Writers in a Time of Terrorism
Speech delivered in Toronto
to The Writers’ Union of Canada, at its AGM.
May 2005.
Hours after the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, my horror and grief for the victims gave way to the realization that a backlash was in progress against members of my community – Sikhs – and other minorities. Beatings, stonings, arson attacks, gun assaults – in all 206 hate crimes against Sikhs were logged across America at Sikh.org in just five days. Because our men wear turbans, there were actually Americans who believed we are related to or followers of Bin Laden. At the same time, 3.5 million Muslim friends and neighbors were also targets, and we didn’t want to redirect the violence we were experiencing against them.
It was impossible to separate writing and living, so I placed The Tiger Claw on hold and threw my writing energy into flyers, e-mails, and anti-hate crime faxes. Creating in the face of destruction made me feel somewhat less helpless; I was writing in hope of making a difference. And because so many of the people affected could not write in English.
We are told the world changed dramatically on 9/11/01, that racial profiling, random search and seizure and invasion of privacy are now permissible. That secrecy is the mode of operation for the government. The crime seems to have given an excuse to redefine the very basis of morality, beginning with the dictionary definition of “torture.” Words like “freedom” and “democracy” are up for redefinition. The crime of 9/11/01 gave an excuse to those who wish to dismantle international law, set aside the law of the land, law that ratified the Geneva and Red Cross Conventions. It gave Bush an excuse to invade two countries, label minorities and immigrants "terrorists" and "sleeper spies," lock them up or deport them. In countries around the world governments, even democracies like India, have followed his lead, passing prevention of terrorism legislation declaring demands for minority rights “terrorist demands.” We the public can no longer distinguish between their rational and irrational fears.
For most of us, being “under attack” on this beautiful summer day in 2005 is something that happens to a few writers in nations like Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, China, Iran, Vietnam, Turkmenistan. Journalists who describe or undergo terrible brutality like Zahra Kazemi and for whom PEN Canada has to take up the struggle. But writing is predicated on experiencing, observing, witnessing, naming, recording, describing, and analyzing. So writers and writing come under scrutiny and attack whenever self-styled “realists” begin promoting the idea that liberty is an unaffordable luxury in these terrorist times.
Writers of all kinds and political leanings threaten certainty, even the certainty of liberal secular individualists like me, by offering multiple points of view. Journalists and authors of books engage with and examine Fascism, Fundamentalism and other forms of group-think that plague our time. That was true before 9/11/01 and remains true today.
I have never yet been personally under attack, but I have been indignant at insidious methods that target dissidence and compassion, especially since 2001. Consider these examples:
1. Double Standards annoy me: When evangelists said the World Trade Center bombing was divine retribution for the cultural sins of Americans, they were not censored, though their message may have been scorned. Professor Churchill said the WTC bombing was “the inevitable result of a U.S. foreign policy that disregards the rule of law and results in massive death and destruction abroad.” In Feb 2005, Churchill was forced to step down from his professorship. But what did he SAY? He said the alliance of business and expansionist governments -- Fascism -- resurfaces through time. In preliminary stages, it calls itself colonialism or neo-colonialism, and historically, its requirement has been secrecy and the suppression of information.
2. As Salman Rushdie will tell you, attacks from organized fundamentalists are just as virulent as those of the state – In Jan 2005, I got involved in support of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti when her play Bezhti came under attack in the UK from some members of the Sikh community whose fragile egos were threatened by art. Note that they were upset, not because a professional reader of the holy book rapes a woman in Bhatti’s play, but because it happens in a gurdwara. Bon Courage, Gurpreet!
3. If your book or a play doesn’t cause you to be attacked, you’re still at risk in North America. The war against terrorism in the guise of the 2001 Patriot Act affects scholars, publication in the US in translation, and minorities of all kinds. It affects writers on tour (for instance Rohinton Mistry cut his tour of the US short because of continual harrassment at each checkpoint). And the Patriot Act trumps a Nobel Prize, as Iranian writer Shireen Abadi found when her book could not be published in the USA. It was literature from Iran – a country embargoed by the USA.
4. Bill HR3077 now before the US congress affects academic writing, as it sets up an “advisory” or “monitoring” body on Area Studies departments that receive federal funding. It would make it illegal to criticize the government and allows the govt to decide whose voices are mainstream. Dr Michael Sells, author of Approaching the Qur’an has been under attack for years now, because his translation actually captures some of the beauty of the original.
5. Demonization of minorities facilitated by sites like Campuswatch.org, which invites University students to report on – maybe I should use the word denounce – their area studies or Middle Eastern Studies professors’ Anti-American tendencies. Having spent the last four years studying Occupied France during WWII, I find the historical parallel very disturbing.
6. This month, Canadian Newspaper Assn president Anne Kothawala wrote an article about how Canadian institutions can restrict access to evidence, penalize journalists for not revealing sources, or in the case of the Edmonton Sun and Ottawa Citizen columnists, try to stifle reporting.
7. On May 6, Democracy Now reported that the US military has admitted that US and Iraqi forces are holding without charge nine Iraqi journalists working for international news organizations, “on suspicion of aiding resistance fighters.” Some of them have been held for several months. These nine are in addition to the 17,000 Iraqis are currently detained by US and Iraqi forces, most of them without formal charges.
All is not doom and gloom:
• Courageous journalists, writers and photographers allied with lawyers, anti-defamation leagues and non-profit coalitions to ensure that Americans can never claim not to know what has been done in their names at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. They are labelled Muslim lovers and “Traitors” by writers like Anne Coulter. But at least Americans cannot claim not to know that Madeleine Albright considers the deaths of 1/2 million Iraqi children “collateral damage.” And thanks to Iraqbodycount.org no one can claim not to know the death toll in Iraq is currently 24,000 or more as compared with 1200 Americans. Marla Ruzicka’s efforts documented the suffering of Iraqi civilians before and after WMD were not found. And thanks to whistle-blower writers like Erik Saar, author of “Inside the Wire” we cannot say we do not know what happens when international law and the Geneva Conventions are set aside.
• 27,054 people sent messages to the FCC and the DOJ to demand an end to undisclosed government-produced fake news segments on local stations. In April 2005, the FCC issued a clear rule requiring all broadcasters to disclose the source of these video news releases.
In 2000 when my novel What the Body Remembers was published in the USA, 2812 hardcover copies were mistakenly pulped by Doubleday, before they ever came to market. That hurt -- especially when editor Nan Talese’s promises to relaunch the book in paperback were never kept. But, as Joseph Brodsky said, “there are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” Remember the 1953 Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451? In the story, the government begins burning books as a way to keep firefighters employed because people have stopped reading. Whenever reading comes under attack, writers are under attack.
Examples:
• In 2003, my public library system suspended interlibrary loan service from and to the only repository public library in the Midwest – maybe because 1/3 of my taxes are going to pay for a war. It took petitions and protests from writers to bring it back.
• In 2005, my local library funding has been cut by 35 million and the result is the number of acquisitions of books has slowed to a trickle. Our protest emails have not brought the funding back.
• The US National Endowment for the Arts has somehow gathered statistics that say men in the USA do not read. If you were a normal profit-seeking US publisher you would stop publishing books men may like to read. Here’s the coming vicious spiral: American men won't read because people don't publish books directed at them, therefore they won’t be interested, therefore publishers will publish even less books about men or by men. A writer might respond by creating a protagonist with a female sounding name who neither menstruates nor reproduces. Take the trend to its logical extreme and men may some day read fiction the way women used to, looking but not finding themselves - and we know how unhealthy that was for women. Thank heavens that in Canada the market is not considered the invisible right hand of a supreme deity as it is in the US.
In July 2004, Newsweek reported that it is a wonderful time for Canadian writers, “the audiences are there. The prizes are there. There are models now.” This is a relative assessment. Compared to places where writers are persecuted or countries where the only press is vanity press, and there are no creative writing programs, writers residencies or colonies our glass is pretty full. And government funding has enabled a number of us to travel and pursue projects out of reach to individuals. My writing has been nurtured and encouraged by the Writer’s Union, The Canada Council, subsidized publishers and prizes. Nevertheless, there's a general blank spot in public awareness. Do people think of writing as a profession? When a woman writes, can it be her only profession? Do readers realize some of us get paid once every four-five- or ten years? Does anyone besides us understand why a Writers Union is necessary?
I’m told writers have a unique role, in that we “speak truth to power.” To that I say: Some of us do, and some of us become bards for those who pay our bills or have the authority to help us get ahead. At Bleu-Met-Bleu in Montreal this year, Vladimir Tasic a writer who came here from the former Yugoslavia reminded me, “yes many of us speak truth to power, but power doesn’t listen.” If you ever have such thoughts, whisper this secret mantra: the world would be a far worse place if I stopped writing.
It’s often said that better writing comes out of oppression. But though I do want to write better, I would really prefer to work on it privately. There’s enough fear of penury associated with writing that we don’t crave more.
Worldwide, Fascists – whom some call patriots – and fundamentalists whom some call conservatives, are at war. They are laying seige to our compassion for those not of our tribe, the very compassion that expresses our common humanity. The Handmaid's Tale solution – personal escape into the mountains – is no option. Film and TV cannot help us enter other minds. Only writers can offer a simulation of other points of view, and the sound of someone else’s voice in our heads. We must engage more, not less. I predict writers will be at the forefront of the battle for compassion – it just goes with the territory.
Shauna Singh Baldwin