Graffiti on the separation wall in the occupied West Bank includes part of Paul Éluard’s poem, ‘Liberté.’ Photo by Laurin-Whitney Gottbrath Many people might dismiss what writers and storytellers do as useless and harmless, but the evidence for our usefulness and power is substantial, especially in this age of growing global authoritarianism and fascism. We deal in narrative, with narrative dominance critical to the struggle for power and ideas. While writing is mostly done individually and should not be legislated, the task of committed writers is to also imagine how their solitary work exists in relation to collective movements for liberation and justice.
From the perspective of the West, it is countries like Russia, China, and North Korea that suppress their writers and artists. Hostility against these countries is justified at least partially through the idea that the West is free and these countries are not, which somehow makes it acceptable to bomb places like Iran at will (the freedom to bomb apparently coming with freedom of speech). But silencing happens within the West, too, sometimes operating through consensus and sometimes through coercion, usually of writers and artists from marginalized populations.
October 7 and the aftermath vividly illustrate how power and narrative operate together in the West through consensus and coercion.
Edward Said would have spoken out about October 7, and he said a great deal about the interlocking nature of power and narrative. So did W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, John Berger, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, and many others whose work was literary as well as political. They were committed to opposing abusive forces from white supremacy to settler colonialism, patriarchy to anti-Blackness. Contrary to the opinion held by some that art and politics should not mix, they would not have been the writers they were without their political commitments. This is manifest both in the shape of their writing and their existence in the world, from Said’s activism with the Palestinian liberation movement to Morrison’s work as an editor, scholar, and builder of a Black literary community.
Committing as a writer to the side of the powerful and abusive can happen, too, although in the United States, that typically happens more through default or passivity. Complicity with the abuses of power is obscured in the US because writers, at least of the literary kind, usually line up against the powerful domestically in terms of being opposed to racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on. The narrative efforts of writers who simply sought to tell the stories of their marginalized communities did have a political effect, helping transform American culture to such an extent that the right wing has forcefully counter-attacked against the unholy trinity of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
But international politics and American foreign policy are more befuddling subjects, since those writers who are American citizens, even of the minority kind, are also complicit in what the United States does by dint of our taxes and our silence. During the war in Viet Nam, many American writers did take to the streets in protest and also wrestled with the war in their art. Yet such an antiwar consensus has been less evident in confronting Israel’s apartheid and genocidal war in Gaza. While a vocal literary faction has spoken up, many writers have stayed silent or neutral or adopted a symmetrical approach, equating Israel and Palestine. But silence and neutrality add up to passive support for the status quo of American and Israeli policies, which are premised not on a moral, political, military, or human symmetry, but instead on a radical asymmetry in which American and Israeli interests, viewpoints, humanity, and weaponry far outweigh anything that Palestinians and their supporters can muster.
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The neutrality and perhaps fear of some writers is not a surprise, since Israel and its supporters have conspicuously targeted non-neutral writers in what is not just a shooting war but a narrative war, from Israel’s killing of poet Refaat Alareer in Gaza and Shireen Abu Akleh in the occupied West Bank to the indefinite postponement of an award ceremony for Adania Shibli for her novel Minor Detail. Hundreds of lesser-known Palestinian journalists and writers have been killed by Israel, and non-Palestinian writers, journalists, and editors have been silenced, canceled, or fired for criticizing Israel. Their offense was the thought crime of challenging the narrative of Israel and the United States, expressed most nakedly by Yoav Gallant, the former Israeli minister who called Palestinians “human animals.” Impolite, to say the least, but also the naked and obscene truth about how not only Israel but the American state views Palestinians, as a lesser people whose lives have little value and whose deaths are met with silence.
A composite image of 25 images depicting funeral ceremonies and memorial photos of journalists killed in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Ukraine. Photo AA Team/Anadolu via Getty Images The efforts at intimidation have worked to some extent, and yet it has also been astonishing how rapidly the dominance of Israeli and US narratives – their propaganda – has diminished over the last 21 months. That diminishment has been matched by furious attempts to suppress the allegation of genocide, or the images of death and destruction from Gaza, or the wearing of keffiyehs or the colors of the Palestinian flag, or the organizing of campus protests, or the telling of Palestinian stories, or the insistence that this has been and is an asymmetrical occupation that has resulted in a vastly disproportionate amount of death that one side has been able to inflict on the other. These narrative gains for Palestinians contrast with the utter destruction of Gaza.
The Committed Writer Must Be Disagreeable
Watching the horrifying spectacle in Gaza allows some to connect it to the other terrorizing spectacles that have been a part of the Western domination of the Global South and its “human animals” for decades. And it has allowed critics of Israel and the US to make an important argument: that the very notion of international law is based on power and violence, an argument hard to deny given Donald Trump’s demonstration of it through his authoritarian surge, where he claims that there is no law except his law. If it is so objectionable to some that Trump disregards the law, why has it been acceptable for Israel to do the same, and for many presidents to have supported Israel in doing so?
Perhaps because while Trump’s policies are repulsive, so is his undiplomatic language, full of excessive praise for his lackeys and hyperbolic condemnation of anyone who dares to dissent, stripped of even a pretense to law and protocol. His abuse of the language is a part of his abuse of power. This is where, for committed writers, the intersection of their art and their politics matters. One of our talents as writers is to detect the abuse of language and the deployment of narrative for the purposes of power, which is the relatively easy part. The harder part is to stand against that abuse, both when it takes place by those we disagree with and by those with whom we would otherwise agree. As a matter of principle, the committed writer has to be disagreeable.
A Palestinian puts paints graffiti on ruble caused by Israeli strikes in the northern Gaza city of Beit Lahia on April 20, 2024. Photo by Omar El Qattaa/Anadolu via Getty Images There are many reasons why writers should want to disagree when they detect injustice, which means that there is a wide spectrum of political commitments, some of which may be less passionate or critical than I might care for, but all of which are necessary now for a united front against authoritarianism and fascism. But the most important, or at least the most common reason why writers should speak out against injustice, is due to the writer’s first and foremost responsibility, which is to the art of our writing. Our work must be beautiful, however one chooses to define beauty.
More than this, says John Keats, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” which means that in their pursuit of the beautiful, writers must also arrive at the truth. Truth should be opposed to injustice, from the abuses of the state to the abuses of individuals. This is no easy thing, to seek the truth in some worldly and debatable sense or in the emotional and spiritual sense of being absolutely honest with oneself as a writer and being willing to say things that are difficult or painful to understand and reveal. Without such honesty about oneself – an honesty that no one but the writer can assess – I wonder if great art is possible.
Authoritarians do not care about great art except in the sense of art that glorifies them and their own greatness. They recognize that power and narrative cannot be separated: physical violence has to be justified by symbolic violence and vice versa, which is why Trump cannot be satisfied with the power of social media and his bully pulpit, but must also try to undermine American universities, take over the Kennedy Center, turn himself into an object of veneration, and claim the truth by naming his social media platform Truth Social. In the face of this attempt at total symbolic domination, how can a writer not be committed to opposition?
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Saying What Must Not Be Said
I am not demanding the politicization of writing inasmuch as recognizing that the implicit politics of the status quo already exists in much of American writing, typically defined by silence around problematic issues like the American support of genocide and authoritarianism, not just in Israel but elsewhere (South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Guatemala, El Salvador, and the list goes on). Politics in writing is not so much about the content, although that matters, but more about the willingness of writers to say what must not be said.
Committed writers are explicitly political because they go against the grain of the status quo, although there should not be any prescriptions about what that confrontation means and how it looks. Writers have to determine in their own private confessional to what degree their writing is political and whether it affirms dominant power or challenges it. There are so many ways to undermine that power through a political idea of literature, but unlike the politics of parties and governments, writers should not be obligated to come up with certain platforms, but rather to heed their own inner, authentic voice about how to be truthful to themselves. The politics of parties, movements, and governments tends to the orthodox, whereas the politics of writers, as realized in their art, is usually best when unorthodox.
Reading something that we think only we have thought can be a powerful experience, showing us that we are not alone.
Authoritarianism and fascism work at least partly by making commitment seem hopeless, making the dominated fearful and feeling as if they are alone and powerless. While the individual imagination is powerful, the individual writer may still feel isolated and may prefer to be noncommittal in the face of seemingly overwhelming state power and social fear or consensus. But certain forms of writing and creation can bring writers into contact with others. Saying what must not be said out loud may lead to others affirming that they, too, have been thinking the same. Reading something that we think only we have thought can be a powerful experience, showing us that we are not alone. Encountering the arrangement of words on a page that we have not seen before, or finding a writer doing something new with their chosen form, or inventing a new form altogether, can be electrifying and can introduce us to a new community of like-minded readers and writers.
That experience can also be confusing. Confusion can be what happens when one is exposed to new ideas, new forms, new ways of thinking and being. These are aesthetic shocks, but they are also often political shocks as our sense of the world is unsettled, even upended. Art is not the same as politics, but that moment where they overlap is one way the world becomes manifest in the writer, and vice versa.
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While the individual work of art can influence the world with its visions of beauty and truth, the world remakes artists, too. Our moment demands, from all of us, writers and artists and otherwise, that we work on and through ourselves as individuals, but that we also see ourselves as part of the natural and human world, both under threat by authoritarianism and fascism, militarism and capitalism. The human world manifests in collectives, movements, and efforts to create and renew public spaces where individual acts of the imagination can be felt collectively, from marches and protests to readings and festivals. Meanwhile, the less visible but crucial work of individuals continues, from the organizers and mobilizers to the writers and artists.
Harnessing individual visions to collective and committed movements can reshape the imaginations of the artists, making them greater than they could have been on their own. This is the absolute condition of resistance to abusive power – that we can be more powerful together than we can be individually. Aligning these public gestures of writing and art together with a commitment to a political cause and a broad movement does more than just bring art to the masses. It also transforms our narrative of art and artists, helping us understand that art being political is not its deformation, but instead its fulfillment.
Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen is author of several books. His latest is To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other. He is also the co-editor of the anthology, The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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