Even though I’m a couple weeks late on banned books week, I’ve been reading, apropos of nothing, a number of banned books. I just finished Nabokov’s Lolita and am reading Joyce’s Ulysses – both wonderful, wonderful books (although so far my favorite is Lolita – Nabokov is a genius). I also have a longstanding fascination with the furor that still hovers over Salman Rushdie – as evidenced by the protests across Muslim countries this year when the Queen announced she would knight him. In fact, I read The Satanic Verses primarily because it had been banned (an ironic bit of logic – that banning usually leads to more readers than fewer). I’ve never tried to explain my fascination with the fatwa on Rushdie, although I’ve recognized that my obsession transcends normal explanations. I think it might be this: that imprisonment, censorship, death threats and other forms of oppression from governments and religious organizations do two things. One, they reaffirm what writers want to believe with all their heart: that their writing matters, that it triggers cultural tremors that shake up people’s presuppositions about society. Two, it makes the writer’s life into an action story, a Hollywood danger flick that might or might include some cloak-and-dagger fleeing in the night. At least that’s how I imagine it. And I admit that it fascinates me only because I’m not the one being assassinated or jailed.
Well, over at Ward Six I found a post referencing Cities of Refuge. It’s a program that provides asylum for writers persecuted in their native countries. They say it better:
A City of Refuge is a free space, unfettered by censorship or political repression, in which writers who have undergone such hardship may safely practice their craft.
Asylum is such a beautiful thing. It’s at the core of that undervalued and yet crucial ethic: hospitality. By protecting writers who have been exiled from their countries (and there is a long list – check the website), we are exhibiting the most generous form of hospitality, not only taking others in and providing for their needs, but guarding them against the enemies that would be willing to hunt them down. A noteworthy static gleaned from the site:
Between January and June 2006, 19 writers were murdered, 33 had received death threats and 142 were imprisoned, according to International PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee.
Sorry, I could chalk this up to naivety, but I think the numbers are higher than what I would have guessed. Aren’t you surprised?
Interestingly enough, the term City of Refuge comes from the Old Testament, from the book of Deuteronomy and Joshua, where six cities were designated as places for murderers to flee. Inside the city, they were safe from persecution – including the right of relatives to kill them to avenge their kin. But this concept of the City of Refuge is just the opposite – it’s not murderers hiding but the innocent seeking refuge from murderers.
Although. I wonder – even if this is only the wondering of someone who’s been teaching too much rhetoric in freshman comp classes. Could there be a time when a country shouldn’t offer asylum to a writer? I honestly can’t think of one. I could think of examples when we shouldn’t offer asylum to criminals, people whose crimes were much greater than putting pen to paper, in which case hospitality is upstaged by the ethic of neighborly duty and the moral decision would support extradition. But writers, at least in my judgment, seem to always deserve protection. I will admit, however, that in this case I might have a very slight bias.
