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- 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 main stage in New York City,
an event we produced in partnership with
the PEN World Voices Festival.
Here's Salman Rushdie live at the mall.
(audience clapping)
- I was not always, as you see me now. (audience laughing)
At one point, I was considerably younger.
(audience laughing)
I'd like you to help me now to become little younger
in your eyes. 23 years, that may be really
really long time for some of you.
But try, imagine, (audience laughing)
Imagine the years falling away from me
the hair growing on my head
my body becoming lean, taut (audience laughing)
kind of like Brad Pitt (audience and Salman laughing)
And, and so I asked you to come back with me in 1986.
In 1986, that impossibly distant time.
I was sitting in London writing a novel,
and I have 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
I didn't know what to do about it.
So I thought, what do you do if you are 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.
(audience laughing)
People are not always offered invitations to revolutions,
(audience laughing) but, but in my case, it was in fact so.
The reason for that, in fact, was a PEN Festival.
I was, I had come to New York
for a PEN Festival in the spring of 1986
and under the presidency of Norman Mailer.
And out of all places, the Temple of Dendur
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 compañera of,
of Daniel Ortega then the president of Nicaragua
and the leader, of course, of the Frente 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.(audience laughed)
They had very fancy wraparound shades. (audience laughed)
But she said, Please come and experience
our revolution for yourself. And at the time I said,
No, I can't do that cuz 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 laughing)
Could I, on second thoughts, come?(audience laughing)
So for, for, 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 laughing)
the compañera of Danielle Ortega, universally loathed.
So I, there I was with the most hated woman
in Nicaragua and people looked at me oddly
when I said that she had invited me
and it did cause some problems, but it had some advantages.
And 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 (audience laughing)
(Salman laughing) and it's kind of diary
with a stomach upset attached.
(audience and Salman laughing)
And, and, and 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.
And I discovered many things.
I discovered that the three different groups that formed
the Frente Sandanista 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.
(audience laughing)
And, and they, and, 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.
(audience laughing)
This was a thing I subsequently discovered, when I
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 mention somebody, whether
from the left or the right, Bianca would say, Oh yes,
I used to go out with him. (Audience laughing)
And, and I, 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 (audience laughing)
in, in, in all sorts of different ways,
some of which were sexual. (Audience and Salman laughing)
And so I learned all this, you see, and, and
and had a lot of very, very good food.
Well I did but I don't want to underestimate
what was happening there. The country was in a state of
of genuine devastation because the United States,
a, a,a larger country to the north had, had, had
(audience laughing) had formed the opinion that
Nicaragua, which contained a population slight, 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.
And, and, and some of the effects of the crushing
were very striking. For instance,
people in Nicaragua got up very in early in the morning
to do their shopping because
the prices went up at lunchtime. And,
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, the prices went up twice a day.
Also, as we discovered, if you, if you had a, a, a tractor
if you were a farmer in 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
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.
(Audience laughing) So, it was, 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 the, here was a city center where there wasn't a center.
You know, there would be these streets,
big esplanade-like streets, but no buildings,
cuz they had all fallen down in the earthquake
and it gave the government a problem.
So for instance, the Ministry of the Interior, they
they had to use the few buildings that had survived.
So the Ministry of the Interior was in a supermarket
and you could actually see the supermarket sign still up
outside the Ministry of the Interior.
And, 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,
Samoza, Hope Samoza's house. And in actually
Ernesto Cardenal's office was in Hope Samoza's bathroom.
(audience laughing)
So we were sitting there in her bathroom that he talked
about liberation and, and how
how his presence in this bathroom indicated
that the country had been liberated. (audience laughing)
He said this without irony.(audience laughing)
Ernesto Cardenal is not strong on irony.
(Audience laughing) There was a point,
I remember seeing him at literary festival when he claimed
that Nicaragua had become the first country
on earth to nationalize poetry. (audience laughing)
Some, some Soviet hating Russian stood up and said,
Second nation. (audience laughing)
Anyways, So Ernesto Cardenal, there he was
in Hope Samoza's 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, 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.
And he taught them that they should write from their heart
and not worry too much about, about things like form.
They should speak about their lives in
in the most personal and emotional way.
And, and he said, as examples, he said, we are giving them
showing them the work of great American poets.
I said, 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, I said,
if you are teaching them how to write simply
and you are teaching them Marion 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 Marion Moore in simplified form.
(audience laughing) This, too, was said entirely
without irony (audience laughing)
as was his statement that
there were no political prisoners in Cuba.
(audience laughing)
So you see, it was a complex thing
in the world of the mind in Nicaragua.
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 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.
And, and my translator said to me, you know, Bono's here,
she said. And, and, and he hasn't gone to the war.
Anyway, they didn't want me to get hurt,
but eventually I, I yelled at them so much
that they began to relent. And I read in the newspaper,
terrible story about a, a, a road in the north of Nicaragua
near the border, where a landmine had, had blown up
a busload of school children and,
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 (audience laughing)
and but I wanted to go to see this road.
So, I managed to persuade them to send me.
So off I went, and eventually I was in the back
of a truck (audience member coughing)
being driven towards the, the war zone.
And actually, you know, it was getting really
a little bit scary (harmonica plays)
(audience laughing) and near the end of the war.
(audience and Salman laughing)
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 Sandinista soldier standing next to me,
I said, I said, is there any way to, you know
to tell if there are landmines in the road?
And he said, yes, he said, yes.
So I was relieved.
I said, what is the way he said, there is a very big bang.
(audience and Salman laughing)
And so that, 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 laughing)
And, and, and but, 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. (audience laughing)
You know, we are now dead people.
There is a Contra ambush and we are sitting ducks
and we've had it. And they actually, the soldiers
on the truck thought so too, really? (audience laughing)
And so they leapt off with their
with their AK-47s and they did all the kind
of things that people do with AK-47s. (audience laughing)
They ran around like crazy.
I, I, I sat on the truck and quaked essentially
(audience laughing)
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.
(audience laughing) And, and, and, you know,
the amazing thing was that it was just that
a tree had falled across the road.
There was, there was no ambush, it was an accident.
So I got to live and I came
I came back and I took the first plane out and went back to
to London and my study and I thought,
huh
home
safe
nothing bad will ever happen again.(audience laughing)
And also, I knew exactly how to write the novel now.
I knew exactly all the problems that disappeared.
And I sat down and wrote
the final draft of The Satanic Verses.
(audience laughing and clapping)
And I, I discovered that not only
landmines could make a big bang.
Sometimes books could make them too, but
but the great benefit was that I cured my writing block.
Thank you.
(audience clapping)
- That was Salman Rushdie. (audience clapping)
Salman is the author of ten 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 to 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
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 versus 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. (background noise)
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 Promax.
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 Jenness, Sarah Jane Johnson,
Katherine Burns and me, Marc Sollinger.
The rest of the Moth's leadership team
includes Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hixson,
Meg Bowles, Kate Tellers,
Jennifer Birmingham, Marina Klutse, Suzanne Rust,
Brandon Grant, Lee Anne 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.