There is something very comforting about an evening with Salman Rushdie without bag searches or metal detectors. International PEN’s literary festival Free The Word! ( April 2008 ) packed writers from all over the world into London’s Southbank for three days of verbal verve. An online World Atlas of Literature continues to celebrate writers, particularly those in danger of being silenced or unheard. What’s the point? The freedom to write. How appropriate that this festival should close with Lisa Appignanesi, president of English PEN, in conversation with He Who Wrote The Satanic Verses. Last time I glimpsed him in real life, there were body-guards and bullet-proof jackets aplenty.
The freedom to write. This is a concept which, in my dusty mind, used to attach to those dreadful places where Amnesty International has to work hardest. But the concept starts to feel vulnerable here in our apparently enlightened liberal democracy. Never mind exotic edicts. Our Government has recently passed a blasphemy law. Is this true? No, I must have invented it. I am a fiction writer and sometimes I imagine stuff so vividly I think I’ve lived it. But I think it is true to say that I cannot write abusively about ideas that happen to be religious – unless I want to break the law. Can this really be true?
Back to Rushdie. His latest novel The Enchantress of Florence features a dictatorial protagonist, Emperor Akbar, whose royal “we” embraces all the beings, and all the things, that comprise his realm. Rushdie read out beautiful passages that riffed like verbal jazz on the notion of perspective. He spoke eloquently about his own multiple selves: the famous name that lends itself to the PEN cause and helps to free oppressed writers, Salman the private person, the novelist, the cultural commentator, the migrant, the others. There must also be a persona who faced death at the hands of a misguided militant. As a man who hid from ubiquitous and infinite assassins, it’s no wonder that Salman Rushdie’s identity went forth and multiplied.
Now I start wondering: does every fiction writer have a trace of this condition? We wear the shoes of our characters and speak with their voices, desire as they do, fear as they do, change gender. Anything less would be poor impersonation. Are “we” royally dictatorial, hiding in a crowd of selves or plain empathetic? Perhaps we are all Spartacus.
By Elise Valmorbida, author of Matilde Waltzing, The Book of Happy Endings and The Winding Stick (Two Ravens Press, 2009)
