"First they came for the Boy Reporter & shelved him alongside Persepolis & Sandman, & I did not speak out, because I was not a Boy Reporter"

Ignoring the Oscars altogether (since they were awarding mimickry and nostalgia all the way through), let's turn our eyes upon China Miéville, who is in magnificent form with this post on Tintin in the Congo and its legal wrangle in Belgium:

When human rights lawyer David Enright asks for the book to be sold as an adult work, while explicitly, repeatedly, stressing that he does not advocate banning it, nonetheless, cometh the resentment-spewing dissemblers in the comments insisting that he is supporting ‘censorship’. This is a degree of point-missing so great it is hard to believe it is not performative.

(Indeed, an astoundingly small proportion of arguments ‘for free speech’ & ‘against censorship’ or ‘banning’ are, in fact, about free speech, censorship or banning. It is depressing to have to point out, yet again, that there is a distinction between having the legal right to say something & having the moral right not to be held accountable for what you say. Being asked to apologise for saying something unconscionable is not the same as being stripped of the legal right to say it. It’s really not very fucking complicated. Cry Free Speech in such contexts, you are demanding the right to speak any bilge you wish without apology or fear of comeback. You are demanding not legal rights but an end to debate about & criticism of what you say. When did bigotry get so needy? This assertive & idiotic failure to understand that juridical permissibility backed up by the state is not the horizon of politics or morality is absurdly resilient.)

There are a very few attempts to insist that Tintin au Congo is really not racist, but this is a hard line to take, given its shameful cavalcade of j***aboo grotesquerie & preening white supremacism. How then, can that, the key issue, the racism of a book that shows stupid, rolling-eyed & thick-lipped Congolese unable to string coherent language together or add 2 & 2, worshipping a white boy’s dog, considering him a ‘great Juju man’, be avoided?

i) One may admit that aspects are unfortunate, but simply refuse to engage with the question of racism.

One commentator, who proudly proclaims his predisposition to find against liberal do-gooders (& does so, though on utterly confused grounds), is forced to admit the book is ‘shockingly patronising & insensitive’. He simply ducks, however, the key question of whether it is racist. Similarly, Guy Staggs in the Telegraph stresses only that ‘campaigners claim that Tintin in the Congo causes offence’: indeed they do, & one might think the rightness or not of that claim is germane to the issue. Forlorn & unexamined, however, it goes, as Staggs segues blithely to allowing, questions of race ignored, that the book is not ‘a good read’.

As if that is what we were talking about. (This - It’s Not Racist It’s Just Not Very Good - is a sort of evil-twin variant of the more common How Can Little Black Sambo Be Racist I Read It As A Child ; I Loved It & What’s More I Understood Sambo Was The Hero (cf also How Can I Be A Sexist I Love Women In Fact I Prefer Them To Men aka How Is That Racist Having Natural Rhythm Is A Good Thing) position.)

ii) One can insist that the book’s attitudes ‘reflect its time’, as the court held.
There are two interesting points about this ultra-common defence for every undeniably racist (sexist, homophobic, &c) text in existence. The first is that it is historically bogus. Such ideas, like all ideas, were - are - contested. Certainly & obviously the mainstream shifts, the balance of forces alters, but the implicit or explicit claim that there were no dissident voices on supremacist agendas is a lie. To claim that everyone talked like Tintin about the Congo back in the day is (whatever other serious political arguments we may have with them) to slander, say, Felicien Challaye, Albert Londres, the French Socialist movement that declared at its 1907 conference that colonialism ‘relies on violent conquest and institutionalises the subjection of Asiatic and African peoples’.

The second point is that even if these attitudes do ‘reflect their time’ in the sense of reflecting a then-more-mainstream agenda, so the fuck what? The point about attitudes is that they change, in response to struggle, to a battle for ideas. The question here is whether or not Tintin au Congo is racist. Which it is. That may perhaps in part be because white supremacism was less contested back then - just as well we’re not back then, then, isn’t it? & that instead we live in now, when the resistance of those deemed unable to add 2 & 2 has forced the recognition that this kind of shit is shit. These days a ‘collective synapse’ should kick in ‘forged by mass movements … that have forced a lot of people, particularly white straight men, to have a clue.’

Read the whole thing.

And Yet It Moves

I have carefully avoided saying anything about JLF, Rushdie, and the whole free speech vs. censorship clusterfuck that chewed up most of the end of January. If I'm talking about it at all, it is to point everyone to the one piece that I want to keep and remember.

And the reason I'm doing this at all is because today - Valentine's Day - has been designated #flashreads for free speech day.

Whatever. When - if - you organise readings in the public spaces of your city, I hope you will take, along with the piece you plan to read aloud, some of the nuance of Deepa D's post (Deepa was at Jaipur). In fact, perhaps someone could read her piece out loud. I just want to say 'What she said'.

Here's some of it:

It's not Rushdie's fault or responsibility that growing up in a Hindu-dominant culture reading mostly English I had not been exposed to any writings about early Islam and the Prophet's life. Nor is it his fault that while cultural osmosis around me gave me sympathetic factoids and apocryphal anecdotes and reverant narratives about Krishna and Buddha and Mahavir and Nanak and even Jesus, so that I could understand how they fit into the context of religious veneration--the anti-Muslim bigotry around me was insidious and pervasive enough so as to strip any such dignity or familiarity away from Mohammad. I was lent Martin Ling's book by a Muslim friend at a time when I was just beginning to unpack how very communal and anti-Islam the default culture around me was. We discussed The Satanic Verses briefly; it was an emotional experience for him to try to explain his dislike of it. I am better equipped to empathy now, after having been exposed to how a wider world chooses to talk about and treat the gods and mystics that matter to me.

I defend the rationality of being offended by a misrepresentation of what one holds sacred. I defend the right of those in the marginalised, threatened or oppressed position in a hierarchy to challenge and question and reject those ideas and stories that reinforce the injustice being done to them.

But no matter how much value I may want ascribed to non-physical violence--be it economic, ideological, legal or cultural--I do not wish to downplay my rejection of physical violence. In the hours it has taken me to write this, I scroll up and compare my kneejerk irritation at the JKF (sic) Rushdie imbroglio to the aching empathy I felt for Rashid in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, exiled from the source of his stories. Free speech and it's consequent debates around book banning, censorship and the like is one thing. But bodies imprisoned or exiled because of threat of violence, translators stabbed, defenders beaten;** this is wholly more absolute injustice. I consider the written word sacred enough that though I have felt the desire to do damage to a book, I could never imagine ripping, or burning or physically harming even the most loathsome text. How much more sacred then, is even the most antagonistic human soul, the source for those words, enshrined in a fragile and totally irreplaceable body.

A banned book may be resurrected, a dead person cannot be.

For all my reservations, minor and major, with the various champions of these various causes, I don't want my doubts and disagreements to negate my fundamental support of people speaking out against what they (and I) see as injustice.