Month: February 2023

British author Salman Rushdie said he finds it “very difficult” to write after being stabbed last year, in an interview published Monday ahead of the release of his new novel Victory City.

Rushdie, whose “epic tale” of a 14th-century woman who defies a patriarchal world to rule a city hits U.S. shelves Tuesday, said the attack had scarred him mentally.

“There is such a thing as PTSD you know,” the 75-year-old told the New Yorker magazine in his first interview since the August 12 stabbing at a conference in Chautauqua in upstate New York.

“I’ve found it very, very difficult to write. I sit down to write, and nothing happens. I write, but it’s a combination of blankness and junk, stuff that I write and that I delete the next day. I’m not out of that forest yet, really,” he added.

The award-winning novelist, a naturalized American citizen who has lived in New York for 20 years, lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand, his agent said in October.

Rushdie told journalist David Remnick that “big injuries are healed” but he was not able to type very well because of a lack of feeling in some fingertips.

“I’ve been better. But, considering what happened, I’m not so bad,” said the Indian-born author, describing himself as “lucky.”

Rushdie lived in hiding for years after Iran’s first supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered his killing for what he deemed the blasphemous nature of The Satanic Verses, published in 1988.

The attack shocked the West but was welcomed by extremists in Muslim countries such as Iran and Pakistan.

Words ‘the only victors’

Rushdie was asked whether he thought it had been a mistake to let his guard down in recent decades.

“I’m asking myself that question, and I don’t know the answer to it,” he said. “Three-quarters of my life as a writer has happened since the fatwa. In a way, you can’t regret your life.”

Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old from New Jersey with roots in Lebanon, was arrested immediately after the attack and pleaded not guilty to assault charges.

“I blame him,” said Rushdie, simply.

Victory City purports to be a translation of a historical epic originally written in Sanskrit. It’s his 15th novel and was penned before the attack.

The much-anticipated work tells the tale of young orphan girl Pampa Kampana who is endowed by a goddess with magical powers and founds the city, in modern-day India, of Bisnaga, which translates as Victory City.

While not personally promoting the book, Rushdie has begun to communicate via social media on Twitter, most often to share press reviews of his new novel.

An icon of free speech since he was subjected to the fatwa that forced him into hiding, Rushdie is still an outspoken defender of the power of words.

His new work follows a heroine on a mission to “give women equal agency in a patriarchal world,” according to publisher Penguin Random House’s summary.

The book tells the tale of Pampa Kampana’s creation of a city and of its downfall.

A triumph

“Over the next 250 years, Pampa Kampana’s life becomes deeply interwoven with Bisnaga’s, from its literal sowing from a bag of magic seeds to its tragic ruination in the most human of ways: the hubris of those in power,” it added.

The novel concludes with the statement: “Words are the only victors.”

U.S. author Colum McCann wrote in The New York Times that his friend Rushdie was saying “something quite profound” in his new novel.

“In the face of danger, even in the face of death, he manages to say that storytelling is one currency we all have,” said McCann.

The Atlantic magazine called it a “triumph — not because it exists, but because it is utterly enchanting.”

Born in Mumbai in 1947, Rushdie published his first novel Grimus in 1975, and gained worldwide fame six years later with Midnight’s Children, which won him the Booker Prize.

Source: Voice of America

Black and Hispanic adults on dialysis experience more staph bloodstream infections than white patients receiving the treatment for kidney failure, U.S. health officials said Monday.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), citing 2017-2020 data, said adults on dialysis for end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) were 100 times more likely to have a Staphylococcus aureus bloodstream infection than adults not receiving the treatment.

According to the CDC, more than 800,000 people in the United States live with ESKD. Seventy percent are being treated with dialysis and 30% have a functioning kidney transplant.

African Americans constitute some 33% of all U.S. dialysis patients although they make up only 12% of the population.

About one in every five dialysis patients is Hispanic.

Members of both groups have significantly higher rates of staph bloodstream infections than white patients on dialysis, the CDC said, with Hispanic patients experiencing a 40% higher risk.

The CDC said the higher prevalence of ESKD among Blacks and Hispanics is due in part to underlying conditions such as hypertension and diabetes.

Needles and catheters are used to connect patients to dialysis machines that clean their blood, and bacterial infections such as staph can enter a patient’s bloodstream.

Some staph infections are resistant to common antibiotics, making them particularly deadly.

The CDC said bloodstream infections in dialysis patients in the United States have decreased since 2014 but more needs to be done to prevent them.

“Preventing staph bloodstream infections begins by detecting chronic kidney disease in its early stages to prevent or delay the need for dialysis,” CDC chief medical officer Debra Houry said in a statement.

“Health care providers can promote preventative practices, including methods to manage diabetes and high blood pressure, as well as providing education on treatment options,” Houry said.

The CDC said 4,840 dialysis facilities reported 14,822 bloodstream infections in 2020 and 34% of them were due to staph.

Source: Voice of America

For Wilfred Cadet, buying soup on Sunday is the equivalent of going to church.

Seated on plastic chairs next to a street food stand tucked in an alleyway, the 47-year-old Haitian slurps orange-colored soup out of a metal bowl next to his 9-year-old son.

Haitians mill past them cradling larger plastic containers, each eager to get a giant spoonful of the stew boiling in two human-sized pots behind them.

Made of pumpkin, beef, carrots, cabbage – ingredients produced on the island – soup joumou is a cultural staple in Haiti.

And in a moment of deepening crisis in the Caribbean nation, it’s one of the few points of enduring national pride.

To this day, when you mention the soup, Haitians are quick to crack a smile.

“It’s our tradition, our culture. It makes people proud. No matter what happens (in Haiti), the soup is going to stay around,” said Cadet.

During the colonial period, slaves were banned from eating the spicy dish, and would have to prepare it for French slave owners.

But Haitians claimed soup joumou as their own in 1804 when they staged one of the biggest and most successful slave rebellions in the Western Hemisphere.

The uprising put an end to slavery in Haiti far before much of the region, and the dish gained the nickname “independence soup.”

In 2021 – the same year the country spiraled into chaos following the assassination of its president – the soup was added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage List, the first cuisine Haiti has on the list.

“It is a celebratory dish, deeply rooted in Haitian identity, and its preparation promotes social cohesion and belonging among communities,” reads the UNESCO entry.

It’s traditionally eaten on Sunday mornings, and on Haitian Independence Day in early January.

That’s when customers begin filing through a pair of black metal gates into 50-year-old Marie France Damas’ makeshift restaurant at 7:30 a.m.

Tucked behind rows of parked cars, a brick wall with a painted sign reading “Every Sunday: Soup Joumou” and a pile of local pumpkins, Damas labors away over her two big pots just like she has for the past 18 years.

Her husband weaves between plastic tables taking orders while her daughter chops vegetables behind her. It’s a family affair, but Damas is clear.

“I’m the boss of the soup,” she said with a grin.

The business has allowed her to put her children through school and give a good life to her family in a place with some of the highest poverty and unemployment rates in the region.

To each Haitian, the cuisine means something different.

For Cadet and his son, it represents one moment of an escape from the day-to-day pandemonium of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince.

It has also allowed Cadet to pass on a cherished part of Haitian culture at a time when they’re slowly fading away. Celebrations like Carnival that once took center stage on the island have withered due to deep gang violence tearing apart the nation.

“The violence in the country is making everyone leave, and over time, we’re going to lose a lot of cultural traditions,” Cadet said. “My son, of course, (will go). Right now, he doesn’t like Haiti.”

He hopes that when his son goes, he’ll remember their Sunday mornings together.

To others, like 35-year-old Maxon Sucan, it’s a way to reconnect with family and home in the countryside.

He grew up in a rural town in western Haiti in a farming family cultivating the very vegetables used to make the soup.

He came to Port-au-Prince 13 years ago to support his family, and works as a manager at a nightclub.

He would once visit his family six to eight times a year, but because of kidnappings and gang control of the countryside, he’s now unable to go home.

So Sunday mornings, he drinks the soup just like he once did as a kid, and he thinks about his daughter who he sometimes goes weeks without speaking to.

“She’s 3 years old and it hurts me that I can’t see her,” Sucan said. “(When I eat soup joumou) I remember my family.”

As he gets ready to leave the restaurant alone, cradling a large Tupperware filled with steaming soup, he pauses.

“When I go home today, I’ll call her. And when I do, I’ll ask if she ate the soup,” he adds.

Source: Voice Of America