Six international authors have withdrawn as hosts of the PEN American Center’s annual gala, following the organisation’s decision to honour the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, with its annual PEN/Toni and James C Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award.
The New York Times reported that novelists Teju Cole, Taiye Selasi, Michael Ondaatje, Peter Carey and Rachel Kushner have chosen not to participate in the event, citing the controversial magazine’s “cultural intolerance” as their main reason for protesting.
The issue of freedom of speech at the expense of others has come under the microscope, with no easy answers from either side.
Read the article:
In an email to PEN’s leadership on Friday, Ms. Kushner said she was withdrawing out of discomfort with what she called the magazine’s “cultural intolerance” and promotion of “a kind of forced secular view,” opinions echoed by other writers who pulled out.
Mr. Carey, in an email interview yesterday, said the award stepped beyond the group’s traditional role of protecting freedom of expression against government oppression.
“A hideous crime was committed, but was it a freedom-of-speech issue for PEN America to be self-righteous about?” he wrote.
He added, “All this is complicated by 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.”
Midnight’s Children author Salman Rushdie responded to the authors who objected to the award and tweeted the following on Monday, 27 April: “The award will be given. PEN is holding firm. Just 6 pussies. Six Authors in Search of a bit of Character.”
.@JohnTheLeftist @NickCohen4 The award will be given. PEN is holding firm. Just 6 pussies. Six Authors in Search of a bit of Character.
— Salman Rushdie (@SalmanRushdie) April 27, 2015
The Guardian reported Rushdie as saying: “If PEN as a free-speech organisation can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organisation is not worth the name.”
Read the article for Rushdie’s letter of support to PEN president Andrew Solomon:
“It is quite right that PEN should honour [Charlie Hebdo’s] sacrifice and condemn their murder without these disgusting ‘buts,’ Rushdie wrote.
“This issue has nothing to do with an oppressed and disadvantaged minority. It has everything to do with the battle against fanatical Islam, which is highly organised, well funded, and which seeks to terrify us all, Muslims as well as non Muslims, into a cowed silence.
Flavorwire responded to Solomon’s statement that he didn’t think the award would be met with such criticism, by sharing an extract from Cole’s essay in The Yorker entitled “Unmournable Bodies”, which he wrote two days after the attack on Charlie Hebdo.
On the issue of Charlie Hebdo, PEN has rehearsed a pronounced obliviousness predicated on readerly negligence. “I didn’t feel this issue was certain to generate these particular concerns from these particular authors,” PEN president Andrew Solomon told the New York Times. Yet the position of some of these authors on Charlie Hebdo was a known entity. Just two days after the shooting, Teju Cole published “Unmournable Bodies” at The New Yorker, where he made his case in no uncertain terms:
The killings in Paris were an appalling offense to human life and dignity. The enormity of these crimes will shock us all for a long time.
Read Cole’s essay from two days after the Paris attack, in which he warns against condoning the ideology of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists:
But it is possible to defend the right to obscene and racist speech without promoting or sponsoring the content of that speech. It is possible to approve of sacrilege without endorsing racism. And it is possible to consider Islamophobia immoral without wishing it illegal. Moments of grief neither rob us of our complexity nor absolve us of the responsibility of making distinctions. The A.C.L.U. got it right in defending a neo-Nazi group that, in 1978, sought to march through Skokie, Illinois. The extreme offensiveness of the marchers, absent a particular threat of violence, was not and should not be illegal. But no sensible person takes a defense of those First Amendment rights as a defense of Nazi beliefs. The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were not mere gadflies, not simple martyrs to the right to offend: they were ideologues. Just because one condemns their brutal murders doesn’t mean one must condone their ideology.
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