The Man in the Straw Hat

The release of Salman Rushdie’s new memoir, “Knife: Meditations after an attempted murder,” is a message in itself: The assassination attempt that sought to silence him has instead become grist for his writing. Rushdie has consumed his assassin, of whom he speaks disdainfully in interviews yet wrestles, in his book, to understand. What prompted a complete stranger to stab him several times during a public event last year?

Salman Rushdie, to recap, published “The Satanic Verses” more than 30 years ago, prompting the leader of Iran’s theocratic revolutionary government to call for his death. The novelist lived in hiding for years, gradually returning to public life and putting the matter behind him until Hadi Matar, who was not yet born when the novel debuted, leaped onto a stage in Chautauqua, New York and gravely wounded Rushdie in front of some 1,500 people. Rushdie barely survived, losing an eye and movement in one hand.

While I have not suffered anything like Rushdie’s injuries, several elements of his storytelling on this incident touch rarely disturbed, traumatized nerves within me, as I have been the target of violence on several occasions myself. The worst of these, being attacked on a crowded New York City subway, lingers like a weird dream decades later.

The attacker can loom like a giant despite being a rather dull person. Hannah Arendt’s often misunderstood idea of “the banality of evil” arose from her observations of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem over his participation in organizing the Holocaust. She found Eichmann unsettlingly ordinary and dull, a bland middle-management sort.

Likewise, what we know of Matar suggests he is simply a thoughtless person, “radicalized” (as we say when describing someone who has adopted someone else’s wicked ideas in the absence of their own), who did something monstrous for little apparent reason. The lack of sense seems to augment the trauma. It reminds me of my smallness.

So why did this guy in Brooklyn smash my face? He was tall, wearing a stylish shirt and cargo shorts, in a straw hat and little round sunglasses. I was writing in a journal, barely aware of him until he knocked my leg with his own. Assuming it was accidental, I ignored him. Then he shoved my leg again and spoke: “I’m watching you, too.”

“I’m not watching you, man,” I replied, trying to sound friendly. He stood with unsettling speed, a slight smile on his face, and demanded my pen. It occurred to me that handing him a pointy object might not be in my best interest, so I said no.

The next thing I remember are blows, as if not fists but shovels struck my body; hitting my head on a pole; falling on a seated woman in her Sunday dress; a lot of pulsing blood. The doors opened and people silently left the car. No one intervened and I barely moved to defend myself, trapped in slow motion.

Rushdie, writing of his own inaction when his attacker appeared, offers this: “The targets of violence experience a crisis in their understanding of the real.” Violence erupts in the midst of a familiar routine and most of us, untrained for this, freeze at the incongruity.

For weeks, a diligent police detective called me, imploring me to go to the station and look through mug shots on the off chance of spotting my assailant. I never went. I doubted I would recognize the man in the straw hat and little round sunglasses; and what’s more, I didn’t care.

The injury that lingered longest was the lack of meaning.

Even so: While the man in the straw hat and little round sunglasses may come around the corner any time, we must live.

Algernon D’Ammassa married into Deming and has been raising a family in Luna County since 2008.