Presently30:14Salman Rushdie ended his life in 27 seconds
Famed author Salman Rushdie credits a series of “man-made miracles” for surviving the horrific injuries he suffered in a knife attack a year and a half ago.
“There was a slash across my neck here, but it didn’t seem to cut an artery … I had three stab wounds in the center of my torso, but they missed the heart,” Rushdie said.
“That’s what we call luck.”
On August 12, 2022, Rushdie was stabbed in the face, neck, arm and stomach while preparing to give a lecture in Chautauqua, Western New York. His alleged assailant, Hadi Matar of New Jersey, He was arrested at the scene and charged with attempted murder and assault. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges and is awaiting trial.
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Trauma surgeons who treated Rushdie’s injuries said they initially did not think he would survive. The 76-year-old author suffered 14 stab wounds and lost his right eye.
“The worst thing is the knife in my eye … it went deep into the optic nerve, so there is no chance of saving the vision,” he said. “But as you know, the optic nerve connects the eye to the brain.”
Famous author Salman Rushdie was attacked with a knife on stage in August 2022 and eventually lost his eye. He tells CBC Radio’s Matt Galloway how close he came to death – and the ‘man-made miracles’ that saved him.
Rushdie told CBC Radio that if the knife had fallen a millimeter further, it would have severed the optic nerve and damaged the brain. Presently.
“I was lucky, and then I was saved by my medical science,” he said.
“That’s a miracle, it seems to me.”
Rushdie wrote about his attack new book, The Knife: Meditations after an Attempted MurderPublished on Tuesday. He said he didn’t want to write about the incident for a long time, but he had to because he “couldn’t really focus on anything else.”
“I think the hardest part was writing the first chapter, the chapter that describes the attack,” he said. “Once I got that tough moment, the rest of it started to flow.”
As the attack unfolded, Rushdie said she felt “clearly” that she was going to die.
“I wasn’t afraid of it … but there was sadness in it because of dying in a strange land far from home, you know, in the company of strangers, away from everyone I cared about.”
27 seconds of violence
Rushdie remembers a man running across the stage at Chautauqua that day. He remembers falling, and a man with a knife coming at him.
The stabbing lasted 27 seconds, but to Rushdie “time seemed to stand still.”
“I have this picture of me on the floor … spread out in a pool of blood around me,” he said.
Witnesses to the attack on Salman Rushdie in West New York on Friday describe how a man came onto the stage at the Chautauqua Institute where the author was about to give a lecture, attacked him and then was pinned down by people from the audience.
The moderator of the event, Henry Rees, was also injured in the attack. He and Rushdie were prepared to discuss protection and freedom of expression for exiled writers. Dedicated by Rushdie knife For the audience that day who rushed on stage to tackle the attacker.
“For a moment I realized … somewhere at my side, a kind of pile of bodies on top of the attacker, trying to hold him down,” he said.
Rushdie remembers being airlifted to hospital, where he was put on a ventilator. He spent several weeks in the hospital and underwent months of rehabilitation.
Uninformed attacks on literature
Matter, the alleged assailant, told the New York Post that he had only read a couple of pages of Rushdie’s writing, but believed the author had attacked Islam.
In 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa for the assassination of Rushdie, calling for his novel. The Satanic Verses Shame on Islam.
Several people died in violent demonstrations in the months that followed; Hitoshi Igarashi, the book’s Japanese translator, was murdered in 1991.
Iran has No one was involved in the 2022 attack.
Rushdie was in hiding under police protection for over a decade. The fatwa was never lifted, but in 2000 the author decided to move to the US and return to public life.
he said Presently He used to resent authors being subjected to public condemnation by people who didn’t read their books, but now he understands that happens all the time.
“I think the people who call James Joyce obscene obviously haven’t read Ulysses because, I mean, he’s a great writer, but I don’t think he arouses sexual interest,” Rushdie said.
“Maybe that’s how it should be … If you tell yourself the truth, it’s hard to take such a fiercely controversial position.”
Rushdie is not mentioned in the book. He said at one point he wanted to meet him – but his wife, the poet and novelist Eliza Griffiths, talked him out of it. Instead, he wrote a chapter in a book that envisions that conversation.
“I thought, maybe I can do better by imagining myself in his head than I would if I had the chance to actually talk to him, because I don’t think he’s forthcoming,” she said. Presently.
In the book, Rushdie wrote that he was “not looking for an apology. I wonder how he feels now that he has had time to think things over.”
After a violent knife attack in 2022, author Salman Rushdie says learning to live ‘with that shadow’ of death has helped him appreciate the ridiculous things in life.
Taking second chances
During his years in hiding, Rushdie said he wanted to return as a writer – judged on the artistic merit of his books. He published 16 books The Satanic VersesAnd believed that the fatwa had faded into conversations about his work.
“This attack has drawn me back to the other person who was attacked and I don’t want to be there,” he said.
“I’m in the business of making things up, writing fiction and telling stories… Writing about myself was never the plan.”
He hopes that knifeHis 22nd book and second autobiography, allows him to return to “doing things again” and close the chapter on the attack.
“I have this fantasy of sitting under a tree by the river with a notepad, writing and not worrying about anything else,” he said.
Although Rushdie never fully recovered his physical strength, he feels that he has “bucked the odds” and been given a second chance at life.
“The biggest (thing) about second chances is that it gives you an indication not to waste your time,” he said.
“Don’t mess around. Use the time you’ve got.”