Catherine A. Fitzpatrick
Artifacture via MidJourney
This interview of Salman Rushdie in the New York Times by Ezra Klein is a must-read so here's a complimentary link.
If you, like me, or even the author, did not read Satanic Verses, let along Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder then at least read this interview, and it may get you to read the books, perhaps even me, too.
I try to think why I haven't read these books even priding myself being an intellectual of sorts, although not a highly educated one. I think it's because I associate the entire "Salman Rushdie" phenomenon as part of that irksome "bien pensant" New York City literary world which I came into touch with while working at Human Rights Watch and other non-profits, and came to associate with PEN Club leftwing selectivity and moral obnoxiousness. (More on PEN Club soon.)
Growing up in rural Upstate New York, I tried to reach this big-city literary world, getting into poetry seminars with Marvin Bell at a Rochester university or writing seminars where Yevtushenko spoke at University of Toronto or going to readings of people like William Stafford in Rochester who gave me my life-long mantra: "To get started, I will accept anything that occurs to me."
I recall going to a reading of Muriel Sparks in Rochester and went up to her afterwards to get her signature on a somewhat tattered page of a lady's magazine which had a poem of hers, illustrated by a lunch counter with two colours of drinks -- which I can't find now online and hope I can find in real life. She was surprised as she had forgotten about that little poem.
What I felt with the phenomenon of Salman Rushdie in NYC -- then and now -- is that people rushed to appreciate and support him not really for the work's own sake or him (and his humour!) but because at long last they could give voice in a way to their dislike of radical Islam which they couldn't express, being good liberals. That is, they wouldn't outright condemn radical Islam because that was tied up with the Palestinian cause, but now they had a way to Do Something About It.
It was so popularized and so crushing that I just didn't want to read the book like everyone else.
I was shocked and horrified at the knife attack precisely because it was at Chatauqua, a place in the Finger Lakes where I grew up, a place I once visited because my best friend in college had a cabin there one summer because her mother was somehow involved in the programs. I think of it as a place for elites who can afford it, for one -- the Upstate of wine tours and historically-preserved buildings where we didn't leave -- but also a relatively obscure place where Islamists wouldn't bother to show up. I vaguely remember my friend in a granny gown, which I didn't own, and courses on Robin Morgan's books or composting or something. Honestly, I don't remember. But Chataqua is a thing. Right now it features John Meacham and the Beach Boys. Eep.
Knife has come out just in time for Chatauqua's 150th anniversary (!) President Michael E. Hill writes:
Chautauqua and Sir Salman will forever be linked because of this tragedy and because we stand as symbols of the importance of freedom of expression to our democratic way of life. We will continue to support them on this journey.
Somehow, that statement feels rather anodyne and sanitized to me, and leaves me wondering what President Hill and Sir Salman think about the campus mayhem with the pro-Palestinian uproars. No doubt they support them. Or if a Muslim beats up a Jew or forces them to stay away from classes, even, the Jew is supposed to traverse a journey of understanding and compassion and even revisit the scene of the crime with healing. This is Christian in nature, in fact.
I think Sir Salman a) deserves maximum protection and support b) publishing, keeping in print, and display of his novels and teaching them in courses and featuring them c) condemnation of extremism in any form that seeks to silence him -- and I learn from this interview that even my beloved John Le Carre felt he shouldn't have dissed someone else's religion in this way and seemed to say he "asked for it."
All literay life is supposed to end in harmony -- though the Guardian couldn't help calling it "gloriously vituperative" -- so Le Carre and Rushdie made up after awhile.
Said Le Carre:
But I am a little proud, in retrospect, that I spoke against the easy trend, reckoning with the wrath of outraged western intellectuals, and suffering it in all its righteous glory. And if I met Salman tomorrow? I would warmly shake the hand of a brilliant fellow writer."
I personally don't go out of my way to dis other people's religions and I don't think they "deserve" punishment. I also don't feel I need to publish or link to cartoons of the Prophet and such -- America is based on the premise of religious tolerance and mutual respect of different religions which underpins the free speech doctrines.
Even so, I want to try to convey to you my very real experience of these contradictions in real life, in an incident that I think Salman Rushdie himself would understand and appreciate.
So back when Rushdie's Satanic Verses came out in 1988, or not long after, and I worked at Human Rights Watch (where I was in Helsinki Watch dealing with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from 1981-1990), a demonstration -- a march, really -- was organized in support of Rushdie.
I don't recall which organization or organizations staged it. I don't think it was HRW, as they didn't "do" demonstrations. It might have been Amnesty, or perhaps the Freedom to Write Committee of the Association of American Publishers (whose meetings I used to attend regularly) but more likely it was PEN Club. It might not have been right then in September 1988 but later. But this was before 9/11, remember. (I can't find any record of it, although there were Muslim marches against the book in 1989.)
We assembled at the UN, and we had a police permit for the march, in which several hundred people took part -- not a huge crowd, but given that these organizations I highlighted usually do not stage marches, it was something. To get a permit, you merely have to inform the police for that precinct where you will assemble, and your route. It's not permission-based; it's notification-based, i.e. "not Russia". There are designated areas on Dag Hammarskold Plaza or the Sharansky Steps across the street from the UN by E. 42nd St. -- you can't go right in front of the UN.
So we assembled, then took a walk around the block -- it didn't really go further to my recollection. We marched along E. 42nd Street likely to the street before Grand Central Station, then round the block back to the UN demonstration point. It wasn't that big or long. I'm not sure why it took the form of a march, and not a stationery demonstration -- perhaps to give the illusion of "mass" and "big" although it was neither. I've been in many far, far bigger demonstrations and marches in NYC, e.g. against the war in Iraq.
I went to this demonstration as a job duty of sorts, although it wasn't mandatory; it's just what good young liberals did. I hadn't read the book but of course I got behind the cause.
But I was given great pause for thought on this march which I never forgot for the rest of my life, and which I often think about in pondering causes, demonstrations, and free speech.
As we rounded the corner on to E. 42nd Street, and got past the Ford Foundation, which is kind of an empty stretch, we approached Grand Central, and along the way we began to see now news kiosks, which then -- as now -- were staffed by Pakistani men. They sold newspapers, but also soda, gum and candy, aspirin, lottery tickets, little odds and ends.
I'll never forget the look on the face of the newstand vendor as our march passed by his modest, little wooden kiosk on the street.
It was stark fear.
It was the kind of stark fear I've seen on faces of people I don't know well that might be mistaken for anger or hatred but in fact is stark fear.
Stark fear on the face of this brown-skinned immigrant from Pakistan, no doubt Muslim, who saw this march coming at hin unexpectedly on a street where he made his living, and no doubt sent money back to his homeland to support relatives.
Fear.
Because he had no way of knowing that this crowd lumbering toward him, garbed in expensive clothing and haircuts (the non-profit world is filled with the children of rich parents), was peaceful, was not targeting him or "all Muslims" but was more about the positivity of supporting Rushdie. We had a police permit! Nobody was going to be knocking heads here.
But from where he came from, a crowd like this would be a mob, that might indeed knock heads and blow up things.
The fear was there because he never expected to encounter anything like this in America -- a crowd chanting "Hands Off! Salman Rushdie!" What would it mean for him and his fellow Muslim immigrants?
I can still hear the wind-rush of the syllable RUSH-die and its emphasis as we passed the kiosk of this Pakistani man with fear stamped on his face. Fear for his livelihood (what else?). Not the sort of abstract hatred or support that PEN Club members might get up to. More ordinary. At least that's what I felt it was. If people were now going to support this blasphemy, this infidel, that was a bad thing, right? Because they might come for newstand vendors next.
As they would in not-America, not-land-of-the-free countries, right?
To say more about this, to make crappy MidJourney images, is to get further and further away from the shock and jolt it gave me, the feeling that maybe this march wasn't a good idea, if this was the result. Obviously, the fatwa-uttering mullahs were unaffected, the countries of the UN, as always with such demonstrations, mainly ignored it. So who was supposed to see this march, except news vendors on E. 42nd Street and passersby on their way mainly to the station and thus likely from out of town?
This is part of my long complicated relationship with PEN Club about which I'll write more (and I'm not even sure -- again -- they organized this particular march although it's the kind of thing they'd do). Maybe someone else will remember? Unfortuantely, the few people I know who would -- and were likely on that march with me -- are dead now.
When we rounded the corner, I seem to recall looking back and seeing the news vendors had shuttered their kiosks. This happens rarely in NYC -- it takes a flood, a blackout, not even 9/11 -- at least during the day. They didn't feel safe.
So I feel as if I must read Rushdie's books to be a complete human being or at least New York intellectual, yet the news vendor's face looms before me.
Somehow, I never spoke of it.
To write about, to make MidJourney images of, to try to reconstruct a memory -- is to erase. Yet I risk it anyways or it dies with me.
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