The PEN and the Knife (and Salt for the Wounds)
On reading Rushdie's new memoir in the wake of writers successfully shutting down the PEN World Voices Festival, which he co-founded to broaden channels of dialogue in the wake of 9/11
I’ve just finished my second reading of KNIFE by
. It’s a tender, urgent book that would at any time be on my list of works to recommend to friends and colleagues. But this isn’t any time; it’s the very specific one in which much of the literary world has chosen to side with Islamist extremists rather than Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers. Nor is that just any good book; it’s a book about the aftermath of the attempted murder of Rushdie by Hadi Matar, who seems to have been motivated by the 1989 fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemning Rushdie to death. And it is, most amazingly, a book about love rather than anger, at a time when we most desperately need to be reminded that love is possible. I’ve read it twice, starting it over as soon as I’d finished it, because it’s a reminder I need very much right now when so many of my beloved friends and colleagues are now people who would call me their enemy.PEN’s World Voices Festival has long been a home difficult discourse in an era that decries disagreement. I titled this post after Rushdie’s own NYT article, written at the founding of the festival because I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the twinned timelines of the book’s release and the forced cancellation of the 20th PEN World Voices Festival.
Many of you are probably blessedly unaware of the complexities of this cancellation. Others have done an excellent job chronicalling it, and if you’d like more background, I suggest you read one or some of these excellent chronicles of the events:
A Prominent Free-Speech Group is Fighting for Its Life by Gal Beckerman for The Atlantic
PEN America Cancels 2024 World Voices Festival Amid Further Fallout by John Maher for Publisher’s Weekly
PEN America Has Stood by Authors. They Should Stand by PEN. by Pamela Paul for the New York Times
This quote from the public letter announcing the cancellation makes clear, I think, how antithetical doing so was, and remains, to PEN’s larger mission and particularly to the festival’s mission:
When Salman Rushdie first announced the founding of World Voices in 2005 he rued “our dumbed-down, homogenized, frightened culture, under the thumbs of leaders who seem to think of themselves as God’s anointed and of power as their divine right; it is harder to make such exalted claims for mere wordsmiths. Harder, but no less necessary … one has the sense of things shutting down, of barriers being erected, of that dialogue being stifled precisely when we should be doing our best to amplify it.” Nineteen years later, the very festival created to surmount these waves has been subsumed by them.
I haven’t the hubris to try to imagine how Rushdie feels about the cancellation of the festival. Rushdie is one of the towering intellects of our time; I’m an associate professor, whose books are read by tens of people, writing on social media. But I imagine it must be an unpleasant kind of echo for him that the group behind the push for cancellation is a nakedly Islamist group seeking to radicalize American youth in exactly the same way Hadi Matar was radicalized. And I can infer, from this brief reflection on the struggles at PEN when it offered its Courage Award to the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo:
“My association with PEN America had been long and deep. I was a past president and a co-founder of the PEN World Voices Festival, and we had been fighting the good fight together for decades. Unfortunately, sometimes the fight wasn’t so good, and was just a brawl. I couldn’t forget that eight years earlier, in April 2015, when this same Courage Award had been offered to the murdered cartoonists of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, an upsetting number of prominent writers objected because the magazine had occasionally lampooned Islam. It had poked fun at Roman Catholicism and at Israel far more often, and viciously satirized the French government, but it was characterized by these literary eminences as Islamophobic and statist, even though some of them admitted to never having seen a copy of Charlie and not being able to read French, anyway. It was a bitter quarrel. Friendships were broken, including several of mine, because I thought, and still think, that failing to stand by our colleagues who had been slaughtered by Islamist terrorists for drawing pictures was a morally confused thing to do. I couldn’t help wondering what the anti-Charlie clique thought of the award to me. Perhaps they weren’t in favor of that, either. I can’t say. None of them has contacted me in several years.”
Perhaps Rushdie, in what he calls his newfound “wounded happiness,” is able to just turn away from the awful echo that is Islamists being able to shut down the World Voices Festival that he created to give everyone—including Muslim writers—a place at the literary table in the face of the censorious impulses that took over much of the world of letters in the wake of 9/11. I sincerely hope so. But it’s hard not to imagine that, instead, this must be particularly stinging salt in the wounds first the fatwa, and then the murder attempt, have left.
If you haven’t read the book, do. If you have read it, read it again, or pass it along to someone who needs what it has to say. This is a book about healing, and when this war ends—and it will end—we are all going to have a lot of healing to do.
Sarah, this is so excellent. You are such a strong writer. I love you.
The Jewish community saw the remark as offensive. I saw it as indicative of the poor quality on scholarship.