KAMILA SHAMSIE in conversation with PANKAJ MISHRA
(left) Kamila Shamsie PHOTO/Pankaj Mishra (right) Pankaj Mishra PHOTO/Maya Mishra
Kamila Shamsie and Pankaj Mishra discuss the absence of political anger in Western literature and why we shouldn’t be so quick to condemn writers like Mo Yan.
Pankaj Mishra’s first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), was a travelogue and his second, The Romantics (1999), was a novel, but for the last dozen or so years he has been known primarily for his literary and political writings, in both the long and short form. His most recent book, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in the UK, won the Crossword Book Award for nonfiction in India, and is the first book by a non-Western writer to win the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding in Germany. He is a fearless critic of imperialism and neoliberalism in his articles for a number of journals and magazines, including The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The London Review Of Books.
In 2012, he became involved in a controversy concerning the Chinese writer Mo Yan, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature—a decision which met with considerable hostility from other writers, including Salman Rushdie, who described him as “a patsy” for the Chinese government. One of the few voices speaking out against the hostility was Pankaj Mishra. Writing in The Guardian, he took to task the sinologist Perry Link who said that, “Chinese writers today, whether ‘inside the system’ or not, all must choose how they will relate to their country’s authoritarian government.” Mishra’s response to this was: “Do we ever expose the political preferences of Mo Yan’s counterparts in the West to such harsh scrutiny?”
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Kamila Shamsie: The decision to give the Nobel Prize for Literature to Mo Yan was heavily criticized by many writers, not because of his work’s literary merit, but on the grounds that he had refused to sign a petition calling for the freedom of Liu Xiaobo, a fellow laureate. The criticism grew even stronger when Mo Yan defended censorship, comparing it to airport security. You’ve always been politically outspoken, and have expressed your frustration with writers who remain quiet over political issues. You might have been expected to join the chorus of disapproval. Instead you turned around and criticized those who were criticizing Mo Yan. Is there a contradiction here in your own position?
Pankaj Mishra: I should say right away that at no point did I defend Mo Yan’s political positions, and that in fact made clear my own strong disagreement with them. What I objected to was the attempt to delegitimize his literary achievement through some selective reference to his political choices, like his refusal to sign a petition. If we were to take that narrow measure to many of the canonical figures of Western literature—from Dickens with his bloodthirsty writings during the Indian Mutiny, to Nabokov, who adored the war in Vietnam—those writers would have to be dismissed as worthless.
The other point that got lost in the rush to condemn Mo Yan was that we need a more complex understanding of writers working under authoritarian or repressive regimes. Something to replace this simpleminded, Cold War-ish equation in which the dissident in exile is seen as a bold figure, and those who choose to work with restrictions on their freedom are considered patsies for repressive governments. Let’s not forget that most writers in history have lived under nondemocratic regimes: Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Goethe didn’t actually enjoy constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of speech. And let’s not forget also, alas, that freedom of speech doesn’t guarantee great literature.
The recent past is full of diverse examples of writers—Mahfouz in Egypt, Pamuk in Turkey, and more interestingly, Pasternak in the Soviet Union—who have conducted their arguments with their societies and its political arrangements through their art in subtle, oblique ways. They didn’t always have the license to make bold pronouncements about freedom, democracy, Islam, and liberalism, but they exerted another kind of moral authority through their work.
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