A (0:00)

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B (1:09)

Welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. Before we get started, we wanted to tell you about the Moth Membership Drive. As a not for profit organization, we're asking everyone who enjoys the podcast to please consider making a donation so we can continue producing stories like the one you're about to hear on this week's podcast. Your contribution helps keep our podcast free, and it also helps keep our radio show on the air. For a $125 membership, you receive two tickets to our annual members show here in New York City on May 12, but donations of all sizes obviously are greatly appreciated. For more information on how to become a Moth member, please Visit our site, themoth.org and thank you for your support. So this week's storyteller, Salman Rushdie, we're happy to announce, will be hosting our upcoming show in collaboration with the PEN World Voices Festival in New York City on April 30th. Here's his story recorded live at the mosque in 2 2009. The theme of the night was you say you want a revolution. Stories about change.

C (2:29)

I was not always as you see me now. At one point I was considerably younger. I'd like you to help me now to become a little younger in your eyes, 23 years. That may be really, really long time for some of you. But try imagine imagine the years falling away from me, the hair growing on my head, my body becoming lean and taut, kind of like Brad Pitt. And so I Ask you to come back with me to 1986. In 1986, the 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 and didn't know what to do about it. So I thought, what do you do if you're 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. People are not always offered invitations to revolutions, but in my case, it was in fact. So the reason for that, in fact, was a PEN festival. I had come to New York for a PEN festival in the spring of 1986, under the presidency of Norman Mailer, and at, of all places, the Temple of Dendoor 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 companera of Daniel Ortega, then the President of Nicaragua and the leader, of course, of the Frente Sandinista, 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, they had very fancy wraparound shades, and I don't even like guys. But they were very, very desirable, unlike Rosario Murillo, who was not. But she said, please come and experience our revolution for yourself. And at the time, I said, no, I can't do that because 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? Could I, on second thoughts, come? Because I thought, if you're writing a book and it's not going well, why don't you go and look at the lives of people who. Who are really having a bad time, and you can immediately feel superior and come home and finish your work. 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, the companera of Daniel Ortega, universally loathed. And it was a kind of preemptive loathing, because people didn't realize that the thing for which she would really. She really ought to have been loathed. She hadn't yet done. Many years after this, her daughter, Zoe Lamerica, accused her boyfriend, Daniel Ortega. Rosario Murillo's boyfriend, Daniel Ortega of having raped her. And Rosario Murillo's response to this was to side with Daniel Ortega against her daughter. The reasons motives for this were entirely political, because ever since then she has had Daniel Ortega's genitalia very firmly in her grasp, and he has to do everything she says. So that's the real reason to hate her. But that, you see, it shows that people in Nicaragua have a very elastic sense of time. They can hate people for things they're going to do in the future anyway. So 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. And it's a kind of diary with a stomach upset attached. 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, without seeming to spoil the evening. And I discovered many things. I discovered that the three different groups that formed the French Sandinista deeply detested each other. There was the Ortega group, which was the guerrillas who had come down from the hills, who were savage and barbaric and 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. 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. This was a thing I subsequently discovered. But 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. 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 in all sorts of different ways, some of which were sexual. So I learned all this, you see, 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 genuine devastation because the United States, a larger country to the north, had formed the opinion that Nicaragua, which contained a population 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 some of the effects of the crushing were very striking. For instance, people in Nicaragua got up very early in the morning to do their shopping because the prices went up at lunchtime. And if you didn't do your shopping, then the prices went up again at 5 o'clock in the afternoon. So the inflation rate was like that. The prices went up twice a day. Also, as we discovered, if you had a tractor, if you were a farmer and 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 unless it was a Trabant, of course. So 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, destroyed so much of the center of Managua. So here was a city center where there wasn't a center. There would be these streets, big esplanade like streets, but no buildings, because they had all fallen down in the earthquake. And it gave the government a problem. So, for instance, the Ministry of the Interior, 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 the Ministry of Culture, where I went to meet the great poet Ernesto Cardinal, who was the Minister of Culture. The Ministry of Culture was located in the home of the former mistress of the former dictator Somoza Hope Somoza's house. And in actually Ernesto Cardinal's office was in Hope Somoza's bathroom. So we were sitting there in her bathroom, and he talked about liberation and how his presence in this bathroom indicated that the country had been liberated. He said this without irony. Ernesto Cardinal is not strong on irony. There was a point. I remember seeing him at a literary festival when he claimed that Nicaragua had become the first country on earth to nationalize poetry. Some Soviet hating Russian stood up and said, second nation. Anyway, so Ernesto Cardinal, there he was in hopes of Moza'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 things like form. They should speak about their lives in the most personal and emotional way. And he said, as examples, he said, we are giving them show the work of great American poets. 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're teaching them how to write simply and you're teaching them Marianne 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 Marianne Moore in simplified form. This too was said entirely without irony, as was his statement that there were no political prisoners in Cuba. So you see, it was a complex thing, 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 my translator said to me, you know, Bono's here, she said, and he hasn't gone to the war. I said, oh, really? Is that right? Then she said a wonderful thing. She said, please, who is Bono? This was before the unforgettable fire, so I guess she could be excused. But anyway, they didn't want me to get hurt. But eventually I yelled at them so much that they began to relent. And I read in the newspaper a terrible story about a road in the north of Nicaragua near the border where a landmine had blown up a busload of school children and 50 odd schoolchildren 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. 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 being driven towards the war zone. And actually it was getting really a little bit scary. And near the end of the war 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, is there any way to, you know, to tell if there are land mines in the road? And he said, yes, yes. I was relieved. I said, what is the way? He said, there is a very big bag. And so 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. 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, 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. And so they leapt off with their AK47s and they did all the kind of things that people do with AK47s. They ran around like crazy. I sat on the truck and quaked, essentially thinking, I've got a novel to finish. Please not now. I need to go home and write a final draft. And the amazing thing was that it was just that a tree had fallen across the road. There was no ambush. It was an accident. So I got to live and I came back and I took the first plane out and went back to London and my study, and I thought, home safe. Nothing bad will ever happen again. And also I knew exactly how to write the novel now. I knew exactly all the problems had disappeared. And I sat down and wrote the final draft of the Satanic Verses. And I discovered that not only landmines could make a big bang, sometimes books could make them, too. But the great benefit was that I've cured my writing block. Thank you.