The New York Times reports today that six writers have agreed to be “table hosts” at the presentation of the PEN courage award to Charlie Hebdo, replacing six who had withdrawn in a protest that has drawn the support of over 100 other authors. Bravo to them.
The new hosts are Art Spiegelman, Neil Gaiman, Alison Bechdel, George Packer, Azar Nafisi, and Alain Mabanckou. The latter is a French-Congolese author who will present the actual award to the Hebdo survivors.
Per the Times:
“The Charlie Hebdo PEN award is for courage. The courage to work after the 2011 firebombing of the offices, the courage to put out their magazine in the face of murder,” said Mr. Gaiman in an email to The Times. “If we cannot applaud that, then we might as well go home…I’ll be proud to host a table on Tuesday night.”
The award to Charlie Hebdo stands for much more than the right to draw cartoons of Mohammad. Around the world, a small number of fanatics have attempted to silence writers and artists in the name of religion. Salman Rushdie’s forced hiding is the most famous example, but many others have been murdered, as in the case of the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses; as in the case of the film maker Theo van Gogh; as in the case of the gay Dutch politician Pim Fortyn; as in the case of the atheist Bangladeshi blogger Washiqur Rahman; as in the case of the secularist, and American, Avijit Roy, who was also hacked to death in Bangladesh. The Nobel Prize winning Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mahfouz was not murdered -- he was merely maimed – and there were no cartoons in his Cairo Trilogy. What we are seeing, and what Charlie Hebdo resisted, is censorship at the point of machete.
Gary Trudeau has criticized Charlie Hebdo’s satire for “punching down” instead of “punching up,” but this only makes sense if one also accepts his premise that CH was “attacking Europe’s disaffected Muslim population.” That claim, however, is reductive and untrue. If anything, CH was challenging a fanatical fringe – quite unrepresentative of the Muslim population – that is attempting to impose its view of the world on everyone else, including many Muslims. If artists cannot resist censorship-by-threat, then we have all agreed to be silenced by terror.
Some of the CH cartoons were no doubt tasteless and annoying, but there is no way to resist censorship other than by violating its demands. And the great irony, evidently unrealized by the protestors, is that Charlie Hebdo is in fact an anti-racist journal, much of its satire having been aimed at Marine Le Pen and the National Front. For that reason, Charlie Hebdo was described by the head of SOS Racisme (France’s leading civil rights organization) as "the greatest anti-racist weekly in the country."
Bravo, it is more important now than ever to speak out against the bullies who wish to impose their warped ideology on society. Too many people of fought and died to create a civil society in which we have the right to speak, worship and live as we choose to, allow these terrorists to destroy it.
Posted by: Dana Lubet | May 04, 2015 at 01:37 PM
Don't these writers like Gary Trudeau realize that their rationalization of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo taken to their logical conclusion justify all the attacks that writers have experienced around the world? Essentially, taken on face value, PEN's aim is unjustifiable. If freedom of expression is to mean anything, it is to protect the unpopular and insulting speech.
To say that you have the freedom to express yourself when nobody objects to what you have to say, makes this freedom worthless.
Posted by: Adam | May 06, 2015 at 01:18 AM