Host: Jon Goode
Jon Goode: [00:00:02] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm Jon Goode, 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 Moth. He's been on Moth stages, hosted some of our live events, served on our benefit committee and was the recipient of the 2009 Moth Award. Everyone at The Moth 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 Mainstage in New York City, an event we produced in partnership with the PEN World Voices Festival. Here's Salman Rushdie, live at The Moth.
[cheers and applause]
Salman Rushdie: [00:01:04] I was not always as you see me now. [audience laughter] At one point, I was considerably younger. [audience laughter] I'd like you to help me now to become a little younger in your eyes. 23 years, that may be really, really long time for some of you, but try. Imagine, imagine the years falling away from me. The hair growing on my head, my body becoming lean and taut, like Brad Pitt. [audience laughter]
So, I ask you to come back with me to 1986. In 1986, that impossibly distant time, I was sitting in London writing a novel. I have to tell you that it was not going well. I'd 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 a novel? I thought, I know you go to a revolution.
Now, as it happened, I'd been invited to a revolution. People are not always offered invitations to revolutions. [audience laughter] 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 Mailer. Of all places, The Temple of Dendur at 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 compañera of Daniel Ortega. Then the president of Nicaragua and the leader, of course, of the Frente Sandinista, 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 wraparound shades. [audience laughter] 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? [audience laughter] Could 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, [audience laughter] the companera of Daniel Ortega universally loathed. So, there I was with the most hated woman in Nicaragua. People looked at me oddly when I said that she had invited me. 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, and they would talk very, very freely. And the trouble is, I knew that if I put a tape recorder on the table, they would not talk so freely. So, I had to invent diarrhea. It's diary with a stomach upset attached. [audience laughter] I would have to, at these dinners, absent myself every five minutes to go to the bathroom and scribble like crazy, so I could write down everything everybody had said without seeming to spoil the evening.
I discovered many things. I discovered that the three different groups that formed the Frente Sandinista 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 Maoist, Ho Chi Minh really group which believed in raising the consciousness of the peasants. And then, there was a middle-class group of writers and intellectuals and businessmen and other useless people. [audience laughter] 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. 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.” [audience laughter] 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 [audience laughter] in all sorts of different ways, some of which were sexual. [audience laughter]
So, I learned all this, you see, and had a lot of very good food while 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, [audience laughter] had formed the opinion that Nicaragua, which contained a population, I mean, 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.
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. If you didn't do your shopping, then the prices went up again at 5 o'clock in the afternoon. So, the inflation rate was like that. The prices went up twice a day. 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 goes if you were a farmer, there were diminishing returns involved in this, because you'd end up with just the tractor and no cows and 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. It gave the government a problem. So, for instance, the Ministry of the Interior, they had to use the few buildings that had survived. So, the Ministry of the Interior was in a supermarket. You could 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 Cardenal, who was the Minister of Culture.
The Ministry of Culture was located in the home of the former mistress of the former dictator, Hope Somoza's house in [unintelligible [00:07:41] Ernesto Cardenal'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. [audience laughter] He said this without irony. [audience laughter] Ernesto Cardenal 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. [audience laughter] Some Soviet-hating Russian stood up and said, “Second nation.” [audience laughter]
Anyway, so Ernesto Cardenal, there he was in Hope Somoza’s bathroom. 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, 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 campesinos, the villagers, could be taught how to write poetry. 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.
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're teaching them how to write simply and you're 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 Whitman and Marianne Moore in simplified form.” [audience laughter] This too was said entirely without irony, [audience laughter] as was his statement that there were no political prisoners in Cuba.
So, you see, it was a complex thing, the world of the mind in Nicaragua. 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 Contra 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. My translator said to me, “You know, Bono's here,” she said, [audience laughter] “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. I read in the newspaper a terrible story about a road in the north of Nicaragua near the border where a landmine had blown up a busload of school children, and 50 odd schoolchildren had been killed just the previous week. And so, I thought, I'm going to be a war correspondent, I am going to be a correspondent if it kills me. Actually, no, I didn't think that. I thought, as long as it doesn't kill me. [audience laughter] But I wanted to go to see this road. So, I managed to persuade them to send me. So, off I went.
Eventually, I was in the back of a truck being driven towards the war zone. Actually, it was getting really a little bit scary [audience laughter] and near the end of the war [audience laughter] 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 Sandinista soldier standing next to me, I said, “Is there any way to tell if there are landmines in the road?” And he said, “Yes, yes” I was relieved. I said, “What is the way?” He said, “There is a very big bag” [audience laughter] And so, that wasn't at all what I wanted to hear.
And so, as we went on, we suddenly found ourselves going into woods. The woods got darker, thicker. The woods were lovely, dark and deep. [audience laughter] 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, we are now dead people. There is a Contra ambush, and we are sitting ducks and we've had it. Actually, the soldiers on the truck thought so too, really.
And so, they left off with their AK47s and they did all the kind of things that people do with AK47s. [audience laughter] They ran around like crazy. I sat on the truck and quaked, essentially [audience laughter] thinking, I've got a novel to finish. [audience laughter] Please not now. I need to go home and write a final draft. 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.
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 down and wrote the final draft of The Satanic Verses. [audience laughter] I discovered 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.
[cheers and applause]
Jon Goode: [00:13:14] That was Salman Rushdie. Salman is the author of 10 novels, including Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses 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 Booker 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, Roe vs. Wade, LGBTQ rights all begin with uncomfortable conversations protected by one's First Amendment right, one's 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. It's 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.
Marc: [00:14:54] Jon Goode 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 Promax. He has written a collection of poetry and short stories entitled Conduit and a novel entitled Mydas, both available wherever you get your books. Jon is the current host of The Moth Atlanta.
This episode of The Moth Podcast was produced by Sarah Austin Jenness, Sarah Jane Johnson, Catherine Burns and me, Marc Sollinger. The rest of The Moth’s leadership team include Sarah Haberman, Jenifer Hixson, Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers, Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Klutse, Suzanne Rust, Brandon Grant, Lee Ann Gullie, Inga Glodowski and Aldi Kaza. All Moth 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 PRX, The Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.