Dhe solidarity reading for Salman Rushdie on the steps of the New York Public Library began almost exactly a week after the assassination of the writer, this Friday at 10 a.m. local time, which is 5 p.m. here. PEN America, formerly headed by Rushdie, had invited the library to do so by providing its most famous view: the staircase between the two stone lions, and it must be remembered that Rushdie is so attached to this institution that he was asked by her in 2009 was named Library Lyon for his services to reading and freedom of expression. The Indian-British writer has been living in the city for a number of years. This time he could only watch from his hospital room in Philadelphia.
“Stand with Salman” was the slogan, and at the end of the seventy-five minutes, the camera angle of the live stream changed for the only time from a static close-up of the lectern on the stairs (only occasionally a few of the world-famous pigeons flew through the picture) to a long shot, so that you could see the many hundreds of spectators, and on the steps the participants were grouped with individual letters in their hands, which formed a huge “Stand with Salman”.
The program was tight because of the shortness of the intended duration (one hour was targeted): After Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, ie Rushdie’s successor, who allowed herself a lion’s share of the total time as a welcome, and a library representative, who pleasantly kept it shorter , a total of sixteen speakers followed, most of them writers, including such prominent figures as Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster, Colum McCann and Gay Talese – the latter, at ninety, still the most elegant of them all. But Tina Brown, the former editor-in-chief of the New Yorker, also agreed at short notice, and Roya Hakakian, an Iranian colleague of Rushdie’s, spoke for those compatriots and Muslims who see no devil in the author of the “Satanic Verses”. .
Everyone had chosen a different work by Rushdie
Most of the sixteen performed excerpts from Rushdie’s works: from “Midnight Children”, the first hit (released in 1981), to the as yet unpublished “Victory City”, which is only announced for February 2023. But Rushdie’s speeches and essays were also read – and meticulous care was taken not to mention the same work twice. Likewise, “The Satanic Verses” was heard only once, with the beginning of the novel’s fall from heaven, read by the British writer Hari Kunzru, himself the son of an Indian. Auster read from the 2012 fictionalized autobiography Joseph Anton, and Brown presented an excerpt of a 1996 Rushdie speech on the importance of the press.
It is debatable whether it was logical for poet Reginald Dwayne Betts to be the first guest on the stairs to compare the effects of beloved literature to radioactive fallout. All the more impressive was McCann, who told of how, after reading “Midnight Children”, he had wandered through London at the age of twenty and had found the address of the admired Salman Rushdie in the nearest telephone book. Although the writer was not at home then, McCann met his wife, who opened the door to him without a care. “That was the world,” McCann said now on the steps of the Public Library, “when the greatest risk a writer faced was that an avid reader would suddenly show up at the door. It’s called civilization.” Just a few years later, in 1989, the fatwa was issued against Rushdie, and to date, that civilization has not returned.
