Salman Rushdie and The Knife
Stories that Heal
During the trial, the author was charming and witty. He laughs with the defence attorney that a romcom was his highest life’s achievement, rather than the Booker Prize.
Laughter relaxes the body. It creates a longer exhale and vibrates the vagus nerve. As a physician and trauma therapist, it’s remarkable to witness someone intuitively doing what the body reflexively has capacity to do: self-heal.
Salman Rushdie is healing his trauma through his body.
This was the first time he’s been in a room with his attacker since the incident, ironically while he was on stage to discuss author safety in 2022. A young Lebanese-American rushed the stage and stabbed him 15 times, leaving him close to death. The trauma remains lodged in Rushdie’s body through disability, a completely blind right eye and hampered function in his left hand.
Not to mention the psychological consequences: nervousness and fear, the need for enhance security in public, and vicarious sadness lodged in his heartbroken wife Eliza.
Even before this trial, Rushdie began to heal. It wasn’t just the weeks that stretched to months in the rehab facilities. It was through writing of the book Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024).
Trauma Lodges in the Body
In Rushdie’s most remarkable work, Midnight’s Children, there is a quote, “What can’t be cured must be endured.” But what most people don’t understand is that even when a situation cannot be cured, healing is possible. Practicing trauma therapy at a refugee clinic, where people have survived the greatest atrocities, I learn this lesson through my patients.
Trauma exists in the nervous system long after an experience has passed. The amygdala in our brain tends to get more sensitive––scanning both the internal and external environments, looking for danger. Our sympathetic nervous system is heightened, keeping us in the restless states of fight and flight. It may manifest as PTSD: hypervigilance, intrusive symptoms, avoidance of triggers, and a shift in our foundational views.
Rushdie describes all of this in Knife. From vivid nightmares to hesitation of public appearances. Grieving the loss of binocular vision alongside the loss of a sense of safety in the world.
He says, “We would not be who we are today without the calamities of our yesterdays.” Likewise, we would not experience the painful stretching of post-traumatic growth without having gone through these significant challenges. A caterpillar, whose skin dissolves as it undergoes metamorphosis into a butterfly.
Of course, Rushdie was most aware of the fear––watching his assailant running up to him and “punching” him with the knife. The sense of dread, as he believed in that moment he would die. Later, the medical traumas of humiliation and indignity, as his clothes are cut off at the busy scene, then facing catheterization in a hospital setting. All these emotions and physical sensations stay not just as memories in the mind, but as memories in the body.
What can take a number of months to fully realize, and most people never do, is just how much their belief system is affected. While we all have some understanding that humans commit violence toward one another; once you have been a deliberate target, it can be hard to believe that security is ever possible. I see this in my work at our refugee clinic, but also with people suriving childhood trauma in my addiction medicine practice. Trauma changes our world view.
Trauma Processing
When we heal from trauma, there are three main steps, as outlined in Judith Herman‘s seminal book in the 1980s, Trauma and Recovery.
The first is establishing safety in the nervous system. The overactive fight and flight reflex is driven by the sympathetic side. The underactive, freeze and collapse system is an overwhelm with the parasympathetic. Spending more time with a balance between states is something that must be relearned. Reconnecting to familiarity, to those we love, to art and beauty, to nature and stillness are possible pathways.
In the second step, we must access the traumatic memory and then change the associations to those that are tolerable, if not pleasurable. Rushdie visited the location of his assault with his wife, remembering what he could of the event. He recalled the vigils held across numerous cities around the world, recognizing with clarity that this was “better than any medicine.” This is what we call exposure, which can actually strengthen traumatic associations if not done in a calm body. When we re-expose, the first step of creating a more relaxed state first, is essential.
Processing trauma can occur through narratives. In the text of Knife, Rushdie used his imagination to conjure a discourse with the attacker, whom he calls A. Not only did he “imagine a way into [A’]s head”––he wouldn’t let him out until Rushdie decided it was over. That he had said everything he needed to say. That he set the record straight.
The scene was funny and insightful. Rushdie twisted A’s brain into knots, redirecting the blame over and over. The hilarity of presuming this young probable incel had been radicalized by “Imam Yutubi,” after visiting his father overseas and regaling his mother for failing his spiritual teachings. He emerged, at least on the page, satisfied.
Post-Traumatic Growth
Most of the best forms of trauma processing do something similar. In Accelerated Resolution Therapy, you would watch a movie in your mind, gain some distance from the pain, and then re-create a scene that would be preferable, dialing down the intensity of all the associated emotions and sensations to traumatic content.
This is what Salman Rushdie did with his imaginary conversation in a jail cell.
That week in February, he faced A for real.
The third step in healing is reconnecting, to create a new understanding of your place in the world and forge a path towards your values and goals.
Judith Herman released a follow-up book in 2023, entitled Truth and Repair, in which she envisages justice as being the final stage to healing.
Rushdie had already established his victory, through the power of story.
You can also watch the video about this here or on my TikTok:
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