Outraged
Salman Rushdie was stabbed. Last week. In the sad way of news cycles, the stabbing pain of outrage may have subsided in my breast, but rages still against the integrity of his body, his skin, sinew and bone. Still being knitted back together, patched up, repaired. An eye lost, perhaps, probably, most likely. Life-altering injuries is what the newspapers say. Also soul-crushing. The bruising, fading to purple then yellow, without the pay-off of a face-lift.
I will not pretend that any amount of shock, distress, or heartache I may feel can undo, soothe, or alleviate the injury done. But I can wonder what I might say, if I knew him. I might call him Sal, if we were friends and he had a nickname. Or maybe Rush. I might say I am so, so sorry. I might ask what can I do to help? I might wait outside his hospital room, pace the corridor, bring a coffee to a family member, or offer to make a run to the cafeteria for others who might claim more intimacy. I might be among those who, like Sal himself, have been thrown into the world of before and after when reality shifts and nothing is ever the same again.
Never the same. A life, at 75, already hints at impermanence, is under the shadow of mortality, that sense of maybe not being around forever. His life is now shattered, diminished, reduced by life-altering injuries. And not just the physical wounds. Rewind to the idea of being stabbed, and before that, the idea that someone wanted him dead, that someone hated enough to plan to kill him. Arrived armed with a knife, skirted security and, on the strength of ugly conviction, jumped to the stage and attacked.
I am outraged. I have a sense of outrage. I feel outraged. Maybe being outraged is real and feeling outraged is merely performative. Maybe gerunds matter. Recently I heard a poet say he stopped reading the poems he wrote after his wife’s death because his grief began to feel performative, not quite his to share anymore; instead he read her poems aloud. After the Rodney King riots, some white liberals I knew started to attend First AME Church. Performative prayer. Years ago, I bought The Satanic Verses and never cracked its spine. Performative activism. Performative reading.
Outrage is transitory. Outrage is a media-created and nourished sideshow, the hollow monster of our age. Grief is real. Experienced in the gut, at the cellular level, it takes up residence in the soul, doesn’t dissipate when the news cycle moves on. It takes its own sweet time and never really leaves.
It’s all I can do. I can grieve for you, Salman Rushdie. I can grieve your physical pain, the psychic trauma, the long recovery. The loss of an eye without the vindication of its biblical imperative. I can grieve your altered life and its melancholy, perhaps bitter, trajectory forward.
