Writer Salman Rushdie warned this Sunday that freedom of expression is in danger and called for its unconditional defense by receiving a German prize in recognition of his literary work and determination in the face of constant danger.
The British-Indian author described the current era as one when freedom of expression is under attack from all sides by authoritarian and populist voices.
Rushdie made his comments at a ceremony at St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt, where he was honored with the German Book Trade Peace Prize for continuing to write despite decades of threats and violence.
The German prize, worth 25,000 euros, has been awarded since 1950.
The jury said earlier this year that it would honor Rushdie “for his determination, his positive attitude to life and for enriching the world with his joy of storytelling”.
After receiving the award, the writer today called for the defense of freedom of expression and the preservation of peace, a value that, given the current conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, seems more like a “fantasy”.
“Peace seems to me at this moment a fantasy created by the smoke of an opium pipe,” said the author, who recalled in his speech that while those present today “gathered to talk about peace” in the Church of St. Paul in Frankfurt “not far away there is a war going on [Ucrânia] attributable “to the tyranny of a single man and his thirst for power and conquest”.
The fighters cannot even agree on the meaning of the word peace, he noted.
“For Ukraine, peace is more than the end of hostilities. Peace must also mean the restitution of all occupied territories and the guarantee of its sovereignty,” while for Russia it means “the surrender of Ukraine and the recognition that their lost territories will continue to exist.” lost,” he declared.
It is “the same word and two incompatible meanings,” he added, lamenting that in the Middle East “peace for Israel and the Palestinians seems even further away.”
‘Peace is difficult to create and difficult to find and yet we long for it, not only the great peace at the end of a war, but also the small peace in our private lives, a life at peace with ourselves and our small worlds. ” he noted.
Regarding the prize received today, Rushdie said he liked the idea of thinking that “peace itself is the prize”, awarded by a jury of “wise benefactors” with “magical” and “fantastic” powers for a period of a year.
“It would be a reward that I would receive with the greatest joy. I am even thinking of writing a story about it: ‘The Man Who Received Peace as a Reward,’” he declared.
Rushdie also called for the defense of freedom, and especially freedom of expression, “without which the world of books would not exist,” at a time when it is under attack from all sides by “reactionaries, authoritarians, populists, demagogues “, both left and right.
In August 2022, the writer was stabbed repeatedly while on stage at a literary festival in New York State, in the United States, and will next year publish a memoir about the attack that left him blind in his right eye and with the affected left eye. hand.
“Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” will be released April 16, in a work the author defined as a way to “respond to violence with art.”
“This was a book I had to write, it was a way to take control of what was happening and respond to violence with art,” said Salman Rushdie, quoted in the publisher’s statement, released this month in New York released.
The attack took place more than 30 years after Rushdie was the target of a ‘fatwa’ (death sentence) issued by former Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, following the publication of his fourth novel, ‘The Satanic Verses’. fiction inspired by the life of the Prophet Mohammed, which won him the Whitbread Prize and a place among the finalists for that year’s Booker Prize.
Rushdie lived under protection and in hiding for the next decade, an experience he also recorded in his 2012 memoir, “Joseph Anton.”
Source: DN
