Nationalism can be a positive or negative force, Salman Rushdie says
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In the Hotel 10 basement on Sherbrooke St., security guards inspected a procession of writers, editors and literature lovers as they arrived at a literary roundtable discussion.
The security was high because this wasn't just any literary event.
One of the panellists, author Salman Rushdie, was attacked with a knife in 2022 as he was about to give a public lecture in New York, leaving him blind in one eye.
'Two and a half years ago was a bad audience,' the 77-year-old author joked at his talk on Saturday afternoon, while wearing his signature glasses with a black-tinted right lens.
The Indian-born author was the object of multiple death threats and assassination attempts after the publication of his famous 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. His most recent autobiographical work from 2024, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, recounts the stabbing attack. Rushdie's upcoming novella collection, The Eleventh Hour, is scheduled to be published this fall.
Rushdie was in Montreal for the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival, where he was awarded the Grand Prix Award for a lifetime of literary achievement and interviewed by longtime CBC Radio host Eleanor Wachtel.
The Blue Metropolis Grand Prix is given each year to a world-renowned author, accompanied by a $10,000 grant.
Earlier in the day, Rushdie gave a talk with historian Simon Sebag Montefiore around themes of history, dreams and imagination.
At the talk, Rushdie discussed his complicated feelings toward growing Canadian nationalism, which has spiked in reaction to annexation threats from the United States.
'(It's a) very odd word, 'nationalism,' because there are contexts in which it's been a very positive force. For example, the growth of the nationalist movement in India is what ended up getting rid of the British Empire, and I can see that as a kind of almost entirely positive thing,' he said.
'But there are other parts of the world where nationalism has become associated with more primitive kinds of right-wing politics. So it's mixed. It's a word that you have to be careful about.'
Rushdie also spoke about how history offers lessons on staying optimistic, even during challenging times.
'One of the things that the study of history taught me was that there's nothing inevitable about history. You know, history doesn't run on tram lines, and enormous changes are possible at very short notice,' he said.
'In all these changes at short notice ... I think that doesn't necessarily mean things get better, they can get worse. But at least it means that change is constant.'
While Rushdie has long explored the lessons of history in his work, he noted that the broader public often fails to do the same.
'To take only recent history, the second election of Donald Trump. If you have the example of the first presidency of Donald Trump, then you should learn from that. But instead, everybody learned the wrong lesson. And now you get all these statements in the press of kind of buyer's remorse, people who voted for Trump regretting it.'
The Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival runs until 6 p.m. on Sunday, and will hold both in-person panels at the Hotel 10 as well as online programming.
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