Brown Alumni Magazine, RI
Jan 24 2007

Choose Your Words Carefully

Writing would be much easier, says Salmon Rushdie, if its purpose
were merely to entertain.

By Lawrence Goodman

[CENSORSHIP]

The writers up on the Salomon Center stage may have come from different
countries, but they all had one thing in common-they’ve been persecuted
for speaking their minds.

"We are gambling with our lives when we choose a word," said Iranian
novelist Shahriar Mandanipour about the lack of free expression in his
native land. Mandanipour spoke at a panel on freedom of expression
that was part of a weeklong program titled "Strange Times, My Dear:
A Freedom-to-Write Literary Festival." Speaking alongside Mandanipour
was 2006 Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, who was threatened with
imprisonment in his native Turkey after he spoke openly about the
early twentieth-century mass murder of Armenians there.

At the forum Pamuk said he preferred not to speak about his battle with
the Turkish government. "I don’t want to go into it," he responded
when a student asked about his experience, which ended in late 2005
after the government dropped all charges.

Instead, Pamuk said, he worried about censorship in the West. As
immigrants from the East enter Europe, he said, they are "very roughly
treated." As a result, when they perceive insults against their culture
they call for less free speech or the banning of certain books. Then,
he said, Western governments ignore the underlying issues of racism
and cheap labor and instead "choose to ban books, plays, and films
just to please these immigrants."

The festival featured a one-on-one conversation with Salman Rushdie,
who in 1989 famously became the target of a fatwa offering a reward for
his murder. In an interview with conference organizer Robert Coover,
the T.B. Stowell Adjunct Professor of Literary Arts, Rushdie said
that writers have an obligation to be more than entertainers.

"It would give us [writers] a much better life if we were
entertaining," he said, "if all we were doing was to put things out
there to give people a pleasing evening."

Rushdie said the writer should be less a political activist than
an excavator of the memories and experiences a society wishes to
suppress. "It’s not a question of seeking out a political conflict,"
he explained, "but simply remembering the way it was."

Rushdie noted he will be starring as a gynecologist in an upcoming
movie directed by Helen Hunt. "Helen said that when she wrote the
part she was thinking of Salman," Rushdie said. "I have been thinking
what it means that when Helen Hunt thinks of me, she thinks of her
gynecologist."