The recent knife attack on Salman Rushdie was not only appalling, it also shook many of us out of a sort of complacency regarding his situation: thirty plus years after the pronouncement of the Iranian Fatwā against the author of The Satanic Verses, when all the noise and the danger seemed to have died down and Rushdie had been moving around freely and publicly for more than a decade, this assassination attempt came as a complete surprise.

It is this struggle, what he calls his “solitary-solidary struggle,” deeply committed, deeply political, yet situated outside any ideological system, a struggle toward the construction of an ethics able to equal the complexities of our world, that has been his compass. The rest is poetry.

Rachida Madani was born in Tangiers, Morocco, in 1951, and still lives there, now retired from a career teaching French.

Pierre Joris has moved between the US, Great Britain, North Africa, France & Luxembourg for close to half a century. He has published over 40 books of poetry, essays and translations, most recently Canto Diurno #4: The Tang Extending from the Blade, an Ahadada ebook, 2010. His translations include Paul Celan: Selections (University of California Press) and 4×1: Work by Tristan Tzara, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Pierre Duprey & Habib Tengour translated by Pierre Joris from Inconundrum Press. With Jerome Rothenberg he edited Poems for the Millennium, vol. 1 & 2: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry.