‘Very difficult’: Salman Rushdie reveals toll of stabbing attack

Salman Rushdie has re-entered public life following the attack that nearly claimed his life last year.

Salman Rushdie, pictured in 2019. Picture: Getty Images

Salman Rushdie has posed for his first photograph since being stabbed in the eye with a knife. He has also returned to Twitter, with a quote from … Popeye.

Yes, Popeye.

“I yam what I yam,” Rushdie declares, in his new bio. “And that’s all that I yam.”

It’s brilliant re-entry to public life: Rushdie, 75, always had a wonderful sense of humour, and it’s heartening to know that the grub who attacked him on stage during a New York state literary festival last August hasn’t managed to remove it.

On the other hand, he has lost his sight in that eye, and some feeling his in hand. He is struggling to write, and has spent time in therapy. It probably goes without saying that he’s again having to employ security.

A picture of novelist Salman Rushdie, posted to his official Twitter account.

Rushdie’s re-emergence has been timed to coincide with the release of his new novel, Victory City, which he completed before he was attacked. In his first interview – a monstrously wordy and slow-moving profile by The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick – he says he only sometimes finds himself complaining that somebody stuck a knife in him.

“Poor me,” he laments.

He is cheered by the support he’s received since being attacked, not least because support has over the past 20 years been somewhat muted.

“People didn’t like it,” he says, of the nimble way he has managed to dodge those who have wanted to kill him, since Iran’s now-dead supreme leader issued a very-live fatwa against him, for writing The Satanic Verses, in 1989.

“Because I should have died. Now that I’ve almost died, everybody loves me … That was my mistake, back then. Not only did I live but I tried to live well. Bad mistake. Get fifteen stab wounds, much better.”

The New Yorker posted a grim photograph to go with the article, in which Rushdie can be seen wearing reading square glasses with one lens blacked out. He has since posted his own photograph on Twitter, saying: “The photo in the New Yorker is dramatic and powerful but this, more prosaically, is what I actually look like.”

Leaner than you perhaps remember. Still with the arched eyebrow.

Rushdie says that he had a nightmare, a few days before the attack, of someone, “like a gladiator,” attacking him with “a sharp object.”

He didn’t worry too much; he’d had such nightmares before.

He had just taken his seat, alongside a fellow panellist, Henry Reese, for an event in the New York state village of Chautauqua on 11 August, when would-be assassin, Hadi Matar, rushed the stage.

Matar began stabbing Rushdie with a knife he’d carried on the bus, from his home about an hour away (he’d seen a notice about Rushdie’s appearance on Twitter, bought a ticket, and got himself there, by bus and Lyft).

It took Reese a moment to figure out what was happening. He saw blood on Rushdie’s face and flecked about the stage. He leapt up, and tackled Matar to the ground.

A doctor sitting in the second row, who’d had breakfast with Rushdie that morning, got out of his seat and rushed to help. Before long, no fewer than four doctors – an anaesthesiologist, a radiologist, an internist, and an obstetrician – were helping him, as was a fireman, who told Rushdie, “Don’t blink your eye.”

He agreed, but lost the sight in that eye anyway. He now reads with an iPad. A nerve in his left hand was damaged, and his face was cut.

He spent six weeks in hospital, and since been recuperating at home with his fifth wife (in September, 2021, less than a year before the attack, Rushdie married the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, whom he’d met six years earlier, at a PEN event.) He watched The White Lotus, and Harry and Meghan’s love story on Netflix, and the World Cup.

He can’t tour with this book, but has shown off copies on Twitter. It has been reviewed by The Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the FT … everyone loves it (a review by Peter Craven, who knows Rushdie, is coming to The Australian’s book pages very soon).

Asked who he blames for the attack, Rushdie said: “I blame him” – meaning, the “idiot” with the knife, who will likely spend the rest of his life in prison. Rushdie, meanwhile, hopes to write another book because, in his words, you’ve got to “bop til you drop.” Not literally, one hopes.