Bravo, PEN!
". . . just read a few of the select explanations provided this week by the writers who chose to sit out the PEN dinner. "A hideous crime was committed" wrote the novelist Peter Carey, "but was it a freedom-of-speech issue for PEN America to be self-righteous about?" And this, from a letter signed by 26 of contemporary literature’s most vaunted, arguing that Charlie Hebdo "seems to be entirely sincere in its anarchic expressions of disdain toward organized religion. But in an unequal society, equal opportunity offense does not have an equal effect. Power and prestige are elements that must be recognized in considering almost any form of discourse, including satire."
Liel Liebowitz, Tablet Magazine
"[PEN's] seeming blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population."
Peter Carey, Australian novelist, PEN member
"[The PEN award] does not believe that any of us must endorse the contents of Charlie Hebdo's cartoons in order to affirm the principles for which they stand, or applaud the staff's bravery in holding fast to those values in the face of life and death threats."
PEN president Andrew Solomon
"If PEN as a free speech organization can't defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the name."
former PEN president, Salman Rushdie
A Hebdo-themed mural in the French western city of Rennes on March 6, 2015.
(Damien Meyer/AFP/Getty Images)
At a New York gala coinciding with PEN's annual World Voices Festival on May 5, PEN American Center plans to award its annual Freedom of Expression Courage award to the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Present will be a grand gathering of international writers, some 800 writers, publishers and supporters. Gerard Biard, Charlie Hebdo's editor-in-chief will accept the award on behalf of the magazine.
That he is alive today owes to the fact that he was absent from the office that January day when a dozen of Charlie Hebdo's staff were slaughtered by Islamic jihadists. Jean-Baptiste Thoret, another staff member who, arriving late to the office, had his life saved from a violent and early death, will also be on hand to accept the gracious recognition of the world's premier writer's group.
But there will be members, some of them distinguished writers, who have chosen to boycott the event. Among them is Canada's own Michael Ondaatje, scheduled to serve as a host, and now no longer part of the ceremony; missing in action. That action being to express solidarity with Muslim outrage that their religion -- along with all the world's other religions, politicians, celebrities, and world-shakers -- suffered mockery at the clever cartoon hands of Charlie Hebdo staff.
Rachel Kushner, an American writer, expressed extreme discomfort with the magazine-to-be-honoured's "cultural intolerance". Do they really believe that claptrap? Other writers, in withdrawing their august presence from the event, cite the focus on "disenfranchised" Muslims, handily overlooking the even treatment meted out by Charlie Hebdo staff to all pretentiously sanctimonious arbiters of the sacred, the rude and the sublime.
It has been pointed out that PEN, in reaching the decision to honour Charlie Hebdo, now stands a real risk of itself attracting the attention of Islamists outraged at its recognition of the newsmagazine they love to hate, for spreading "Islamophobia". The eyes and curses of the offended Islamists will now swivel toward PEN arbiters of virtue in the written word and the scribbled cartoon.
In offending Muslim sensibilities, admittedly irascible for far lesser transgressions than these, PEN and its leading lights also affirm uncategorically the right of poets, writers, novelists, editors, cartoonists to express themselves without fear or favour where civilizational values hold that the truth and realities as they are seen and recognized must have priorities over pretensions of righteousness.
Labels: Atrocities, Conflict, France, Islamism, News Media
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, May 02, 2015
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