Justin Erik Halldór Smith on Charlie Hebdo.

In response to the recent attempt by some members of PEN to betray persecuted editorialists throughout the world by refusing to honor the survivors of a right-wing death squad’s attack on a group of caricature artists in Paris a few months ago, Harper’s has taken my April essay out from behind its paywall. Many have been writing on the Internet about their exasperation with all the ‘think pieces’ on this topic. When will we have finally had enough? they wonder. My answer is that there will be no more need for ‘think pieces’ when there will be sufficiently serious thinking about this question. What the PEN protesters have given us is a refusal-to-think piece: Twitter-worthy, infantile, presentist American identitarianism that both denies commonalities of experience and history when they are present (as between Europe and the Arab world), and presumes such commonalities when they are in fact absent (as between Anglo-American and French traditions of humor and satire), all on the basis of the ungrounded extension of the currently preferred American analytic lens of ‘whiteness’ and ‘non-whiteness’. This lens certainly reveals quite a bit about American history and its enduring legacies, but very little about the broader history of the Mediterranean and its peoples, against the background of which the recent Charlie Hebdo incident is best understood.

Dayum, this guy can word. “Twitter-worthy, infantile, presentist American identitarianism” is one for the ages. (And yes, “American” belongs there. I often prepare to bristle when I see that word, because it [or rather its plural] often precedes some stupid remark like “are so pathetic to think ‘pussy’ means ‘vagina'” or just “are so thick.” But in this case there’s a parochialism that just wouldn’t fly in places that share several borders with foreign countries.)

Honestly, people who have signed the PEN letter are openly admitting that they have never even looked at Charlie Hebdo, and even that they would not be in a position to understand the French if they were to look it. I can accept that your overall judgment of it might, after thorough consideration, be negative (just like you might not like Lolita, Gargantua, Monty Python…), but that is just patently not what is happening here. As I’ve written elsewhere, it seems to me thatCharlie Hebdo has been Justine Sacco’d in the Anglosphere: summarily judged, and then subject to a campaign of ruthless denunciation. Except that Charlie Hebdo is not a Tweet, but a decades-long collaborative endeavor, and those of us in the part of the world that is still capable of interpreting texts and images in a nuanced way are left scratching our heads when we see the unreflective, summary judgment passed on such a complicated body of work –often misfiring, but often unquestionably courageous and unquestionably funny– as if it were some dumb Tweet or other source of ephemeral online outrage.

Yes but you see they have friends who say it’s racist. Those friends also haven’t read or understood it, but they too have friends who say it’s racist. If you go back far enough there must be some people who actually have read and understood it, and are Correct to say it’s racist. Otherwise…well there wouldn’t be all these people saying it is, would there. That’s democracy.

Honestly from what I can see that’s about the level of the “thinking.” It sort of has to be, since it’s so easy to find people explaining how and why Charlie is not racist. It has to be some ridiculous level of trust in chains of transmission from one right-on person to another right-on person that can trump all those people who do know something about the subject.

In the Harper’s piece what I was trying to do was to insist on a revision of the facile view that what Charlie Hebdo represented was something distinctly and exclusively ‘Western’, ‘Enlightenment-based’, etc. Hence my attempt, space permitting, at a sort of genealogy of the joke and of the sources of bawdy literature –of which I see Charlie Hebdo as a descendant– in pan-Mediterranean oral folklore. I detect here a possibility for going back around all the apparent dichotomies that both French laïcité defenders such as Alain Finkielkraut as well as the American left thinkers who have taken such a firm stance on Charlie Hebdo have helped to perpetuate, and finding a shared history and a common reality.

To put this a bit differently, Rabelais is closer to an anonymous medieval Arab raconteur than he is to, say, Peter Carey. You can classify Charlie Hebdo as a product of the wit-shrouded racism and imperialism of the Enlightenment, assimilating it to Voltaire and so on, but there is an alternative genealogy, which I have been trying to draw out, which connects the modern European satirical tradition to something much larger than Europe, and to something much older than modernity. It is my opponents, and not me, who are perpetuating the ideology of European exceptionalism by acting as though satire has no roots, and can have no purchase, outside of Europe.*

Ah now that’s interesting – Charlie as a descendant of Rabelais. There is no American Rabelais; maybe that’s why this all goes so wrong.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Katha Pollitt stands up for Charlie Hebdo.

When PEN decided to award the first PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, they surely thought they were honoring bravery in defense of free speech. This was a magazine that kept publishing after its offices were firebombed by Islamists in 2011, and kept publishing after nine staffers were horribly murdered by Islamists in January. Compare that to, say, Yale University Press, which dropped the illustrations for Jytte Clausen’s book about the Danish Mohammed cartoons after the book’s first printing, or Random House, which canceled publication of Sherry Jones’s The Jewel of Medina, a historical novel about Mohammed’s wife Aisha. Both publishing houses cited fears of violence by Muslim extremists. Those fears were not irrational. The head of the British publishing house that picked up Jones’s novel had his house firebombed—and the book was dropped. Violence works.

Damn straight. There was even some hesitation about Does God Hate Women? for a few nerve-racking days, but that ended.

But the Six see things differently.

“Charlie Hebdo’s work is not important,” Francine Prose told me, over the phone. “It’s not interesting.” She said she was offended by Charlie’s crude cartoons of the Prophet and mockery of the religion of France’s marginalized Muslim community: “It’s a racist publication. Let’s not beat about the bush.” She compared the magazine’s Muslim caricatures to Goebbels’s anti-Semitic propaganda. “I don’t see a difference, really. It’s the same big noses and thick lips.” She pointed out that many dozens of Mexican and Russian journalists had been killed for reporting on their government’s corrupt doings. Why not honor them?

She should start her own PEN if she wants to decide who gets the awards. Thinking someone else should have gotten it is not a good reason to boycott it, especially when the people getting it were murdered.

I’ve known Francine since we were in college, and admire her and her writing enormously. I agree with her that there’s a distinction between supporting the freedom to speak and write, as we both do, and honoring the speech itself. It is probably safe to say that if PEN believedCharlie Hebdo was the Volkischer Beobachter of our day, they wouldn’t be giving it an award, no matter how many of its editors had been massacred. I don’t agree that the drawings of Mohammed are in a different key than the magazine’s rude caricatures of the Pope or Hasidic rabbis or the Virgin Mary just after being raped by the three kings, but maybe that’s in the eye of the beholder. In any case, Charlie is a small satirical magazine run by aging sixties leftists who spend the vast bulk of their column inches attacking the National Front and other French conservatives, with frequent jabs at the Catholic Church. Those immersed in French cartoon culture have pointed out that the offensive drawings circulating on the Internet are, in context, the opposite of what they seem to some American readers—indictments of the racist and anti-immigrant views of right-wing French politicians. In fact, after the murders, Rushdie tweetedthat the president of SOS Racisme, the premier anti-racist group in France, had called it “the greatest anti-racist weekly in the country.” Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, whom opponents of the award described as depicted as “a black woman drawn as a monkey” in the pages of Charlie Hebdo, also paid tribute to the magazine.

So why can’t Francine Prose and the rest of them take that in? Even if the cartoons (or some of them) make them flinch, why can’t they take in the explanations that they simply have it wrong? Why can’t they at least grasp that Charlie is not on the right but the left? Why can’t they listen?

The six writers are circulating a letter to PEN members, which many great and famous writers are signing: Joyce Carol Oates, Junot Diaz, Lorrie Moore. It seems to me these writers must be awfully sure that they will never fall afoul of either fanaticism or well-meaning liberalism. “There is a critical difference between staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable,” it argues, “and enthusiastically rewarding such expression.” Well, sure, but excuse me: violates the acceptable? The acceptable what? And don’t we need writing and artwork that pushes the boundary of what the acceptable is? “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” as Blake put it.

It’s a great piece; read the whole thing.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Salman Rushdie tweets:

Salman Rushdie @SalmanRushdie 12 hours ago
Salman Rushdie retweeted Philip Gourevitch
The head of SOS-Racisme calls CH the greatest anti racist weekly. PEN protesters, please note. Salman Rushdie added,

Philip Gourevitch @PGourevitch
“Charlie Hebdo, le plus grand hebdomadaire anti-raciste”: more French context from Dominique Sopo, Pres of SOS-Racism http://www.europe1.fr/mediacenter/emissions/europe-midi-votre-journal-wendy-bouchard/videos/charlie-hebdo-est-le-plus-grand-hebdomadaire-anti-raciste-2341899 …

And:

Salman Rushdie @SalmanRushdie 11 hours ago
Now that the leading anti-racist group SOS-Racisme has called CH “the greatest anti-racist weekly”, will PEN protesters admit their error?

Le plus grand hebdomadaire anti-raciste:

EXTRAIT – Le président de SOS racisme prend la défense du journal qui a été la cible d’un attentat.

The president of SOS Racism defends the magazine that was the target of an attack.

D’accord? Francine Prose, Peter Carey, the rest of the 150? Anything?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

How not to start a piece about PEN and Charlie Hebdo and The Protest.

The annual PEN Literary Gala, in which writers, the male half badly dressed in once-a-year tuxedos, assemble under the big whale at the American Museum of Natural History to mutter about their advances and applaud their imprisoned confreres, has always had its comic aspects. Glamour and guys (or gals) who write are not two subjects that are often congruent.

Sigh. We are not a parenthesis. We are not an afterthought. We are not the other. We are not the exception. We are not second. We are not an eccentric forgotten deviation from the rule that writers (and all other important people) are men. We are not the diameter to men’s circumference. We are not et cetera. We are not a catch-up. We are not an edit. We are not a corrected typo. We are not also.

Moving on, hoping Adam Gopnik doesn’t distract with any more gaffes –

And yet the PEN gala feels essential, and for one reason above all: the writers are there to stand up for some other writers who can’t be there because some bad guy has locked them up for writing something that the bad guy didn’t like. The principle involved is that the free expression of ideas, including insulting ideas, is part of what writing is. If people aren’t free to insult authority in some distant country, then we aren’t entirely free here. This does seem like a good principle to banquet upon.

Still with the “guy”; pretend not to notice.

Other table hosts have publicly chided the missing for going missing. (I should say that I am one of those hosts; The New Yorker is also part of the Benefit Committee, and our cartoon editor, Bob Mankoff, will be onstage with the Charlie Hebdo editors.) Salman Rushdie, who speaks with some sad authority on such issues, was succinct, calling them “six authors in search of character.”

He says they no doubt mean well. They think the views of Charlie Hebdo are “bigoted or, at least, to use the word of the decade, insensitive.”

This badly misunderstands the actual views, history, and practices of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. Their work, as I’ve written, was not for those who like subtlety and suavity in their satire—it was not entirely to my own taste—but they were still radically democratic and egalitarian in their views, with their one passionate dislike being, simply, the hypocrisies of any organized religion. Few groups in recent French history have been more passionately “minoritarian”—more marginalized or on the outs with the political establishment, more vitriolic in their mockery of power, more courageous in ridiculing people of far greater influence and power. They were always punching up at idols and authorities. No one in France has, for example, been more relentlessly, courageously contemptuous of the extreme right-wing Le Pens, père et fille.

Prose and the 150 are just wrong about Charlie Hebdo. Mistaken. In error.

Their doubters, it seems, believe that this activity of imagination was wrong or condemnable. They believe, instead, in a kind of communal protection—that the comfort of communities is more important than the public criticism of ideas. It’s a legitimate thought, one with a history of its own. It just doesn’t seem to be a thought worth inspiring a boycott by a self-defined cosmopolitan community of writers. If literature has any social function, after all, it is premised on the belief that, in the long run, the most comfortable community is going to be the one that knows the most about itself. Criticism is always going to be uncomfortable for somebody. There is something to be said for group solidarity over unhindered expression. But writers are the last people on earth who ought to be saying it. (Writers ought always to be a little on the outside; that’s one reason they look so awkward when they come together as a group.)

Maybe, or maybe it’s just because writers are nerdy (because it’s so hard to write in a crowd). Plenty of writers are very big on comfortable community and very bad at standing a little apart to take an outsider’s look.

It is not merely that an assault on an ideology is different from a threat made to a person; it is that it is the opposite of a threat made to a person. The whole end of liberal civilization is to substitute the criticism of ideas for assaults on people. The idea that we should be free to do our work and offer our views without extending a frightened veto to those who threaten to harm us isn’t just part of what we mean by free expression. It’s what free expression is. The Charlie Hebdo staff kept working in the face of death threats, and scorning an effort to honor that courage gives too much authority to those who want that veto. The killers were not speaking for an offended community and explaining why, after all, someone might easily miss the point of the cartoons. They were responding to an insult with murder. The honored cartoonists, in turn, are not markers in an abstract game of sensitivities. They were elderly artists whose last view in life was of a masked man with a machine gun. If that is not horror, then nothing is horror. If that is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. If writers won’t honor their courage, then what courage can we honor?

My feelings exactly. I forgive him for everything.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

NPR reports that Francine Prose tells NPR that 150 writers have joined the anti-Charlie Hebdo protest.

The protest over a free speech award to Charlie Hebdo continues to grow.

Earlier this week, six authors withdrew from the PEN American Center’s annual gala in response to the organization’s decision to give the French satirical magazine its Freedom of Expression Courage Award.

Former PEN American President Francine Prose was one of the original six. She tells NPR that as of Thursday afternoon, she’s been joined by nearly 150 other writers — such as Junot Díaz, Lorrie Moore and Rick Moody — who’ve signed on to an open letter critical of the decision.

Disgusting.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Boris Kachka at The Vulture has that letter to PEN.

This afternoon, a letter went out to members of the PEN American Center — not an official communique but a letter of dissent, boasting 35 signatories and soliciting many more. It concluded, “We the undersigned, as writers, thinkers, and members of PEN, therefore respectfully wish to disassociate ourselves from PEN America’s decision to give the 2015 Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo.”

So they think the Kouachi brothers were right, then – not right to murder, but right in their reasons to murder.

For all its swiftness, the minor PEN revolt over Hebdo’s offensive depictions of Muslims had been brewing for some time. Ever since the attack and the subsequent outpouring of “Je Suis Charlie” solidarity, a vocal minority of writers have distanced themselves from the magazine, usually on the grounds that its secular satire was needlessly provocative — perhaps to the point of hate speech — and aimed at dispossessed French Muslims.

Which is just ignorant of them.

On March 27, two days after PEN announced the Hebdo honor, PEN member Deborah Eisenberg (not a table host) wrote to executive director Suzanne Nossel to object at length. A revered short-story writer with a strong leftist-activist bent (along with her partner, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn), Eisenberg attacked the paper’s crude illustrations as offensive not just to fundamentalists but to all Muslims (particularly those marginalized in France).

So she thinks she knows what all Muslims think? And she thinks they’re all fanatically theocratic? And she thinks that’s not crude and offensive?

She added that PEN’s decision to salute Hebdo “almost looks less like an endorsement of free expression than like an opportunistic exploitation of the horrible murders in Paris to justify and glorify offensive material expressing anti-Islamic and nationalistic sentiments already widely shared in the Western world.”

Which just underlines how uninformed she is.

News stories on Sunday referenced Eisenberg’s letter as an unrelated example of brewing dissent. In fact, her exchange had made the rounds of sympathetic writers, and she shared her dismay with others early on. Her letter had proposed Edward Snowden go-between Glenn Greenwald as an alternative PEN honoree, and Greenwald was looped into conversations this past weekend. Cole and Greenwald had both written pieces questioning the lionization of Charlie Hebdo. They and Kushner are vocal critics of Western policies that, they argue, kill and suppress far more people than terrorists in Europe; their protest is a dissent of the literary left from the liberal middle.

Nope. I’ve never accepted the claim that those people are to the left of people who oppose theocracy. There is nothing left-wing about theocracy. Secularism is or at least should be a pillar of the left.

Here’s the letter with the signatories:

Dear colleague,

If you are in sympathy with the following statement from some of your fellow members of PEN, please reply, and your name will be added to the list of signatories.

Thank you.

—

April 26, 2015

In March it was announced that the PEN Literary Gala, to be held May 5th 2015, would honor the magazine Charlie Hebdo with the PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award in response to the January 7 attacks that claimed the lives of many members of its editorial staff.

It is clear and inarguable that the murder of a dozen people in the Charlie Hebdo offices is sickening and tragic. What is neither clear nor inarguable is the decision to confer an award for courageous freedom of expression on Charlie Hebdo, or what criteria, exactly, were used to make that decision.

We do not believe in censoring expression. An expression of views, however disagreeable, is certainly not to be answered by violence or murder.

However, there is a critical difference between staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable, and enthusiastically rewarding such expression.

In the aftermath of the attacks, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons were characterized as satire and “equal opportunity offense,” and the magazine seems to be entirely sincere in its anarchic expressions of disdain toward organized religion. But in an unequal society, equal opportunity offense does not have an equal effect.

Power and prestige are elements that must be recognized in considering almost any form of discourse, including satire. The inequities between the person holding the pen and the subject fixed on paper by that pen cannot, and must not, be ignored.

To the section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled, and victimized, a population that is shaped by the legacy of France’s various colonial enterprises, and that contains a large percentage of devout Muslims, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the Prophet must be seen as being intended to cause further humiliation and suffering.

Our concern is that, by bestowing the Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award on Charlie Hebdo, PEN is not simply conveying support for freedom of expression, but also valorizing selectively offensive material: material that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world.

In our view, PEN America could have chosen to confer its PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award upon any of a number of journalists and whistleblowers who have risked, and sometimes lost, their freedom (and even their lives) in service of the greater good.

PEN is an essential organization in the global battle for freedom of expression. It is therefore disheartening to see that PEN America has chosen to honor the work and mission of Charlie Hebdo above those who not only exemplify the principles of free expression, but whose courage, even when provocative and discomfiting, has also been pointedly exercised for the good of humanity.

We the undersigned, as writers, thinkers, and members of PEN, therefore respectfully wish to disassociate ourselves from PEN America’s decision to give the 2015 Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo.

Chris Abani

Russell Banks

Peter Carey

Teju Cole

Junot Díaz

Deborah Eisenberg

Eve Ensler

Nell Freudenberger

Keith Gessen

Francisco Goldman

Edward Hoagland

Nancy Kricorian

Amitava Kumar

Rachel Kushner

Zachary Lazar

Patrick McGrath

Rick Moody

Lorrie Moore

Joyce Carol Oates

Michael Ondaatje

Raj Patel

Francine Prose

Sarah Schulman

Taiye Selasi

Kamila Shamsie

Wallace Shawn

Charles Simic

Rebecca Solnit

Linda Spalding

Scott Spencer

Chase Twichell

Eliot Weinberger

Jon Wiener

Dave Zirin

I’m surprised to see Kamila Shamsie there. Just the other day she was mourning the murder of her friend Sabeen Mahmud.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Nick Cohen – award-winning Nick Cohen – excoriates the Six Soft-heads in the Spectator.

Those who shout the loudest about respecting “diversity” and the culture of others, cannot stir themselves to respect the French enough to learn their language and understand their culture. If they did, they would know that Charlie Hebdo is a left-wing magazine, which used Boko Haram to parody  conservatives so lost in paranoia they imagined enslaved Nigerian women were threatening to come to France and steal their money.

Max Fisher of Vox tried to shake up Anglo-Saxon leftists by pointing them to a New Yorker cover showing Barack Obama as a Kenyan Muslim and Michelle Obama as a terrorist. It was a satire of the Tea Party fantasy that Obama was a foreigner, who could not stand for election, his wife was a far leftist and between them the couple married the ideologies of the Mau-Mau and the Black Panthers. No one who understood New York liberal culture could fail to see the satire. Similarly, he continued, as if he were speaking to an unusually stupid child, no one who understood Parisian culture could fail to see that Charlie Hebdo was mocking the prejudices of the French Right.

Levels, in other words; you have to recognize the levels. If you don’t, you make a shaming booboo.

Meanwhile Olivier Tonneau, a French radical, who now teaches at Cambridge, wrote an open letter to the Anglo-Saxon left, and explained : 

Charlie Hebdo was an opponent of all forms of organised religions, in the old-school anarchist sense: Ni Dieu, ni maître! It ridiculed the pope, orthodox Jews and Muslims in equal measure and with the same biting tone. It took ferocious stances against the bombings of Gaza. Charlie Hebdo also continuously denounced the pledge of minorities and campaigned relentlessly for all illegal immigrants to be given permanent right of stay. Even if you dislike its humour, please take my word for it: it fell well within the French tradition of satire – and after all was only intended for a French audience. I hope this helps you understand that if you belong to the radical left, you have lost precious friends and allies.

Ah but they’re French, so they don’t count. Or something.

Prose, Carey, the London Review of Books and so many others agree with Islamists’ first demand that the world should have a de facto blasphemy law enforced at gunpoint. Break it and you have only yourself to blame if the assassins you provoked kill you

They not only go along with the terrorists from the religious ultra-right but of every state that uses Islam to maintain its power. They can show no solidarity with gays in Iran, bloggers in Saudi Arabia and persecuted women and religious minorities across the Middle East, who must fight theocracy. They have no understanding that enemies of Charlie Hebdo are also the enemies of liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims in the West. In the battle between the two, they have in their stupidity and malice allied with the wrong side.

Damn right. And it’s not even as if people haven’t been trying to explain this for years.

Most glaringly they have failed to understand power. It is not fixed but fluid. It depends on where you stand. The unemployed terrorist with the gun is more powerful than the Parisian cartoonist cowering underneath his desk. The marginal cleric may well face racism and hatred – as my most liberal British Muslim friends do – but when he sits in a Sharia court imposing misogynist rules on Muslim women in the West, he is no longer a victim or potential victim but a man to be feared.

Give that man an award.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)