Early this week, PEN American Center named six new table hosts for its annual dinner on Tuesday, substituting for the six who opted out to protest the organization’s decision to present its “freedom of expression courage award” to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Nonetheless, an additional 198 writers have joined the initial six dissenters, Peter Carey, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, and Taiye Selasi. The 204 writers (so far) no doubt understand that their vocation depends on the First Amendment. Of course they believe in freedom of speech, and it’s awful that 12 people were executed in Paris in January, but from their perspective that’s no reason to celebrate a bunch of cartoonists and writers who’ve made a habit of picking on a dispossessed minority still suffering the depredations of European colonialism.
It’s true, as critics of the PEN dissidents charge, that the letter and subsequent comments show that they don’t know much about the magazine itself—for instance, that it makes fun of sports more often than it does of Islam. Nor do they understand the role Charlie Hebdo plays in Parisian cultural life, as a pillar of the institutionalized nostalgia for May 1968. It’s not even clear how many of the PEN dissidents are able to read the left-wing French weekly.
