Near Death, with Salman Rushdie

Through the power of memory and words, Salman Rushdie slashes through the thickest layers of the human experience.

Procrastination, they say, often leads you nowhere. But, on a recent evening, it prompted me to the Google search bar, which I then filled in with my name.

Surprised I was when, on the second result page, I found an article from a Cuban website retelling, detail by detail, the most traumatic experience of my life: the time I was kidnapped while vacationing in Havana, and, in a desperate attempt to survive, I jumped from a high-speeding ‘almendrón’ in the middle of a highway.

There won’t be any promenade down memory lane, since, for the time being, that’s a chapter of my life that I’ve decided to keep in the past. For today’s purpose, though, let’s agree to call it the Havana Incident.

Live To Tell

A near-death experience, or NDE, I don’t wish upon anyone; the small hyphen becomes a representation of the only lifeline keeping your heart beating.

Salman Rushdie surely knows about this. On August 12, 2022, during a panel in front of thousands, a stranger jumped onstage and stabbed him fifteen times.

Needless to say, he survived.

In his most recent book, Knife (Knopf), Rushdie takes the reader through every minute before, during, and after the murderous attempt. Slashing through the thickest layers of the human experience with his words, he lets the highest level of generosity writing can distill burst out.

“On such coin-toss moments a life can turn. Chance determines our fates at least as profoundly as choice, or those nonexistent notions, karma, qismat, ‘destiny’.”

— Knife, Salman Rushdie, p. 27

Knife has also become this sort of gospel to which I return every now and then, to find sense in the fact that, for a brief moment, I too ceased to exist.

Almost as if acting on its title, Knife torqued the doorlock preventing my near-death experience from meeting the correct lexicon. Up until now, I could only access the Havana Incident through mental images: a slideshow or a PowerPoint presentation that my brain replayed without any problem each time I wanted to go over it—something I attribute to my photographic memory.

And, of course, I’ve shared my story with close ones. But it has mainly been done in a reviewing manner. Putting words into emotions, going beyond the context and setting, and finally fleshing out the characters and story was another much more complicated affair for which I didn’t feel completely ready.

Rushdie’s words broke the sealing code, I feel.

“When Death comes very close to you, the rest of the world goes far away and you can feel a great loneliness,” he writes. And, it’s true. After I recovered, I felt—still do sometimes—estranged from the world, like that meme of the guy standing alone at the party.

To come back from the other side, as some might say, sets your deepest sense of individuality on fire, making you feel like a pyre that can withstand any hurricane. But, after reading Rushdie’s account, I finally realized that it’s up to me to either share my light or keep it to myself until it is drowned.

“I have never believed in the inmortality of the soul. and my experience […] seemed to confirm that. The ‘me,’ whatever or whoever it was, was certainly on the edge of death along with the body that contained it. I had sometimes said, half-humorously, that our sense of a noncorporeal ‘me’ or ‘I’ might mean that we possessed a mortal soul, an entity or consciousness that ended along with our physical existence. I now think that maybe that isn’t entirely a joke.”

— Knife, Salman Rushdie, p.16

The art of writing, partly, is about expanding the power of language and creating a bridge through which both, authors and readers, can inhabit a common emotional dimension, free of judgment. Rushdie does so with insurmountable gentleness in here.

Gentleness with himself and his vessel (“Doctors and nurses would come to inspect me and say, ‘You’re looking much better,’ and I believed their lies, because I wanted to.”); with the reader; with his craft (“Language was my knife. It could be the tool I would use to remake and reclaim my world, to rebuild the frame in which my picture of the world could once more hang on my wall.”).

Gentleness with his perpetrator (“I don’t remember anger. I didn’t think very much about the man whose actions had put me in this place. I thought only about survival, by which I meant not only staying alive, but getting my life back.”); and with his own existence (“To regret what your life has been is the true folly, I told myself, because the person doing the regretting has been shaped by the life he subsequently regrets.”).

This consciousness of oneself within a historical timeline is known as temporal distance, and it is tightly related, I believe, to how we tell the stories about emotional events, and how these stories change over time.

“Bloody, but unbowed”

On a recent evening, I found myself in front of the blank page and, almost as if letting a faucet open, words started scribbling themselves, forming sentences, scenes and dialogues.

After wrapping up the seventh page, I felt happy with the story that I’d started weaving because it meant that I was no longer dragged by the actions someone inflicted upon me. Instead, I could now assimilate, interpret and play with pain, turning it into a brick that could eventually become a bridge.

I could now relate to Rushdie, and W.E Henley, whose 1875 poem “Invictus” Rushdie quotes in the last pages of his book:

“Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed.”