Dangerous truths

The ongoing threat against Salman Rushdie's life illustrates what it's like to be a writer in too many parts of the world

Writing inconvenient facts can be hazardous to one's health. Witness the recent report of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which found that, last year, 118 journalists around the world languished in prison and 24 were murdered. But writing a truth that is deeper than mere facts -- the kind of truth sometimes found in literature -- can be every bit as dangerous, perhaps even more so. The artist's vision, after all, can be so much more powerful, and thus so much more subversive.

The most famous contemporary example of this is Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born writer whose 1989 novel, The Satanic Verses, almost killed him, and may yet. Ten years ago, the theocrats who govern Iran passed a fatwa ordering Rushdie executed for his novel's alleged anti-Islamic themes. And though the current, more-moderate Iranian government backed away from the fatwa last year, other Muslim extremists -- a description that extends to hard-line factions of the same Iranian government that has supposedly reached peace with Rushdie -- could still carry out the death sentence.

Though Rushdie's case is the best-known, there are many similar ones. The PEN (Poets, Essayists, Novelists) American Center, through its Freedom-to-Write Committee, keeps track of such cases worldwide. Here are a few examples, as documented by PEN:

Alina Vitukhnovskaya, a young Russian poet who wrote critically of the Yeltsin government, was arrested and charged with selling LSD. Russian PEN members attending her trial reported that the charges were nothing but a spurious attempt to silence her. American PEN member Michael Scammell profiled Vitukhnovskaya in the New York Review of Books, and a short time later she was released.

Norberto Fuentes, a dissident Cuban writer, contacted an American friend -- the novelist William Kennedy, a PEN member -- after he was arrested by Fidel Castro's repressive government. A personal appeal was couriered to Castro and publicized in the Washington Post. Fuentes was eventually allowed to leave Cuba, flown out by the writer Gabriel García Márquez aboard his private plane.

A novelist and documentary filmmaker arrested in Nigeria was granted a PEN Freedom-to-Write Award anonymously so as not to endanger his life further. His family used the prize money to hire a lawyer; within weeks, he was released from prison.

Of course, not all cases have such relatively happy outcomes. Consider the Egyptian novelist Alaa Hamed, sentenced to eight years in prison and fined $1000 in 1991 -- an additional year was later tacked on -- for "propagating extreme ideas including atheism and contempt of religion" and for "attacking Islam, mocking religions, resorting to obscenity, and encouraging promiscuity." Sounds like pretty good stuff. But Hamed and his family are in dire straits: though he has stayed out of prison on appeal, he was fired from his job and his books were banned, leaving him with no means of support.

"I think one of the things about living in a free society . . . is that you don't have to examine the idea of freedom too much, because it's simply there," Rushdie recently told the Boston Phoenix ("Salman Speaks," May 7). "I guess what happened in my case is that somebody tried to turn off the tap. Somebody tried to deprive me of those basic freedoms and, as a result, drew my attention to the importance of them -- not just the importance, but the importance of articulating the case for these fundamental freedoms."

For more information, and to find out what you can do, see the PEN American Center's Freedom to Write Web site, at http://www.pen.org/freedom/freedom.html.

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