Writers, Readers and Rushdie

On June 2 last year, an Algerian journalist, poet, and novelist, Tahar Djaout, died of wounds he received when he was shot in the head near his home on the outskirts of Algiers by Muslim terrorists who objected to the attitude his newspaper took toward their fundamentalism. Humanely, any crime of this kind is reprehensible, but culturally the loss is also considerable because Tahar Djaout, 39 when he died, was an accomplished writer whose novels, written in French, had received both prizes and acclaim. His murder got his ghost a brief and passing paragraph in several American newspapers.

Yes, we fanatics, we followers, we faithful, we patriots, we partisans: Death is what we do best. We bear the body, beset the life, cause the corpse. The residue is huge: a heap wider than a wasteland, higher than a hill. Yet what have we made when we’ve made it? One more small circle of grief around a pile of sightless eyes. So many sick and shot and starved. So many women raped and widowed. So many children maimed and left alive to weep because they weren’t among the fortunate who grew into their death like weeds into the ground.

Consequently, what call has Salman Rushdie--yes, a worthy man, immensely talented yet only a writer, and a citizen of another country, after all--what call has he on our attention, when an entire world seems surfeited with suffering and we’ve lost count of even those still strong enough to scream? What scale can weigh his years of imprisonment within the hug of security police, where we must imagine his spirit being cautioned to skulk through the hallways of his own head? There is no way we can share these fears of a hidden gun held at the heart, as in a cruel game, to go off at a time unnumbered on any dial. What is one man’s career supposed to mean to us, so safely situated, or his desire to be known for the excellence of his work, rather than be notorious for the odd malice of his fate? What claim can any of this have on ears as continually beset as ours, where we hear howling everywhere, as if we each sat at the mouth of Hell itself, and read or watched--were fed--the news?

Sense is what we are supposed to make. Meaning is for Man to manage, making mind out of all this “never matter.” We ought always to have the gift of consciousness on our conscience. Who else can feel the warmth of someone’s pleasure in a finger’s touch? Hear a voice rise like a slow bird from the meadow of the page?

So when by threats or sophistries or betrayal’s rewards, our liberty of thought and expression is constrained, our openness of action and free field of dreams impeded; when an unpleasant opinion, a vulgar expression, a disturbing incident, a troubling idea, a satiric skit, a peal of laughter, a hoot of derision, is foreclosed because this or that is not a laughing matter, is sacred as a cow may be, or king, or caste, or race, or flag, or god, or mother; when dirt’s words are bottled up like bugs chloroformed in jars; when only the difference of local sameness is embraced, rather than difference itself; when the fascism of the left and the fascism of the right clasp underhands; then . . . then what? Shall we toddle back to bed like chastened children, goblin-cowed; shall we fail to render those in danger aid, though their plight is a plight of principle, and not merely--not merely--a neighbor’s need? Shall we allow the very bases of all good life and all fine art to be besmirched, even removed, by sullen fanatics, by bewildered fools, by those who will surely lose their seat near god if they can’t keep the rest of us away from the table?

The fatwa was pronounced against us all. It commanded the murder of a mouth, yet issued from the mouth of a murderer. Although the act called for anger from us, an anger honest and righteous to stand against this fabricated and expedient pretense which fueled ignorant and distant mobs, the time for that feeling went pallidly past, and now the only object of anger ought to be ourselves for our slow, our wan, response, for our characteristic feeling of futility, our fears, too, consequential as they may have been, since the question of the reality of the risk is irrelevant to principle.

Yet even if we believe no man is an island, even if we are all part of the main, there are so many in want, in danger, who have been, by their leaders and circumstances, betrayed; there are simply so many multitudes in pain; what can we say to ourselves on one man’s behalf, or on the behalf of readers and writers, as if they were sufferers, too, though most read only the papers, sign petitions, apply salves to their conscience, sit in meetings, pound an innocent table?

Only this, I think: there is a bond between us, readers and writers, an ancient tie, as old as writing is, if not as old as speech itself, a pact, a promise which the act of setting down sentences in a moving way implicitly solidifies; that what we shall say shall be as true to things and to our own heart as we can manage with our skills to make them; and that what we read shall be free and unforced and uttered out of the deepest respect for the humanity all language represents, whatever its content otherwise; and that this covenant (broken, tragically, every day which history has been there to mark) is the model for all exchange of thought and need and feeling, and that this community--the community of unveiled countenance and free speech--must be sustained, if we are to continue, either in the harsh and unforgiving condition of survival, or in terms of every genuine enterprise of the moral spirit--in short, so we can say, though we may be here by genetic accident or a god’s decree, that we deserve to stay.

Our papers report that on account of the fatwa--out of a hatred which would numb the tongue before its undoubted excision--editors, translators, readers, writers like Tahar Djaout, have been threatened, assaulted, wounded, murdered; but their victimizers cared nothing for their victims, not in the state of hate they represent; they care not a sweet plump fig for Salman Rushdie or his work or what it may say to them or to anyone, not in the condition of ignorance and fear which they embody; they seek an excuse to silence the mind, to blind the eyes, to stopper the free flow of feeling. Fundamentalists will not rest, for to rest, like a cyclist, is to fall; to rest may be to realize that their light comes from a far away star, that their mode of life has been dead for a long time, and the world, in which they are busy killing and constraining, is already a bier into which they, with their miseries, have been born.

Five Years Later

“On February 14,1989, the religious leader of one country issued a death edict against a citizen of another country. Five years later Salman Rushdie is still a man with no fixed address. The novel that provoked the death sentence, ‘The Satanic Verses,’ continues to be available in bookstores and libraries through out the United States and many other countries. But Rushdie is in hiding, still writing nearly every day, making public appearances on occasion--but effectively under threat, marked as with an incandescent X on his chest and back.”

Excerpt from a flyer that bookstores across the nation are giving away to comemmorate the anniversary of Rushdie’s hiding. The beautifully printed statement written by Don DeLillo--which will surely make it a collector’s item--is provided by the Rushdie Defense Committee USA, a coalition of organizations that campaigns for the rescinding of the Iranian decree calling for the death of Rushdie and of all those associated with his novel.