In 1989, I was working at the B. Dalton bookstore in the Americana Manhasset shopping center on Long Island, NY, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini made a decision against Salman Rushdie. I am 17 years old. The job that was once a sassy teenager’s dream has become something else: a political awakening.
Like most children of the time, I had long known about the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the hostage crisis that followed, even though I was too young to read the news at the time. A crude description of what to do for the ayatollah was spray-painted thickly and in black lettering on the wall just outside the elementary school I attended. Looking at it every day, I have a frighteningly childish feeling of “Someone could be in trouble.”
It was only when the fatwa was released that I realized: This is the kind of trouble worth dealing with. Our store manager told us that B. Dalton had decided to continue selling “Verses of Satan,” the novel that fueled the ayatollah’s lucrative. Some of my colleagues might not want anything to do with it. After all, some bookstores in the United States have fire. But like most of my colleagues, I immediately went from fear to determination, signing up for as many shifts as possible.
Stores have taken precautions. Every day we came to work, a manager updated us with the latest protocols. At one point, all copies of the novel were removed from shelves and displayed and kept in a back room. Then we hid the copies under a counter in the back.
“If someone asks if we have stock, think twice before you answer,” we said. “Answer on a case-by-case basis.”
Twenty-five years later, while working at The Times as editor of Book Magazine, I was drinking with Salman Rushdie’s agent, Andrew Wylie, on the day Gabriel García Márquez died. Wylie asked Rushdie to write a García Márquez review for the Book Review. There is no better answer than yes. Rushdie’s essay, which he filed the next day, without correction. When it ran on our cover, the feedback was gratifying, overwhelmingly positive.
In that essay, Rushdie wrote about how, despite different countries of origin and languages (for him, India and English; for García Márquez, Colombia and Spain), he saw own life in the work of colleagues: “I know García Márquez’s colonels and generals, or at least their Indian and Pakistani counterparts; his bishops are my mullah; His market street is my market. He also wrote, “in both places religion is of great importance and God is living, and unfortunately, godly.”
I never succeeded in getting Rushdie to write the Book Review again, no matter how many times I asked him, even though he did. an exception to a colleague in 2019. If not, he always begs graciously; he is working on another novel or traveling. But publishing Rushdie is still a high point in nine years of editing my Book Review. How lucky we were.
What else is there to say about the horrific attack on Rushdie last week at the Chautauqua Institute in New York, a place with little security because it always feels so safe? About the fact that after all these years, the act of writing a novel is punished with violence?
I remember my time in B. Dalton, when in the aftermath of the fatwa, customers came in large numbers. Some people put copies of “Clear and Present Danger,” “The Dark Half,” and Nelson DeMille’s latest book on the counter before saying, “I don’t know if that’s my type, but I want to. buy a copy of ‘Verses of Satan.’ “Others went straight to the cashier and asked if we had what we thought was the Book. “We need to support him,” they would say. Those customers have become a other kind of inspiration.
Because it’s not only important that the authors keep writing books that can challenge and may offend some people’s sensitivity or sanity. It is important not only that publishers continue to side with those authors, to protect, promote and be proud of them, and that interpreters continues to deliver those words to a global audience. It is important not only that bookstores continue to sell those books, even if their employees disagree or disapprove of them, or even if they fear that some in their community will object. they.
It is also important that readers continue to read the works to maintain those authors. Ultimately, it is readers’ willingness to tackle challenging books that allow a culture to remain open and flourish.
After all, it was Rushdie’s readers who could literally have saved him last week. “We are grateful to all the spectators who bravely rushed to protect him and provide first aid, along with the police and doctors who took care of him and for the love and support from all over the world. in the world,” said Rushdie’s son Zafar in a statement after the attack. Readers will keep reading his novels many years from now who will always keep the words of Salman Rushdie alive.
