writing wrongs - amnesty international and the canongate prize
(3,541 words)

My cousin works in a Karachi bank. Recently, the middle of the night, he was taken from his bed by the police and thrown into jail, where he was beaten so badly, he didn't walk again for three months. All this, because he had been campaigning for a political party. In a few days' time, at one of the Edinburgh Book Festival's daily PEN/Amnesty events, I will be reading from The Execution, by Sharnush Parsipur. Set in an Iranian prison where the writer was incarcerated, it is short, moving and horrific. J.S. Mill said that actions are wrong [in proportion] as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. It is impossible to pursue happiness in such a prison, and it is wrong to put a person in prison for their beliefs. Through the medium of her consciousness and her language, Parsipur is recording a wrong that has been done to her. She is righting a wrong.

The concept of linking this year's Canongate Short Story Competition with a funding effort by Amnesty International is both inspired and appropriate. 2,000 entries (last year's number) would raise £10,000 for Amnesty. I once attended a medical supplies' fund-raising reading for Palestinian refugees. While the poets from Glasgow poured forth in the tones of angry urban alienation, those from Palestine read instead of love and yearning. To write of love while your home is being bulldozed around you, requires a peculiar kind of concentration, one which, by its very existence, is liberating and which, morally, psychologically and spiritually, is 'righting the wrong' which has been committed against you. Of course, it is enmeshed in complex linguistic, poetic and socio-religious terms. The Glaswegians were writing of relative poverty, but on a deeper level, they were mourning the loss of spirituality, of hope, a lack which is the necessary fuel for a capitalist society, and of the effects of that loss on human beings. The Palestinians were singing about the power of love, and of the spirit, in the face of death and despair. Death may be the ultimate wrong, the ubiquitous injustice, or else it may be the great leveller, and therefore the defining right. But it is only these things when we write about it.

The essence of fiction is the exploration of the tension between a character's pursuit of happiness and the extent to which the attainment of that happiness may be prevented by themselves, by other characters or by circumstances. When I heard Sidney Poitier on the radio, the other morning, reading from his recently published autobiography, I stopped the car and listened. His story is one of struggle against poverty, racism and the urge simply to give in. A Utilitarian might say that he has done nothing. Yet through the roles he has portrayed and by his example, his voice, he has inspired many to think, to feel, to act their way out of the wrongs which have been inflicted on them for so long. The enslavement, the lynchings, the denial of rights, the terrible feeling of inferiority… the whole damn thing, as Poitier might say. Still, today, the American film industry remains ferociously racist. We see more black actors, but their roles remain, to a large extent, circumscribed by a set of prejudices which trail back to the bloody soil of the plantations. Clearly, only certain people are permitted to pursue happiness. The world is steeped in wrongs, injustices, apeings of the spirit. It is only through struggle that anything is achieved. In Poitier's case, this took the form of acting in parts which did not compromise his ideals. In the case of writers, it might involve drawing on the totality of their spirit every time they pick up the pen. Wresting the text, like clotted blood, from rock.

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The wrongs we write about may be obvious, external injustices: imprisonment, torture, poverty, betrayal, abuse, genocide, war, and so on. Or they may exist inside the writer's head, subtle deficiencies in the fabric of the soul, which must be righted through a creative process, a mediated, diagetic catharsis in which the author plays demi-urge to a greater, Jungian power and which derives from a need for internal, mental unity. But writing can be most powerful when the two approaches are combined, like the different sections of an orchestra, and then it can produce a tour de force which can move, inspire and change things. Not on its own, though. No piece of writing ever actually did anything. Words exist in another universe, a continuum played out in the mind where the driving force has as much to with means, as it does with ends. There is no division. The interaction between energy and matter, thought and action, spirit and flesh are transmuted through the figures of language - each one, an icon - and every time, this involves a re-invention; it is the act of a deity, even if the writer be an atheist.

Writing - and reading - heighten the awareness, impelling one to judgement, decision, grounding us in the human, the material, the flawed. In a utopia, there would be no need of writers, or of redress. There would be no place for Borgesian paradox. Writing is about creating imperfection. When we create an imperfect person, we are impelled to cogitate on the flaws within ourselves and others and in the systems which those above us have set up and maintained through us. It is not about escape, but about cerebral engagement. It shoots the mind into the orbit of a parallel universe, a parabola, a parable from whence the reader can look at the world in a very different way.

It could be Kadare's bizarre tale of the search by an Italian general for the graves of a lost army in Albania, or Gunn's search for wells at the ends of this world, or el-Sadawi's letters from the women's prison. To write about wrongs, is to attempt to begin the process of righting the damage which they have caused. It could be Kelman's espousal of language as a weapon of class struggle, Haider's poignant, humanistic work in pulling intense realities from the polyglot that is India, or Okri's dancing, wrestling road poems of the spirit. These writers are writing wrongs, writing to redress the balance, to give voice to the buried, the slaughtered, the enslaved, the colonised, the bonded, the marginalized, those who refuse, because the writers find it impossible to conceive of, or to accept a dual, dead universe.

Wrongs occur, first of all, in the head. Oppressors fear the word, and so they foster illiteracy. Literacy carries the potential to turn heads. But oppressors have grown clever; they steal tales and fashion fake mythologies around them, and then they prostitute that which they have torn from the people to set in motion the worst of all possible dynamics in those same people. And writers are far from immune.

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There are three stages in writing: One, the idea, the intention, two, the process, the engagement and three, the reading of the text by the many. This dynamic mirrors the political process. Writing is the politicisation of the brain. To write, or read, texts which aspire to less, is to become less aware. If politics grows oppressive, either overtly, or subliminally through corporate sleight of hand, we suffer, possibly externally, physically, and certainly internally, in our dream-states. Our parabolic lives wither and we fall from orbit.

Perhaps, we should stop waiting for utopias. Perhaps this world will always be a struggle which will require effort, tears, death. In the span between Genghis Khan's I am the Wrath of God!, Hitler's Work Makes Free death-camps, and the obscene, boned earth of Bosnia, Rwanda or Timor, what progress has there been, really? Where is the ascent from the C19th American Governments' bacteriocidal genocide of indigenous peoples, to today's vote-rigged administration's germ warfare agenda? Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Acknowledging that everything is relative, is surely an injunction. It impels every one of us to make a decision, to judge, to be a demiurge, to decide whether or not we do something to contribute towards setting right a wrong. I will leave you with the last words of Eliot's Middlemarch, written at a time when British women did not have the vote, could not own property, were viewed as mentally, physically and spiritually inferior to men and essentially, were imprisoned at home. I see this as a distillation of her philosophy, a thought shot, parabolically, into the future:

Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Our books are our tombs. Let us strive for happiness, for ourselves and for others. Let us go forth, and write wrongs!

Who knows, we might even win.

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