In May, and for the eighth time, I will attend the annual meeting of PEN in
Slovenia, the best organized thing of its kind I know. In addition to readings,
presenters are asked to address the migrant (and immigrant) crisis that faces
the West. As I consider what I’ll say, I find myself reflecting on what strikes
me as a disturbing moment in American political history. Here are some
reflections.
The citizens of my nation, which I do love, may sometimes fall into the
belief that our land has an exclusive
hold on virtue; nowadays, some also find that the ever so slightly
left-of-center inclinations of Barack Obama have threatened the country with ruin,
moral and otherwise. I admit this strikes me as nonsense.
The U.S. still has a number of virtues, and high among them, at least until
lately, has been its receptiveness to immigration. This seems apt, of course,
in that the only Americans who can claim to be truly indigenous are our
so-called Indians. Though I am no social scientist, I would urge, in fact, that
some other assets that America has historically displayed-- improvisatory agility, inventiveness, relative disregard for social station-- owe themselves
to the rich variety of cultures we encompass.
There has never been a single, definable American culture. For some, this
is an impediment: our lack of monarchy and established religion famously drove novelist Henry James, for example, to
Europe; but for others, including me, there is a hybridized glory in our most
significant cultural achievements– like jazz, tap or hip-hop dancing, and even, though
I haven’t space to linger on this, most of our greatest literature. And that
glory is at least partly accounted for by the multivalency of our cultural
life.
It therefore greatly pains me that a nation of immigrants should now seek
to slam the door against all manner of prospective newcomers. How, one wonders,
can someone named O’Malley, or Zukofsky, or LaSalle, or Belli, or Feinstein, or
for that matter Trump– how can any of these insist on excluding people named
Hernandez or Hussein or Said? For a U.S. citizen to demonize whole categories
of people (Syrian, Central American, Mexican, what have you?) smacks
disturbingly of fascistical logic. I have the dreadful
suspicion that my country is sliding toward the sort of thought that ushered in
the Holocaust: namely, that if things are going ill in my country, then it must be
the fault of some group disloyal to its national character. America’s current
socio-economic problems are legion, yes, but many angry people are now blaming
them on some of the poorest and most defenseless people ever to have sought
refuge on our shores. Why such citizens should hold these struggling souls
accountable for their woes, rather than faulting the fabulously wealthy, who,
by virtue of brute economic power, have clearly been far more responsible for those
woes than any other faction—well, that’s beyond me. Even more absurd is their
imagining a Messiah in Donald Trump, the very personification of extravagant
wealth.
Even apart from the moral issues connected to it, there are certain
indisputable contradictions in our newfound exclusiveness: while so much talk
is of the crime and terrorism that will accompany certain categories of
immigrants, an American’s chances of coming to mortal harm at the hands of one
of his or her native-born, gun-toting compatriots are literally 5,000 times
greater than of dying at the hands of the people we are being told to curse.
One also hears that illegal aliens are taxing our social service capacities and
are thus a mighty burden on American taxpayers. So far as I know, there is no
credible study to ratify any such claim; what is clear is that, without immigrant labor, the cost of many
American products would soar so astronomically as truly to hurt the taxpayer. Even here in Vermont, the dairy
industry would likely founder without Latin-American labor; the prices of
fruits and vegetables grown in places like Florida or California, to use a more
dramatic example, would rapidly
rise beyond the reach of all but those same ultra-wealthy Americans.
But for the moment, needless to say, it is Muslim immigrants who have
become our whipping boys, no matter the sad irony that the U.S has killed many,
many more Middle and Near Easterners with our ill considered wars and our drone
attacks than citizens of ours have been killed by Muslims of whatever sort,
including terrorists. And yet...
And yet, having allowed all this, I do at the same time harbor some
contrarian reflections on the issue we’ll be discussing in Slovenia. The
program description suggests, for instance, that "we need not repeat the hopes
that so-called normal Muslims, those living in Europe and North America and
already adjusted to Western standards, can calm the terrorists, although these
fighters of the Caliphate represent only a small minority of the Muslim
community." Really? Have I missed some reason not to repeat those
hopes? I confess to disappointment in prominent Muslim leaders’ abidingly tepid
condemnations, at home and abroad, of extremist violence. One can comprehend a
concern for their own personal safety, and I don’t meant to sound sanctimonious;
I’m not sure how I myself would
behave in their positions. But such worries never deterred the likes of Martin
Luther King.
The program description also asserts that Islamist
terrorism "has its source in a deep and fundamental rage against the West and
its continuing exploitative tendencies in the Near and Middle East, as well as
its pervasive belief in the superiority of Western civilization." Well, western exploitation in the Middle
East is undeniable, even reprehensible, and surely does have something to do with the violence we
are witnessing; and yet the planners and perpetrators of the events of
September 11th, 2001, of each of the more recent attacks on U.S. soil, and of
the Paris massacre seem all in fact to have been quite well-heeled and
well-educated; indeed, quite a number have benefited greatly from the
abundance of the western world. What I’m stressing, then, is that their motives
appear to have been far less political than religious, or, more accurately, that
their politics appear to have been determined by religious fundamentalism, as
unbending in its contemporary radical-Islamic avatar as it was in the militancy
of Christians during the Crusades. The Caliphate, in a word, insists upon the
superiority of its own culture. From my perspective, the mere fact that we,
Westerners for the most part, will be able to have such an open conversation as
the one I look forward to in May– well, that may not be an automatic proof of
relative superiority, but at this stage in my life it will do until some better
proof comes along.
I should admit that to play historian or social scientist takes me out of
my depth. Let me turn, therefore, to some matters about which I do know a bit. Our
program asks, "What can we, as writers and intellectuals, contribute to this
relationship, that must grow into dialogue?" I am all for dialogue, and am far
from thinking it impossible with all Islamic people, a few of whom I include
among my friends. Frankly, however, I think we live in a fairy tale world if we
imagine the likes of the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab, or Bokol Haram are
the least interested in dialogue. Their views of the true, good, and beautiful
are, from what I can tell, absolute and non-negotiable.
Yet we are further asked, ”What role must literature and culture play in resolving
the conflict between Middle Eaterner and Westerner?” Most of us are lucky enough not to live in a system such as the
old USSR’s, say, in which –as Joseph Brosdsky once said in a journal I edited–
merely to describe a flower accurately felt like a political act. But in much
of the west, and certainly in the U.S, we face a subtler difficulty: namely
that neither the authorities nor the public at large are likely to be swayed
one way or another by anything like fiction or poetry, simply because those arts
go largely unnoticed. To that extent, our better writing strategies likely
involve newspapers or, more accurately in our day, social media, as opposed to
the so-called creative arts. But even online activism, to name it that, proves
problematic, for at least two reasons. The first is that social media find
Einstein in the same house as the village imbecile: thus, if two disparate
accounts of the same thing are broadcast, there is no determining which will
strike a broad readership as more compelling. In the U.S., this was exemplified
by the idiotic controversy over President Obama’s birthplace. Those who chose
to label him a Kenyan were simply not to be dissuaded by indisputable proof of
his birth in Hawaii. The social media’s second great liability is that, just as
oppressed parties may use them, so may their oppressors, a sad fact illustrated
by the ill-starred Arab Spring and by frequent manipulations of information in
China, for instance.
So it may be that more direct political activism– street demonstrations, more
vigorous support of candidates we
believe in, and so on—are the likeliest avenues to such success as we may may
find.
But let us imagine a literature that was
an effective tool of change. My surmise is that, like socialist realism, it
would, qua writing, be bad or tepid
in any case, simply because art founded primarily on an aprioristic agenda is
usually doomed to inferiority in my view.
All this may sound as though I
urge political or social nonchalance upon the artist, urge him or her to be a
little Nero, playing the violin as Rome burns. Not at all. In fact, exactly the
contrary. Any poet who stayed innocent of the great migrant crisis would be no
poet at all. An artist must be as open as possible to all manner of observation,
and must be jealous of those observatory powers, because the threats to them
are myriad. To allow that openness to be usurped by anything –even the noblest political or moral conviction– is by my
lights suicidal.
Here is a remark, which resonates
with me, by my dear friend, poet Fleda Brown: "I’ve
long since quit worrying about whether writing itself is a worthy use of my
life. Whether it is or isn’t doesn’t change my inclination to do it. Anyway,
I’m positive that it matters, words themselves being small bulbs buried under
the soil, small grenades."
I
hope that Fleda is right, but in any case, I know that a willful effort to make my poems "political"
or "relevant"
will serve no one: not me, not my reader, and not any cause I subscribe to,
including a sane and compassionate attitude toward those disrupted by violence,
along with the development of a non-hysterical stance toward terrorism.
The
only thing I really know to do is to beat at my keyboard. If what results
is an explosion, I must accept that. If I am moved by a bloom or a bird or the
birth of a grandchild, these are what I need to bring forth. The point is, we
writers need to sustain belief in our own voices, and in their autonomy– not to
the point of perversity or narcissism, but right up to those points. If we
allow our voices to be controlled by dogma, even virtuous dogma (if there be
such a thing), we might as well be writing advertisements or propaganda. We
need to believe that our sincerest testimonies matter, even if we cannot define
how that may be in any definitive way. We need to agree with American poet
William Carlos William's assertion that
- It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably
every day
for
lack
of what is found
there.
