Twenty years of the most infamous literary fatwa.
Every year, all over the world, in the pages of thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of newspaper pages, magazines and journals – and now e-books, blogs and 140-character Twitter tweets, as well – millions upon millions of words are put into the public domain by tens if not hundreds of thousands of writers. Yet sometimes it can feel as if everyone is speaking at the same time – and no one is listening to anybody else. But there is one figure who seems to be to listening very keenly indeed. Not necessarily in order to hear what is being said, but rather to hear what he or she wants to hear, or even what this figure is afraid of hearing. This is, of course, the censor.
"Working under censorship," according to J M Coetzee, who wrote some of his most powerful novels in apartheid South Africa, "is like being intimate with someone who does not love you, with whom you want no intimacy, but who presses himself in upon you. The censor is an intrusive reader, a reader who forces his way into the intimacy of the writing transaction, forces out the figure of the loved or courted reader, reads your words in a disapproving and censorious fashion." Coetzee describes a time when the Soviet Union had about 70,000 bureaucrats supervising the work of 7000 writers, a staggering ratio of ten to one; if anything, he adds, the ratio of censors to writers in apartheid South Africa was higher.
With the collapse of the communist regimes, the handover of power in South Africa, and the advent of the Internet, censorship in many parts of the world may have generally been expected to decline in favour of freedom of expression. Yet, though the nature of the debate has indeed changed, freedom of expression today has become an increasingly contentious subject of debate all over the world. A committee of the worldwide writers' group International PEN regularly collects and publishes a case list of writers facing pressures or threats for their work. According to its latest statistics, between January and June 2009: nine writers have been killed; another 13 killed for an unknown motive; six have disappeared; 136 have been imprisoned; another 72 have been imprisoned pending investigation; five are under 'judicial concern'; 193 are on trial but not imprisoned; 21 have been given non-custodial sentences; 56 have undergone brief detention; 32 have received death threats; 56 have undergone other threats or forms of harassment; 42 have been attacked or otherwise ill-treated; two have been kidnapped; and one has been in hiding. In all, 644 writers across the world have faced some form of persecution.