A screen can attract many people if the person appearing is Salman Rushdie (Bombay, 1947). From the library of his home, the author of The Satanic Verses was one of the authors in charge of inaugurating yesterday the twelfth edition of the Kosmopolis festival, which will be held until next Sunday in the different spaces of the Center de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) .
“How is your shitty year going?” fellow writer Lisa Appignanesi (Lód?, 1946) broke the ice in reference to the attack she suffered during a conference she was giving in the United States and in which she lost her right eye. “I have fully recovered,” she said. The audience then broke the deathly silence that had reigned until that moment to applaud and let out a few whistles.
“It’s not every day that you get to hear him speak live, even if it’s electronically,” student Arnau González enthusiastically expressed to La Vanguardia, who found a free spot in the front row. A stroke of luck considering how quickly the hall filled up. Throughout the presentation, at least two people approached the screen surreptitiously, probably with the intention of feeling it close. They would not have been able to do it if the writer had attended in person, since no one can come closer than four meters for security reasons.
From everything bad, Rushdie has always known how to get something positive: productivity. He did it after Iran’s late leader, Ayatollah Ruholah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for his death by publishing a memoir under the pseudonym Joseph Anton, and he’s doing it again now with Cuchillo, due out in April and which narrates the tragic experience he lived in August of last year.
“I hope to be able to return to fiction soon. I never thought I would write autobiographies because they didn’t interest me in the least, but life circumstances deserved it. This will be about 200 pages and is written in the first person. When they stick a knife in your neck you acquire that right,” he said just before acknowledging his concern about the new novel by Gabriel García Márquez that will soon see the light of day. “He didn’t want this to be published. He wrote it while suffering from dementia and I’m worried about it hitting bookstores. I say right away that at the University of Austin I have some somewhat overwhelming manuscripts that I do not want to be disseminated.”
Tsitsi Dangarembga (Mutoko, 1959) was the other protagonist of the afternoon. The writer and filmmaker, recognized for being a reference for feminism in Africa and, like Rushdie, a defender of freedom of expression, received the Veu Lliure 2023 award from PEN Català. In her speech, and during a conversation with journalist David Guzmán, Dangarembga stressed the importance of literature to make visible the inequalities and oppressions “that still affect us today.”
The most praised question came from a girl. “Why you writing?”. The author from Zimbabwe answered firmly: “Because when she was reading she couldn’t find anyone like me and I understood that we had to take a step forward.”
