Writers, Literature As A Form of Resistance

The basis for this screed came in yesterday and today through my email. I thought the first too long to be added to anything I published yesterday. That second article came in today, I felt my delay justified. It also left me when I should publish. So far, I have posts scheduled to September 14. I thought September 15 was too far off. This left me with putting it to be published today.

I have fallen behind in my reading, so let me note my possible ignorance that might contradict me. I do not think that American writers rebel against what is American that has brought us MAGA; not even in what has come to me through literary journals. Yes, there are writers writing articles against Donald J. Trump. They are doing a grand job. But fiction lets us take a different kind of journey that exceeds the grasp of the polemic. There is a darkness in America, it has always been here, and we need to confront that darkness through our literature. For my models, I take first Ross Lockridge Jr's Raintree County. Find it in your library, or, even better, buy it and read it. Second is William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!. Both touch on slavery, genocide, racism, and economic classes; subjects we wish away under the epithet "woke". 

Perhaps, what follows will give you ideas.

 ‘Literature can be a form of resistance’: Lea Ypi talks to Elif Shafak about writing in the age of demagogues (The Guardian)

Lea Ypi’s prize-winning memoir, Free, detailed the experience of growing up in Albania both before and after communist rule. Her new book, Indignity, reconstructs the life of her grandmother, who arrived in Tirana from Salonica as a young woman and became closely involved with the country’s political life. She currently holds the Ralph Miliband chair in politics and philosophy at the London School of Economics. The Turkish writer Elif Shafak is author of more than 20 books, both nonfiction and fiction, including the Booker-shortlisted novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World and, most recently, There Are Rivers in the Sky. When the pair talked over videocall, Ypi travelling in India and Shafak at home in London, their conversation ranged over the threats of censorship and the rise of populism, the challenges of being writers with multiple identities and the importance of representing complex historical events in their work. 

This idea of true justice only existing in homogenous societies is something I never thought of, never encountered. Not even Nietzsche thought of racial purity as a prerequisite to justice. If that is in the mind of our white supremacists, then do they really believe it? It is propaganda, if the leaders do not. I hear Karl Marx having a good laugh, if leaders and followers believe this.

Lea Ypi What’s striking for me is the contrast between this really rich life that you find in literature and in academia, and the platitudes of politics. In literature there is an experimentation with genres and with cultures and with languages, and so you get this sense of complexity. You have almost the exact opposite happening in the political realm, where it’s all about simplicity. It’s all about being on message, not making it too complex. It has to be short. It has to be very simple, on the verge of banality. And increasingly, it’s also exclusionary. So there is this tendency in contemporary political discourse to say: OK, let’s drive out the migrants – a sense that you can only get a just society if you have homogeneous societies.

Perhaps, Ms Ypi, American politicians recognize a few facts: 1) most of America is functionally illiterate; 2) most Americans have the intellectual curiosity of a rock; and 3) troubling most Americans with complex ideas benefits neither the politician nor the citizen.

I doubt most Americans will even recognize the importance of the ideas in this passage:

LY What has been important for me about growing up in Albania and then navigating the transition from communism to the post-communist period is that living in a totalitarian society makes you very, very sensitive to propaganda of all kinds, all the time. And so there was never actually this break where first I lived in an unfree world and then I became part of the free world, it was always about remaining vigilant to see where there is censorship and ideological manipulation and propaganda – even coming from places that seem completely innocuous and innocent at first.

You’re always thinking about what is critically missing in a society in which you live: where is the gap in democracy? There is all this praise of freedom, and yet we live with politicians and people who make decisions that are so obviously constraining the freedom of other people everywhere.

We have this expression in Albania: “Istanbul is burning and the old woman is combing her hair.” You worry that in some ways, what you’re doing is completely irrelevant, but you say to yourself: my job is just to be critical and to put pressure and to remember, to try and make people think about how the past shapes the future, how these ideas repeat themselves, and how these political conflicts in the present all have a history and all come from some unresolved trauma in the past.

ES We have so much in common: the subjects, the themes that we deal with, the geographies that we come from, but also the silences that we dig into. I think for both of us, memory is important, not in order to get stuck in the past, but because without remembering we cannot repair.

LY It starts by understanding how every voice out there is always a result of some power relation or other. This was my experience with writing Indignity, which was about my grandmother, and going into the archives. It turned out it was really hard to research a woman who lived in the 1920s and 30s in particular. She lived in Salonica, which was still very much culturally Ottoman when she was growing up. It had just become part of the Greek state, and they completely shaped the discourse of what they wanted to be told and how it was told.

If you’re relying on official authority sources, they all have their own agenda, and by the way in which they construct the archive, by the way they write history, even by the way they shape literary traditions, they always have an agenda that is usually the agenda of the people in power. So how do you challenge that? I think it’s only when literature becomes resistance that it can challenge that, but it needs to explicitly want to do that.

 What ideas?

1. Always remaining vigilant to see where there is censorship and ideological manipulation and propaganda. (I remember the phrase, "Don't believe everything you read in the papers", but do not hear it from anyone today. Those watching Fox and its attendant entities think they are getting the word directly from the burning bush.) 
2.  "Memory is important, not in order to get stuck in the past, but because without remembering we cannot repair." (MAGA does not remember, they fantasize; they want not to repair but impose their fantasies on reality.)
3. Know your power relationships. 
4. All official authority sources, have their own agenda.
5. Official sources want to prop up those in power.
6.  Literature becomes resistance when it challenges the official position.

And speaking of literature:

LY Literature has this democratic function only because it doesn’t preach. If it were to preach, it would lose it. If you were to tell the reader: “This is how you should see the world, this is what’s right, and this is what’s wrong”, then you become authoritarian.

And then, actually, literature loses this power that it has to continue with the reader. I don’t think the book is finished when the writer writes it: it continues to write itself in its reception, in the way people discuss it, in the way its themes feed into societal and cultural debates more broadly. 

I bring in ‘I have no interest in the white gaze any more’: Randa Abdel-Fattah on Gaza, boycotts and her new novel (The Guardian) for its discussing literature and censorship.

In 2021, when Randa Abdel-Fattah began working on her latest novel, Discipline, she questioned whether a story about state violence, the right to protest and the racialisation of Arab youth in Australia would resonate.

 Suspicion of Arab communities – particularly young Muslim men – in media and political commentary had been potent in the years after 9/11 and had formed the subject of her academic research (and her 2022 nonfiction book Coming of Age in the War on Terror) – but, she says, the issue seemed to have “fallen off the radar”. She wondered whether people still thought it was a problem deserving of attention, and even emailed her publisher in September 2023 to ask if it believed there was a market for the novel.

 ***

Watching the genocide unfold in Gaza after the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 left Abdel-Fattah creatively paralysed. As the relentless, live-streamed bombardment continued, the book was put on hold. But as the days and months rolled on, crackdowns on protests, freedom of speech and political expression gave her impetus to revive the work, and it morphed into a tale with profound new resonance in a nation where pro-Palestinian sentiment is being fought privately, and publicly, like never before.

***

And earlier this month she withdrew from Bendigo writers’ festival – where she had been invited to speak about Discipline – after a code of conduct was issued directing panellists to “avoid language or topics that could be considered inflammatory, divisive, or disrespectful”. Speakers appearing on panels presented by La Trobe University were also told they must adhere to La Trobe University’s anti-racism plan, which contains a contentious definition of antisemitism.

The following does make me confront reality: what American reader exists that wants to read about the dark things done by us and our ancestors?

Abdel-Fattah does not hesitate when asked who the intended audience is. “I was writing it for my community,” she says. “I felt like this was my way to validate all the private messages and angst.” Unlike some of her previous young adult novels, which she concedes sought to appeal to white audiences, Abdel-Fattah says, “I have no interest in that white gaze any more.”

I went downtown for the Labor Day demonstration, and heard someone talking about a genocide. I had to take that to mean Gaza. It is a genocide. I cannot reconcile it with the idealism towards Israel I grew up with. Whatever Zionism means, should mean, is beyond my ability to speak about. What I can see is that what has always ruined idealism for me: nothing of this world is perfect. We cannot let the good in anything keep us from ignoring the evil. Americans must take responsibility for our support of Netanyahu's evil.

“Bendigo felt like a turning point in terms of solidarity,” she says. “I didn’t ask anybody to withdraw … There was this momentum of people withdrawing of their own volition.”

Abdel-Fattah wants all those who have not spoken up against the injustices inflicted on Palestine to confront the “violence of their silence”. The opening page of Discipline states: “I humbly dedicate this book to all the Palestinian academics and journalists killed in Gaza who would be alive now if academics and journalists in the West had spoken and acted when they had the chance.” 

Consider this as a slightly different perspective on literature as resistance: “Without her, 68 Publishers would not exist”: On writer and translator Zdena Salivarová’s legacy (Radio Prague International).

But it was the events of 1968 that changed her life the most, as they did for many in Czechoslovakia.

The couple happened to be in the US during the invasion in 1968, so they stayed there and later moved to Toronto, where they founded the publishing house 68 Publishers, as Tomková told me. Over the course of twenty years, it published more than 200 works by Czech authors in exile. Tomková with more:

“She dedicated nearly her entire adult life and all her energy to the Toronto-based publishing house 68 Publishers, which she ran. Without her, it probably wouldn’t have even existed. I think many books and authors would have been forgotten without it. They published both exiled authors and those living in Czechoslovakia who were not allowed to publish at home. These books would then get smuggled back into the country, so through this work, they filled a critical gap that would otherwise have existed.

Who will be there for American writers if fascism does take over here?

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