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A
writer's freedom This
is
the text of a paper delivered at the Conference on ' Writings from
Africa:
Concern and Evocation', held by the South African Indian Teachers'
Association
in What
is a writer's freedom? To
me it is his right to maintain
and publish to the world a deep, intense, private view of the situation
in
which he finds his society. If he is to work as well as he can, he must
take,
and be granted, freedom from the public conformity of political
interpretation,
morals and tastes. Living
when we do, where we do,
as we do, ' freedom' leaps to mind as a political concept exclusively -
and
when people think of freedom for writers they visualize at once the
great mound
of burnt, banned and proscribed books our civilization has piled up; a
pyre to
which our own country has added and is adding its contribution. The
right to be
left alone to write what one pleases is not an academic issue to those
of us
who live and work in All
that the writer can do, as
a writer, is to go on writing the truth as he sees it. That is what I
mean by
his ' private view' of events, whether they be the great public ones of
wars
and revolutions, or the individual and intimate ones of daily, personal
life. As
to the fate of his books —
there comes a time in the history of certain countries when the
feelings of
their writers are best expressed in this poem, written within the
lifetime of
many of us, by Bertholt Brecht: When
the Regime ordered that books with dangerous teachings Should
be publicly burnt and everywhere Oxen
were forced to draw carts full of books To
the
funeral pyre, An
exiled poet, One
of
the best, Discovered
with fury when he studied the list Of
the
burned, that his books Had
been forgotten. He rushed to his writing table On
wings of anger and wrote a letter to those in power. Burn
me, he wrote with hurrying pen, burn me! Do
not
treat me in this fashion. Don't leave me out. Have
I
not Always
spoken the truth in my books? And now You
treat me like a liar! I order you: Burn
me! Not
a very good poem, even if
one makes allowance for the loss in translation from the German
original;
nevertheless, so far as South African writers are concerned, we can
understand
the desperate sentiments expressed while still putting up the fight to
have our
books read rather than burnt. Bannings
and banishments are
terrible known hazards a writer must face, and many have faced, if the
writer
belongs where freedom of expression, among other freedoms, is withheld,
but
sometimes creativity is frozen rather than destroyed. A Thomas Mann
survives
exile to write a Dr Faustus; a
Pasternak smuggles Dr Zhivago out of
a ten-year silence; a Solzhenitsyn emerges with his terrible world
intact in
the map of The Gulag Archipelago;
nearer our home continent: a Chinua Achebe, writing from America, does
not trim
his prose to please a Nigerian regime under which he cannot live; a
Dennis
Brutus grows in reputation abroad while his poetry remains forbidden at
home; and
a Breyten Breytenbach, after accepting the special dispensation from
racialist
law which allowed him to visit his home country with a wife who is not
white,
no doubt has to accept the equally curious circumstance that his
publisher
would not publish the book he was to write about the visit, since it
was sure
to be banned.* Through
all these vicissitudes, real writers go on writing
the truth as they see it. And they do not agree to censor themselves .
. . You
can burn the books, but the integrity of creative artists is not
incarnate on
paper any more than on canvas - it survives so long as the artist
himself
cannot be persuaded, cajoled or frightened into betraying it. All
this, hard though it is to
live, is the part of the writer's fight for freedom the world finds
easiest to
understand. There
is another threat to that
freedom, in any country where political freedom is withheld. It is a
more
insidious one, and one of which fewer people will be aware. It's a
threat which
comes from the very strength of the writer's opposition to repression
of
political freedom. That other, paradoxically wider, composite freedom -
the
freedom of his private view of life, may be threatened by the very
awareness of
what is expected of him. And often what is expected of him is
conformity to an
orthodoxy of opposition. There
will be those who regard
him as their mouth-piece; people whose ideals, as a human being, he
shares, and
whose cause, as a human being, is his own. They may be those whose
suffering is
his own. His identification with, admiration for, and loyalty to these
set up a
state of conflict within him. His integrity as a human being demands
the
sacrifice of everything to the struggle put up on the side of free men.
His
integrity as a writer goes the moment he begins to write what he ought
to
write. This
is - whether all admit it
or not – and will continue to be a particular problem for black writers
in Neither
is it, as the claim
will be made, 'a language of the people' in a situation where certainly
it is
very important that imaginative writing must not reach the elite only.
The
jargon of struggle lacks both the inventive pragmatism and the .poetry
of
common speech - those qualities the writer faces the challenge to
capture and
explore imaginatively, expressing as they do the soul and identity of a
people
as no thousandth-hand ' noble evocation' of clichés ever could. The
black writer needs his
freedom to assert that the idiom of Chatsworth, Dimbaza, Sowetot ** is
no less
a vehicle for the expression of pride, self respect, suffering, anger -
or
anything else in the spectrum of thought and emotion - than the
language of
Watts or Harlem. The
fact is, even on the side
of the angels, a writer has to reserve the right to tell the truth as
he sees
it, in his own words, without being accused of letting the side down.
For as
Philip Toynbee has written, ' the writer's gift to the reader is not
social
zest or moral improvement or love of country, but an enlargement of the
reader's apprehension'. This
is the writer's unique
contribution to social change. He needs to be left alone, by brothers
as well
as enemies, to make this gift. And he must make it even against his own
inclination. I need hardly add this does not mean he retreats to an
ivory
tower. The gift cannot be made from any such place. The other day,
Jean-Paul
Sartre gave the following definition of the writer's responsibility to
his
society as an intellectual, after himself having occupied such a
position in
France for the best part of 70 years: 'He is someone who is faithful to
a
political and social body but never stops contesting it. Of course,- a
contradiction may arise between his fidelity and his contestation, but
that's a
fruitful contradiction. If there's fidelity without contestation,
that's no
good: one is no longer a free man.' When
a writer claims these
kinds of freedom for himself, he begins to understand the real
magnitude of his
struggle. It is not a new problem and of all the writers who have had
to face
it, I don't think anyone has seen it more clearly or dealt with it with
such
uncompromising honesty as the great nineteenth century Russian, Ivan
Turgenev.
Turgenev had an immense reputation as a progressive writer. He was
closely
connected with the progressive movement in Czarist Russia and
particularly with
its more revolutionary wing headed by the critic Belinsky and
afterwards by the
poet Nekrasov. With his sketches and stories, people said that Turgenev
was
continuing the work Gogol had begun of awakening the conscience of the
educated
classes in But
his friends, admirers and
fellow progressives stopped short, in their understanding of his
genius, of the
very thing that made him one - his scrupulous reserve of the writer's
freedom
to reproduce truth and the reality of life, even if this truth does not
coincide
with his own sympathies. When
his greatest novel, Fathers and Sons, was published in
1862,
he was attacked not only by the right for pandering to the
revolutionary
nihilists, but far more bitterly by the left, the younger generation
themselves, of whom his chief character in the novel, Bazarov, was both
prototype and apotheosis. The radicals and liberals, among whom
Turgenev
himself belonged, lambasted him as a traitor because Bazarov was
presented with
all the faults and contradictions that Turgenev saw in his own type, in
himself, so to speak, and whom he created as he did because - in his
own words
- ' in the given case, life happened to be like that'. The
attacks were renewed after
the publication of another novel, Smoke,
and Turgenev decided to write a series of autobiographical
reminiscences which
would allow him to reply to his critics by explaining his views on the
art of
writing, the place of the writer in society, and what the writer's
attitude to
the controversial problems of his day should be. The result was a
series of
unpretentious essays that make up a remarkable testament to a writer's
creed.
Dealing particularly with Bazarov and Fathers
and Sons, he writes of his critics,'. . . generally speaking they
have not
got quite the right idea of what is taking place in the mind of a
writer or
what exactly his joys and sorrows, his aims, successes and failures
are. They
do not, for instance, even suspect the pleasure which Gogol mentions
and which consists
of, castigating oneself and one's faults in the imaginary characters
one
depicts; they are quite sure that all a writer does is to "develop his
ideas "... Let me illustrate my meaning by a small example. I am an
inveterate and incorrigible Westerner. I have never concealed it and I
am not
concealing it now. And yet in spite of that it has given me great
pleasure to
show up in the person of Panshin (a character in A House of
Gentlefolk)
all the common and vulgar sides of the Westerners: I made the Slavophil
Lavretsky "crush him utterly ". Why did I do it, I who consider the
Slavophil doctrine false and futile? Because, in the given case, life,
according to my ideas, happened to be
like that, and what I wanted above all was to be sincere and
truthful. 'In
depicting Bazarov's
personality, I excluded everything artistic from the range of his
sympathies, I
made him express himself in harsh and unceremonious tones, not out of
an absurd
desire to insult the younger generation, but simply as a result of my
observations
of people like him . . . My personal predilections had nothing to do
with it.
But I expect many of my readers will be surprised if I tell them that
with the
exception of Bazarov's views on art, I share almost all his
convictions.' And
in another essay, Turgenev
sums up: "The life that surrounds him (the writer) provides him with
the
content of his works; he is its concentrated reflection; but he is as
incapable
of writing a panegyric as a lampoon . . . When all is said and done -
that is beneath
him. Only those who can do no better submit to a given theme or carry
out a
programme.' These
conditions about which I
have been talking are the special, though common ones of writers
beleaguered in
the time of the bomb and the color bar, as they were in the time of the
jack-boot and rubber truncheon, and, no doubt, back through the ages
whose
shameful symbols keep tally of oppression in the skeleton cupboard of
our civilizations. Other
conditions, more
transient, less violent, affect the freedom of a writer's mind. What
about literary fashion,
for example? What about the cycle of the innovator, the imitators, the
debasers, and then the bringing forth of an innovator again? A writer
must not
be made too conscious of literary fashion, any more than he must allow
himself
to be inhibited by the mandarins, if he is to get on with work that is
his own.
I say 'made conscious' because literary fashion is a part of his
working
conditions; he can make the choice of rejecting it, but he cannot
choose
whether it is urged upon him or not by publishers and readers, who do
not let
him forget he has to eat. That
rare marvel, an innovator,
should be received with shock and excitement. And his impact may set
off people
in new directions of their own. But the next innovator rarely, I would
almost
say never comes from his imitators, those who create a fashion in his
image.
Not all worthwhile writing is an innovation, but I believe it always
comes from
an individual vision, privately pursued. The pursuit may stem from a
tradition,
but a tradition implies a choice of influence, whereas a fashion makes
the
influence of the moment the only one for all who are contemporary to it. A
writer needs all these kinds
of freedom, built on the basic one of freedom from censorship. He does
not ask
for shelter from living, but for exposure to it without possibility of
evasion.
He is fiercely engaged with life on his own terms, and ought to be left
to it,
if anything is to come of the struggle. Any government, any society -
any
vision of a future society - that has respect for its writers must set
them as
free as possible to write in their own various ways, in their own
choices of
form and language, and according to their own discovery of truth. Again,
Turgenev expresses this
best: ' Without freedom in the widest sense of the word - in relation
to
oneself . . . indeed, to one's people and one's history, a true artist
is
unthinkable; without that air, it is impossible to breathe.' And
I add my last word: In that
air alone, commitment and creative freedom become one. • *
The
Afrikaans poet Breyten Breytenbach returned to **
Chatsworth and
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