EMDR Therapy Quarterly

This book is an appreciation of how art and the uncanny can influence trauma recovery. Would be readers of Sir Salman Rushdie’s honest and thought provoking account of a knife attack would do well to listen to the audio version. Rushdie’s voice has the ability to convey both anger and vulnerability. Listening to Rushdie’s speaking his own words makes this very personal description of trauma and recovery even more intimate and affecting. Even as I write the word recovery, I am aware of wanting to apologise to Rushdie; he makes it plain that the knife attack stole so much that was precious to him that he is not sure how much he has really recovered.

Rushdie was stabbed 15 times in 27 seconds by a young man enacting the fatwa, or death sentence, imposed upon Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989, for writing his novel The Satanic Verses. Rushdie was stabbed as he addressed an audience on the importance of protecting artists and writers from those who would silence them, often violently, sometimes permanently.

Trauma memory

Rushdie’s detailed descriptions of the stabbing and its aftermath are not gratuitous but deeply human. His feelings of embarrassment when his legs were lifted in the air to get blood to flow back to his heart. His preoccupation with where his keys and credit cards were… “What does it matter?” says a voice. But these are the details that people remember from their trauma. It matters where the keys are because they represent our identity and the feeling of being in control of our lives. He recounts the patchwork impressions of all the different clinicians working on him to save his life. One was experienced just as “a thumb,” trying to staunch the flow of blood from his neck. Then there are all the other experts…. Dr Staples, Dr Breath, Dr Pain, Dr Liver. This is a wonderful, albeit traumatic, depiction of the fragmentation of experience that occurs when a person is traumatised and their body becomes the property of the medical world.

Trauma therapists understand that traumatic memories will be jumbled up and bizarre and that recovery necessitates the ordering and auditing of those memories. For all those lawyers who argue about false memories invalidating a victim’s account, Rushdie’s testimony should be required reading. Yes, he makes a mistake in his memory of how long it took to be put into a helicopter (apparently it was much quicker than he remembered) but the facts of his stabbing are real. His trauma event was real. Our trauma memories may be jumbled, but they do convey the essential truths…such as, “someone tried to kill me.”

Adaptive information processing

Traumatologists tell their patients that trauma shatters our basic assumptions, and we have to build new internal maps to negotiate this new world. Recovery involves the creation of a new, more adaptive narrative. Rushdie describes how, when the attack started, the audience could not let go of their basic assumption that they were at a sophisticated cultural event. Within their frame of reference, they thought they were watching a piece of performance art unfold. It was only as they saw Rushdie’s blood seep out onto the stage floor that they realised this was no performance. This was real. Then, the adaptive thing was to stop being audience members and to act.

Well, I think it feels pretty damn personal to be stabbed 15 times in 27 seconds.

Rushdie writes a remarkable chapter in which he imagines an interview with his attacker. He calls him “A.” He explains that A is for Assassin, Ass, Asshole and so on. Rushdie expresses his anger and refuses to use his attacker’s real name. In the imagined interview, Rushdie gets to interrogate A. He also gets to state his own manifesto, which is his right to express himself. Rushdie declares his right to write. Even if it offends others, even if he is perceived as “disingenuous” by A, that does not give A the right to murder him.

He asks A if he has ever had a girlfriend. “That is a personal question and none of your business,” A replies. “Well, I think it feels pretty damn personal to be stabbed 15 times in 27 seconds. So, I think I have a right to ask you a personal question,” Rushdie replies.

Here we see the therapeutic process of confronting the trauma par excellence. We know our clients are healing when they are able to make a joke about what happened. In this imagined conversation, Rushdie has distanced himself healthily from the action of the traumatic event in an attempt to bring it into the world of the ordinary. As trauma therapists, we encourage our clients to go back into the traumatic event, confront the perpetrator, and say and do what they could not do at the time. Rushdie, in writing this book in which he imagines this conversation, beautifully regains control over his story.

Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), himself a Russian philosopher of language, has interesting things to say about language and power. Bakhtin had to write under a pseudonym during the Terror. This was the period between 1936 and 1938 when Russians were terrorised by Stalinist purges. Thousands were summarily executed or sent to die in the Gulag labour camps. Bakhtin, in writing about how power shapes language, described two types of discourse: authoritative discourse, which restricts variation and only allows one voice to speak, and alternative discourse, which allows many voices and various points of view.

Authoritative discourse is serious and monolithic; alternative discourse is pluralistic and playful, and it has a sense of humour. Rushdie, by writing an account that traces the murder attempt, recovery, therapeutic process, the court case and sentencing followed by Rushdie’s own judgement of A, has created his own alternative discourse. Bakhtin claimed that we must all write our alternative discourse, even if we think it will be banned, burned, ridiculed or demonised, because as long as it is written, there is a chance the alternative story will survive. It gives us hope that authoritarian discourse, which tries to control and shut down freedom of expression, can ultimately be defeated. This is Rushdie’s victory over the fatwa. He is attempting to live a relatively ordinary life again, where he can feel in control of events. His jokes and his art triumph.

The uncanny

Murder not only steals a person from their own life but also from the lives of their friends, family, children and work colleagues. It steals the future from them all. It creates an appalling hollow that feels profoundly wrong and that “should not be.” A different future exists in place of the one that was supposed to be. Rushdie’s writing has been called “magical realism,” and there are often many strange events and synchronicities that occur in his stories. However, he has made it clear that, although he writes about the uncanny, he himself does not believe in God or miracles. Despite this, as he recovers, he starts to realise that his recovery is miraculous (he dedicates his book to those who saved his life) and that there were many life events that foreshadowed his stabbing.

As a result of the attack, he lost the sight in one eye and movement on one side of his body. For Rushdie, blindness is his Room 101, the “most terrifying thing” from Orwell’s novel 1984. He has always been horrified by tortures involving the eyes ever since, as a boy, he saw a version of King Lear in which Gloucester was intentionally blinded. Then, a young man, Rushdie acted in a television play where he had to pretend to be stabbed but was handed a real knife by the props guy instead of a fake where the blade receded. “What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked. “Act,” … came the reply. When acting, the actor is in control of events; there is a script. In trauma, all control is lost. Again, we can see how Rushdie is attempting to process this by fitting this event into his life story.

Two days before the attack at the speaking event, Rushdie had a nightmare in which he was being stabbed with a spear by a gladiator in an amphitheatre. When he awoke, he did not want to go but convinced himself he should, after all the work others had put into the event. The address during which he was stabbed took place in an amphitheatre.

The fact that so many synchronicities (meaningful coincidences) occurred around the event interests me as a trauma therapist. I have noticed that many clients share this perception that uncanny events happen around their trauma. Professor Gordon Turnbull (the psychiatrist who attended the aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing and who has helped many hostages on their release) believes that people can sense traumatic events because they give off a kind of vibration (personal communication). This point of view does not have to be taken on trust. I wonder if Rushdie, the great sceptic and lover of science, is aware that there are seven very interesting and statistically significant experiments about precognition, reported by Bem in his paper Feeling the Future (2011). Apparently, people can be affected by events that have not happened yet. In one experiment, participants guessed the position of emotionally arousing images more accurately than neutral images before they were seen; the participants seemed to know intuitively where the images would be. It is suggested in Bem’s paper that, due to the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, our bodies and psyches are sensitive to the impact of strong emotions to come. We literally feel the future. Rushdie describes his unease lying in his uncomfortable hospital bed as he remembers, time after time, the knives, stabbings and blindings in his life and his nightmares.

Love and hate

Rushdie’s story reminds us that we must never doubt that our messages of love are healing to those who are injured and hurting. Time and again, he describes the comfort he receives from knowing his wife and family are nearby or communicating from a distance. Letters from friends are treasured. Messages of support have a genuine therapeutic effect and lift his spirits. It is well known that the placebo effect is real and affects body chemistry for the good. At the same time, Rushdie discloses how painful it is when he gets blamed for “bringing it upon himself.”

When the fatwa was first declared decades ago, he was accused by many of having caused the problem by writing a book. He quite rightly feels indignant that those who declared the fatwa never actually read his book. For years, he was in hiding, and commentators resented the UK government having to pay for his protection. He was written about as “not a very nice man.” This account shows us clearly the damage that is done to trauma victims when their trauma is not recognised by wider society but minimised. After the stabbing, during his recovery, Rushdie closed his Twitter (now X) account because he did not need to read all the messages wishing him dead. The power of the nocebo is as deadly as the placebo is therapeutic. Victim blaming is the sadistic, sour cherry on an already bitter-tasting cake. Traumatologists are well aware that those clients who are validated, supported and loved find it easier to own their story and recover their new life after trauma. Clients whose trauma was denied, minimised and justified must dissociate from their pain. Their recovery is possible but requires a longer struggle for peace and justice. This account by Rushdie reminds us that trauma victims, whoever they are, need our compassion.

Redemption

This healing path of bearing witness is well known by trauma therapists, and there is even a therapeutic approach called Testimony Therapy (Cienfuegos and Monelli 1983), in which victims of war crimes are encouraged to give testimony. Stories, poetry, plays and even children’s artwork are submitted to the International Criminal Court in The Hague as evidence of war crimes, but they also have a redemptive effect and significantly aid recovery from PTSD.

As a trauma therapist, I want to thank Rushdie for being brave and continuing to write, despite the grotesque threats towards him over the decades and the cruel attack that nearly ended his life. His redemptive act of writing, speaking out and telling his story shows how art and culture help us rise above our traumas and create meaningful new stories to help us live. We all need stories to help us live. As trauma therapists and as human beings, you will not regret reading this story about how somebody is overcoming fear to live a full life.

Jessica Woolliscroft is an EMDR Europe-accredited consultant and facilitator with an independent practice in Cheshire, UK.