![]() ![]() And yes, every human communication involves storytelling of a sort: we live in time, and time is one event after another, and unless we have lost both our short-term and our long-term memories, we describe ourselves and others in narrative form. You can hardly open a newspaper without hearing of some new oil spill or food contamination or forest fire or threatened extinction or mutated microbe or heat wave or flood.īut I take it that by “literature” you might have expected me to talk about fiction – about storytelling. All of these subjects can be placed into the basket called “the environment,” and I suppose that anything written about them might be termed “literature.” In that sense, a great many writers are concentrating on these problems already. The list of good and worthy things has recently expanded to include something often called “the environment.” We have recently been made very conscious of the many threats to “the environment” – threats that may range from melting glaciers and sea ice, to rising global temperatures and the more extreme weather that results from these temperatures, to pollution of the air and water, to the chemicals we are unwittingly putting into our children’s mouths through industrial food, to the extinction of many plant and animal species, to the failing harvests on land and the dwindling fish stocks in the ocean – and even to the higher risk of plagues and illnesses that such environmental changes will almost certainly precipitate. And shouldn’t the writer exercise that responsibility by doing the good and worthy thing that the preacher will now proceed to spell out? Kurt Vonnegut used to have a rubber stamp he’d use on students’ question-filled letters to him it said, “Write your own essay.” I do feel I might have quite a lot of success with a T-shirt – to be worn only by writers – that would say “Write your own book.” Or, even better, “Write your own worthy book.” If by some chance the preacher realises that the writer does not in fact possess that kind of power, he or she is likely to be dismissed as a frill, an irrelevance, a self-indulgent narcissist, a mere entertainer, a parasite, and so forth.ĭoesn’t the writer have a responsibility? these preachers ask. ![]() In fact, there’s a strong tendency to speak to and about writers as if they are the government as if they actually possess that kind of physical-world power, and therefore ought to use it for the betterment of society, as they surely would do if they were not filled to the brim with laziness, cowardice, or immorality. It’s an odd thing, but people are always lining up to preach to writers about their duties – what they ought to be writing, or what they should not have written and they are very ready to tell the writer what a bad person he or she is because he or she has not produced the sort of book or essay that the preacher feels he or she ought to have produced. Possibly you are expecting that I will now deliver a sermon about your duties as writers. I am proud to be a member of PEN, as I am sure all of you are as well. PEN supports those writers everywhere who have come under fire –often literally – because they have sought to give a human voice – fictional or not – to those whose voices have been silenced. As the torturer O’Brien tells the hapless Winston Smith in George Orwell’s novel of the future, Nineteen Eighty-Four, posterity will not vindicate him because posterity will never even hear about him. We like to think that all evil deeds will eventually come to light and that all stories about them will sooner or later be told, but in many cases this is simply not true. New media are also being targeted: last year, for the first time, PEN America honoured an Internet writer – Nay Phone Latt, a blogger imprisoned in Burma for reporting too accurately on conditions there. That is why writers of all kinds, including many journalists, have been shot, imprisoned, exiled, and – to use a fairly new word – disappeared, and why so many newspapers and publishing houses have been closed down. The inability to speak encourages the unspeakable, and secrecy is an important tool not only of power but of atrocity. There is nothing that repressive governments desire more than imposed silence. I am truly honoured to have been invited to speak today at the PEN Congress here in Tokyo. This is the text of a speech Margaret Atwood wrote and gave in 2010.
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