Oct 9th 1997
THOSE who regard poetry as a quiet, introspective activity—the mental equivalent of basket weaving—will be surprised by the 25th anniversary issue of Index on Censorship, a magazine founded in 1972 by Stephen Spender, an English poet who turned against communism, to give publicity to the worldwide persecution of writers. The issue is given over to poets vilified, imprisoned, tortured, exiled or censored—all of them for practising the not-so-gentle art of poetry.
The cases cited in the issue belong mainly to the 20th century, but perhaps the most famous banned poet of all time was Publius Ovidius Naso. He was exiled in AD8 by Augustus Caesar to Tomi, a bleak fishing village on the coast of the Black Sea, where he died nine years later.
What exactly did Ovid do wrong? The details are by now a little hazy, but the general picture is quite clear. He showed—as so many banned poets have done since—an unseemly lack of reverence for authority. He wrote highly-charged erotic verses at a time when Augustus was trying to set the morals of Rome to rights. And, quite specifically, he managed to offend the emperor directly by publishing “The Art of Love” at a time when Augustus’s only daughter had herself been shipped off to the island of Pandataria for an assortment of adulterous liaisons.
In most places poets can now get away with a joyous celebration of human sexuality. But modern censors can be just as intolerant as the ancient ones were about an irreverence towards the powers-that-be, especially when the poet displays a talent for parody, and about poems that sniff out hypocrisy and double-think of all kinds.
Mild and bitter
In western democracies official censorship of poetry is residual, and intended primarily to shield children from profanity. The treatment in the United States of Allen Ginsberg, a beat poet who died earlier this year, is a case in point. An absolute ban imposed on the broadcast of some of his poems on national public radio, on the grounds that they contained “indecent language”, was not lifted until 1993. Since then their broadcast has been permitted only between 8pm and 6am. But all the forbidden poems are freely available in American bookshops in Ginsberg’s “Collected Poems”. One begins:
The young kid, horror buff, monster Commissar, ghoul connoisseur, attic bedroom postered with violet skulls, cigarette butts on the floor, thinks he’d strangle girls after orgasm . . .
Poets in authoritarian and totalitarian countries suffer not only censorship but persecution. Under the dictatorship of Dr Hastings Banda in Malawi the punishment meted out to Jack Mapanje in the late 1980s for publishing a collection of poems called “Of Chameleons and Gods” was brutally direct in the first instance (a prison sentence of three-and-a-half years), and demoralisingly devious after the poet’s sudden release from prison in 1991.
Though Mr Mapanje, who had been teaching in the English Department of the University of Malawi when he was arrested, had not been formally dismissed from his post, he was told that he would have to re-apply for his job. He duly did so, but his letter of application was not even acknowledged until two months later. Mr Mapanje eventually left Malawi, and now lives in England.
His book of poetry was never officially banned. Instead, it was said to have been “withdrawn from public circulation”, which means that, though not exactly banned (it could, according to the authorities, be legally kept, bought and sold), it was not officially available for sale either. This kind of cat-and-mouse deviousness belongs to the fictional shadow worlds of Franz Kafka. The bewildered citizen/poet does not know whether he is innocent or guilty—and if he is indeed guilty, of what is he guilty? The writer himself is obliged to seek out the causes of his own guilt.
Ken Saro-Wiwa, a combative novelist, poet and television producer who founded the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, infuriated the military dictators of Nigeria with lines like these:
Corpses have grown
And covered the land
The xylophone of the deceased chief
Is still, has forgot the past.
Ancestral spirits driven from home
Walk tearful abroad
The orphaned land weeps.
He was hanged in 1995 after a kangaroo trial on a conspiracy to murder charge.
Outside the third world, some of the worst excesses of the censors in modern times have been experienced by poets in Turkey (where several of them have ended up in prison) and by poets who lived, and struggled to write and publish, in Eastern Europe during the cold war. In the 1950s and 1960s, Miroslav Holub, a Czech poet, resorted to writing poetry that was stripped bare of anything that might be regarded as poetic language, even metaphors and adjectives. He was making a point: in those oppressive post-war years poets favoured by communist propagandists were using the high-flying rhetoric of poetry, and all its musical resources, to celebrate the glories of Stalinism. Poetry’s well, Mr Holub was saying, had been poisoned by the political atmosphere.
As with Mr Mapanje in more recent times, Mr Holub lived in a mood of perpetual uncertainty, never quite knowing whether or not his work would lead to persecution of himself and his family. When he was asked recently to give evidence against the former totalitarian regime, he looked into instances of persecution and discovered that from 1969 onwards his name was among the several thousands on an official but secret black-list. In the event of political unrest, this meant that he would have been taken into custody or imprisoned in a camp.
But what is it about poets that those in positions of power fear? Why have Liu Hong Bin and Yang Lian been living in exile from China since the Tiananmen massacre? Why are Samih Al-Qasim and Mahmoud Darwish, two Palestinian poets, persecuted by the Israeli authorities? And why has Shams Langaroudi’s four-volume history of modern poetry in Iran been banned from publication in that country?
Because some poets are incorrigible individualists who, at their best, endeavour to tell the truth about what they see, and the truth is often unpalatable as welel as complicated. They are, in the words of Mark Doty, a fine contemporary American poet, our “tru guarantors of individuality”—an individuality that is the antithesis of the repressive, totalitarian spirit.
THOSE who regard poetry as a quiet, introspective activity—the mental equivalent of basket weaving—will be surprised by the 25th anniversary issue of Index on Censorship, a magazine founded in 1972 by Stephen Spender, an English poet who turned against communism, to give publicity to the worldwide persecution of writers. The issue is given over to poets vilified, imprisoned, tortured, exiled or censored—all of them for practising the not-so-gentle art of poetry.
The cases cited in the issue belong mainly to the 20th century, but perhaps the most famous banned poet of all time was Publius Ovidius Naso. He was exiled in AD8 by Augustus Caesar to Tomi, a bleak fishing village on the coast of the Black Sea, where he died nine years later.
What exactly did Ovid do wrong? The details are by now a little hazy, but the general picture is quite clear. He showed—as so many banned poets have done since—an unseemly lack of reverence for authority. He wrote highly-charged erotic verses at a time when Augustus was trying to set the morals of Rome to rights. And, quite specifically, he managed to offend the emperor directly by publishing “The Art of Love” at a time when Augustus’s only daughter had herself been shipped off to the island of Pandataria for an assortment of adulterous liaisons.
In most places poets can now get away with a joyous celebration of human sexuality. But modern censors can be just as intolerant as the ancient ones were about an irreverence towards the powers-that-be, especially when the poet displays a talent for parody, and about poems that sniff out hypocrisy and double-think of all kinds.
Mild and bitter
In western democracies official censorship of poetry is residual, and intended primarily to shield children from profanity. The treatment in the United States of Allen Ginsberg, a beat poet who died earlier this year, is a case in point. An absolute ban imposed on the broadcast of some of his poems on national public radio, on the grounds that they contained “indecent language”, was not lifted until 1993. Since then their broadcast has been permitted only between 8pm and 6am. But all the forbidden poems are freely available in American bookshops in Ginsberg’s “Collected Poems”. One begins:
The young kid, horror buff, monster Commissar, ghoul connoisseur, attic bedroom postered with violet skulls, cigarette butts on the floor, thinks he’d strangle girls after orgasm . . .
Poets in authoritarian and totalitarian countries suffer not only censorship but persecution. Under the dictatorship of Dr Hastings Banda in Malawi the punishment meted out to Jack Mapanje in the late 1980s for publishing a collection of poems called “Of Chameleons and Gods” was brutally direct in the first instance (a prison sentence of three-and-a-half years), and demoralisingly devious after the poet’s sudden release from prison in 1991.
Though Mr Mapanje, who had been teaching in the English Department of the University of Malawi when he was arrested, had not been formally dismissed from his post, he was told that he would have to re-apply for his job. He duly did so, but his letter of application was not even acknowledged until two months later. Mr Mapanje eventually left Malawi, and now lives in England.
His book of poetry was never officially banned. Instead, it was said to have been “withdrawn from public circulation”, which means that, though not exactly banned (it could, according to the authorities, be legally kept, bought and sold), it was not officially available for sale either. This kind of cat-and-mouse deviousness belongs to the fictional shadow worlds of Franz Kafka. The bewildered citizen/poet does not know whether he is innocent or guilty—and if he is indeed guilty, of what is he guilty? The writer himself is obliged to seek out the causes of his own guilt.
Ken Saro-Wiwa, a combative novelist, poet and television producer who founded the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, infuriated the military dictators of Nigeria with lines like these:
Corpses have grown
And covered the land
The xylophone of the deceased chief
Is still, has forgot the past.
Ancestral spirits driven from home
Walk tearful abroad
The orphaned land weeps.
He was hanged in 1995 after a kangaroo trial on a conspiracy to murder charge.
Outside the third world, some of the worst excesses of the censors in modern times have been experienced by poets in Turkey (where several of them have ended up in prison) and by poets who lived, and struggled to write and publish, in Eastern Europe during the cold war. In the 1950s and 1960s, Miroslav Holub, a Czech poet, resorted to writing poetry that was stripped bare of anything that might be regarded as poetic language, even metaphors and adjectives. He was making a point: in those oppressive post-war years poets favoured by communist propagandists were using the high-flying rhetoric of poetry, and all its musical resources, to celebrate the glories of Stalinism. Poetry’s well, Mr Holub was saying, had been poisoned by the political atmosphere.
As with Mr Mapanje in more recent times, Mr Holub lived in a mood of perpetual uncertainty, never quite knowing whether or not his work would lead to persecution of himself and his family. When he was asked recently to give evidence against the former totalitarian regime, he looked into instances of persecution and discovered that from 1969 onwards his name was among the several thousands on an official but secret black-list. In the event of political unrest, this meant that he would have been taken into custody or imprisoned in a camp.
But what is it about poets that those in positions of power fear? Why have Liu Hong Bin and Yang Lian been living in exile from China since the Tiananmen massacre? Why are Samih Al-Qasim and Mahmoud Darwish, two Palestinian poets, persecuted by the Israeli authorities? And why has Shams Langaroudi’s four-volume history of modern poetry in Iran been banned from publication in that country?
Because some poets are incorrigible individualists who, at their best, endeavour to tell the truth about what they see, and the truth is often unpalatable as welel as complicated. They are, in the words of Mark Doty, a fine contemporary American poet, our “tru guarantors of individuality”—an individuality that is the antithesis of the repressive, totalitarian spirit.
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