When authors take sides
Should writers engage with politics? Giles Foden reports on the war of words over the crisis in the Middle East
- The Guardian,
- Article history
'Politics," said Charles de Gaulle, "is too important a matter to be left to the politicians." Writers have often been keen to fill the gap, and rarely more so than now. September 11, the war in Afghanistan and the recent crisis in the Middle East have provoked a host of novelists, poets and playwrights to take up - with sighs, gasps or shouts, as their particular sensibilities dictate - their role as Shelley's "unacknowledged legislators of the world".
With the exception of a notable debate in and around the London Review of Books, authors' responses to September 11 and the conduct of the war were no more than an intensification of the usual traffic between the journalistic and literary worlds. It has taken the binary fix of Israel/Palestine - nomenclature itself is a charged issue, as Jack Straw learned to his cost - to marshal writers along partisan lines. Discounting world wars, in which many British authors were official propagandists, not since the Spanish Civil War have so many writers taken sides.
One of the most outspoken has been Tom Paulin, whose comments to an Egyptian newspaper have provoked a storm of protest. US-born Jewish settlers in the West Bank are, he said, "Nazis and racists" who "should be shot dead...I feel nothing but hatred for them". He later told the Guardian : "Sharon is the equivalent of Franco."
From one point of view, Paulin's outbursts (this isn't his first) might be seen as "the tongue's atrocities", as Geoffrey Hill put it in his poem "History as Poetry". The critic Christopher Ricks glosses the phrase like this: "compacting or colluding the atrocities of which the tongue must speak, with the atrocities which - unless it is graced with unusually creative vigilance - it is all too likely to commit when it speaks of atrocities."
The Board of Deputies of British Jews tried to prosecute Paulin under public order legislation. What defences could he have mustered? One doubts police would be convinced by the idea of the "necessary murder" that W H Auden at one time averred was needed to further a political cause. Even Auden himself recanted, withdrawing the poem in which the phrase occurs, "Spain 1937", from the authorised edition of his Collected Shorter Poems.
The intemperate nature of Paulin's interventions masks a broader taking of sides by writers on the Israel question that goes beyond professional controversialism and "coffee house babble", as Disraeli described talk of the Bulgarian atrocities of 1876. British writer Sarah Maguire has been using emails to draw attention to the plight of the Palestinian poet Zakaria Mohammed, who was holed up in Ramallah. "I talked to him again today," wrote Maguire, "and he sounded very weary indeed. Yesterday the Israelis shot directly at his flat though, charitably, he said he thought they were not attempting to kill him or his family, 'but only to terrorise us'. The tanks are still outside all day and all night."
Adrienne Rich, the distinguished American poet, pledged her support: "Please if you speak to him again tell him that here in the US, some of us (poets, American Jews, other activists) are doing what we can toward reversing this horrible situation...That his words and the connections made from language to language create hope and urgency to break the walls of propaganda, lies and silence. Remind him that a poem goes beyond where the poet can imagine."
A large number of British poets have lent their support, Maguire says, including John Burnside, Carol Ann Duffy, Sean O'Brien, Ruth Padel, Kathleen Jamie and Benjamin Zephaniah.
The London-based Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif has been calling for an end to Israeli occupation since long before the recent crisis. Again, email has been employed as a means of getting the message across, in this case as part of a petition to the White House, forwarded by Soueif: "One of the things we need to do is keep on and on at the Powers about how the situation is not acceptable; how the only solution is an end to the occupation - not just a ceasefire. Anything less will mean consigning more Palestinians and more Israelis to terrible lives and unnec essary deaths. Anyone in power or in the media is worth contacting."
Other authors emphasise the danger of writers speaking out on events abroad. "On the whole," says A S Byatt, "I do not believe writers of fiction have any more privileged insight into international affairs than other members of the public. This is not to say that I don't support the work of organisations like PEN or Amnesty, concerned with the fate of writers who have had to speak out in their own countries. Nor that I don't understand the anxieties of American Jews who, while not supporting all of Israel's actions, are disappointed by the way disapproval in Europe seems to shade very easily into anti-semitism."
A study-group of writers - some Zionists, some not - including Linda Grant, Sarah Dunant, Gillian Slovo and DD Guttenplan, recently worked together to draft a document describing their common ground on Israel, pressing for a British policy in the Middle East that is "less hostage to the vagaries of American politics".
Then there are the activities of an organisation called the International Parliament of Writers (IPW), which last month launched an appeal for peace in Palestine at the Paris book fair: "There is a war going on in Palestine," declared the proclamation. "It is not a war between the armies of two enemy nations but between one of the most powerful armies in the world and an occupied nation." What is happening in Ramallah is "a crime that may be compared to Auschwitz", said the Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago, one of a number of writers brought to the occupied territories by the IPW.
Saramago's words caused an outcry. IPW director Christian Salmon issued a formal response distancing the organisation from him. Calling for writers to respect a certain ethics of language and to reject excessiveness, he deplored "the suffering brought about by foolish analogies".
The Saudi ambassador to London and highly respected poet, Ghazi Algosaibi, has engaged with the crisis poetically as well as diplomatically. His ode "The Martyrs", published in a London Arab paper, praised the "sacrifice" of an 18-year-old Palestinian who blew herself up in a Jerusalem supermarket, killing two Israelis and wounding 25. The poem also criticised the US as "a White House whose heart is filled with darkness".
Surely even the most balanced Israeli writers, figures such as Amos Oz and David Grossman, could not but be hostile to work that appears, at least on the surface, to support suicide bombers?
Grossman says: "The idealisation and glorification of murderous suicide bombers must reflect something distorted in a culture. A Hezbollah official recently said: 'we shall win because the Jews love life and we love death'."
Writers with direct Israeli or Arab connections need to be distinguished from British groups. The distinctions here are complex in any case. It is far too simple to say that the Grant-Guttenplan gathering, which also includes Susie Orbach and Maria Margaronis, is "pro-Israel". Even the Zionists among them support an immediate end to the occupation, and a viable Palestinian state; many would object to being characterised as somehow less tough on Israel. But there is a clear division between them and avowedly "anti-Israel" literary circles, which are much in the majority.
A somewhat similar situation existed in 1937, when Auden and Spender published "Authors Take Sides on the Spanish Civil War" in the Left Review , having sent out a questionnaire to virtually every leading British and Irish writer. The Spanish republic, they asked: "are you for/against/neutral?" Earlier that year, Auden had gone to Spain to drive an ambulance (he never actually did so).
There was some literary gerrymandering: Ezra Pound, a natural fascist, found himself in the "for" camp as a consequence of the ambiguities of his prose. But the result was pretty clear. Of all the writers asked, only five - including Evelyn Waugh and Edmund Blunden - were against the republicans, which is not necessarily the same thing as being pro-Franco, but they understand Franco.
For whatever reason, Joyce simply acknowledged receipt of Auden's letter. Beckett, famously, replied "¡uptherepublic!". He would later nail his anti-fascist colours to the mast by joining the Resistance in Paris. But as his work shows, it may have been a sense of existential absurdity that informed his engagement. That is certainly true of Sartre and Camus, who both joined the Resistance.
Auden himself had a relatively simplistic notion of the instrumental power of writers and writing: "today the struggle...", "young poets exploding like bombs", etc. It was a position the elder Auden would repudiate as containing "wicked doctrine". "Poetry makes nothing happen", argued his elegy "In Memory of W B Yeats", being instead a "way of happening" itself.
To some extent, this restated the art-for-art's-sake idea that was explored by 19th-century French poets and then rejected by campaigning social novelists such as Emile Zola - a figure whose name came up in a recent attack on the IPW by Guardian columnist Ian Buruma. "Successful writers in democracies can make a great deal of money, receive grand prizes, and get decent tables in fashionable restaurants, but they are rarely taken seriously as political figures," he wrote. "Nor should they be. They do not represent anyone. Political analysis is not the point of most imaginative writing. And yet they persist, our modern-day Zolas, in writing pompous open letters to political leaders, as though literary talent lends to their opinions a particular moral weight."
The issue emerged in its most sophisticated form during the renaissance of poetry that occurred in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s around Seamus Heaney and his former pupil Paul Muldoon. It could be argued that one of the reasons for their inexorable rise to literary importance was the intermediate, dialectical position they took, not just on (to put it baldly) unionists v republicans and Catholics v Protestants, but on the self-reflexive issue of literature's instrumental value.
Revisiting Auden and co in the poem "7, Middagh Street" (a house where the poet lived with various artistic figures), Muldoon has Louis MacNeice say:
"Poetry can make things happen -
Not only can but must -
And the very painting of that oyster -
Is itself a political gesture."
But other parts of "7, Middagh Street" express different arguments. "This lobster's not a lobster," says Salvador Dalí, another speaker in the poem, "but the telephone that rang for Neville Chamberlain..."
The Dalí view, even though it notices the dangers of appeasing fascism, is unlikely to appeal to Tom Paulin, whose writing has tried to inhabit the imaginative space of Protestant experience in Ireland. What others perceive as choleric splutterings, he would no doubt argue is in a tradition of radical, engaged dissent that goes back, via Ulster's Plantations, to the Puritan side in the English civil war.
Perhaps the last word should go to Heaney, a writer who has always been alive to art's particular ability to explore the dynamics of an issue. Having been, for decades, accused by others of a lack of engagement, and having levelled that same accusation at himself in his poems, he has learned how to steer a middle way. It is an approach that neither falls into damaging partisanship nor refuses point blank to engage in public debate. Why? "If it is a delusion and a danger to expect poetry and music to do too much, it is a diminishment of them and a derogation to ignore what they can do." GF
Zanzibar, Giles Foden's novel about al-Qaida, is published by Faber in September. On May 15 an LRB public debate, The War on Terrorism: Is There an Alternative?, will take place at 6.45 pm, Logan Hall, Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London. Speakers will include Tariq Ali and Christopher Hitchens. For more information email edit@lrb.co.uk
IN: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/apr/27/politics
