New Delhi: Nine months after being stabbed, Salman Rushdie made his first appearance, wearing a black eye patch and cracking a joke.
“Well, hi everybody. It’s nice to be back — as opposed to not being back, which was also an option. I’m pretty glad the dice rolled this way,” said Rushdie at Pen America’s 2023 Literary Gala in New York City on Thursday.
A New York Times report said that Rushdie made a surprise appearance after Pen America’s president, novelist Ayad Akhtar referred to the Booker Prize-winning author’s impact and the knife attack.
Last year in August, Rushdie was badly injured in a knife attack by an assailant while he was speaking on the dais at a literary event at the Chautauqua Institute. He lost sight in one eye and nerves in one arm were severed.
In his short remarks, the author of The Satanic Verses praised the efforts of those who rushed to tackle his attacker on August 12, 2022.
“I was the target that day, but they were the heroes. The courage that day was all theirs,” he said.
He asserted that “terrorism must not terrorise us” and that the mission of PEN America to protect free expression was never “more important” in a time of book bans and censorship. “Violence must not deter us. As the old Marxists used to say, La lutte continue. La lutta continua. The struggle goes on,” he added.
Rushdie stayed on for the cocktail hour where he was “his voluble self”, as per NYT.
In India, the response to the attack, even from the government, had been muted. “India has always stood against violence and extremism. We condemn this horrific attack on Salman Rushdie and we wish him a speedy recovery,” said an MEA spokesperson, two weeks after the incident.
