Burn this book

BURN THIS
BOOK

PEN WRITERS SPEAK OUT ON
THE POWER OF THE WORD

EDITED BY

TONI MORRISON


CONTENTS

1

Peril
Toni M orri son 1


2

Why Write?
J ohn U pdi ke 5


3

Writing in the Dark
D avi d G r oss m an 22


4

Out from Under the Cloud of Unknowing
F ranc i ne P r ose 33


5

The Man, the Men at the Station
P i c o Iy e r 42


C O NTE NTS

6Notes on Literature and Engagement

R uss e l l B anks 51


7

Talking to Strangers
Paul A ust e r 6 6


8

Freedom to Write
O rhan Pam uk 70


9

Notes on Writing and the Nation
Sal m an R us hdi e 78


10

The Sudden Sharp Memory
E d Park 84


11

Witness: The Inward Testimony
N adi ne G ordi m e r 97


Contributors 115
About the Editor 119
Credits CoverCopyright About the Publisher
iv


1

Peril
Toni M orri son

A

uthoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always, fools. But none is foolish enough to give perceptive, dissident writers free range to publish their judgments or follow their creative instincts. They know they do so at their own peril. They are not stupid enough to abandon control (overt or insidious)over media. Their methods include surveillance, censorship, arrest, even slaughter of those writers informing and disturbing the public. Writers who are unsettling, calling into question, taking another, deeper look. Writers—journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights—can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace; and they stanchthe blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.

TO N I M O R R I S O N

That is their peril. Ours is of another sort. How bleak, unlivable, insufferable existence becomes when we are deprived of artwork. That the life and work of writers facing peril must be protected is urgent, but along with that urgency we should remind ourselves that their absence, the choking off of a writer’swork, its cruel amputation, is of equal peril to us. The rescue we extend to them is a generosity to ourselves. We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writing is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justicesystem, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources. The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steadypeeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow. The history of persecuted writers is as long as the history of literature itself. And the efforts to censor, starve, regulate, and annihilate us are clear signs that something important has taken place. Cultural and political forces can sweep clean all but the “safe,” all but state-approved art.
2


PERIL

I have been told thatthere are two human responses to the perception of chaos: naming and violence. When the chaos is simply the unknown, the naming can be accomplished effortlessly—a new species, star, formula, equation, prognosis. There is also mapping, charting, or devising proper nouns for unnamed or stripped-of-names geography, landscape, or population. When chaos resists, either by reforming itself or by rebellingagainst imposed order, violence is understood to be the most frequent response and the most rational when confronting the unknown, the catastrophic, the wild, wanton, or incorrigible. Rational responses may be censure, incarceration in holding camps, prisons, or death, singly or in war. There is however a third response to chaos, which I have not heard about, which is stillness. Such stillness...