The Other Victims of the Rushdie Attack

The ones you may not have heard about. How they, and we, can respond.

A historical view of the famous Amphitheater at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. It looks very similar these days. The stage shown at the left in this image is where Salman Rushdie and Henry Reese were sitting yesterday morning, August 12, when an attacker rushed from the crowd to stab them. (New York Public Library.)

This is an unusual post. It is co-written by my wife, Deb, and me; it’s co-posted in a longer version on the Our Towns web site, because it was through Our Towns travels that Deb and I met some of the people we will mention; and it is not what I had intended to write today, which was U.S. politics-related, and will hold.

Instead Deb and I want to write about the “other” victims of an attack that has drawn worldwide attention. We hope you will find their stories compelling, along with their ideas about possibilities for response.

---

What else happened in Chautauqua, and why it matters.

By Deborah Fallows and James Fallows

In the wake of the shocking and brutal knife attack on the main stage of the Chautauqua Institution yesterday, the world’s attention is naturally and properly directed toward Salman Rushdie. He has spent most of his adult life under the threat of murder ordered by fatwa; he has never stopped writing and has dared to re-appear in public; he has been one of world’s best-known exemplars of what “courage of one’s convictions” can mean. Now the world is reminded of what he had to fear all along.

The two of us know Salman Rushdie only through his work, but we join the widespread horror at what he has endured and admiration for what he represents.

We know in a different way the other person who was stabbed yesterday, and the place where the assault occurred. We want to say a few words about each of them.

---

The other man who was stabbed: Henry Reese, and the City of Asylum.

Henry Reese was preparing to lead an on-stage discussion with Salman Rushdie yesterday, when the attacker stormed up from the audience and began stabbing them. We understand that Henry was injured, with a wound that just missed his eye, as he attempted to block the attacker.

There could hardly have been a better-suited person to lead this discussion than Henry Reese, which is of course why Chautauqua had selected him. Over the past two decades, he and his wife, Diane Samuels, have led Pittsburgh’s “City of Asylum,” which has been devoted to providing protection, support, and a base for artists who have been persecuted for their views. Salman Rushdie’s experience and personal guidance have been important parts of their effort.

You can read the City of Asylum’s account of Rushdie’s role in its creation from its own website, here. After the first of our many trips to visit them back in 2014, Deb Fallows wrote about  Reese, Samuels, their vision, and their work. This is from one of her articles, which mentioned the roles both of Rushdie and of an exiled Chinese poet named Huang Xiang:

There are Cities of Asylum all around the world, founded about 20 years [in the 1990s] ago to provide sanctuary for exiled at-risk writers. A couple from Pittsburgh, Henry Reese and Diane Samuels, happened to hear Salman Rushdie speak in town. When he happened to mention the Cities of Asylum in Europe, they were interested. To say “interested” is an understatement.

For six years, Reese and Samuels asked the network in Europe to let them create a Pittsburgh City of Asylum. One day they got a call back: yes. The Pittsburgh agreement would be unusual, as other centers were organized with institutional sponsorship, mostly universities. Pittsburgh, as a community, would go it alone.

Reese, who had run successful businesses involving coupon books, telemarketing, and call centers, and Samuels, who is a visual artist, pulled together a group of friends and donors to give it a try for two years. They would need to raise money to provide housing, medical benefits, a living stipend for the writer.

They bought a former crack house on a small lane called Sampsonia Way and fixed it up. The lane feels like a Midwest version of a hutong in old Beijing. It sits in the close-in north side section of Pittsburgh known as the Mexican War Streets (with street names from battles and generals from the Mexican American War), a kind of gentrified Bohemian row-house neighborhood with many writers, artists, eclectic personalities and interesting people. Reese and Samuels live there, too…

The Chinese poet and calligrapher Huang Xiang, at the 10th anniversary celebration for City of Asylum. (Renee Rosensteel.)

Huang Xiang and his wife, Zhang Ling, arrived. Then the magic began to happen. No one had any rules for how this was supposed to work, so they all learned from one another.

Huang Xiang was full of ideas and energy. As Reese describes it, Huang was fairly bursting to let loose with all that had been pent up for so many years. Huang didn’t just recite a poem, he danced, shouted, waved, and lived that poem with his entire body and spirit. He was a master of performance…

Reese’s and Samuels’s default was to say yes to everything. When Huang saw Pittsburgh’s Mt. Washington and said he’d like to carve a poem into the mountain, in the tradition of Chinese poets, Samuels didn’t blanch but suggested he might paint his poems on the outside of his house instead. So they set up scaffolding around the frame house and Huang went to work, painting his poems in his own “grass style” calligraphy. He was “writing his house” as they now describe it.

People could not help but notice House Poem. Before long, neighbors who didn’t even understand a word of Huang’s Chinese poetry, began to slip notes through the mail slot, with poems they had written themselves.

There is much more in Deb’s account, which is all the more relevant in the wake of this shocking news. Among her conclusions:

I finally understood that the City of Asylum is about more than giving an exiled writer a place to live and work. It is about building a community around them that participates with the poetry, or art, or music that is being created in that living space.

---

‘So speak…’

Two other reports on the City of Asylum, both by Deb, are “A River of Words in Pittsburgh,” and “Language as Art in Pittsburgh.” In 2016 our colleague Ben Speggen wrote in the Erie Reader about what the City of Asylum had meant to its community. These too have additional relevance.

As does the quote that has headlined the City of Asylum’s web site since long before this tragedy:

So far no one has died from the Chautauqua attack, although Rushdie’s status was initially reported as “critical,” and though the wounds of all sorts are profound. We barely dare reflect on what might have happened if the weapon were not a knife but the familiar high-capacity, rapid-fire weapon of destruction.

The objects of this attack have stood for courage and freedom of expression. Their examples and influence will always live, and we hope their own work becomes all the stronger. 

---

Chautauqua and America.

The other object of attack was the Chautauqua Institution itself. This is a magical physical space, and an enduring example of the best in civic life at all levels: individual commitment and values, family connections and tradition, community possibilities, goals that transcend boundaries of race and faith and gender and politics.

We feel ourselves very fortunate to be part of the extended Chautauqua family. We have been there many times over the decades, starting when our children were little in the 1980s and extending to the immediate pre-pandemic years. Three years ago Jim emceed a weeklong series of afternoon discussions, in Chautauqua’s glorious, open-air Hall of Philosophy, including people we’d met in the Our Towns travels. We’ve had the honor of speaking on the main amphitheater stage where yesterday’s attack occurred, and being in chairs like those where Rushdie and Reese were seated. We’ve made memories and friendships that endure.

We know how significant the atmosphere of trust, informality, person-to-person contact, and casual conversation and connection is to Chautauqua’s lasting imprint – and therefore how deeply shocking this act of violence was.

There is no better way to express what Chautauqua has stood for, and will stand for, than to hear the powerful brief message that its president, our friend Michael Hill, delivered to a Chautauqua community vigil last night, from the stage of the Hall of Philosophy.

Eloquence and profundity, in times of grief, are rare rhetorical achievements. Michael Hill was eloquent and profound. We have made a transcript, which you can see at the Our Towns site. But for the full effect we hope you will listen to these four minutes:

Michael Hill also put out a formal statement today.

Bear Salman Rushdie in your thoughts. And Henry Reese, Diane Samuels, and the City of Asylum family. And the example set by the whole Chautauqua community.