Tucked away down under Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn, the Powerhouse bookstore cum arena cum gallery played host to the latest PEN World Voices Festival offering: "The Writer as Activist." The Powerhouse’s large airy space and piped acid jazz music gave it a very contemporary feel, perhaps not surprising given its location in the heart of New York’s hippest borough. The snarled up traffic due to the Five Borough Bike Ride meant the event started 30 minutes late. It was a reasonably well attended , although I feel the gorgeous weather has kept some people away. Those that did make the effort, though, were rewarded with an interesting discussion.
Moderated by Sarah Schulman, the event was one of question and answer, with our four panelists being asked three or four questions by Schulman and a couple by the audience. One thing I did notice was that providing a strong framework for literary types is much like herding cats—a largely fruitless task—typically it seemed like the panelists answered a different question to the one posed by our moderator. I say this with no small amount of respect; I think that in and of itself says something about our independently minded panelists.
Schulman’s first question laid the framework for the discussion. She asked the panel to reflect the challenge that writers faced when they stepped outside the bounds of the dogmatic mainstream narrative and wrote on topics that challenged centers of power, which was followed up with how the critical writer could and should deal with praise and punishment.
Peter Schneider reflected back on how fortunate he had been to be in West rather than East Germany pointing out that he “would rather be free and unknown than famous but imprisoned.” He later pointed out that he saw writing and activism, two things he does very well, as two very different disciplines. In his younger days, he found himself at odds with two different European governments, being exiled from both East Germany and Italy, but interestingly for two different reasons. With East Germany he was punished due to his literary work, which was presumably seen as divisive and a threat to the state, but in Italy he was refused entry because of his political work, which was presumably seen as divisive and a threat to the state! A very subtle point made by Schneider was that as an activist you needed to have a single very clear message, but having that as a writer probably meant that you were not a particularly skilled in the craft. He also pointed out, quite self-deprecatingly, that “we should not assume that a writer is right more often than any other citizen of the world.”
The unrelenting and powerful voice of dissident, activist and scholar Irakli Kakabadze, whose native Georgia is surely a country that has gone through one of the most painful de-Sovietization, pointed out the new realities in his country. The post-modern censorship in his country was indeed more subtle than it had been during the Soviet Era, but still the state heavily regulates the “biopolitics of your actions,” according to Kakabadze. The citizenry were “slaves of the bourgeois” where challenging the ethical validity of new market-based organization left the author and activist alienated and oppressed. Oh, and if you step too far out of line a visit from the death squads is still a very real possibility, perhaps an indication of the liminality present in national consciousness of modern day Georgia.
Former President of International PEN Homero Aridjis, a Mexican writer and activist, now mostly focusing on environmental issues, pointed out that nowadays globally journalists are more likely to be oppressed by state power than literature author, a phenomena that was less true fifty years ago. He finds that his writing and activism comes from two very different places in his mind and that the two do not mix particularly well.
Ariel Dorfman, the panelist most willing to come back to the questions posed by Schulman, gave a strong and lively account of his views on the role of the writer as activist. He started us of with an anecdote regarding their delayed arrival pointing out that they had insisted of taking a taxi driver down a one-way street the wrong way and how that ought to be the role of the critical writer. He said that after the runaway success of his play Death and the Maiden he recognized that he needed to make sure he did not let the pressure to reproduce the popularity it gained by “driving down the one-way street the right way”—something he encouraged other writers to reflect on. He advised them to allow “praise and punishment to be something that affects what you are doing, that it should enrich and inform you, but that ultimately you have to start pure to yourself.” He pointed out that ironically under dictatorship, which he lived through under Augusto Pinochet in his native Chile, although the body may be in great danger the soul was permitted to flourish, a reversal of the situation experienced during the transition to democracy—an altogether murkier experience for the soul.
The final question posed by the audience went to our moderator, Sarah Schulman, who was asked to reflect a little on her work. She point out that if as an author you represent the non-dominant position within society you will constantly be berated, but that the advantage is that the community whose views you are expressing will really appreciate your efforts—and that they tended to be a much more engage and invigorated group. This was a strong message on which to close a very worthwhile event, and one I am sure all the panelists would have echoed.
Here are some books that the panelist recommended that are written by living women.
- Chloe Aridjis Book of Clouds
- Maria Sabina (dead but great, apparently)
- Yana Djin Immortality
- Toni Morrison A Mercy
- Everything by Margaret Atwood.
- Antjie Krog Country of My Skull
- Laura Restrepo Delirium
- Deena Metzger Ruins and Beauty
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