In 1989, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the death of writer Salman Rushdie. For nine years, Rushdie lived under police protection, and fought a personal war against the thought police. Today, Rushdie continues to write award-winning novels, story collections, children’s books and academic works. Rushdie joined Jim Braude and Margery Eagan on Boston Public Radio to discuss his latest tale of magical realism, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, which Rushdie says could be his funniest novel to date.
You’ve gotten wonderful reviews on this book… tell us the story
It’s a kind of ‘war of the worlds’ story, it suggests that there’s this other world, other than ours, where there live these fantastical creatures who we’ve come to know as genies, but their real name is the Jinn. They attack, they invade this world, and at least one of them has world domination schemes. The main female character of the novel is also a Jinn, a Jinn princess, who loves human beings, and loves one of them in particular, and actually comes to the defense of them. There was a moment, halfway through, where I thought, ‘oh my goodness, I think I may be re-writing I Dream of Genie.’
This is such an imaginative work. How do you think these things up?
I’m sorry to tell you, this is the nonsense in my head. This is what comes naturally to me. There are some people for whom social realism is what comes naturally, for me, this crazy stuff is what seems to show up when I sit down to work.
The character who opens the book is a philosopher from 800-900 years ago, who you’re named after?
This is a famous 12th century Arab philosopher from Córdoba Spain, called Ibn Rushdi, who is better known in the West as Averroës, a great Aristotelian philosopher. My father admired his thinking so much that he changed the family name to Rushdie, as a follower of Rushdie. My grandfather wasn’t called Rushdie, that’s my father’s invention. It’s because, in his time, [Rushdi] was a very progressive voice. He was somebody arguing for the values of reason and logic and tolerance and science, and against blind faith. Rather strangely, given what happened to me, he was also persecuted in his time, he had his books burned, and he was sent into exile. So for obvious reasons, he seemed kind of attractive to me. He starts the book off, and actually he’s the person with whom the Jinn princess falls in love.
Many people know you not just for your novels, but also for the fatwa that was issued against you many years ago, and was reissued just last year.
There are occasional rhetorical noises, but really this thing has not been a factor in my life for many years now. I’ve lived in New York for almost 16 years, and it’s been perfectly normal, really. What happened to me 26 years ago—that attack— is now a much more general attack. Now, the threat from fanatical religion is not just something aimed at one novelist and his book. In a way, that’s where the vision of this war of the worlds comes from, it’s about a war, not just between genies and men, but between the forces of reason and unreason, between the rational and the irrational. That’s something we’re living through.
And between reason and faith as well, right?
Many of the genies are not at all religious, but one of them gets (I’m afraid) infected with fanatical religion, and sees it as being useful. It’s more cynical use of religion than actual faith.
‘Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights’ happens to come out to 1001. Is that correct?
That’s the clue that tells you what kind of a book it is. Sixteen years ago, I arrived in New York with all these stories in my baggage. I thought, ‘well, maybe I’ll unpack those stories and throw them at Manhattan and see what happens.’ It’s an Arabian Nights story, but it takes place in contemporary New York.
Can you tell the story of One Thousand and One Nights?
It’s the beautiful frame story of the Arabian Nights, Scheherazade is this woman who marries a really dreadful king. To get his revenge on the female race (because long ago his wife was unfaithful to him) he’s been marrying and deflowering and then executing a virgin every night of his life for several years. [Scheherazade] volunteers to marry him, because she thinks she knows how to solve the problem. She begins to tell him stories, but she never finishes the story at the end of the night. There’s always a cliffhanger finish. He can’t bear to have her executed; he has to wait for the rest of the story. She always finishes the story in the middle of the night, and starts another one. That goes on for one thousand and one nights, and not only does she save her own life, she does something kind of remarkable: she civilizes him. At the end of the story, he’s no longer a mass-murderer, and he’s become a better man. This is a fable about the power of stories to civilize even barbaric tyrants.
There’s a character—a gardener—who suspends himself an inch or two off the ground. Why not fly?
To be half an inch off the ground is as great of a destruction of the law of gravity as being 25 feet up, but it’s funnier. It’s also kind of sadder. He’s a gardener, he’s in his sixties, he has spent most of his life loving and nurturing the earth and the things that grow in it, and for such a man to suddenly discover that he had somehow become detached from the earth, it’s a hard fate. It creates all kinds of logistical problems… how do you drive a car if you’re half an inch off the seat? How do you go to the bathroom?
There was a divide when French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo got the prestigious PEN award after religious fanatics murdered staff members. Some people thought they ridiculed Islam and took it too far, but you sided with Charlie Hebdo, saying they deserved the award. Now there’s another controversy involving Charlie Hebdo satirizing the three-year-old child who drowned trying to escape Syria. Where are you on that one?
It’s just another misrepresentation. Anyone who actually looks at the magazine and looks at the comic can see that the people who were being attacked are the people who were being close-minded and against the taking of immigrants, it’s not an attack on the poor little dead kid. This is just how things are manipulated now, people just straight-forwardly lie about the meaning of images, and that lie gets replicated all over the world, and becomes what Stephen Colbert wonderfully called “truthiness.” This is an example of truthiness. People believe what they read.
Salman Rushdie will be at the Harvard Bookstore on Monday, September 21, at 7:00pm.
To hear the full interview, click on the audio link above.
