Rachel Eliza Griffiths on love, loss and Salman Rushdie

Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s memoir opens on the day of her wedding to Salman Rushdie in 2021. She has had her hands painted with traditional henna patterns for the occasion; inside this “hand-drawn world of diamonds and delicate curlicues” is inscribed the name of her new husband. It’s a name that is globally recognised (although not by Griffiths’s father, who politely asks his future son-in-law at their first meeting, “Would they know your name at Barnes & Noble?”), and one freighted with a history of violence. “I am marrying a man that some people have deemed dangerous,” she writes. “Will I be wed to Salman’s history, too?” But, she tells herself, “What harm could find us on such a day, in such a love?”

It’s a question that is clearly setting up its own answer, and the reader might assume that these overt intimations of tragedy waiting in the wings refer to the attack on Rushdie less than a year after their wedding, a legacy of the fatwa pronounced against him for blasphemy against Islam more than three decades previously. But Griffiths – an award-winning poet and novelist – has not merely written a counterpart to Knife, Rushdie’s memoir about the stabbing and its aftermath. In fact, her account of the attack comes relatively late in the book, the greater part of which is concerned with the tragedy that preceded it – one that didn’t make international headlines, but was no less significant or devastating to the author.

The Flower Bearers is the story of Griffiths’s own formation as a poet and artist, an evolution that is inseparable from her friendship with a fellow poet, her “chosen sister” Kamilah Aisha Moon, whom she met while studying creative writing. In these opening chapters, her excitement during the preparations for the wedding is marred by the fact that Aisha has failed to turn up. As her sister and friends attempt to assuage her worst fears, Griffiths feels an instinctive foreboding: “The anxiety had nothing to do with my decision to marry. This was about something else, but I couldn’t see its form yet.”

By this point the reader can hazard a guess at what form it might take, given that Aisha is – along with Rushdie – one of the book’s dedicatees, her name followed by the dates that bookend a life: 1973-2021. But here Griffiths leaves this first section on a cliffhanger, cutting back in time to the beginning of her relationship with Aisha, and further back, to her earliest understanding of her desire to write. Born in 1978 to a middle-class Black family in Wilmington, Delaware (“Delaware was a punchline in Wayne’s World,” she observes drily), Griffiths quickly finds her artistic ambitions dismissed by her parents, for whom “writing was only necessary along the journey to a ‘good job’”. Grief is a watermark running through her story: for her loving but sternly critical mother, who died young after years of illness; for her child self, who experienced abuse and coped by learning how to dissociate; for the Black men and women killed by racial violence in America, whose names echo through her adult life. “Aisha and I wrote poems elegising murdered Black people and their children. It was hard for me to recall any sustained moment when Black people weren’t getting executed.”

But she also shares with Aisha a love of music and dancing, and a desire to carve out a life that will give them the freedom to write, following in the footsteps of the canon of Black writers they both admire. She mentions the book’s title in the context of a pilgrimage she made with Aisha to lay flowers on James Baldwin’s grave, though the symbol of giving flowers to honour and recognise someone accrues layers of additional meaning throughout Griffiths’ memoir.

For a book so preoccupied with death and trauma, The Flower Bearers is often surprisingly funny; Griffiths is particularly good at recreating conversations among groups of friends with a novelist’s sharp ear for dialogue. She also brings a poet’s feel for images – New York pigeons who fluff “their garbage-coloured feathers”; Salman’s “widowed eye” – though occasionally these can be so dense as to become opaque: “I lift a white flag at the drawn knives of my enemies, the shining guns aimed at dawn’s approaching mercy.”

Less than a year after Aisha’s sudden death, the cause of which remains unknown, Griffiths is at home in New York when a friend calls to say that Salman has been hurt. She captures the helplessness and terror of having to watch her husband’s fate unfold on a breaking news channel: “Locked inside a scrolling ticker, the words stabbing and attack blur in front of me.” Her experience of those uncertain hours between life and death offers a complementary perspective to Rushdie’s, and – whether consciously or not – sometimes mirrors it; both use the image of an egg to describe his ravaged eyeball.

“I can’t accept that what I need to do is learn to listen, to coexist, with my complicated grief,” Griffiths writes in the aftermath of Aisha’s unexplained death, which she learns about on her wedding day: “the best and worst day of my life”. But in writing such a raw and open tribute to courage – Aisha’s, Rushdie’s, her own, as well as the writers who have gone before – she has reached an accommodation with that grief, and found a way to transmute it into poetry.

The Flower Bearers by Rachel Eliza Griffiths is published by John Murray (£22). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £19.80. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Rachel Eliza Griffiths