Dear readers,
Happy 4th of July to all who celebrate!
Today brings you a reflection on two prize-worthy non-fiction books I read in response to The Booktender’s June reading challenge: Andrew Leland’s Pulitzer-prize nominated The Country of the Blind: A Memoir of the End of Sight and Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. Each complicates a core value of the United States: the guarantee of civil rights and the right to free speech.
No matter what country you’re reading from or what day it is, these books also make an interesting paring because each tracks a literary man’s transition from fully sighted to something more ambiguous-- “not quite blind and not quite sighted.” And at the same time they’re about society in transition. Each connects to the ways organized communities of people with common interests grapple with larger divides in media, politics, and culture around the globe.
As I explained in yesterday’s post, this is the first one I’m sending to all with paid content. For some fireworks that won’t tap into your dog’s neuroses, please upgrade your subscription!
Leland wrote The Country of the Blind: A Memoir of the End of Sight over several years, as the retinitis pigmentosa he lived with since he was a teenager progressed to legal blindness. He approaches becoming blind as an expansive experience, with curiousity about culture, innovation and technology. In doing so, he learns new ways to live, work, and be loved by his wife and child. He draws upon his personal experiences to make larger reportorial and critical commentary related to media and advocacy.
The book’s structure maps the unique demands blindness makes on individuals living in a society not designed with those specific needs in mind. If you’re a reader who has also experimented to discover what books you like to read on audio (non-fiction, especially memoir read by the author; thrillers) vs. what texts you feel a need to hold in your hand (literary fiction), what you need in an audiobook narrator (artistry and no mouth noises!), you’ll probably enjoy the chapter “The Library of Babel.” The discussion of how the voice in our own head influences our experience consuming or creating text made me self-consciously aware of my own. Leland shares a dramatic version of the history of the “War of the Dots” that led to the standardization of braille, and provides a moving account of learning to read braille, one children’s book at a time.
Leland gets particularly excited about the role of technology in the dynamics of independence for the blind. Take the app Be My Eyes, an app through which about 7 million volunteers worldwide assist over 600,000 blind users with requests made through a one-way video/two-way audio interface. I tried it, helping a man in St. Lucia with a request related to the settings on his crockpot. If you have a functional eye or two you can spare for a few minutes which otherwise might be spent looking at something deeply frivolous that you can never unsee, I highly recommend giving it a try. (Yes, that sure looks like a dog, Vanity Fair).
The spectrum of the American political divide is on display in the rift between the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind, which split from the first in the 1960s. Today, the two organizations approach their advocacy differently— NFB, which has faced internal dissent around inclusion of salient identities other than blindness in its programming while also reckoning with extensive allegations of sexual harassment and assault, is known for a strident opposition to mandated accommodations its leaders believe reinforce mainstream ideas of blind helplessness, such as audible pedestrian signals. ACB meanwhile positions itself as a consumer organization, friendlier with federal agencies and focused on advocating to remove barriers to full participation in society. The controversies illustrate that no group of American people, no matter their common interest, is a monolith.
In making blindness relatable for non-blind, non-disabled readers, Leland navigates internalized ableism with self-awareness and vulnerability. The scenes in which he notices the kinds of blind people he feels a connection with versus the interactions that produce an urge to reject blind identity are uncomfortable to read. Likewise, he grapples with the ways his relative position of privilege—as a person with generational wealth to fall back on, who retains a narrow field of vision, and who has had the advantage of establishing a professional media career as a mostly sighted person—makes some aspects of blind culture unknowable to him.
I did not get the sense Leland has resolved these contradictions of intersectionality, independence and interdependence for himself. His capacity to entertain the complexity and discomfort of experiencing both sides of sightedness serves as a reminder: sight is only one a sliver of our experience as individuals in a complex social fabric.
The uniqueness of Leland’s expansive approach to blindness resonated even more poignantly for me because I read The Country of the Blind in close timing with Salman Rushdie’s memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.
Knife is Rushdie’s first-person account of survival and recovery after an extremist loner, who admitted to the New York Post he’d only read a couple of pages of Rushdie’s work, stabbed him 15 times on August 12, 2022. As a result, the author nearly died— and forever lost sight in his right eye.
Intervening bystanders held off his would-be assassin—known as “The A” throughout the book—saving his life. His family’s love and the work of many healers (“Dr. Eye, Dr. Hand, Dr. Stabbings, Dr. Slash, Dr. Liver, Dr. Tongue”) restored his strength and capacity to work. Yet the loss of sight remains emotionally difficult. In interviews following the book’s release, Rushdie said he’s still upset everyday by the loss of his eyesight.
Both authors converse with literature (H.G. Wells, Joyce, Borges, Shakespeare, Saramago, etc.) as a way of comprehending blindness, but they filter similar examples through radically different emotional realities. For example, take the scene in King Lear in which Cornwall’s gouges out Gloucester’s eyes crying “Out vile jelly!” Leland imagines borrowing this bit of dialogue, leaning “with comic gusto” to title a podcast about his failing vision Vile Jelly. Rushdie recalls this scene as the origin for his longstanding fear of blindness as his “worst thing in the world,” the thing he’d find if compelled to descend to the Orwellian torture chamber Room 101, in the basement of 1984’s Ministry of Love.
And so, the pairing of these two books also underlines the added dimension fear and terror add to any kind of loss. The violence that instantaneously caused his blindness intensifies Rushdie’s emotional pain. The “eye” and the “I” entwined, he fights back the way he knows how: “Language too, was a knife. It could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths. It could cut through from one reality to another. It could call bullshit, open people’s eyes, create beauty. Language was my knife.”
Knife, at once distressing, charming and thought-provoking, opens with an ironic frame. Rushdie was attacked while onstage to speak about keeping exiled writers safe from harm. His description of the dream he had two nights before traveling to Chautauqua gave me goosebumps—in it he was attacked by a gladiator with a spear. It felt like a premonition, and he told his wife, poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, he didn’t want to go. “So it’s you. Here you are,” Rushdie thinks, fundamentally unsurprised when he see the man in black with a knife; the pragmatism and courage that have earned him his reputation as the poster-grandpa for free speech on full display.
In his recovery, the cause became secondary. At the time of the attack, Rushdie and Eliza—the name he calls Griffiths—were practically newlyweds. Their courtship and close bond comes through beautifully. Immediately after the attack, Rushdie focused only on this love from family— including his sons and sister— as the means and reason to survive. While hospitalized he was:
“in no state to talk about freedom…ever since conservatives started laying claim to it (Freedom Tower, freedom fries), liberals and progressives had started backing away from it toward new definitions of the social good according to which people would no longer be entitled to dispute new norms. Protecting the rights and sensibilities of people perceived as vulnerable would take precedence over freedom of speech…The First Amendment was now what allowed conservatives to lie, to abuse, to denigrate. It became a kind of freedom for bigotry. The right had a new social agenda, too, one that sounded a lot like the old one: authoritarianism, backed up by unscrupulous media, big money, complicit politicians, and corrupt judges… my desire to protect the idea of freedom—Thomas Paine’s idea, the Enlightenment idea, John Stuart Mill’s idea—from these new things, was beyond my power to articulate.” (emphasis mine)
As past president of PEN America from 2004-2006, Rushdie has become synonymous with that organization’s mission “at the intersection of literature and human rights.” In the U.S., it has led the charge to document and fight back against bans in schools in and libraries. In his memoir, he aligns himself with that advocacy as expected and also spells out his resistance to progressivism, too.
Knife is not the first time he has gone on record against the progressive movement to call out and cancel writers whose sensibilities offend inclusive norms. Rushdie was one of the most eminent writers who signed the notorious letter in Harper’s in 2020. But it is interesting to me that in 2024 he still considers the changing social mores he references to be new. That sounds…old.
Near the end of Knife, Rushdie recounts his first public event following the attack. On May 18, 2023 he received a hero’s welcome at the annual PEN America gala at Museum of National History in New York, accepting the Centenary Courage Award under the whale. In his speech, he praised PEN America’s partnership with Penguin Random House to sue the state of Florida over its book bans. He closed with these words to the fellow writers who make up PEN’s membership: “Terrorism must not terrorize us. Violence must not deter us. La lutte continue. The struggle continues.” Within the book, its a joyful and triumphant return to the world of writers.
Rushdie paints the scene in the piquant context of the internal battle within PEN America eight years ago, when a faction expressed dissent when the same award was presented to Charlie Hebdo. That Knife’s publication coincided with an even more significant PEN America meltdown extends the irony beyond Knife’s striking covers. How bewildering, to have sacrificed a literal eye in the name of free speech, and then to find oneself embroiled (again) in an internal battle for the conscience of an organization of writers dedicated to that cause.
Just four days prior to its April 16 publication, Rushdie signed a letter from PEN America’s past presidents as they attempted to stem the damage to the organization’s reputation after a significant number of finalists withdrew from its prestigious literary awards in protest of PEN America’s response to the Israel-Hamas war.
One of them? Rachel Eliza Griffiths, nominated for her debut novel Promise.
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