| Friday, May 1, 2009 8:02PM | | | | Tyrants, Bloodshed & A Good Story | Posted By: Masha Hamilton
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| Tags: Politics, Aslam, Gstrein, Jongman, Khet Mar, Starnone, novelists, Pakistan, war, Burma, censorship | 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.”
Even if Americans can be blissfully ignorant of politics—(and this might be changing)—the decisions of American leaders sequestered in Washington have strongly impacted the political lives of others, Aslam noted. “Boring, gray decisions written on boring gray paper by …” (here he hesitated briefly) … “boring gray men” have had enormous impact on lives in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the settings for his two most recent novels, he noted.
Aslam was among the panelists participating in Left/Right Literature: The Politics of Taking Up The Pen. Another panelist, Burmese author Khet Mar, (Wild Snowy Night) spoke about the censorship faced by authors in Burma, where the government scrutinizes the words not only of reporters, but of poets. Last year, Reporters Without Borders' Press Freedom Index placed Burma 164th out of 168 countries, just ahead of Cuba, Eritrea, Turkmenistan, and North Korea.
How the author writes about politics, or specifically war, is the topic of Austrian born author Norbert Gstrein (The Craft of Killing) a novel about the Balkan wars in which journalists discuss how to—and not to—write about war. Gstrein has dedicated his book to the memory of the Stern magazine reporter Gabriel Grüner, who was shot in Kosovo in the summer of 1999. Other panelists were Italian author Domenico Stamone and Dutch author Mariken Jongman (who noted that she was “shocked” be to included on the panel as she does not consider her work political at all. It is about, she said, the empowerment of children, but perhaps that is a kind of politics.)
Language itself becomes politicized in many countries, if not all. Aslam mentioned an example from Pakistan, where chemistry textbooks once read: “Two atoms of hydrogen mixed with one atom of oxygen makes water.” Now those textbooks read: “Two atoms of hydrogen mixed with one atom of oxygen makes, if Allah wills it, water.”
But even authors whose work is infused with politics must at some point work at a level devoid of politics, Aslam noted. They must work at the level of crafting the page, the paragraph, the sentence. Although not all the panelists’ work has been translated into English – a loss for us English-language readers – I can wholeheartedly recommend Aslam’s novels, which are at once political explorations of our world and literary gems. | | | |
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