Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

In Knife, Rushdie argues that love is a powerful enough force to overcome the effects of violence in the world. When Rushdie was attacked, he was in the early year of his marriage to writer and artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths. His relationship with her is a motif that he repeatedly returns to as he develops the idea that their love for one another allowed them to overcome the trauma that resulted from Matar’s attack on Rushdie. Eliza is so important to his story that Chapter 2, “Eliza,” is devoted to her. In this chapter, Rushdie tells the story of their meeting, evolving relationship, and eventual marriage. He praises her intelligence and her talents, and he reproduces the entire e. e. cummings poem he recited to her during their wedding. This background is highly relevant to Knife’s portrayal of the August 2022 attack because Eliza, and Rushdie’s love for her, were central to his recovery. Each chapter that describes the stages of his recovery—Chapters 3, 4, 5, 7, and 8—contains details about Eliza’s loving support and her own trauma following the attack. He explains how she rushed to his side despite the enormous expense of chartering a plane, how fiercely she guarded him and supervised his care, and how carefully she hid her own terror that he might die (a terror that he shared). The memoir conveys Eliza’s traumatized perspective on the severity of his injuries and his difficult path to recovery. The book’s final scene recalls the couple standing on the stage at Chautauqua, where Matar’s attack set in motion the terror and trauma that both Rushdie and Eliza endured, because this scene demonstrates the strength they lend one another and the power of their love to endure and overcome.

In exploring the power of love, Rushdie also credits his relationships with his sister and his sons for helping him overcome the trauma of the attack, linking this theme with another one: The Devastating Impact of Violence. Just as he describes Eliza’s support despite her severe trauma, he depicts the impact of the attack on Sameen, Zafar, and Milan. He recalls their visits to him and the efforts each made to cheer him up and help him process the entire experience. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Rushdie’s first thought was “Somebody tell them” (16) and a desperate sadness at the idea of dying far away from his wife, sister, and sons. When it became clear that he would live and he began to think about how he wanted to spend the remaining days of his life, he had only two priorities: work and love. His determination to prioritize his relationships with Eliza, Sameen, Zafar, and Milan arose at least in part from his sense that their love had guided him through the worst episode of his life. In describing Knife, Rushdie explicitly states that it is “a story in which hatred […] is answered, and finally overcome, by love” (29).

Knife considers the many effects of violence on victims and their loved ones. It examines how violence creates both physical and psychological traumas and affects both public and private life. The most obvious example of the impact of violence is Hadi Matar’s attack on Rushdie. In multiple chapters, Rushdie describes the physical trauma it caused through graphic details of his injuries and the medical procedures required to deal with them. He describes his eye, for instance, as “hugely distended, bulging out of its socket, and hanging down on [his] face like a large soft-boiled egg” (53). This image explicitly conveys the horrific nature of his injuries.

In addition, Rushdie describes the psychological trauma that he and his family experienced because of the attack. He repeatedly had nightmares and became uncertain of his own identity, questioning the path his life had taken and would take in the future. He felt frustrated at being drawn back into the time of the fatwa, out of the new life he worked hard to build. Once again he had to be on guard against both public criticism and the threat of future attacks. Similarly, his wife, sister, and sons had to confront the fear of losing him, disrupt their lives to stay with him, deal with increased security against potential future threats, and hide their own trauma to support him through his arduous months of recovery.

However, the memoir is not just about what happened to Rushdie and his family in August 2022. As Rushdie commented to Eliza when they decided to make a documentary about it, the attack symbolized something larger than just Rushdie and his immediate circle. Knife critiques violence more generally. It recounts multiple types of violence—including not only other acts of violent extremism by Islamic fundamentalists, but also violence associated with authoritarian repression and racism, and even the abusive violence of Rushdie’s father. The text portrays all of these forms of violence as anathema to human happiness and freedom. One of the primary arguments that Rushdie makes in this memoir is that people often use the fear of violence and its lasting effects to stifle freedom of expression in others because free speech is an important instrument in ending repression of all kinds. Knife exemplifies how people can use free speech to confront violence, reframe it, and reclaim the things it attempts to steal.