Salman Rushdie said he felt incredibly grateful and keen to continue writing, saying “you can’t regret your life”, in his first interview since surviving the brutal and harrowing attack last summer.
“I’m lucky. What I really want to say is that my main overwhelming feeling is gratitude,” he told The New Yorker as he continues to recover, both physically and mentally, from being stabbed more than a dozen times during a Western New Literary event.
“It was the nightmares, not exactly the accident, just scary. They seem to be in decline,” he said. “When I say I’m fine, I mean there are parts of my body that need constant checks. It was a colossal attack.”
The attack left him hospitalized for six weeks. He lost 40 pounds and lost the sight in his right eye. He also suffered nerve damage in his left hand, he said.
She also suggested she has PTSD as a result of the ordeal and said she has difficulty writing.
“It was very, very difficult for me to write. I sit down to write and nothing happens. I write, but it’s a combination of blank spaces and junk, things I write and delete the next day. We’re not out of the woods yet, really,” he said.
The violence, which also injured another event host, followed decades of threats after Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for Rushdie’s death in 1989 over the publication of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. The book was considered blasphemy by some Muslims.
For a decade after this edict, called a fatwa, was declared, Rushdie said he lived underground in London for his own safety, fully believing himself to be a dead man. He became less cautious after moving to New York in 2000, where he said he decided to live his life freely, in the open, leaving many around him unaware.
Rushdie said the only person he could blame for what happened last summer was those responsible, although he admitted he doubted it was a mistake to let his guard down.
“Three quarters of my life as a writer has been through fatwas. In a way, you can’t regret your life,” she said.
Hadi Matar, charged with attempted murder and assault over the attack, told the New York Post in a brief prison interview last August that he only read a few pages of The Satanic Verses, but no: Rushdie told him he liked it . He said he was surprised Rushdie survived his injuries.
“It’s someone who attacked Islam, attacked their beliefs, their belief systems,” he said of the author.
Rushdie’s latest novel, Victory City, which he finished writing shortly before the attack, will be released on Tuesday.
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