The writer Salman Rushdie has given his first television interview since he was the victim of a serious attack in August 2022. A man stabbed him more than fifteen times while he was participating in a literary festival near New York. It was a fulfillment of the fatwa proclaimed by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 for how he represented Muhammad and the Koran in The Satanic Verses. A death sentence that haunted him for more than three decades and from which he was saved despite the cruelty of the criminal. Rushdie has lost his right eye and suffers after-effects from his injuries. And now he promotes Knife, the book he has written to talk about this fact.
Anderson Cooper made him the interview in the legendary 60 minutes from CBS. Nearly sixty years on the air, on Sunday nights, remaining among the ten most watched programs in the United States. It was a brief conversation, thirteen minutes long, and the journalist wanted to focus on the attack. He went back to the dream that the writer had had a couple of days before, sensing the attack. Cooper delves into how the events unfolded: the moment when Rushdie saw a man in black approaching the stage, the intuition of what was about to happen and the feeling that the past was suddenly becoming present. Rushdie stresses that it was twenty-seven seconds of cruelty against him, and the journalist carries out a shocking experiment. He announces to him: "This is twenty-seven seconds." And he takes the stopwatch from his mobile phone and lets them pass in silence. Rushdie and Cooper sit face to face without saying anything, waiting for time to run out. It seems like an eternity. On television we are not used to pauses or the absence of words. The idea has something atrocious and poetic at the same time. It is both powerful and sensitive. It is somewhat disturbing, because inside our heads we are imagining the stabbings. Journalistically, it also puts emphasis on the rigour of the data, on the duration of the events. Twenty-seven seconds may seem very short to us, but lived from the absolute awareness of the passage of time, they can seem very long. When the stopwatch stops, Rushdie says: "This is half a minute of extraordinary intimacy. When life meets death." Cooper asks him about his feelings at that moment: "I had no revelation beyond realising that there is no revelation. No heavenly songs or the gates of heaven," he comments with a certain sarcasm. It is a little surprising how they go into the details of the wounds. The presenter then continues to be interested in the murderer, whose name Rushdie does not want to write or pronounce and, in some images of him walking through Central Park with the journalist, he explains the after-effects that have remained on him at a physical and psychological level. He confesses that he feels the presence of death closer. Cooper asks him if he thinks the end has come for this story that began in 1989. "I hope it's the last twist. But I don't know. I'll tell you." For those of us who are from the generation that remembers the initial scandal ofThe Satanic Verses, this interview of the 60 minutes It is also as if the past were coming back to visit us.
