The Russian invasion in Ukraine has evoked a nostalgia for the Cold War, both in politics and culture.
So, as 80 writers from around the word filed into the stately Trusteeship Council Chamber at the United Nations on Friday, some may have flashed back to the heyday of high-stakes cultural diplomacy — or at least the climax of the 2005 Nicole Kidman thriller “The Interpreter.”
The Emergency World Voices Congress of Writers was held by the writers’ organization PEN America. But after the pounding of the opening gavel, the group’s chief executive, Suzanne Nossel, laid to rest any notion that the grand setting meant that a solution to the “cascading crises” of the moment was at hand.
The U.N. Security Council, which meets just across the hall, she noted, counts among its permanent, veto-wielding members “the world’s most egregious aggressor” (Russia) and “the world’s worst jailer of writers” (China).
“If these are the guardians of our freedom and security,” Nossel said, “we’re in trouble.”
The congress, which coincided with PEN’s annual World Voices Festival, was inspired by a similar emergency gathering held in New York in May 1939, where some 500 writers, including Thomas Mann, Pearl Buck and Dorothy Thompson, came together to address Europe’s slide toward war. But the role of the writer — and the nature of the emergency — has changed a lot since then.
Over three hours, there were impassioned statements on Ukraine, the killing of the Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, social media polarization, climate change, the deluge of disinformation and the global decline of democracy, along with pleas to remember, as one Sri Lankan novelist wryly put it, “the insignificant little countries” of the world.
There was much laughter and a lot of fiddling with the microphones. If there was a common theme, it was faith and the old-fashioned power stories have.
“A poem will not stop a bullet, a novel cannot defuse a bomb,” Salman Rushdie said. But writers can still “sing the truth, and name the lies.”
“We must work,” he declared, “to overturn the false narratives of tyrants, populists and fools by telling better stories than they do — stories within which people might actually want to live”
The rhetoric quickly reached a cruising height of approximately 30,000 feet and remained there. There were also passionate on-the-ground appeals from writers from Ukraine to support Ukraine.
Andrey Kurkov, a novelist and the president of PEN Ukraine, assailed Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine’s territory, culture and history, which he described as an assault on the whole world.
“He is destroying not only Ukraine,” Kurkov said. “He is trying to destroy life on Earth, menacing everyone with nuclear weapons.”
There were plenty of laments that, as the American novelist Siri Hustvedt put it, “literature lives at the margins of culture, especially in the United States. ” But some stuck up for the less exalted forms of storytelling.
Luiza Fazio, a Brazilian screenwriter, said that it was pop culture that shaped the imaginations of most people, especially young people — for better and worse. (Are superhero movies, she asked, “normalizing war” and “glamorizing violence”?)
Shehan Karunatilaka, a Sri Lankan novelist, noted that it wasn’t a “well-researched novel” but social media hashtags like #GoHomeGota that have helped fuel recent protests against Sri Lanka’s strongman president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
“Let’s not be too snobbish when talking about the written word,” he said. “Sometimes a well-choreographed TikTok can bring down a tyrant.”
Walid Hajar Rachedi (French-Algerian novelist) recalled the shock he felt when he learned that one of the attackers in the terrorist attack at the Bataclan club in Paris in 2015 was from the same suburb he had grew up. As a writer, Rachedi said, “I believe in the power of stories.” But he asked if a novel like his own well-received debut, “What Would I Do in Paradise?,” could really counteract whatever story turned that young man into a killer.
“We are here in New York, and it is very fancy,” Rachedi said. “But does it make a difference outside the world of literature?”
Leila Slimani, a French Moroccan writer noted that around 700 million people, including her grandmother and mother had never learned to read and write. “Maybe the first thing we have to fight for is this fundamental right,” she said.
The United States was mentioned in terms of the Republican-led attempts to ban books and limit teaching on race. However, some speakers warned against the more subtle forces that can coerce or constrain the imagination.
Yiyun Li, a Chinese-born novelist, recalls how she was 18 years old when she joined the Chinese military. She had written propaganda a lot, which she found more rewarding than cleaning the toilets or feeding the animals.
Recently, she overheard her American-born son and a friend talking about how they couldn’t win a school poetry contest unless their poems included certain “key words,” like “injustice” and “police brutality.” Can’t a poet also “write about flowers,” one asked?
Our role, she said, “is to make sure they know they don’t have to write the keywords, as I did when I was in China.”
Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University (and a sharp critic of American-style identity politics), called on writers to cultivate imaginative openness to “the minds of all others, not just the cultural other.”
“We need to make it harder to speak so confidently about what’s wrong, about what’s wrong with the people we think are behind what’s wrong, and we need to develop some humility and self-doubt,” he said.
There was some disagreement, but there wasn’t any direct debate. Patrice Nganang, an American Cameroonian novelist, stated that more than 50 countries in Africa have so far refused to impose sanctions against Russia or support Ukraine. But African writers, he said, should feel no shame over their countries’ lack of enthusiasm for a “unipolar world.”
“African people very quickly realize that it is the very same countries that chained the African continent and Black people for so long that are clamoring for freedom at the borders of Ukraine,” he said.
Kurkov was the last to speak. It is natural, he said, to feel one’s own “tooth pain” most acutely. But “I myself feel tooth pain for Sri Lanka, for Africa, for Palestine.”
“Always remember there is no competition of tragedies,” he said. “If we can help, we should help.”
There was an informal (and unanimously accepted) vote at the end on one proposal: That PEN begin an oral history project about today, similar to those that were undertaken in 1930s by the Works Progress Administration.
The congress felt like a very first installment.
“These are writers,” Nossel said after the group posed for a portrait. “You can’t script them.”
Source: NY Times