We should all be grateful to the Honorable Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and his fair and balanced committee of Republicans for their willingness to investigate liberal media such as the New York Times, ABC, NBC, CBS.
We can only hope that they will discover why the liberal New York Times would not permit its writers to say George Bush lied when he said there were no warnings of a terrorist attack before 9/11 and that no one imagined using airliners as bombs. At least 12 other nations and a Taliban official warned the Bush administration of a planned attack on the US. US intelligence had known since 1998 of a plan to use hijacked airliners to attack the World Trade Center, and since 1999 of a...
Salwa Al Neimi, born in Syria but lives in France and writes in Arabic, Zsófia Bán from Hungary, Nicole Brossard from Canada, and Rakesh Satyal born in the US to Indian parents, met to tell an audience about taboos. They generally agreed that religion, politics and sex were dangerous, particularly if one did not represent the prevailing religious, political or sexual orientation.
Although the Jewish Bible describes the body as being good and mentions functions of the body in frank terms, Al Neimi has been censored for using Arabic, the language of the Koran, when writing about the erotic. Bán and Satyal found that otherness in sexuality was taboo. Satyal said that he wrote the book he needed as a child and didn’t...
Il tema proposto, indubbiamente stimolante, è quello del rapporto tra scrittori e potere, e l’assunto che storicamente essi si sono schierati su entrambi i lati della classica divisione tra destra e sinistra. Ma poi questo panel si è naturalmente orientato in una direzione diversa rispetto a quella prevista, e...
WRITERS AND POLITICS AT PEN WORLD VOICES
Featuring Nadeem Aslam, Norbert Gstrein, Mariken Jongman, Khet Mar, Domenico Starnone, and Larry Siems.
With politicians becoming writers (Obama, Nixon), and writers becoming politicians (Mario Vargas Llosa, Vaclav Havel, Shashi Tharoor), is it possible to draw a line between politics and literature, and declare that one should never include the other?
Art as neutral to and indifferent to and above politics: it is an appealing self-deception, a bit more prevalent in the West, with writers whose professed stance, “I am not my brother’s keeper; I’m an artist, and that is all I am” seemingly carries this subtext: "I’ve got to look out for Number One,...
It’s an issue authors have wrestled with through the ages: what responsibility do they have to respond to the political struggles of their community, their country, their world? The answer suggested during Friday’s panel was: if you can even ask that question, you’re damn lucky.
Award-winning Pakistani-born author Nadeem Aslam (The Wasted Vigil, Maps for Lost Lovers) said for him, ignoring political issues would be impossible. “It is possible in a place like America to live a life with no interest in politics,” he said. “But in some parts of the world, politics is visceral; politics is real. Even if I wanted to, I could not separate my personal life from my political life in the place I come from.”
Ask a room full of writers whether they have a responsibility to write about politics, and you will get a negative response. Writing should be unfettered by responsibilities, they will assert, while a few liberal types might mutter a defense before being shouted down. I know this because I have asked this question to a room full of writers several times. It turns out I was merely in the wrong room.
From Words to Nations
The panel Left/Right Literature: The Politics of Taking Up the Pen, featured in the chilly Nordic basement of the Scandinavian Society, addressed these questions at length. These writers asserted that the responsibility to engage in political discussion varies from focusing on singular words, to the empowering stories of...
So I am sitting here in my comfortable little writing study high above the bustle of Manhattan’s East Side contemplating, of all things, the legacy of President George W. Bush. In a brief few months he will be gone from the public stage and with his absence the vitriol, the adrenaline charged criticism, the often rabid animosity of most of the people in my social world will slowly diminish, and the memory of “W” will slowly dissolve like a lump of sugar in the liquidity of history.
I have channeled my reflections to be sober and neutral, free of bias and contemporary judgments, forcing a kind of emotional absence as I travel forward in time to say fifty or more years...
It was Tip O’Neill, the former Speaker of the House, who once said that all politics is local. With apologies to old Tip, I will go one step further. All politics is personal.
Whatever one’s political preferences, who cannot admire Barack Obama’s verve, spirit, and oratorical skills? But the words of his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who Obama has revered and trumpeted as his inspiration and spiritual advisor, make one shudder with embarrassment for the candidate...
