Problematic Men

#1 Salman Rushdie the "Sad Story"

It is terrible that Salman Rushdie was attached and gravely injured. No writer, no human being should ever have to suffer violent attack on account of their beliefs.

Reading “Knife” Rushdie’s account of the knife attack which left him partially blind and gravely injured provides curious insight into the mind of a man who has if nothing else, always been sharply strategic. Arriving on the British literary scene at a time when only white men wrote important books…Rushdie set himself to the task of becoming white. Hie education at Cambridge helped but most helpful was his willingness to use his satirical skills to affirm what the British…even having fled from India, still wanted affirmed: that the natives were pitiable and absurd characters best worthy of jest. Rushdie is a skilled author and his knives are sharp in Midnight’s Children almost sharp enough to make one forget that to slice and diced the already crushed serves little purpose.

The real kicker was Satanic Verses-a book that Rushdie admits in Knife he would be happy to never talk about again. He does, of course, talk about it, as he has always done but he fails still to see that the book’s tragedy was not the literal fatwa nor even the recent attack both of which were horrendous but rather how it imprisoned Rushdie in a colonial stereotype that made his art, his literature forever secondary to his his “sad story.”

In this sense, Rushdie is not unlike other Black or Brown folk who are rendered by circumstance as “victims of their own culture” and then anointed by the West who sees their suffering as vindication of all of their degrading assumptions regarding the inherent barbarism of such cultures. Rushdie was more of a provocateur than say Malala Yousafzai who is also victimized by a similar dynamic-he intentionally poked fun at the sacred and again at the sacred of the oppressed. Here was an inversion of the power of satire again, a tool meant to irk the powerful put into use to belong among the powerful. If Rushdie was strategizing, he may have calculated that provocation would serve as a stand-in for originality….making the two indistinguishable. His bet was successful.

Something else also happened. The furor against The Satanic Verses meant that Rushdie became a victim; that he now had a traumatic story to tell. As I wrote, in Against White Feminism, this is the flavor in which the West prefers its Brown ad Black people. In the particular example I mention in the book, I note how international human rights organizations often invite people who have been victims of human rights abuses to tell their stories. However, none of these people are ever involved or consulted when it comes to actually making human rights policy. The reason is quite simply that the strategic use of these stories serves the purpose of justifying interventions and criticisms from neocolonial initiatives with the same culture correcting intentions as colonialism itself.

Rushdie stopped being a literary figure following the publication of The Satanic Verses. Since then, he has been an international celebrity who is also a writer, whose writing is praised and published because it represents a continued thumbing of the nose against the forces of obscurantism, a triumphant paean to the freedom of speech. Rushdie himself waxes poetic about this freedom of speech…I suppose he must- given the niche he occupies in the Western imagination. What he absolutely refuses to consider, is that absolute freedom of speech applied on an unequal world-and such is the world which we inhabit-simply means freedom of speech for the powerful. In his quest to join the ranks of the powerful, albeit as the brown man with a sob story-it is freedom for the already powerful that he has been fighting for.

Unsurprisingly, Rushdie betrays no consciousness of any of this in Knife. He is taking control of his own narrative we are told-an irony given that Rushdie thinks of the attacker a man who was not even born when the fatwa was delivered- as the man whom he wishes to deny any power. This is an understandable impulse but also an elementary one; one which highlights Rushdie’s blindness to the world’s larger literary narrative, where Brown and Black authors must constantly affirm long held prejudice about their own race and culture in order to be allowed to say anything at all. What would it be were Rushdie to deny power to that narrative? The fact that he cannot is tragic.

Instead, Rushdie tries to fashion his recovery story in Knife as a love story featuring him and his newest wife the Black poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Here too, Rushdie’s strategic thinking is what shines through most brightly. Griffiths-a Brooklyn poet-photographer comes to the over 250 lbs seventy plus year old writer’s attention when he accidentally walks into a glass door at a party following the inauguration of the PEN Voices Festival. Rushdie has met her before-in the green room-but it is her willingness to nurse his bloody nose-a task for which she accompanies him in a cab to his home-that cements the relationship. If Rushdie was writing about this sort of incident happening to someone else similarly situated-he might insinuate that he decided that the wife he needs now in his advancing age is neither a British aristocrat nor a lithe international supermodel but a willing nurse. Griffiths shows her willingness to occupy the role from their very first meeting.

If Rushdie made the estimation it was a prescient one, for while the ailments she ends up nursing are criminal inflictions-he does prove to be in need of a nurse. Indeed, Rushdie’s own family his sons and sister are only sporadically present during his recovery. Zafar the elder can only be in New York for a little over a week and Milan the younger is so afflicted with a fear of flying that he requires a luxury passage on board a ship to arrive at all. It is the gracious Black family of Rachel Eliza Griffiths that does the busy work of life management-picking up people at the airport-keeping vigils at the hospital and so on. And while I have no doubt about the goodness of these people-I have to confess at some discomfiture at how conveniently Rushdie deploys them into these roles.

Nor is Rushdie magnanimous enough to omit what he is giving Griffiths in exchange before and after the injury. We learn that not long after they begin their relationship-Griffiths presents Rushdie with the manuscript of a novel she has been unable to publish. She soon gets a publisher. At a later moment we learn that the two now share the storied Andrew Wylie-power agent to literary icons. Their honeymoon in Italy involves writer retreats in castles in Umbria where they emulate Hemingway-esque writing during the day, beaches in the afternoon and languorous dinners with friends in the evenings. Following the attack, Rushdie allows Griffiths who is also a documentary film producer to “document” his recovery, to turn the camera on him even when he isn’t feeling up to being documented. Being married to such an international literary victim-Rushdie wants us to know-provides access of the sort she may never have enjoyed otherwise. Love in the Rushdie sense is transcendent and transactional all at the same time-strategic realism if you will. The tragedy of course is that such are the conclusions of a man who has appears to have only experienced love as an onlooker looking in from the outside.