Salman Rushdie | The language of truth

‘I am a dead man,’ that’s what Salman Rushdie thought on February 14, 1989, the day Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa for his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses for alleged blasphemy against Islam. Rushdie was in London, and when a BBC reporter asked him how he felt knowing he’d just been sentenced to death, he said, “It doesn’t feel good,” as recounted in Joseph Anton, his 2012 memoir, alluding to the name he had adopted while going underground soon after the death decree, and also a tribute to two of his many literary inspirations. Other writer friends gathered at the Greek Orthodox Church, like Martin Amis, hugged and told him, “We’re worried about you,” to which Rushdie replied, “I’m worried about me.” The American travel writer, Paul Theroux, called out, “Salman, next week, we’ll be back for you!” What followed was that Rushdie went into hiding for nine years, under the protection of the British government. And in his books, Rushdie tries never to forget that “writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things – childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves — that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers.” While in hiding, Rushdie delivered on a promise made to his son Zafar in 1989 — then, nine years old — that he would one day write a book he could read. In an interview with Rushdie, who was still under cover, after the book was published, old friend Martin Amis, wrote that it appeared that Rushdie was condemned to “enact his own fictional themes of exile, ostracism, disjuncture, personal reinvention,” occupying a kind of “shadowland”, but “formidably alive.” In later years, Rushdie’s novels may not have touched similar highs, but his essays, the latest collected in Languages of Truth, are as incisive and perceptive as those in Imaginary Homelands and Step Across the Line.