Columns: Viewpoint by Salman Rushdie

Columns

India Today, February 15, 1999
Feb 15, 1999

VIEWPOINT
Ten Years After

My unfunny Valentine: how the fatwa and I lived with each other.

By Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie Yes, all right, on February 14 it will be 10 years since I received my unfunny Valentine. I admit to a dilemma. Ignore the politics (which I'd love to do) and my silence must look enforced or fearful. Speak, and I risk deafening the world to those other utterances, my books, written in my true language, the language of literature. I risk helping to conceal the real Salman behind the smoky, sulphurous Rushdie of the Affair.

I have two lives: one blighted by hatred and caught up in a dire business which, alas, is not yet done, and another in which I love and am loved, the life of a free man, freely doing his work. Two lives, but none I can afford to lose, for one loss would end both.

So I'll have my say, and because everybody loves an anniversary no doubt much will be said elsewhere by the armies of bigotry and punditry. Let them volley and thunder. I'll speak of bookish things.

When asked about the effect on my writing of the 10-year-long assault upon it, I've answered light-heartedly that I've become more interested in happy endings; and that, as I've been told that my recent books are my funniest, the attacks have evidently improved my sense of humour. These answers, true enough in their way, are designed to deflect deeper inquiry.

How to explain to strangers my sense of violation? It's as if men wielding clubs were to burst loudly into your home and lay it waste. They arrive when you're making love or standing naked in the shower or sitting on the toilet or staring in deep inward silence at the lines you've scrawled on a page. Never again will you kiss or bathe or write or shit without remembering this intrusion. And yet, to do these things pleasurably and well you must shut out the memory -- Never! But you must.

And how to describe the damage? As a spear in the stomach that somehow doesn't kill, but turns and twists. As a heaviness. As something remembered from boarding-school childhood: I wake and lying in bed find I can't move. My arms, legs and head have grown impossibly weighty. Nobody believes me, of course, and all the children laugh.

I can't go on, says Beckett's Unnameable, I'll go on. A writer's injuries are his strengths, and from his wounds will flow his sweetest, most startling dreams.

Amid the cacophony of the professionally opinionated and the professionally offended, may a voice still be heard celebrating literature, highest of arts, its passionate, dispassionate inquiry into life on earth, its naked journey across the frontierless human terrain, its fierce-minded rebuke to dogma and power and its trespasser's fearless daring?

In these years I've met and been inspired by some of the world's bravest fighters for literary freedom. I took part recently in the ceremony of dedication of a house for refugee writers in Mexico City (more than 20 cities already belong to this scheme) and was proud to be doing a little to ease the struggles of others in danger from intolerance. But as well as fighting the fight, which I will surely go on doing, I have grown determined to prove that the art of literature is more resilient than what menaces it. The best defence of literary freedoms lies in their exercise, in continuing to make untrammelled, uncowed books. So, beyond grief, bewilderment and despair, I have re-dedicated myself to our high calling.

I am conscious of shifts in my writing. There was always a tug-of-war in me between "there" and "here", the pull of roots and the dream of leaving. In that struggle of insiders and outsiders, I used to feel simultaneously on both sides. Now I've come down firmly on the side of those who by preference, nature or circumstance simply do not belong. This unbelonging -- I think of it as disorientation, loss of the East -- is my artistic country now. Wherever my books find themselves, by a favoured armchair, near a hot bath, on a beach, or in a late-night pool of bedside light: that's my only home.

Life can be harsh, and for a decade St Valentine's Day has reminded me of that harshness. But these dark anniversaries of the appalling Valentine I was sent in 1989 have also been times to reflect upon the countervailing value of love. Love feels more and more like the only subject. At the centre of my life, of my new work, of my future plans, I now find nothing else.

The remains of St Valentine himself are to come out of hiding. Instead of the cardboard box in which they were ignominiously stored for years, they will have a reliquary in Glasgow's notably unfluffy, roughneck Gorbals district. I like this image: the patron saint of romance discovers the gritty verities of life in the real world, while that world is enriched in turn by the flowering, in its mean streets, of love. "

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