What writers don't say or won't do is occasionally of as much significance as what they have written and said. The recent controversy over the acceptance of the Dan David Prize by distinguished joint winners, Margaret Atwood and Amitav Ghosh, shows how those whose talent with language and storytelling has earned them an admiring following are sometimes charged with the difficult task of representing in real life the ethical concerns of their fiction. Activists for Palestinian rights urged Ghosh and Atwood to participate in a boycott of Israeli institutions by refusing the Prize. Both writers declined, citing scepticism of boycotts as a tactic and their duty as writers to engage with Israeli civil society.
The campaign for ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions' against Israel, which echoes the ultimately successful economic and cultural boycotts of the apartheid regime in South Africa, is a fraught issue and I don't intend here to specifically discuss it or the Dan David controversy. (A thoughtful debate can be found on www.kafila org). My broader interest is with literary honours and the role writers play when accepting or refusing them. From the Nobel and Booker to Pulitzers and knighthoods, having one's work recognised, even by institutions in the most compromised situations, can be thrilling. After years of financial insecurity, for the majority of writers, even successful ones, prize money is not to be lightly dismissed. Which one of us would unhesitatingly turn down half a million dollars in the name of principles?
Public interventions
What though of the publicrole of writers, of the voice that has stirred the consciences of its readers in the first place? How should it speak and what might it say? Honours acknowledge not only the winner's achievement but necessarily elicit recognition for the conferring institutions and contexts in return. V.S. Naipaul termed his Nobel Prize ‘a great tribute to England, my home, and to India, home of my ancestors,' conspicuously leaving out the Caribbean home where he had been raised although in his Nobel lecture, he expanded on his ‘exceedingly confused' Caribbean upbringing as mired in darkness. In 1986, Wole Soyinka saluted the anti-racism of the Nobel host country's murdered premier, Olof Palme, (‘an authentic conscience of the white tribe has been stilled') but delivered a powerful critique of apartheid as ‘the last, institutionally functioning product of archaic articles of faith in Euro-Judaic thought.'
Using the limelight
There is a time-honoured minor tradition of using the occasion for speaking out, for or against institutions and practices. Doris Lessing turned down both the Order of the British Empire and a peerage, noting that her youth had been spent trying to ‘undo' her bit of the Empire she was being asked to nominally endorse. In 2004, poet Benjamin Zephaniah told the British establishment where to put the OBE they offered him, a descendant of slaves involved in the contemporary struggle against racism. He frets over a contradiction between compelling literary content and quiescent authorial gestures: ‘There are many black writers who love OBEs, it makes them feel like they have made it. When it suits them, they embrace the struggle against the ruling class and the oppression they visit upon us, but then they join the oppressors' club.' Atwood herself initially withdrew from a Dubai literary festival to protest homophobia while award-winner Tayari Jones has joined an internal boycott of the U.S. state of Arizona in solidarity with challenges to racist immigration laws saying that ‘travelling to Arizona would be tantamount [to] endorsing these draconian policies.'
In his famous Booker acceptance speech for his novel G, John Berger averred that writers could either use prizes to mark another ‘chapter in a success story' or ‘encourage the will to seek alternatives' to ‘the consensus of average opinion.' For Berger, novels necessarily asked questions about ‘the uses' to which one put a life, including the writer's own. Given the Booker McConnell group's historical trading interests in the Caribbean, he felt obliged to think about how his next book — on the lives of Caribbean migrants — would be financed ‘ from the profits made directly out of them or their relatives and ancestors.' Rather than refuse the money, however, he would ‘turn the prize against itself' by sharing it with a group representing resistance to racialised exploitation, such as the Black Panthers.
Condemnation of Berger for ‘literary thuggery' swiftly issued from the arbiters of good tastes. Whatever one might think of the speech itself (it is actually surprisingly gracious, thanking the judges for their independence of mind in selecting his political novel), Berger succeeded in drawing attention to the fact that hallowed institutions too can have chequered histories. Repudiation is not the only principled option but neither need acceptance be accompanied by bland paeans to cultural exchange and boundary crossings. The much-cited ‘only connect' is a fine credo for writers, as Atwood suggests, but surely this line from Howard's End should be read alongside Forster's sad insight in A Passage to India that cross-cultural friendships are imperilled by the material fact of colonialism. Here, in as nuanced an exploration of dialogue and exchange as any, Aziz famously announces, ‘half kissing' Fielding: ‘we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then…you and I shall be friends.' Berger similarly extolled future unity born out of fighting racism: ‘only through and by virtue of this common struggle — it is possible for the descendants of the slave and slavemaster to approach each other again with the amazed hope of potential equals.'
Is it all, as a Zephaniah poem puts it, ‘sick and self-defeating if our dispossessed keep weeping/ And we give these awards meaning'? There are good arguments against boycotting, but powerful voices can clearly use awards to call attention to real-world wrongs. It seems puzzling then that Atwood and Ghosh, in a joint speech at the Dan David ceremony, focused largely on their sense of being ‘bullied' by the boycott call rather than on the desperate situation which generated that call. Their speech — surprisingly vague for such deft historical thinkers and artisans of language — invoked ‘nuance' and ‘ polyphony', ‘hope and good faith', skirting close to what Edward Said describes as ‘the blandishments of approval, uncontroversial eulogizing, sentimental endorsement' of selective notions of peace and hope required by Israeli partisans
Other freedoms at risk
Ghosh and Atwood also emphasised their affilation with P.E.N International which campaigns powerfully for freedom of expression. However, in situations of asymmetrical conflict and bloodshed, it is a necessary humility for writers to remember that they are not usually the primary victims of violence. True, ‘ writers have no armies', but neither do the dispossessed at the receiving end of massive military violence. P.E.N might well remember there are other fundamental freedoms at risk too and far more vulnerable people at the sharp end of persecution.
‘Total quiescence or total rebellion' were not the only options for Edward Said, a committed advocate of Palestinian rights and universal humane values who consistently engaged with dissenting Israelis like the pianist Daniel Barenboim. When the writer was presented the opportunity to be a ‘a witness to persecution and suffering', he wrote, the real enemy was ‘those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take.'
