Imagination is the enemy of tyranny

An author from the Western Sahara was told by one of his guards, “You have come here to die. Forget the world outside! No one will ever read you, no one cares about you.” The prisoners used half of their bar of dark soap to write and stave off madness. One of them wrote a poem with hundreds of stanzas about Africa; the others learnt it by heart. They were seven tortured men in a cell with two square meters per person and hardly any light. The ability of some of them to use their imagination and create saved them. Imagination is the enemy of tyranny because it is an individual act that no one can control.

The Earth is not the inexhaustible resource we thought it was; it must be protected as something very precious. The same is true of the freedom of expression – it has no life of its own; it must be protected but also defined in a debate that is constantly being renewed. In a vulnerable world fraught with danger, the free flow of ideas plays a vital role. The visions of our poets and thinkers are not concerned with easy solace or a flight from reality but instead with providing nourishment and energy, creating new connections, devising new solutions. 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt defined four human rights: freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom from fear and freedom from want. The first time the expression folkmord [‘murder of a people’] – that is, the absence of all human rights – was publically used is thought to be when Hjalmar Branting in Stockholm in 1917 called what the Armenians experienced “an organised and systemic folkmord.” Rafael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, who lost his family in the Holocaust, came up with the English word genocide when he lobbied to have genocide included in a UN declaration. On 9 December 1948, roughly sixty years ago, the UN Convention on Genocide was adopted unanimously. The next day came the Universal Declaration of Human Right. The Soviet Union, South Africa and Saudi Arabia, however, abstained.

In recent years, other declarations on human rights have been adopted, for instance, the 1990 Cairo Declaration signed by fifty-seven Muslim countries, which prohibits the defamation of religion. In the UN’s Commission on Human Rights, defamation of religion is now considered on the same level as discrimination against people. This should be condemned by Western intellectuals more sharply than it has. Laws against blasphemy should be abolished; they protect doctrines, not people.

It is people who should be protected, not what they believe. (That is why the law on incitement to ethnic or racial hatred is a good and necessary law.) Before, the emphasis was on similarities; nowadays the stress is on differences in order to create greater understanding about other people’s ways of life. But that leads to demands for special treatment because of a person’s culture and traditions, which means that the rights of the group are placed above those of the individual. The culture of diversity can lead to apartheid: each and every one in their own restricted space.

In Islamic countries, every critical opinion of a regime, quite conveniently, is considered blasphemous or a misinterpretation of the Koran. In Sweden too, I hear people who argue that criticism of Islam is racism, whereas blasphemous statements about Christianity (for instance, Jesus was a homosexual) are considered politically correct – thus, a double standard.

The fatwa against Salman Rushdie is still in force after twenty years; this has been highlighted in declarations from the Parliament in Teheran. “Nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion,” John le Carré concurred. “Without the freedom to offend, [the freedom of expression] ceases to exist,” replied Rushdie, whose Satanic Verses resulted in attacks and deaths. And it has made many publishers reluctant to publish controversial books about Islam.

In Latin America today – for example, in Mexico – writers are being executed by drug-ring death squads or imprisoned – as in Cuba. The methods vary. An author or journalist may be thrown into prison by the police and tortured over the weekend as a warning to his colleagues, or he may be killed by hitmen that the government swears it had nothing to do with.

Freedom is measurable and important to the extent there is a lack of freedom that impedes it. In the commercialised Western world, many writers believe that they are expressing themselves in a void. Their hope is exactly what poets in totalitarian states fear: that the walls too have ears. 

That literature has always been on a collision course with autocrats is not because writers always speak out in favour of freedom but because they create people in their works who can themselves observe, discuss and make important choices.

One of the tasks of literature is to help people understand their own nature and get them to realise that they are not powerless. So censorship affects not just writers but especially readers. If readers are denied a book, they are denied the right to know and discover.

Just as nuclear weapons can be amassed, truth, hypocrisy, stupidity and immorality can be amassed through silencing so that they are cemented together into a wall that is difficult to break through. And while in the end literature outlives censorship, society suffers because there is never time enough to test various choices of action and many experiences never find expression. Michel Tournier has noted, “In a country where poets are silenced or driven into exile, there are inevitable housewives queuing outside the shops.”

The author Lars Gustafsson writes
 
must always come
a step ahead of censorship,
as the mongoose is always a phase ahead of
the rattlesnake.
In the end, what annihilates the concentration-camp state,
the surveillance state, the police state
is the swiftness of the living human (…)
Be on your own flight
and never wait for the steps in the stairway

Literature is like love; it is best enjoyed in private but has social consequences. It maintains that people are unpredictable and unfathomable, that they cannot be defined and thus can never be rationally exploited by others. No geometry, databank or government can map out the needs of people, their dreams and fantasies. That is why our work of art contains something that liberates. That is why the world’s censors devote so much energy to destroying fragile things like dreams, thoughts and works of art – and their creators.

“Literature does not need freedom, it is freedom,” Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll once said in Stockholm. No regime and no society can lay claim to giving literature something that it has by its very nature. A writer must go far beyond invisible boundaries to determine how far he can go; no one can know this ahead of time. For literature is not a function or an institution but a process without an end.

When we make public our own inner experience, we show that nothing we do and feel is private. Paradoxically, it is the exact opposite of having state agents look in our windows and listen to our conversations, because when they say that nothing may be concealed, it is because they want to make it their own statistical property. 

It is uncertain whether literary authors are useful or whether it is in fact their uselessness that makes them necessary. The creative work that gives life to new visions and a beauty never seen before may be the most effective form of protest for a writer. That it is not without risk is something we see today in Italy, Iran and Saudi Arabia, in Turkey and Zimbabwe, in China and Russia.

There are fewer and fewer writers today who remain silent when their colleagues are being persecuted. The Holocaust and the Gulag have taught us that silence can be a crime. Those helped most by this new awareness are not the famous names but rather up-and-coming young authors, journalists, translators. Making public the crimes committed against them will deprive those oppressing free thought of the chance to make a deal in secret.

A person is a face, a voice, a testimony, a hope. She is someone waiting for a signal, depending on an insight.  To understand voices from inside the walls, from inside the pain, imagination is required. One needs patience and time to find the wavelengths. But we are not the ones who are supposed to be running out of time. It is prisoners who are running out of time, because they are losing time and their lives.

Ever since the Enlightenment, the European dream has been a culture that sets no fixed boundaries. On the contrary, it defends a living spirit by expanding the domain of imagination, feeling and play, by being in constant, searching motion. Shouldn’t we then let each culture define its own image against the darkening skies? No. We cannot afford to have different opinions about who has the right to live. Every empathetic relativism must end there.

How could Rushdie’s novel insult people’s faith more than the fact that in many Islamic countries homosexuals are tortured, adulterers stoned and women refused education and independence? Rushdie, a man of the Enlightenment, objects to a universal explanation, one answer that applies to all. There is only one humanity but an unlimited number of gods. If faith in Muhammad or Jesus demands respect, we should also be able to promote respect for our faith in the reality of imagination and reason.

That Rushdie is still in mortal danger is due less to passages that poke fun at Muhammad than his treating the Holy Word as myth and not as steadfast truth. Humour and mercy are two qualities that thrive together, but they do not dwell together in the hearts of fundamentalists. 

Literature is nothing sacred. It is an exchange of dreams, emotions and fantasies that never fossilise into dogma and rote learning. Rushdie again: “Wherever in the world the little room of literature has been closed, sooner or later the walls have come tumbling down.”