Not to more than 200 PEN members, though, who objected to Charlie‘s being awarded. Apparently ignorant of the magazine’s roots in the 1960s counterculture, or its gleeful slaughtering of any and all sacred cows, the dissident PEN members bemoaned the funky, small-circulation weekly for allegedly attacking the “disenfranchised.” (Garry Trudeau made a similar argument.)
Russell Banks, a terrific American novelist, was one PEN member who joined in objecting to the award. Yet in in an interesting twist, this week’s Charlie Hebdo issue marking the one-year anniversary of the attack contains a contribution penned by Mr. Banks.
In an email, Banks confirmed to me that it was the editors of Charlie who asked him to write the piece; a remarkable display of magnanimousness on their part after the PEN brouhaha. And it turns out that Banks objected to PEN’s award for reasons quite different than that of, say, Joyce Carol Oates; a reminder that, like the cartoons that Charlie Hebdo publishes, things are not always exactly what they appear to be on the surface.
In a recent interview with France’s Le Nouvel Observateur, Banks explained:
Nearly a year has passed since the murderous attack against the editors, writers, and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, and more than eight months have passed since the contretemps that grew out of the decision by American PEN to give the Freedom of Expression award to Charlie Hebdo at its annual fund-raising dinner in New York. It continues to boil because the issues that lay behind the contretemps were not made clear at the start. I joined the writers who first objected to PEN’s decision — Michael Ondaatje, Peter Carey, Francine Prose, and several hundred more, —not as a specific critique of Charlie Hebdo (which I’m happy to leave to the French, because satire doesn’t really travel well across cultural contexts), but as a critique of American PEN. It seemed to me that PEN was using Charlie Hebdo’s tragic fate as a fund-raising promotion, exploiting the magazine editors’ and artists’ sudden posthumous worldwide fame to attract rich New Yorkers to PEN’s annual fundraising dinner, where a table costs as much as $10,000 each. I have been a member of American PEN for forty or more years and served on its board in the 1980s. Historically, at these annual fundraising black-tie dinners several awards are made to individual writers or publishers who have paid the price of censorship, imprisonment, and sometimes death for the right to express their beliefs, and the awards are almost always made to individuals and organizations that affluent New Yorkers might otherwise never have heard of, whose names they might find difficult to pronounce, from countries they cannot locate on a map. Thanks to the prominence and visibility of American PEN, the awards shine light in dark spaces, they embarrass authorities and regimes who would prefer to keep their oppression of writers and artists in the shadows, and they often have the effect of influencing governments and other authoritarian thugs to back off. PEN’s decision to give the Freedom of Expression award to Charlie Hebdo was a case of letting the tail wag the dog. The editors and artists of Charlie Hebdo should have seen this. In 1993, when Salman Rushdie was offered sanctuary and protection by the mayor of Strasbourg at a literary festival, he was not the only writer with a fatwa calling for his assassination, only the most famous. Rushdie, who was already protected by the British, pointed this out and suggested that the mayor offer sanctuary and safety to one of those little known writers instead, and out of that impulse grew the International Parliament of Writers and its Cities of Asylum project. I’m suggesting, I suppose, that American PEN might better have named their award after Charlie Hebdo and given it instead to one of the hundreds of persecuted writers and poets languishing otherwise unknown and ignored in prisons in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kabul, or the Sudan.
