The Moth - 25 Years of Stories: A Love Note to Salman Rushdie

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

This week, we play a story from Salman Rushdie, a treasured member of The Moth family. This episode is hosted by Jon Goode. Host: Jon Goode Storyteller: Salman Rushdie

Attention Houston! You have listened to our podcast and our radio hour, but did you know the Moth has live storytelling events at Wearhouse Live? The Moth has opened Mike's storytelling competitions called Story Slams that are open to anyone with a five-minute story to share on the night's theme. Upcoming themes include love hurts, stakes, clean, and pride. Welcome to the Mod Podcast. I'm John Good, your host for this episode. About a month ago, we received some truly awful news.

Salman Rushdie was attacked as he was waiting to be interviewed about freedom of speech. In addition to being one of the most celebrated novelists of the past 50 years, he's a dear friend and supporter of the mouth. He's been on mouth stages, hosted some of our live events, served on our benefit committee and was the recipient of the 2009 Malt Award. Everyone at the Malt has him in our thoughts as he recovers. We wanted to share some of what makes Salman Rushdie so special. His truth telling, his humor, his ability to capture life by playing one of his stories. He told this at a

2009 main stage in New York City, an event we produced in partnership with the Penn World Voices Festival. Here's Salman Rushdiey, live at the moment. I was not always, as you see me now. At one point, I was considerably younger. I'd like you to help me now to become little younger in your eyes, 23 years, that maybe really, really long time for some of you, but try. Imagine the years falling away from me.

The hair growing on my head, my body becoming lean and taught, kind of like Brad Pitt. And so I asked you to come back with me to 1986, in 1986, that's impossibly distant time. I was sitting in London writing a novel and I had to tell you that it was not going well. I had written hundreds of pages and I did not like them. I was, as they say, blocked and didn't know what to do about it, so I thought, what do you do if you're blocked when you're writing an novel? I thought, I know, you go to a revolution. Now, is it happened that I'd been invited to a revolution? People are not always offered invitations to revolutions, but in my case, it was, in fact, so.

The reason for that, in fact, was a pen festival. I had come to New York for a pen festival in the spring of 1986, under the presidency of Norman Meiler, and at all places, the Temple of Dendor at the Metropolitan Museum, I met the woman who invited me to a revolution. It was a woman called Rosario Murillo from Nicaragua, who was, in her own word, the company era of Daniel Artega, then the president of Nicaragua and the leader, of the French Sandanista, which had recently taken power in that country.

She was surrounded, I remember vividly, by a group of the most beautiful bodyguards I'd ever seen. They were male, they were oiled, they had very fancy wrap-around shades. But she said, please come and experience our revolution for yourself. And at the time, I said, no, I can't do that because I have a book to write. I went home and discovered I couldn't write the book.

So I called her up and I said, you know that revolution you were offering me? Could I on second thoughts come? So for these literary reasons, I went to Nicaragua. What I didn't realize is that the person who had invited me was the most hated woman in Nicaragua. The company era of Daniel Ortega universally loathed. So there I was with the most hated woman in Nicaragua and people who looked at me oddly when I said that she had invited me and it did cause some problems. But it had some advantages.

One of the advantages was that I got incredible access. I could go and have dinner with everybody who was running the country. They would talk very, very freely. In the trouble is, I knew that if I put a tape recorder on the table, they would not talk so freely. I had to invent diarrhea. It's kind of diary with a stomach upset attached. And I would have to at these dinners, I've sent myself every five minutes to go to the bathroom, it's scribble like crazy, so I could write down everything everybody had said, without seeming to spoil the evening.

And I discovered many things, I discovered that the three different groups that formed the front of the Sise Saint, deeply detested each other. There was the Ortega Group, which was the guerrillas who had come down from the hills who were uneducated, but they had all the guns. And then there was a kind of Maoist Ho Chi Minh really group, which believed in raising the consciousness of the peasants. And then there was a kind of middle-class group of writers and intellectuals and businessmen and other useless people.

And they all detested each other, but what they also did was they all went to bed with each other and they also went to bed with all the leaders of the opposition. This was a thing I subsequently discovered when I finally wrote something about this and I was interviewed here in New York for interview magazine by Bianca Jagger from Nicaragua.

And every time I mentioned somebody, whether from the left or the right, Bianca would say, oh yes, I used to go out with him. And I realized that she was the person who really ought to be writing about Nicaragua because it is this tiny place where everybody fucked everyone in all sorts of different ways, some of which were sexual.

So I learned all this, you see, and had a lot of very good food. Well, I did, but I don't want to underestimate what was happening there. The country was in a state of genuine devastation because the United States, a larger country to the north, had formed the opinion that Nicaragua, which contained a population, I mean, it's considerably smaller than the population of the tri-state area, posed a serious threat to the safety of the United States

and therefore needed to be crushed. And some of the effects of the crushing were very striking. For instance, people in Nicaragua got up very early in the morning to do their shopping because the prices went up at lunchtime. And if you didn't do your shopping then, the prices went up again at sort of five o'clock in the afternoon.

So the inflation rate was like that. It was to the prices went up twice a day. And also, as we discovered, if you had a tractor, if you were a farmer and your tractor needed to be taken to the garage, the cost of servicing a tractor was a cow. This, of course, if you were a farmer, they were diminishing returns involved in this because you'd end up with just the tractor and no cows.

You couldn't eat the tractor. So it was genuinely terrible, especially as on top of all this calamity of the war, there was the calamity of the earthquake, which had destroyed so much of the center of Managua. So here was a city center where there wasn't a center. There would be these streets, big, esplanade-like streets, but no buildings,

because they had all fallen down in the earthquake, and it gave the government a problem. So for instance, the Ministry of the Interior, they had to use the few buildings that it survived. So the Ministry of the Interior was in a supermarket and you can actually see the supermarket sign still up outside the Ministry of the Interior. And the Ministry of Culture where I went to meet the great poet Ernesto Cardinal who was the Ministry of Culture.

The Ministry of Culture was located in the home of the former mistress of the former dictator, Somoza, that was Hope Somoza's house in the Ernesto Cardinal's office, was in Hope Somoza's bathroom. So, we were sitting there in her bathroom and he talked about liberation and how his presence in this bathroom indicated that the country had been liberated. He said this without irony. Ernesto Cardinal is not strong on irony. There was a point, I remember seeing him at a literary festival

when he claimed that Nicaragua had become the first country on earth to nationalize poetry. on the first country on earth to nationalize poetry. Some Soviet hating Russians stood up and said, sec on the nation. Anyway, so Ernesto Cardinal, there he was, it hopes to most as bathroom. And he told me that it was his dream. It was almost already, almost fully realized

that everybody in Nicaragua should be a poet. He said said almost everybody is, but I'm going to complete the task, and to complete the task, he had set up poetry workshops in villages all across the country, so that the compassionals, the villagers, could be taught how to write poetry, and he taught them that they should write from their heart and not worry too much about things like form. They should speak about their lives in the most personal and emotional way. And he said, as examples, he said, we are giving them, showing them the work of great American poets. I said, which ones? He said, Marianne Moore and Walt Whitman. And I thought, those are two of the most complicated poets in the world. So I

said, if you are teaching them how to write simply and you are teaching them Marianne Moore and Walt Whitman, are those the right poets to be choosing? And he said, no, no, you should not worry. We are teaching them the work of Walt Whitburn and Marianne Moore in simplified form. This tour was said entirely without irony, as was his statement that there were no political prisoners in Cuba. So you see, it was a complex thing in the world of the mind in the Caragua.

And there I was, chit-chatting with artists and intellectuals about this. And I thought, this is not what I should be doing. I should be going to the war. Take me to the war. I've come here to see the war. The contraire must be somewhere. They're up there somewhere.

I must go to find the war. They didn't like that very much because they were worried that I could get hurt and that would be bad publicity. And my translator said to me, you know, bono's here, she said. And he hasn't gone to the war. Anyway, they didn't want me to get hurt, but eventually I yelled at them so much that they began to relent. And I read in the newspaper a terrible story about a road in the north of Nicaragua near the border where a land mine had blown up a busload of school children and 50 odd school children had been killed just the previous week.

And so I thought, you know, I'm going to be a war correspondent. I'm going to be a war correspondent. If it kills me, actually, no, I didn't think that. I thought, as long as it doesn't kill me. I am a'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r g driven towards the war zone and actually, it was getting really a little bit scary. And near the end of the war. And I found myself on the road, they said to me, this is the road where the landmine went off. And I thought, oh, and I said to the sun and Easter, so I'll just study next to me, I said,

I said, is there any way to tell if there are landmines in the road? And he said, yes, yes, I always relieved. i'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw'n gweithio'r sdyn nhw' the woods got darker, thicker, the woods were lovely, dark and deep. But actually, I was more and more and more frightened as we got into them, and then suddenly exactly what my greatest nightmare had been took place, which is we turned a corner and there was a tree across the road. And I thought, shit, you know, we are now dead people. There is a contra ambush, and we are sitting ducks, and we've had it. And actually, the soldiers on the truck thought so too, really. And so they leapt off with their AK-47s,

and they did all the kind of things that people do with AK-47s. They ran around like crazy. I sat on the truck and quaked, essentially, thinking, I've got a novel to finish. you know, and you know, please not now, I need to go home and write a final draft. And you know, the amazing thing was that it was just that a tree had fallen across the road. There was no ambush, it was an accident. So I got to live. And I came back and I took the first plane out and went back to London and my study.

And I thought, ah, home, safe, nothing bad will ever happen again. And also I knew exactly how to write the novel now. All the problems had disappeared and I sat that not only landmines could make a big bang, sometimes books could make them too, but the great benefit was that I cured my writing block. Thank you. That was Salman Rushdie. Salman is the author of 10 novels including Midnight Children, The Satanic Versus, and The Enchantress of Florence.

His most recent work is the essay collection, Languages of Truth, essays 2003-2020. He received the best of the book in 2008, as well as the 2009 Moth Storyteller of the Year award. Salman Rushdie has long been a proponent and advocate of freedom of speech, and as I think about his writings, I can't help but think about how freedom of speech is one of our most beloved rights. That is until someone says something that we don't care to hear. The thing is that it is often those uncomfortable moments that lead to the conversations that push us forward as a society. Civil rights, women's suffrage, row versus weight, LGBTQ rights all begin with uncomfortable conversations protected by one's first amendment right, once freedom to speak.

The late great James Baldwin said that everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it's faced. Is through our freedom to speak that we face and confront tough issues, and it is in facing those issues that we become the change that we hope to see. It is my hope that today and every day you speak your truth, you speak it loud, and you speak it freely. That's all for this episode. As you go about your life, we hope you continue to treasure storytelling and keep those who

tell stories in your thoughts. John Good is an Emmy-nominated writer raised in Richmond, Virginia, and currently residing in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2022, he won a gold-American advertising award, a Silver Telly Award, and was nominated for his second pro-max. He has written a collection of poetry and short stories entitled Conduit, and a novel entitled Midas, both available wherever you get your books. John is the current host of the Moth Atlanta. This episode of the Moth podcast was produced by Sarah Austin Geness, Sarah Jane Johnson, Catherine Burns, and me, Mark Salinger. The rest of the Moth's leadership team includes Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Klucce, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Leanne Gully, Inge Glodowski, and Aldi Kaza.

All math stories are true, as remembered by their storytellers. For more about our podcast, information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org. The Moth podcast is presented by Pier XX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at pirex.org.