Our topic, “The Culture of Peace, Censorship and the Writer” is a vast subject to explore, but I feel that there is an inlet, a path, that might reveal the primary rationale that assaults peace the moment it raises its head.

 

Whilst searching for this path I became obsessed with the thought that we would soon leave our children a world where there will only be a single culture, a single language – the world of the American television series where either scandal or sexual titillation or, worse, wholesale killing will stand as a role model for life. A monolithic culture, in other words, which will have finally succeeded in the exclusion of “the other”, alias, “the outsiders”, “the third”, “the writer”, “the artist”, “the intellectual”. (Perhaps the Internet will prove me wrong on this. I pray so.)

 

And it is on the motivations that unleash the persecution of “the other” – among whom persecuted artists and writers form a considerable percentage – that I would like to offer some thoughts.

 

As some of you know I have been a vociferous campaigner on behalf of the Gypsies, a people who suffered persecution for centuries, who were very nearly exterminated during the Holocaust and whose marginalization, since then, has continued unabated.

 

Thus, latterly, our “enlightened” tabloid, The Sun, indicted Gypsy refugees in the UK of exploiting our good will, happily echoing that scurrilous “economic migrants” label, which the Right Honorable Jack Straw, United Kingdom’s “compassionate”, “progressive”, “whiter than white” Home Secretary, the flag-bearer of “New Labor”, directed at the Gypsies some months ago.

 

Since such statements – what shall we call them: chauvinist, elitist, racist? – not only negates the prosperity immigrants have brought to every country in the world, but also suggests that they are predominantly tricksters or pickpockets and, probably, plague-carriers, too, my budding expectations of a more humane future were shattered at a stroke. As a result, I hastily retreated to my old conviction – one which, over the years, had become my leitmotif – and bewailed to my wife that this new century would end as it began: with scant concern for human life or rights. As in every era in the past, humankind would continue to mould morality by conjugating, as it saw fit, the oldest trinity – power, expediency and exclusion.

 

My wife, who is a very wise woman, disagreed vehemently. Dismissing my desire for a better world as a romantic, if not irrational, ideology, she drew my attention to Isaiah Berlin’s distrust of “utopias”.

 

You are familiar with the argument. Much of the slaughter that made the last century the worst in history was perpetrated by man’s demands for the establishment of an immaculate state with a perfect political system, i.e., utopia. But utopias cannot exist if we accept as an inalienable fact that they only hope for a better future lies in the suffrage of personal freedom; for, utopias, by definition, require a uniformity of behavior that cannot accommodate the range and vagaries of such freedom. Put bluntly, utopia means blind conformity; and, invariably, blind conformity leads to autocratic rule – at its worst, to the terrors of Nazism and Communism.

 

My wife then lectured me on the enlightenment that the West, particularly Europe, has achieved through the centuries. She pointed out the growing number of democracies which devote themselves to their people’s welfare. She spoke of the United Nations Charter on Human Rights which is increasingly guiding the enslaved and the oppressed towards enfranchisement. Could I not see that, at long last, we had come to accept – even to understand – the sanctity of life?

 

At first, I felt swayed by her words – not least because I subscribe to Isaiah Berlin’s view. But there is a part in me – the conditioned reflex of the exile, my father once called it – which is always wary of hearty optimism.

 

And this reflex insisted that my contention was not, in effect, about utopias, that it was far more fundamental, that its provenance lay, in an area that might be called proto-utopia, that is to say, in the teachings that produced in us, in the first place, the yearning for utopias, the compulsion to kill and die for utopias.

 

(As aside here, if I may. On the myth of the enlightened West – and particularly of its putative trailblazer, Europe – I must state that, throughout the ages, that continent of “glorious cultures”, that “cradle of civilizations” with which we so arrogantly belittle all other cultures and civilizations, has spawned some of the worst tyrants, religious orders and killer-states.)

 

Wherever we look at the world, we see an autism which, history suggests, the West has not only wholeheartedly embraced, but also zealously exported to the rest of the globe: the autism of hatred for “the other”. Hatred for other religions, nations, races, factions; for other families, elders and children; even hatred for the sexually other. Hatred that is almost palpable, that sears the skin and churns our innards with its fatal poison.

 

Which brings me back to my contention…

 

Since humanity started chronicling its deeds and aspirations, visionaries have always put the need for peace and prosperity – in effect, the need for utopia – as the priority for the betterment of the human condition. Whether, like Isaiah Berlin, we distrust utopias or not, the concept is commendable. Where we go wrong is in the ways we seek to turn these needs into reality!

 

We do it in ways which ensure failure. We do it by devising political systems which are rooted in the most paranoid portions of our sacred texts. We do it by division and exclusion; by dehumanizing brothers and neighbors. In total rebuttal of the best Biblical advice, “love the stranger in thy midst”, we do it by creating the anti-person, the other.

 

Every leader, every religion, every movement that exhorted us towards the creation of a better world, has done so by commanding us to embrace only our kind and to vilify the rest. And to convince us to do so, they have always sought to mobilize, subtly or blatantly, our free-floating uncertainties and insecurities.

You may ask, if, as I claim, division and exclusion are the basic strategies of our leaders, religions and political systems, are there any alternatives?

 

At the risk of being accused of romanticism, I would say yes.

 

We carry the alternative in our souls. We are born with, or as another school of thought would have it, acquire from dominant moral tenets, an ethical foundation that counterbalances our baser instincts and upholds certain primary commandments. According to the British psychoanalyst, D. W. Winnicott, the mind, irrespective of the damage it has suffered, endeavors to attain health. So does humankind. Forever threatened by its compulsion for self-destruction, it, nonetheless, desperately seeks survivial. In effect, it seeks a way of life that respects life, that upholds the equality of every person, that repudiates discrimination, marginalization, destitution, famine, tyranny, ethnic cleansing, genocide. Simply, a way of life which identifies hatred of “the other” as the root of all evil, as the very force which produces those soulless souls who preach “final solutions” and whom Wilhelm Reich called “armored men”.

 

You might say, such a way of life already exists, that it is incorporated in the religions that I, in such a cavalier fashion, accuse of divisiveness and exclusion. You might point at this gathering – and at all the countless people who uphold and campaign for human rights – some, at the risk of their lives – and accuse me of irreverence, impiety, blasphemy, etc.

 

It is true there are many teachings, from many prophets, which, exhorting love for the stranger as an integral part of their message of universal love, can be singled out as the antithesis of “armored men”. The fault does not lie in the content of their teaching. It lies in the tenor with which the teaching is imparted. As I have suggested earlier, the tenor is exclusive – elitist. It is imbued with hatred. It is manipulative of our fears and baser instincts. It has been carefully crafted to serve hate as love. Its aim is to herd us into a unit.

 

Offering the carrot that full obeisance of its doctrines will ensure for us wholeness and spiritual purity – not to mention a life of eternal bliss after life on earth – it seeks to create a colossal power base which will elevate the particular religious institution into a position of superiority over others. True, the ultimate objective of most religions is to achieve universality, to unite the whole world under its creed, and by so doing refute the charge that it is exclusive. But this ultimate objective, a utopia, in essence, runs very close to the political utopias of The Third Reich and Stalinist USSR. The only outcome of such a realization would be the death of the spirit, the destruction of individuality, the extinction of freedom and the worship of paranoia. In these circumstances that sublime humanist phrase of Thomas Jefferson, “the pursuit of happiness”, which makes the US Declaration of Independence the most revolutionary text in history, would become incomprehensible because “happiness” would cease to have a meaning.

 

Then only hate would rule. And it would rule absolutely. For only hate can nourish a society built on hate. And the architects of these societies will have been the great religions.

 

Consequently, we need to go beyond religion; we need to go, to quote Pessoa, “searching beyond God to surprise/The Master’s secret and the profound Good”.

 

For those who doubt my contention, I would suggest they read their Holy books again and start counting the number of people killed, as de rigeur, at the threshold of one hatred or another.

 

They will find that Judaism, whilst considering life sacred and commanding that we should not kill, not only glorifies the destruction of countless peoples opposing it, but proceeds to promise a messianic kingdom only to the Jews and to no one else.

 

They will find that Christian missionaries who, whilst seemingly preaching Jesus’ message of universal love, take time off from internecine warfare only to continue to destroy, without a twinge of conscience, the identities and cultures of delicate pagans in South America and elsewhere as their predecessors did before them.

 

They will find that Islam, praised by its followers, as the ultimate religion of tolerance and enlightenment, has either pursued internecine conflicts like the Christians or has been held hostage by cabals of “good men of god” who have been – and are – either illiterate or opportunist or demented or godless. They will find that these “good men of god”, fired by the narratives of conflict in The Koran not only glorify death – other peoples’ – but also preach the superiority of the Faithful over the Infidel.

 

Much the same can be said of religions where hierarchies and/or caste systems prevail.

 

Let me repeat what I said a moment ago. Though, in the main, religions attempt to inculcate a temperate morality, they do so by mobilizing the hatred in us. Salvation is offered only if we conform to its doctrines, only if we declare allegiance to its hierarchy, only if, like soldiers, we obey and serve; the unconverted, the non-conformist, the other, the stranger, the writer, the artist, the intellectual is always excluded. And from the moment they are pronounced “excluded”, they become dispensable, meriting expulsion and marginalization. And on the off chance that by appealing to our good nature they might seduce us away from the prescribed path, they become a threat that must be destroyed.

 

In our world of fears, the prescribed path, the assurance that we are superior to others, becomes a non-life. And, tragically, such a non-life becomes – is considered –worth living. At the very least, it promises security; at the most, for those who can make good use of its doctrines of hatred and exclusion, it offers authority.

 

In any case, the alternative, for most people, is terrifying. The alternative means dehumanization. It means carrying the mark of the other, of the inferior, of the alien, of the untermench. It means, to use the Nazi terminology for Gypsies, being “a life unworthy of life”.

 

Permit me to refer to a paper I gave some years back in relation to the diabolical fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie by one of those “good men of god”, Ayatollah Khomeni.

 

In it I made a special reference to an article by the psychoanalyst, Christopher Hering, called, “The Problem of the Alien”. This paper, analyzing the science-fiction film, Alien – and the sequels that further exploited its successful formula – discourses on a condition which Hering defines as “emotional fascism”. Referring to the basic tenet of psychology that a person’s development is determined by the struggle between two opposing forces, that of the instinct to maintain life and that of the instinct to return to primary matter – in effect, self-destruction – Herin argues that if a force can be mythified as life-threatening, or worse, as an arch-enemy that threatens all humanity – as the aliens were depicted – then psychotic fiction can masquerade as objective truth. Thereafter, he postulates, the most destructive impulses – impulses we would abhor any other time – can be tolerated, even nurtured as a means of salvation. By the same token, all feelings of compassion, concern, doubt, proscription can be discarded. From that stage onwards the idea of annihilation – of a final solution – receives the sanction to develop into a rational, appropriate and justifiable objective, indeed, a moral imperative.

 

Psychotic fiction as objective truth is precisely what religions have always perpetrated. They have continuously created a narrative wherein alien peoples and races can be depicted as heartless, brainless, soulless creatures of destruction who must be subjugated or exterminated so that not only the followers of the particular religion, but also an undefined summum bonum of immeasurable value for humanity can survive. And they have masqueraded this psychotic fiction as truth.

 

Thus the five continents have been repeatedly buried under the ashes of millions of indigenous innocents, Jews and Gypsies, millions of “aliens” labeled heretic or asocial or homosexual or promiscuous and so on…

 

Can this type of indoctrination be remedied? Can we devise moral code that do not primarily work on the principle of division and exclusion?

 

I repeat: yes. We carry the remedy in our souls. We can direct our ethical beliefs towards that healthy soul that respects life.

 

Let me be bolder and submit that salvation lies with women. Whereas men worship death, women worship life. Therefore, those who naturally respect life must take charge of the survival of life.

 

That, in the first instance, means dismantling our patriarchal societies, a process that would require, to quote Pessoa again, “a thorough learning in how to unlearn” our religions so that we can attain faiths which not only eschew divisiveness and exclusion, but also embrace pluralism and all the joys of pluralism.

 

Carnac
- Tomaz Salamun

In his hunger he used many feathers. Myth

sews and sells him. A cruller twists

apart like a peehole. A beautiful girl

washes up. A robin binds a pale violet silk. Is

there a pebble in a peach? Is the pebble

the while Orpheus? Carnac has teeth and flames.

The morning makes a cross over the sea gull. The wind

speaks. He gives shape to what it rooted out.

The sun closes. White curtains framing

the dark night. The fire is closed and stored.

The murmuring slows. I see the grass

and the bare neck of a rooster. He watches over

the decanting of dolphins. The bone is inverted.

Tonight we sleep in paradise.

 

Writing, Reading, Gaining the Respect of Our Peers

Publishing: how things are for women writers in Mexico

by Lucina Kathmann

I was born in the United States, but I have been living in Mexico for 19 years. My children were born here, and I’m not planning to return to the United States. When I lived there, and for the first few years in Mexico, I wrote in English and tried to market almost everything I wrote in the United States. But I always planned, once I got accustomed to the Spanish language, to start writing in Spanish, to contribute to the culture I now lived in.

 

In 1990 I saw a sign that said that Daniel Sada was coordinating a literary workshop at the art school which serves as the local office of the National Institute of Fine Arts. In most towns this would be called the Culture House. In our town it’s called Bellas Artes (Fine Arts). My youngest baby was by then just big enough to leave for a few hours, so I ran right in and signed up.

 

Since then, years have passed. Daniel left, other coordinators came and went, a budget cut someplace left us for several years without a coordinator at all. Throughout everything, I have maintained my relationship with the group of people from this workshop, my literary “family,” and they have kept me, too. (I say “family”; the more frequent word for a like-minded workshop full of people in Mexico is a “generation”.) They are Maria Luisa and Maruja and Victor and Carmen. My late husband, Charlie, was another of us.

 

These are the people who help me with all my stories in Spanish, they are the people who help me with the Spanish text for the IPWWC newsletter (Maruja, who is also a graphic artist, even designs the cover). We travel together to conferences, we give literary readings together, sometimes alone, sometimes in conjunction with other groups. We always meet on Monday nights, but in fact we are available to each other many other times whenever a literary deadline pops up. We also may be friends in the social sense, but the real heart of our relationship is literary. We know each others’ work and the state of each other’s literary development very well. We can often make suggestions about which of each others’ pieces would be appropriate for some reading or competition, or, too rarely, some publication.

 

I know I have had wonderful luck with my own group, but we are by no means alone in working this way. A great many writers in Mexico work in small groups. The system has many advantages. It provides us with people who will listen to our work, which is an important way to break our isolation. It also provides a source of stimulus, support, constructive criticism, and a group of peers. Depending on the coordinator, we may learn any number of skills. Many of the groups meet under the auspices of the National Institute of Fine Arts, and this means that we can be found by writers interested in joining us, and that the government and others can reach us with information about literary events, prizes and competitions of possible interest.

 

In Mexico, where most cultural resources are concentrated in the capital, for a long time it was just about impossible to be a writer any place else. Since few women were in a position to move to the capital, they were especially marginated.

 

In the 50’s, the government started funding literary workshops in the capital under the coordination of very good and well-known writers. Through this project, famous generations of writers sprung up. By the 80’s, it became obvious that this way of working would be practical for stimulating the production of literature outside the capital as well. The writers started traveling once a week – or once a month, or whatever was practical – to coordinate workshops in the various provinces. The movement caught on, because the provinces were full of people, largely women, who wanted to write.

 

Now, not only are workshops to be found all over the country, they have become independent of the capital. They are still full of women. Daniel Sada, who has coordinated many literary workshops said, “In Mexico there are some 600 literary workshops with an average of five members a piece. The majority and best and hardest working of these writers are women.”

 

By now some widely recognized women writers have emerged from the workshop movement. One is the novelist Martha Cerda, president of PEN of Guadalajara, a chapter from whose novel appeared in the September 1995 issue of Shakti (Vol. 2, No. 1).

 

In most of the workshops, the women participants are generally older than the men. I believe this is because the women writers bloom after their children have gotten big. In some contexts, we have been made to feel self-conscious about this. For example, our state has held statewide writers’ conference for the last four years. At the first conference, there were only two women, both of us from San Miguel, both of us 20 years older than almost everyone else there. During the conference, my husband stood up and said he thought there were not enough women writers present. His remark caused giggles and comments about how some pretty young women would be a great idea.

 

Since then it is possible that the colleagues of my state have matured. For one thing, many more women attend the meetings now, and for another, we have developed a history with each other as writers. One writer liked a story of mine, I liked what another one said about a poem. Maria Luisa disagreed with a third on a point of literary criticism, and this is the sort of thing we would all rather talk about.

 

But even from the beginning, any writer we have ever invited to San Miguel to read with us has come. Male and female, old and young, we are all very hungry for the respect of our peers. I think this is natural, though it is intensified by our being so very under-published. Without many books and a big readership to point to, we really need each others’ recognition.

 

Women and men of the provinces, we are almost all very much under-published. Iwent to a large book fair that represented just about all the market in the Spanish language, certainly all the market in Latin America, in 1994. It was a project of the PEN Women Writers’ Committee. I went from booth to booth with a questionnaire, trying to find out how many womens’ books the publishers were publishing, and which ones would be interested in publishing more. I found out that about 10% of the books being published were by women. I didn’t ask, but I also believe the statistics would show that the vast majority of those writers whose works are published are from the capital. There is too little publication of almost all the Mexican writers, specifically too little publication of writers from the provinces, and these overlooked writers are largely women.

 

Though at book fairs I see 900 page tomes, so I know that the big houses publish them, that happens in the capital and I know very little about it; that’s another Mexico. Insofar as my group has sources of publication, they are small and infrequent literary magazines that perpetually badger us to writer shorter and shorter stories, because they have no means to publish anything long. Since I started writing for Mexican publications, my average story must be about 1/3 the length it used to be. In the USA, a short story usually means 2000 words or more; here, almost nobody would take one that length.

 

Our other big problem is readership. The average print run for a book in Mexico is 1,000 or 2,000 copies, because, though we are a large country, we have very few readers. As of a few years ago, an official of the state of Nuevo Leon told a women writers’ conference I attended that the average Mexican has 4.5 years of education, and that the present goal of the government is to increase this to 9 years. This statistic may be out of date now; I hope so. There are many new secondary schools, many of which, especially in remote areas, teach by means of televised curricula. But even so, the quality of the curriculum at every level does nothing to promote reading literature. There is very little literature in the syllabus, and most Mexican children have no concept whatever of reading for pleasure, with one big exception, which is comic books.

 

The Mexican comic book industry is huge. The books are called historietas, and they are being read on every bus I have ever been on. They are about fourth grade level in their vocabulary, and they are stock genre stories, romances or superhero books. I know of some creative attempts to deal with the readership problems by entering the sphere of comic books, such as the feminist comic book series, Esporadica, by Adriana Batista (now no longer publishing, unfortunately, as it was my favorite) and a history of Mexico in 10 comic books I once owned.

 

But most of us don’t want to go into comic books, so we’re stuck self-publishing in very small quantities when we can afford it and dealing with the very few bookstores and absolute lack of a distribution network, or writing very short short stories for publication in rather miserable periodicals, or giving a lot of readings and laboriously building our audience person by person. In fact, we do all of it at once, and in the course of time we have found that we are establishing a little following, and we are surprised and glad.

 

The Turning

- Toya Gurung

Powder earth, ant hill, climbs high. 

Bushes have been uprooted 

to show nakedness 

or to tame womanhood.

Even the lone traveler 

has too much guts,

he calls endlessly, 

screams through dry throat. 

Leaves are falling one by one, 

they are covering bare flesh.

Irritated breeze comes, 

takes a swipe at them, leaves fall again.

One kick, there is no blood, or wound, 

the skies are scattered.

On the other side, 

the pollen is flying, dry dust. 

One branch yellows, 

browns, and hangs.

You feel these things 

add beauty to the road, 

do you traveler?

Understanding security, 

the thorns do not let you 

touch the branches, they protect them!

The stunted tree continually comforts 

the incarnations that will hang 

until someone pulls at them. 

You count and walk 

or you fall incapable, you fall tired. 

People are walking on the road, 

people are lying on top of it. 

Are they tattered? 

What of those that are of the imagination?

Now the buds form. Born thickly, 

they are uncountable, 

they are birthing, growing. 

What of these cruel travelers 

that pick and eat the figures of the skies?

You are torn, or within, 

you are playing for the public.

Where will your sight be? 

What will you see from the bus? 

In the eyes seven colors dance. 

These moments are shattered, 

where will the body crash?

Adapted by Pallav Ranjan

 

Cupid’s Shadow

- Doma Tsering
 

He was the first

guy I noticed

the first one who

made me think of

infinite possibilities

porcelain skin a

flexible canvas

of weathered mosaics

and intricate textures

of pink and potential

blue-green eyes

a coastal sea

of deep passion and

unquenched thirst for life

beautiful hands

subtle demeanor

so much warmth

and sensitivity

so unbearable

just beckoning me

to sit on his

lap where I

wanted to be

content

lovingly held

comforted and protected

I must be nuts

surely demented

what was this

my mind had invented

what was this

this brush with

cupid’s shadow

experienced without

bow and arrow

It couldn’t be

happening to me

not me, not me

why me, why me

life’s not fair

he liked my hair

what else of cupid’s

shadow

will I ever know.