A very long time in the past – 7 December 1992, to be precise – I used to be backstage at a Toronto theatre, taking off a Stetson. With two different writers, Timothy Findley and Paul Quarrington, I’d been performing a medley of Nineteen Fifties nation and western classics, rephrased for writers – Ghost Writers within the Sky, If I Had the Wings of an Agent, and different fatuous parodies of that nature. It was a PEN Canada advantage of that period: writers dressed up and made idiots of themselves in help of writers persecuted by governments for issues they’d written.
Simply because the three of us have been bemoaning how terrible we’d been, there was a knock on the door. Backstage was locked down, we have been informed. Secret brokers have been speaking into their sleeves. Salman Rushdie had been spirited into the nation. He was about to look on stage with Bob Rae, the premier of Ontario, the primary head of presidency on the planet to assist him in public. “And also you, Margaret, as previous president of PEN Canada, are going to introduce him,” I used to be informed.
Gulp. “Oh, OK,” I mentioned. And so I did. It was a money-where-your-mouth-is second.
And, with the latest assault on him, so is that this.
Rushdie exploded on to the literary scene in 1981 along with his second novel, Midnight’s Children, which gained the Booker prize that yr. No marvel: its inventiveness, vary, historic scope and verbal dexterity have been breathtaking, and it opened the door to subsequent generations of writers who would possibly beforehand have felt that their identities or subject material excluded them from the movable feast that’s English-language literature. He has ticked each field besides the Nobel prize: he has been knighted; he’s on everybody’s checklist of serious British writers; he has collected a formidable bouquet of prizes and honours, however, most significantly, he has touched and impressed an excellent many individuals across the globe. An enormous variety of writers and readers have lengthy owed him a significant debt.
All of the sudden, they owe him one other one. He has lengthy defended freedom of inventive expression in opposition to all comers; now, even ought to he recover from his injuries, he’s a martyr to it.
In any future monument to murdered, tortured, imprisoned and persecuted writers, Rushdie will function massive. On 12 August he was stabbed on stage by an assailant at a literary occasion at Chautauqua, a venerable American establishment in upstate New York. But once more “that kind of factor by no means occurs right here” has been confirmed false: in our current world, something can occur wherever. American democracy is below menace as by no means earlier than: the tried assassination of a author is only one extra symptom.
No doubt, this assault was directed at him as a result of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, a satiric fantasy that he himself believed was coping with the disorientation felt by immigrants from (as an example) India to Britain, obtained used as a tool in a political energy battle in a distant nation.
When your regime is below strain, just a little book-burning creates a preferred distraction. Writers don’t have a military. They don’t have billions of {dollars}. They don’t have a captive voting block. They thus make low-cost scapegoats. They’re really easy accountable: their medium is phrases, that are by nature ambiguous and topic to misinterpretation, they usually themselves are sometimes mouthy, if not downright curmudgeonly. Worse, they ceaselessly communicate fact to energy. Even other than that, their books will annoy some individuals. As writers themselves have ceaselessly mentioned, if what you’ve written is universally preferred, you should be doing one thing fallacious. However while you offend a ruler, issues can get deadly, as many writers have found.
In Rushdie’s case, the ability that used him as a pawn was the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. In 1989, he issued a fatwa – a tough equal to the bulls of excommunication utilized by medieval and renaissance Catholic popes as weapons in opposition to each secular rulers and theological challengers comparable to Martin Luther. Khomeini additionally provided a big reward to anybody who would homicide Rushdie. There have been quite a few killings and tried assassinations, together with the stabbing of the Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi in 1991. Rushdie himself spent a few years in enforced hiding, however progressively he got here out of his cocoon – the Toronto PEN occasion being essentially the most vital first step – and, up to now twenty years, he’d been main a relatively normal life.
Nevertheless, he by no means missed a possibility to talk out on behalf of the ideas he’d been embodying all his writing life. Freedom of expression was foremost amongst these. As soon as a yawn-making liberal platitude, this idea has now turn into a hot-button problem, because the excessive proper has tried to kidnap it within the service of libel, lies and hatred, and the acute left has tried to toss it out the window within the service of its model of earthly perfection. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to foresee many panel discussions on the topic, ought to we attain a second during which rational debate is feasible. However no matter it’s, the best to freedom of expression doesn’t embody the best to defame, to lie maliciously and damagingly about provable information, to problem dying threats, or to advocate homicide. These must be punished by legislation.
As for individuals who are nonetheless saying, “sure, however …” about Rushdie – some model of “he ought to have recognized higher”, as in “sure, too dangerous in regards to the rape, however why was she sporting that revealing skirt” – I can solely comment that there aren’t any excellent victims. The truth is, there aren’t any excellent artists, neither is there any excellent artwork. Anti-censorship people usually discover themselves having to defend work they’d in any other case evaluate scathingly, however such defending is critical, except we’re all to have our vocal cords eliminated.
Way back, a Canadian member of parliament described a ballet as “a bunch of fruits leaping round in lengthy underwear”. Allow them to bounce, say I! Dwelling in a pluralistic democracy means being surrounded by a multiplicity of voices, a few of which will probably be saying stuff you don’t like. Except you’re ready to uphold their proper to talk, as Salman Rushdie has carried out so usually, you’ll find yourself residing in a tyranny.
Rushdie didn’t plan to turn into a free-speech hero, however he’s one now. Writers in all places – those that will not be state hacks or brainwashed robots – owe him an enormous vote of thanks.
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Margaret Atwood is a novelist
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