“The moment you limit free speech, it’s not free speech,” Sir Salman Rushdie told a packed audience at UVM on Wednesday night.
The best-selling author made the remarks in response to a question about last week’s attack by Islamic extremists on the Paris offices of the satirical magazine “Charlie Hebdo.”
Rushdie knows about the power and price of free speech. His 1988 book, “The Satanic Verses,” prompted Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa of death against Rushdie, sending him into a decade of hiding.
Rushdie was in Burlington to speak about the importance of storytelling, an event hosted jointly by the Vermont Humanities Council and the University of Vermont. His 1990 book, “Haroun and the Sea of Stories,” is the 2015 selection for Vermont Reads, a statewide annual book club that aims to encourage communities to read.
But the relevance of last week’s attack that killed 12 could not be ignored.
“You can dislike ‘Charlie Hebdo.’ Not all their drawings were funny,” Rushdie said. “The fact that you can dislike them has got nothing to do with their right to speak.”
In the aftermath of the publication of “The Satanic Verses,” several bookstores were bombed because of they sold the book. Two of the book’s translators were attacked, and one of them was killed.
Though Rushdie did not specifically reference the fatwa, he spoke broadly about art and its role in challenging censorship. Art, he said, attempts to expand “the sum total of what it is we know,” but he cautioned that artists are in a dangerous position.
“Artists who go to that edge and push outwards often find very powerful forces pushing back,” Rushdie said. “They find the forces of silence opposing the forces of speech, the forces of censorship against the forces of utterance.
“What we see from this is that art has incredible resistance and strength, but artists are weak and vulnerable and need protection and often suffer greatly for this attempt to push against the forces of darkness and limitation.”
The bulk of Rushdie’s talk focused on his experience writing Haroun and the Sea of Stories. He talked about storytelling traditions, recounting details of Indian stories from his youth growing up in Mumbai (then Bombay) and comparing them to well-known western folktales.
“Bad guys sometimes win,” he said. “And that’s very useful information because it’s sometimes true.”
Rushdie wrote the book for his first son, who was 10 years old at the time, but he talked about how he went about crafting the story so it would resonate both with children and with adults.
Hundreds of Vermonters and UVM students and faculty packed Ira Allen chapel for Rushdie’s hour-long lecture. A security team searched attendees’ bags and checked inside their coats as they entered the venue.
Brandon Ogbunu, a Burlington resident and member of faculty in UVM’s biology department, waited in line to have his book signed after the talk. A fan of “The Satanic Verses” and Rushdie’s other writing, Ogbunu said he was also interested in attending the talk because of Rushdie’s role as a social critic.
“I appreciated his boldness,” Ogbunu said. “I expected him to be a leader, and he didn’t disappoint.”
Major Jackson, chair of the Vermont Humanities Council, said after the event that he was pleased Rushdie spoke about the role literature can play in challenging censorship.
Jackson invited Rushdie to speak at UVM when they met at a writers’ festival in Jamaica, and Jackson found Vermont an appropriate setting for the world-renowned author to speak out.
“We are a state that engages in debates that affect us in our little towns, but also in the country and humanity writ large,” Jackson said.
