body. “That’s a lot of blood,” I said to myself. And then I thought: I’m dying. »
No, the big man is not going to die.
It wasn’t fun. Hiding nothing from us about the clinical protocols to which his torn body was subject, his book is the moving account of this miraculous rescue, where everyone had their part, starting with himself, the nursing staff of two American hospitals, his London family , friends from all over the world and, above all, his wife, Eliza, poet and photographer, “made of beauty and terror”, who will bring him back from the edges of hell by the power of love.
Regaining consciousness, Rushdie is overcome by visions of palaces, of grandiose constructions made of the letters of the alphabet. He sees in a dream the knight’s chess game against death, in The seventh seal by Ingmar Bergman, dreams a little later of Raft of the Medusa, by Géricault, where all the castaways are Surrealists who tear each other’s eyes out. On his bed of suffering, the man-writer that he is to the tips of his nails, dreams, imagines, takes note of everything, carries this mirror of himself to the very edges of his life, like a special envoy to the territories of pain and Evil.
His book, in the war of stories which pits lies and propaganda against the forges of human consciousness, is a magnificent guide for moving forward in the face of the horror of the present, in the face of sectarianism, of populist, religious and imperial regressions everywhere. work on the five continents, and maintain the hope of a human world, returned under the sun of reason.
Salman Rushdie, human brother.
