He has pointed out the irony of how sales of his novel ‘The Satanic Verses’ soared after the attack
“I sit down to write and nothing happens. I write, but it is a combination of emptiness and garbage”, he has confessed
The British writer of Indian origin Salman Rushdie has reappeared publicly several months after being stabbed during a presentation in the American city of New York at the hands of a young Lebanese follower of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
After the attack last August, where he received up to twelve stab wounds to the face, neck, liver, thorax and abdomen, Rushdie, 75, was left blind in his right eye, has difficulty writing and, at times, He has “terrifying” nightmares, according to what the writer has related in an interview with The New Yorker.
“Well, you know, I’ve been better. But considering what happened, I’m not so bad,” Rushdie said after being asked about his mood, confessing that he has sensitivity in his thumb and index finger and that he does hand exercises in an effort to rewrite.
However, since the attack, the writer who spent years living under threat from Iran for his novel “The Satanic Verses” — published in 1998 and considered blasphemous by the Iranian authorities, who issued a decree calling for his death — has suffered a post traumatic stress disorder.
“I sit down to write and nothing happens. I write, but it is a combination of emptiness and garbage, things that I write and delete the next day,” says Rushdie, who has never had a block like this despite years of threats and complaints. .
About his nightmares, they have been decreasing over time and have not been exactly about the incident, although they have been “terrifying”, a trance that has not always been easy for him, as he has confessed.
Meanwhile, he has sadly noted that sales of his book “The Satanic Verses” soared after the stabbing, as if the author was more popular when he was in danger.
“Now that I almost died, everyone loves me”, he has lamented himself. “That was my mistake, back then. I not only lived but tried to live well. Bad mistake. Getting stabbed 15 times, much better,” he ironized during his interview with the aforementioned magazine.
Rushdie was on stage when he was approached by a young man dressed in black with a knife. The alleged attacker, Hadi Matar, 24, has pleaded not guilty to charges of assault and attempted murder. About his aggressor, the writer has assured that he is “an idiot”, although he has confessed that he did not feel anger.
“I have tried very hard during these years to avoid recriminations and bitterness (…) One of the ways in which I have dealt with all this is to look forward and not back. What happens tomorrow is more important than what It happened yesterday,” he asserted.
Suspicion falls on Matar that he sympathized on social networks with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a country that declared a ‘fatwa’ in 1989 to kill the writer for his book ‘The Satanic Verses’, published a year earlier and considered in the Islamic republic an act of heresy.
