CULTURE: P.E.N.s Against Intolerance

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Nov 27 2003 (IPS) - Some 200 writers, members of PEN International, are meeting this week in the Mexican capital to promote cultural diversity and to defend their duty of "permanent insurrection", as the famed Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa puts it.

For their work in writing and denunciation, some 400 journalists and authors were killed in the past decade, and many others languish in prison, according to figures cited during the 69th PEN International Congress, dedicated this year to promoting tolerance.

Today, attacks on freedom are intensifying and there are more and more threats, but the writers of the world will not be intimidated and they know that "they cannot refuse the challenge of history," Mexican poet Homero Aridjis, president of PEN (poets, playwrights, essayists, editors and novelists), told IPS.

The six-day congress, which ends Friday, has been a series of discussion panels and seminars, many of which vindicate the freedom of journalists and literary artists – and their commitment and responsibility to the truth and to tolerance.

The participants who have captured the spotlight are Vargas Llosa, a naturalised Spaniard, and South Africa’s Nadine Gordimer, 1991 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Both are vice-presidents of PEN International.

"New intolerances, new fanaticisms, new absolute truths that are born of religious fundamentalism, of ethnic movements, of exacerbated movements, are creating sources of violence that today are sowing innocent victims around the world," said Vargas Llosa.

Thirty-six years ago, when he received the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Prize for Literature, in Venezuela, Vargas Llosa stated that "literature is a form of permanent insurrection and does not permit straightjackets."

"All of the attempts aimed at bending its temperamental, wayward nature will fail," he said at the time.

According to PEN president Aridjis, what his colleague said in 1967 is still valid today, despite the dangers, intolerance and death that continue to threaten writers worldwide.

Gordimer called upon her fellow writers to respect diversity, creating the foundations for the tolerance needed in the new millennium.

Unfortunately, our globalised world is far from being just one world, she said. But literature breaks down barriers and PEN International, and its local chapters, play a key role in that process, said Gordimer, who actively opposed the racist apartheid regime in her country, which ended in 1994.

PEN has some 15,000 members in 91 countries, and was founded in London in 1921. It is the only global association of writers created to promote intellectual cooperation and to emphasise the role of literature in the development of culture and tolerance around the world.

The organisation also denounces persecution of writers and advocates for the freedom of those who are imprisoned for their ideas.

According to Gordimer, the writing trade can lead to a paradox: In maintaining his or her integrity, a writer often has to risk both an accusation of treason from the state and criticism from the forces of freedom for lacking blind commitment.

Aridjis, who is also a leading environmental activist in Mexico, says the world congress of writers, organised by the Mexican chapter of PEN, has been a success because the event has made it clear that poets, essayists and novelists remain united against censorship and intolerance, and willing to join others in this fight.

For Spanish author Carlos Tornero, the new threats against freedoms come especially from the U.S. government, through imposing on the world, "with the pretext of the fight against terrorism," security measures that are an attack on linguistic minorities.

British writer Joan Smith made similar comments, saying the climate of censorship that has emerged since the Sep. 11, 2001 terror attacks in New York and Washington is disturbing.

Condemning terrorism does not mean that we are going to accept all of the measures for fighting it, especially if they violate our individual rights, she said.

According to Colombian poet Eduardo García, much of the current panorama of excessive security and censorship "has been brought about and encouraged by the work of the communications media, which insist on treating the war like a profitable spectacle."

In Vargas Llosa’s opinion, the best thing the members of PEN can do in confronting today’s "intolerances and absolute truths" is to continue "proving that coexistence is possible and necessary if we don’t want civilisation to disappear."