Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie has said he plans to pen down his experiences of a decade he spent hiding after a death ‘fatwa’ was issued against him by the Iranian clergy.
The Indian-origin novelist unfolded his plan at Atlanta’s Emory University, where an exhibit of his personal papers opened on Friday.
Mr. Rushdie, 62, was forced into hiding since 1989 after Iran’s late spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini ordered Muslims to kill him for his The Satanic Verses, terming it an insult to Islam. In 1998, the Iranian government said it no longer supported the ‘fatwa,’ but could not rescind it.
“It’s my story and at some point, it does need to get told,” Mr. Rushdie said at a press conference prior to the opening of his exhibits.
“My instinct is that point is getting closer, I think when it was in the cardboard boxes and dead computers, it would have been very difficult, but now it’s all organised,” the author of Midnight’s Children said.
Islamic groups still continue to protest against the author, who was knighted in 2007. But Mr. Rushdie said the ‘fatwa’ was now only more of rhetoric than a threat.
He described his days in hiding as “very nasty.”
“This was a period in my life where people said very nasty things about me and I thought during the time of the attack on that particular novel the best thing I could do is to keep writing.”
Mr. Rushdie, whose other works include The Moor’s Last Sigh and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, said seeing his work catalogued and on display “brings me a step closer to writing about my controversial life.”
Put on display at the Emory are his e-mails and written correspondence from 1970 to 2006. The exhibits include letters exchanged between him and people like U2’s Bono and the then Senator Barack Obama (now the U.S. President).
Creative process
Journals and appointment books describe his creative process and how he developed his characters and non-fiction works. Personal papers include financial, legal and family records.
Mr. Rushdie’s own “doodles” speak about his artistic nature and visitors can also see photographs of Mr. Rushdie from his childhood in Bombay (now Mumbai), to his current hobnobbing with Hollywood. Ex-wives of the four-time married author include Top Chef host and model Padma Lakshmi.
“From the moment I agreed to do this, I knew it was going to be sort of embarrassing,” Mr. Rushdie said during a media tour of the exhibits.
“The biggest issue for me in the whole discussion with Emory had to do with privacy and the boundaries of privacy... it’s not just my privacy at stake, but also [that of] other people,” he said.
