E s s a y
Freedom To Write
artwork by t h lisa
The energy of literary art emanates from the imagination's willingness to journey into places where many would not go. A writer soars and dives, intrudes and clamours, opens windows and widens horizons, creates perspectives and often acts as an anarchist. He can be an irritant to those who are content with the status quo, and perhaps a danger to those whose insularity is threatened. A writer must always be ready to fight against the singularity of a way of life and champion the plurality of what is possible. The art of writing cannot be nourished in an incubator of smug certainty. I would like to think that contemporary writers are receptive to new ideas, that we have been influenced by significant areas of knowledge which have evolved over the past hundred years or so and shaken, if not radically altered, ossified beliefs. For instance, I am particularly curious about the influence of quantum mechanics on our thinking. To be more specific, to what extent has Werner Heisenberg's The Uncertainty Principle made us sceptical about absolutism? Philosophical truth is a matter of perception and perspective and the morality of an artist can only be judged by the honesty with which he responds to his imagination. "More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read," wrote Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest. Were I to engage, for instance, in a dialogue with the Taliban, I imagine I'd get a more extreme variation of what Wilde said. It would go along the lines of: 'Our Islamic culture depends on the reading of one book, and one book only -- the Holy Koran, and your writing should reflect your compliance to the Will of God.' You can imagine a predictable scenario: my dissent and the subsequent edict which would label me as an unrepentant traitor. It wouldn't matter if I argued a case for a choice of belief or my claim not to be a Muslim within the narrowness of a fundamentalist's criteria of Islam, or the fact that as a novelist I have to embrace a multiplicity of ideas which often transgress religious beliefs. The uncompromising freedom of my imagination is the ultimate condition of life. That, and not my cultural, national or religious identity, defines me as a human being. I doubt if I would get very far with that argument with conservative Muslim theologians or with George Bush, for that matter. I am sure the mullahs would point out that I was born a Muslim and it is mandatory for me to live according to the dictates of the Holy Book, as the clerics perceive them. I should read the true words and adopt their sacredness, instead of writing lies. I should imagine God's glory instead of conjuring up profane worlds of gashed souls and dark deeds. I should accept instead of defy. Well, I have no intention of accepting limits. I jealously guard the freedom of my imagination and keep its wings in good condition so that it may soar to daring heights from where one can see the very things that I am told to ignore -- wickedness, jealousy, perversities, grossness and the entire gamut of secret desires and cravings. It could be that the fate of Icarus awaits me. I have to take that risk. A writer doesn't scrutinise the vagaries of human behaviour with a missionary's focus to amend or correct, but with a view to understand and wonder at what we are and share these reflections with others. But that is not enough. One has to turn inwards as well, and travel along sinuous lanes and dimly lit corridors to what Jean Genet called 'the secret place within ourselves', that place from which human adventures begin. If I were to directly address the question, How much freedom do I have in my writing life? my initial impulse would be to say that so far there have been no impediments to my creativity. But, on reflection, that would be a simplistic and fallacious remark. I have to write within the framework of a social and political environment, and currently that environment is not entirely friendly towards freedom of expression or thinking that is contrary to reactionary attitudes, even in a democratic society. 'Freedom' is not an open-ended term. It is an ideology which is shaped by cultural conditioning. How free, one may ask, is a commentator writing for a conservative newspaper, in his or her support for the American, British and Australian presence in Iraq? To what extent have those views been shaped by educational background, the family influence and political preferences. Certainly, there is a freedom to express those views, but there has to be a distinction between the circumstances in which those views were incubated and their expression. In an essay titled 'The Public Interest', published in a 1991 anthology on censorship (Banned), the British critic Jolyon Jenkins observed that "Censorship never really goes away: it just changes its form." Censorship, Jenkins claims, is "rarely if ever determined by any democratic process, but by the interests of powerful elites." That censorship, taken to extreme measures, might entail a death warrant for a perceived offender, is not surprising. For me, personally, the Salman Rushdie debacle merely crystallised a recurring and appalling form of tyranny, one which has kept recurring throughout recorded history -- and that is the brutal effort to silence the dissenting voice. So, to say that I write with complete freedom, without the awareness of possible consequences of anything contentious that my imagination throws up, would be untrue. I lack any sense of bravado and nor am I the stuff of which martyrs are made. After the catastrophe of the twin towers in New York, I was haunted by the image of the last few minutes of Mohammad Atta's life. What were his emotions as the nose of the aircraft, he was piloting, was metres away from the building it ploughed into? I find it impossible to believe that he was not afraid, despite the certainty of his belief in an instant access to Paradise, a concept that is entirely alien to me, despite my Islamic background. Had I been in his place, I have little doubt that I would have banked the plane away to the left or the right before the fatality. I have often thought of writing a short story of the last couple of minutes of Atta's life. I even thought of a title -- Before Paradise. Yet, I never wrote a word nor did I attempt to unscramble and piece together the fragments of images whirling in my mind. Why didn't I write the story? Because I was afraid of creating such an extreme condition of nihilistic darkness in my psyche that my creativity might have been permanently debilitated. An imagination which is crippled by fear cannot create with the energy it is meant to generate. So, no, regrettably I am not entirely free from within myself to write about whatever might tempt me. Nevertheless, risks have to be taken, and I am often compelled by a kind of imaginative insurgency, that chaos which is often associated with the beginning of artistic process, to venture into sensitive areas that may not be prudent to fictionalise. Fear of one's safety is the most corrosive of emotions. I enjoy the security of a stable society, and from that comfort zone, I wish I could reinvent some of the events of the recent past. If only the absurd drama arising from the publication of The Satanic Verses hadn't occurred. It affected the world, and it impacted significantly on those writers who were born as Muslims. As I have said, the notion of 'freedom' is not quite as simple as we might like to believe. It is susceptible to cultural and political bias and the idealisation about its lack of restrictions can be, perhaps cynically, viewed as a utopian fallacy. I doubt very much if, for example, in today's America, supposedly that vociferous champion of freedom, you can write anything criticising the Bush administration and questioning its motives for going to war in Iraq without being subjected to severe scrutiny for the purported purpose of internal security. That can have very dark implications, especially if you are a Muslim or have a Muslim name. No matter in which era of history we live in or where we are, there have always been attempts to curtail the freedom of expression. The creationist version of our beginning in Genesis did not allow Adam and Eve to do what they pleased, Socrates could not express himself as he wished, Galileo was intimidated by the church for upholding the Copernican theory and John Milton was forced to defend unlicensed printing in his treatise, Areopagitica. And his words -- "Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God as it were in the eye." -- resonate across the years and cultures to our own times when fundamentalism is on the rise. Incidentally, one might note in passing that the Catholic Church officially pardoned the genius of astronomy and mathematics in 1992, a mere 350 years after Galileo's death. Religion is rather slow to forgive those who deliberately or inadvertently question its doctrines in their writing. But by Galileo's example, there is some hope that Salman Rushdie might be completely forgiven by the mullahs in the year 2338). I do not write as a Muslim, but as someone who has experienced a sliver of Islam. And it would be accurate to say that because of my upbringing I straddle that murky region between the two great religions, Christianity and Islam, holding up my own banner of rationality that rejects the fundamental premise of both. But Christianity has managed to find refuge in the vast forest of allegory and symbolism that developed in the Western literary tradition in the Middle Ages. One can, for instance, argue that the resurrection is an allegorical narrative in the gospels, that 'Christ's rising' is more symbolical than literal. That is a serious theological and philosophical debate, an engagement which is likely to fray tempers and evoke anger, but I doubt if it will get anyone killed. Islam has not evolved a flexible framework of interpretation. If the Koran is the word of God transmitted to the prophet Mohammad via the archangel Gabriel, then that is absolute and literal in its meaning. It is blasphemy to search for the meaning behind the meaning. It can be sacrilegious to make art which opens up alternate visions of the history of man or question the version of creation in the Holy Book. The conflict between the sacred text and the profane text is, of course, an ongoing debate. The novelist, Carlos Fuentes, sums up the tension between the different perspectives of the artist and cleric. For the religious fundamentalists, Fuentes contends, reality is 'dogmatically defined once and for all in a sacred text. But a sacred text is, by definition, a completed and exclusive text. You can add nothing to it. It does not converse with anyone.' The sacred text formats a monologue; the profane text, by which Fuentes primarily means the novel, leads to a dialogue. The novel 'is the privileged arena where languages in conflict can meet.' It reveals 'that, in dialogue, no one is absolutely right; neither speaker holds an absolute truth, or, indeed, has an absolute hold over history.' We, as literary creators, depend on people's willingness to listen to other voices and opinions if literature is to make an impact in shaping a better world. Our business is to open up the universe just that little bit more with each work of art, to get people to questions themselves and their beliefs, to see the world in different perspectives without the certitude of a definitive rightness. This is not what we are getting in many parts of the world where totalitarianism speaks loudly in condemnation of others with a different agenda. And thus, on one side, we have George Bush lecturing the world about 'good' and 'evil' and the path to righteousness firmly in the way marked by myopic Republicans, and the rabid mullahs and the Taliban with their unshakeable belief in their version of how to live the pious life. As a writer of serious fiction, I find that similarities and differences of faith tend to fade away during the creative process, and I am left to tackle the issues of humanity, dark and sometimes seamy, occasionally noble and selfless. The entire gamut of human emotions and behaviour is at my disposal as raw material to shape and fictionalise as I please. I am not compelled to pay allegiance to any political or social cause. I work on the platform of independent thinking, and there can be few compromises with the authenticity of the imagination. Freedom of the mind is just as important as democratic political institutions which supposedly promote that freedom. A novelist is not a preacher. We observe and show conditions of life without discarding our neutrality. It is in this context that we have to comprehend Milan Kundera's pronouncement that "the novel is an area where moral judgements must be suspended." And it is this suspension which frees the novelist from making hasty judgements of people and events, actions and circumstances. It is a freedom we acquire during the long apprenticeship of our writing life. The realisation of its worthiness is enlightenment in its purest sense. Adib Khan is a Bangladeshi-Australian writer currently pursuing a Phd at Monash University. His latest novel is Spiral Road (Harper Collins; 2007).
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments