Bans & Violence: Bonus - Gaby Wood Interview

MPS02 E08 Bonus: Gaby Wood Interview

Bethanne: Hello, Missing Pages listeners. I'm your host, writer and literary critic Beth Ann Patrick. In this series, we've been looking into the results of censorship in extreme cases. Today, we're focusing on Sir Salman Rushdie as a case study. Does extreme censorship of books lead to violence? We interviewed English journalist, author, literary critic, and chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, Gabby Wood, to learn more.

She wrote an op ed on the Booker Prize website after Sir Salman was violently attacked in August of 2022. Here is our interview and conversation with Gabby Wood.

As you probably already know, we're doing some episodes on the podcast about censorship in literature and violence and so We wanted to discuss Salman Rushdie and his career. And of course, we're very much focused on the recent attack, which is horrible. But we thought, you know, you could talk us through a little bit about what has happened for him as well.

So would you summarize for our audience, the saga around Sir Salman over the last few decades? 

Gaby Wood: Let's go back a bit. Yes. He won the Booker Prize for Midnight's Children in 1981, and that was his second book. He'd written a book called Grimace, and then he was shortlisted after that many times. He was shortlisted for Shame, and then he was shortlisted for the Satanic Verses in 1988, I believe.

In 1989, so just after that, I mean, this came to the attention of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, and earlier than that, to the attention of many groups who felt that Rushdie had insulted the Prophet Muhammad. And so in early 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, which, a fatwa can be anything, but in this case, it was a death sentence.

And so he demanded that, that people, that all of his followers attempt to kill Rushdie. And he immediately went into hiding. As I'm sure you know, he, he didn't live in the same place for three days. He had police protection from the UK, but he spent many, many years in hiding. And, um, years later, he wrote a memoir called Joseph Anton about that.

And, uh, Joseph Anton were the names of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov put together, and that was the, the sort of pseudonym he used, and I guess, sorry, I'm skipping ahead a bit here, but Joseph Anton is a, is a long. important deep memoir, which he wrote, I think, assuming to some extent that the danger had passed, or at least that it was safe to detail what had taken place during those years.

Gaby Wood: So he was under police protection and in hiding for many years, often stayed at the homes of friends who took huge risks in, in protecting him. There was violence against his collaborators. So people who'd worked with him. Certainly, two translators of his were attacked and one died, and one publisher of his was attacked and was left for dead, but in fact survived his injuries, and so everyone was at risk.

Anyone who worked with Rushdie, including his translators and publishers, anyone who worked to bring about this, this work, the Satanic Verses, was under threat. After a while, he began to live, you might say bravely, he went out a lot. He went to many parties for, for years. I remember in the nineties, you know, he would go to parties with his close protection officers and then eventually he didn't and he, he was out and about on his own and in 2019 I saw him a bit sort of now and then, and in 2019 he was shortlisted again for the Booker Prize for his novel, He Shot.

[Which he, he promoted in, in every way that we asked him to do. And he was on his own. He was very complimentary about the other long listies. He was very supportive of other writers. He did public events and he did all of this on his own. And with no sign really that he was living in fear. And in fact, he said a couple of years before that, that his life was really quite normal and that he really appreciated this.

So the more humdrum, the better from his point of view. 

Bethanne: Anecdotally, I was going to say, and I know we're going on to what happened next, but I remember when he was promoting Harun and the Sea of Stories, I interviewed him in D. C. at the Tabard Inn. Such a lovely, lovely person. He is the last person you would ever think would be Given this kind of fatwa, this death sentence, the last person, you know, this is not someone who is by any means an extremist himself.

And so I know you're going on to talk about what happened at Chautauqua. 

Gaby Wood: Yes. Well, he's not an extremist, he is actually very funny. And so part of, if you, if you think about what his works of fiction, and let's stress again that they are fiction, what his works of fiction are doing. He is maximalist in style.

Everything is, things, things are satirical, deeply philosophical, hugely imaginative. And so that is what he's doing in his books. He's saying, what if there were a world in which the following things happened, right? And so, you know, in particular, the satanic verses opens with a very funny account. And so you're, you're gripped from the start because you're following these characters and their, their sort of episodes and adventures.

And, Um, right, right. So up to key shot, which was almost a sort of road trip, um, a kind of road movie in the form of a book. And he relies on his sense of humor as well as his profound intelligence and knowledge and, and his knowledge about religions, philosophies, history, and so on. So he's a, he's a deeply informed person, but also someone who is.

Using humor as a way to draw you in and to question things and not any way an aggressive way, but if you are questioning, I suppose, certain tenets of certain religions, then that can get you into, into trouble. So that's, that's the way it went. And. One of the difficulties, as I understand it, with the fatwa is that it can only be lifted by the person who issued it.

And as it happened, the Ayatollah Khomeini died a few months after issuing this, and so technically the fatwa remained. And even though different things were said, there was a, uh, an attempt to not exactly lift it, but Say that it wouldn't necessarily be enforced. You, you never know when followers might suddenly take it upon themselves to put this into effect.

So yes, fast forward, as you said, many years to Chautauqua when he was giving a talk. And it feels like a long time ago now, just because it was so profound, this attack, somebody rushed at him on stage and with a knife and, and attacked him violently. He lost an eye, he lost the use of one arm and he was in hospital for many, many months. So he has returned. He's published another novel. He's written a book about his experience, which is not out yet. And he's accepted various awards for bravery and literature. And he's got married, you know, he is in life in a way that he always has been. And that is incredibly impressive.

But I suppose what happened on that occasion was not just that Rushdie was attacked, but that. All of literature was attacked and this sense that you couldn't speak your mind or that you couldn't actually invent anything, that you couldn't write, that was really a severe threat to the whole writing community.

And which is not to say that the physical attack on Rushdie was diminished or that anyone else could share it exactly, but that the effects reverberated really quite far, I think, and significantly. 

Bethanne: I remember and, uh, you know, I think that response, um, Gabby, is very, very important. But I also remember being at my, you know, laptop working away and getting, because I was still active on Twitter at the time, a message from a friend whose mother was at Chautauqua in the past.

And she said, She said, Yes, and he said, my mother, uh, my, my elderly mother has just told me that Salman Rushdie has been attacked on stage. And do you remember that moment personally? 

Gaby Wood: Absolutely. Well, I don't remember it as personally as that. I have no connection to anyone who was in the audience. I was with friends in New York, and it was the summer holidays, and I mean, I'm embarrassed to remember this.

I suppose when the news came through, I And maybe we didn't know, there was no way of knowing. I just had no idea how serious it was. And so, I immediately sent him an email saying, I just heard about the attack, I hope you're okay. Which, in retrospect, is the most idiotic email anyone can send. But You know, I just thought, well, it's obviously severe enough that you want to reach out, but I had no comprehension whatsoever of the severity of it.

And then as the day unfolded, I thought, my God, this is, this is just of a different order. I really had no idea. 

Bethanne: It really is of a different order. And in your Op ed on the Booker Prize website. One of the sentences you wrote was, the threat under which Russia has lived is not only one of physical violence against human beings, but of violence against acts of imagination.

And you spoke to that a couple of minutes ago. But let's, you know, pull that thread a little bit more because I truly sometimes wonder people now. Understand what happens when we don't allow imagination full, you know, a full expansion. 

Gaby Wood: Right. Yeah, that's very interesting. I think this is a little delicate because I'm not familiar enough with the beliefs that would lead someone to want to retaliate against that. And so I think we have to respect the fact that somewhere in the world, some, something led someone to believe that this was deeply insulting. And, you know, whatever we think of that, that I, I just want to sort of preface this by saying, I don't understand it well enough.

So there's that, but. I think if you, if you broaden that out to include a community of writers, think about what writers are doing, writers of fiction in particular are doing every day, you know, they're making stuff up. And some writers are making stuff up in order to understand something that is not made up better.

So that's where it takes you, right? How can I show you an imagined world in order for you to think differently about the world in which you already live? That's, that's one way of parsing it, right? Of, of sort of imagining what, what writers are up to, and I know, for example, Katsuro Shiguro, who won the Booker Prize and then the Nobel Prize, and, uh, is the author of, among other books, The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go.

I remember him talking about Trying to work with emotions so with his early books that were set in Japan, people would think, Oh, they're books about Japan and he said, No, no, they're not really about Japan. And he was sort of frustrated that people would give them as guidebooks, almost, to, tour Japan.

Oh, you're going to Japan? Here, I've got a book for you. He, he'd have this. And so, gradually, he started to try and move away from worlds that were too direct. So, again, remains of the day. They'd say, oh, this is how butlers worked. during and after the war and think, no, no, that's, it's not, it's not really supposed to be a work of realism.

And so gradually he detached himself from realism. So that for example, he was writing about clones, or he was writing about robots, or he was writing about medieval giants, or, you know, so he, in each case, he's trying to imagine a world that is so far from a real one, that you understand it, either emotionally or metaphorically.

You understand that what he's trying to show you is, what might it be like to feel this way? If I put it this way, would you, would you share this feeling? Would you understand? And this is the sort of offering, I think, that some writers are, are giving readers. And I would include Rushdie in that, you know, he's saying, if I tell you this joke, will you see how funny the world is?

Or if I present this alternate universe, Will you see the world the different way? Or will you understand a country that, for some people, may be on the other side of the world? And will you understand its history and the lives of the people who were born at the same moment as the country if I tell this story that is completely made up, but of course is rooted in geopolitics?

So I feel that these writers who are imagining things are actually offering readers something real. It's not just making stuff up. It is a way of Interpreting the world and so to shut that down makes us less able to see not only imagine worlds, but the real worlds and the less able we are to see our own world and other people's worlds, the more dangerous it becomes because.

You know, you have to be able to put yourself in someone else's position, and that, I think, is something that fiction does. In fact, fiction almost trains you to do. So, I suppose that's what I mean about the attack. The attack is on the idea that we might be free to communicate with each other.

Bethanne: I think as well. Something else that you wrote, is sort of the next step, and this is very difficult, too, because, like you, I agree that we want to remain open to someone taking their scripture very seriously.

We don't want to diminish that, but at the same time, you wrote, the freedom not only to say what one believes, but to construct a world beyond the real one, must be defended at almost any cost. And you, Gabby Wood and the Booker Prize are not constructing a battle plan, but I do think that the attack on Rushdie at Chautauqua shows that there are lengths to which we all might have to go.

And for us on the side of the imagination and literature, that doesn't mean attacking back with knives, but it might mean things we also don't like. Like. Having more security guards at literary events, not having the same kinds of open air, open tent festivals that we once, you know, took for granted. 

Gaby Wood: Yes, absolutely.

That's very difficult, but I would like to think that there is a way to combine those things. to make things safe and make them democratic. Maybe that seems naive. It's interesting, isn't it? I, I, I'm not in a position to say whether anything should have been done differently at Chautauqua. I, I think that, of course, we like to imagine that these sorts of environments are safe.

And I think now we probably have a responsibility to make them, to make sure that they are safe as opposed to assuming that they, they will be. But you're absolutely right. It does, it changes the game altogether. Because these are public events. I love 

Bethanne: something that Salman said to you, which is either you write your books or don't write your books, but don't write them being scared.

Now is Sir Salman scared today or is he more determined than ever to write without being scared? 

Gaby Wood: Yeah, that's a very good question, and I can't answer it for him because I don't know, but I would imagine from his actions that whether he's scared or not, he's continuing in the face of it. He did say that before, you know, he said that before the attack, and some part of him must have known that this threat was hanging over him anyway, so he was always going to sort of proceed with what he meant to do and what he meant to say.

And I don't know. I think the fact that he's described it, the fact that he's written now two more books, suggests that he's got more to say and that he wants to continue. And just the very fact of doing it is an indication that he's not acting in fear, whether or not he is actually afraid for himself underneath.

Bethanne: You know, we're doing other episodes about censorship. Libraries push back against books. You know, we're having I'm sure you've read about all of this and this situation is different because we are talking about religious beliefs and not about children's reading. Can we all learn something about censorship in paying attention to something like this, to, as you said, the changing of what we share. 

Gaby Wood: As you say, it is very different. It's a death threat. It's a shutting down. It's not a banning of a book. It's actually almost a banning of a person from the world. So that's very different. But I think the idea that books are dangerous, is an interesting one, isn't it?

And that is shared, I think, by the, the censors and the inflictors of, of the fatwa in the sense of what can this do to people? And when you censor something, well, you know, this is obvious, you actually make it more dangerous in a way, not dangerous, you make the situation more volatile. But what can we learn to a question?

I, I think that one thing that we learned from this. story of, of Saman Rushdie is that very few people actually read that book and that they were warring over something whose contents they had really no knowledge of or very little knowledge of. And so everybody is battling over an interpretation of something rather than an experience of something.

And actually in that case, it's the idea of a book or the idea of something that's in a book that is threatening. And I think that's also true of censorship. You know, once you know that a book is banned, you think, oh, that's that dangerous book or that's that book that's been banned, but you, you know, what you really need to do is engage with the book.

And given that every book means something different to every reader, how can you possibly assume, you know, the only, the only place in which people could possibly be united is if they hadn't read the book, you know, and they thought they all knew what, what it was, what it stood for, how dangerous it was, how threatening, et cetera.

But if you really read the book. You would understand that you, you brought yourself to it to some degree, and at that point, it's possible, when I say the only way to be united is, the only way to be sort of unquestioningly united is to not know. The way to really come together and to have a conversation is to experience something yourself and to talk to someone else about it, which is what reading a book is.

As soon as you ban it, that conversation is impossible. That's the message of all censorship. Don't use your own mind to decide what you think. Listen to us. I was remembering, actually, Judy Blume, who I spoke to years ago about censoring books or even just not letting kids read certain books, because she used to get asked that all the time.

Or, what age shall I wait for my child to be until they read forever? Or, you know, is it okay for my child to read Are You There, God, It's Me, Margaret when they're seven? Or something. She said she never, ever recommended that books were withheld from children because children would bring to them whatever they understood and whatever they were ready for at that point in their lives.

And if they read that very same book again, years later, they would have a completely different experience of the book. And, you know, we know this as adults too, that, you know, you read a book at a certain point in your life and you associate it with certain things. And I mean, I remember reading The Cherry Orchard.

And seeing the cherry orchard, I mean, it's a play, but I did read it and thinking it was about a family home and the trauma over not leaving the family home or having to leave the family home, having to sell it. And I sort of got that much. And then years later, after I'd had children, I realized there was a dead child in the cherry orchard and I had absolutely no memory of that.

It just hadn't hit me at all. And so I think that's true for readers of any age. Readers will take what they want from things or take what they understand from a book, and I don't think any personal understanding can be dangerous. Even if it's a misunderstanding, it could be taken to be an invitation to discuss or to ask questions.

So I think this idea that you already know what's good or bad, or you already know what's dangerous, or you, the censor, don't want anyone to be able to make up their own minds, that's, that's what's tricky, isn't it? 

Bethanne: We want to thank Gabby Wood for joining us on missing pages. Her op-Ed can be found at thebookerprizes.com.

Gaby Wood: You mentioned Prophet Song and because I didn't know whether you'd had a chance to read it yet, but that's a very good example of a book that is showing you something, right? It's not a real world, in inverted commas, but it's a world that helps you think about other worlds, or even think about the world that you're in, and that's its design, isn't it? What if this happened to me, or what if this happened to someone I know, or this family at the heart of that book is in a recognizable situation? Even if it doesn't seem quite real to the reader, 

Bethanne: Missing pages is a podglomerate original produced, mixed and mastered by Chris Aniello with additional production in editing by Jordan. Aaron. Produced and hosted by me, Beth Ann Patrick. This episode was produced by Claire McInerney. Marketing by Joni Deutch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Vanessa Ullman, and Annabella Pena.

Art by Tom Grillo. Original music composed and performed by Hashim Asadullahi. Additional music provided by Epidemic Sound. Executive produced by Jeff Umbro and The Podglomerate. Special thanks to Dan Cristo, Matt Keeley, Gabby Wood, Jess Gulliver, and Ruby Short. The views and opinions of guests are their own and do not represent the views of the Missing Pages team or the Podglomerate.

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