PT Data wrangler

Tag: freedom of expression

  • Art and Fire: An Interview with Ben Okri

    Art and Fire: An Interview with Ben Okri

    Ben Okri on climate crisis, the purpose of writing, and what we leave behind.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    Ben – thank you for talking with me. Tiger Work, your collected short works on climate crisis, has a great sense of coherence to it. I’m always interested in how – and why and when – collections are drawn together. So, why these pieces, why in this way, why now?

    The coherence comes from the depth of intention. I’ve been thinking about it a long time, pondering how best to write about this huge and troubling subject. It is a subject that awakens in us primal fears and evasions. It is daunting, nightmarish, and hard to make sense of, all at the same time. So I thought I would use all the powers of literature to try and tackle it. I wanted to use its diverse forms and the power intrinsic to each to take the reader on a cubistic journey round the issue of the climate crisis.

    Seeing these pieces gathered together, their shortness is marked – structurally, but also on a line level. It’s particularly conspicuous in your poetry, with lines often only small handful of words long. Could you talk a little about form, and shortness of form? 

    We don’t have much time. The climate crisis has done something to time. We have a short time gap to turn things around and get the environment back on an even keel. The shortness of the forms and lines reflect the shortness of the time we’ve got. What I need to convey is so urgent that the long form feels oddly inappropriate. The existential nature of the crisis has compelled me to question the way I write. In one of the essays, I talk about a writing without waste. The writing has to match what is needed: truth, simplicity, a kind of Spartan beauty, passion, love, vision.

    Has climate crisis always been in your work, in a way?

    Only to the degree that I have always been sensitive to nature, to the air we breathe, to pollution, to exploitation, to deforestation. Some critics claim that a short story of mine in a volume called Stars of the New Curfew, a story called ‘What the Tapster Saw’, initiated a genre called petro-fiction. But it’s only recently I felt the need to face the subject head on. And it is a tough subject to tackle. It strains the limits of aesthetics. Can one write about the environment and it to still be art? My answer is yes. Absolutely. It can be art and fire.

    I remember discussing ‘What the Tapster Saw’ and ‘petro-magic-realism’ in my now very-out-of-date master’s thesis. The thesis is out of date, I suppose, for the same reasons of short time that you mention above; it was too interested in the aesthetics of writing about climate and not enough also in the material conditions of writing about climate; too bothered with the art, not enough with both art and fire.

    Would you say that your “purpose” for writing (to use that limiting old way of asking a writer why the write, when the answer is of course “because I am a writer” – sorry!) has changed over the decades?

    It changes as I change, but it remains the same as I remain the same. I write for truth, for beauty, for justice, for playfulness, for innovation, for pleasure, to change the world, to stop the breath, to reveal, to question, to discover…

    You’ve spoken elsewhere of the need for ‘a radical act of mass consciousness’ that would jolt us from the numb, passive, unthinking path to climate disaster we’re on. What might that look like, for you? And what function might literature and storytelling have in it?

    I don’t know what it would look like. But I know what it would do. It would be like the spirit of solidarity and courage and awareness that was there during the Blitz. It would be a world where we are all pulling together to cut down on our emissions and our waste. It would be the beginning of a new civilisation, where we no longer do things that contribute to the death of our species. We would be thoughtful and aware. Our commerce would be creative, our government would act not only for the national interest but that of humanity as a whole. We would love our lives and have our virtues and vices, but we would be conscious that what we do impacts beautifully on the world. We wouldn’t be so selfish and naïve. For we are naïve in thinking that we can go on polluting in individual and societal ways and the environmental equation will still come out alright. I believe we are at a crossroads. One road continues our suicidal relationship with the earth all the way to hell. The other road leads to a wider humanity, a new species. That’s the starkness of the choice. When we know what has to be done, we will do it. I think it takes a crisis to bring out the best in us. But we don’t want to wake up to the crisis too late, when there is nothing more we can do. That is what literature can make happen. It can take us there, to the edge, to the hell we don’t want. It can show us a new road. It can make these things real and so empower our imagination and our will.

    I think Tiger Work points to how what we consider “freedoms” are all contingent on, and dwarfed by, the idea at the collection’s heart. As someone with long involvement in the PEN movement, can I ask how, for you, the totality of climate crisis intersects with the idea of free expression, of the freedoms to read and write, listen and tell?

    The first loss of freedom of expression passed into law was in response to climate activism. We no longer have the right to really protest. There, straightaway, is the intersection. Turns out that to talk properly and truly about climate change you need freedom of expression. Climate crisis and liberty are linked.

    It feels to me that much of your work explores what we leave behind (to the world, yes, but also of the world). What do you want to leave behind?

    Creative celebrations of truth, of clarity, of possibilities. Dreams of greater realities. A measure of our freedom.

    Ben Okri was born in Minna, Nigeria. His childhood was divided between Nigeria, where he saw first hand the consequences of war, and London. He has won many prizes over the years for his fiction, and is also an acclaimed essayist, playwright, and poet. In 2019 Astonishing the Gods was named as one of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels That Shaped Our World’.

    Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

  • Bookpocalypse: AI and the Risks to Literature and Free Expression

    Bookpocalypse: AI and the Risks to Literature and Free Expression

    Monica Ali’s PEN H.G. Wells Lecture

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    Monica Ali’s PEN H.G. Wells Lecture was delivered in partnership with New Writing North on 29 November 2023.

    ~

    This summer two worlds – literature and technology – collided. News stories began appearing about authors suing OpenAI and Meta for using their works to train their large language models ‘without consent, without credit and without compensation.’ I wanted to find out more. I read an article on The Verge, titled ‘The Great Fiction of AI: The Strange World of High-Speed Semi-Automated Fiction.’ Then I found a book review in the New York Times of a novella, Death of an Author, which was ‘95 per cent machine-generated.’ I put down my quill and stared out of the window for a couple of hours, wondering if my tried-and-tested productivity hacks of taking the dog for a walk or soaking in a hot tub were no longer going to cut it in this frightening new world.

    Be brave, I told myself. Experiment with these new technologies or prepare to be replaced by a monkey with an iPhone and a writing app. I lay on my bed and opened up Laika, one of the free creative writing tools I’d read about. Laika offers you an array of ‘writing brains’ trained on (as far as I could tell) dead and out-of-copyright authors such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or Dickens. Who wouldn’t want to write like those guys? Perhaps my latest novel, Love Marriage, could have been vastly improved with this genius tool. I chose the Charles Dickens brain and pasted in the first paragraph. Then, with a sense of fair play, I added the opening of the second to give the machine more of a steer about where this story could be going. Here’s the opening of my book:

    In the Ghorami household sex was never mentioned. If the television was on and a kissing-with-tongues scene threatened the chaste and cardamom-scented home, it was swiftly terminated by a flick of the black box. When Yasmin began her first period, her mother had slipped her a pack of Kotex Maxi pads and murmured instructions not to touch the Quran. This was confusing because Yasmin never touched the Quran anyway, except at the behest of her mother. But it also made sense because menstruation, as she had learned in a biology class, was linked to reproduction. And the dotted-line diagrams in the textbook were, surprisingly yet undeniably, linked to the actors who pushed their tongues into each other’s mouths, thus ruining everyone’s viewing pleasure.

    Now, at the age of twenty-six, Yasmin knew all about sex. The human body had long since yielded its mysteries.

    I pressed the ‘write’ button and, moments later, Laika delivered this gem:

    She had seen that the most secret of the secrets of the body, was its female secret. The secret of its male secret.

    Undaunted, I clicked the ‘alternate’ button. The programme was clearly just warming up. Sure enough, Laika spat out an entirely different and highly creative suggestion.

    He had been a boy. He had been a man. But, the day of his death was not yet in sight, when he had seen a great change. He had seen a change.

    What? Who? Has Laika been subject to some kind of cyber-attack? I tried again and without hesitation or any sign of embarrassment, my new writing buddy offered this:

    You know, my dear, how the world is, said Miss Pross, as she looked at her friend. And yet, I am not surprised to hear of your being here. You are a good and good soul, my dear.

    The problem, I then saw, was that I shouldn’t be attempting to write like somebody else, let alone Dickens. Laika, being several steps ahead of me, had already thought of this. You can train your very own brain with whatever material you like. Simply upload between 30,000 and 90,000 words of text and Laika will create ‘little helpers that speak in the voice of the text you provide.’

    Across the Atlantic, authors were suing tech companies for helping themselves to their work. Here I was, entering willingly into a collaboration for the greater good of literature. Feeling smug, I uploaded about 80,000 words of Love Marriage, and waited eagerly while the programme analysed it and created my new brain.

    When it was ready, I simply repeated the experiment, pasting in the same opening paragraph and a bit of the novel. I hit the ‘write’ button.

    The bedroom door opened to reveal a woman clad only in a white nightdress, her hair in a perfect chignon and her body perfectly toned.

    A sudden segue that doesn’t work at all, but I wasn’t about to give up now. I clicked ‘alternate’.

    She knew the ins and outs of the human body, from the pubic hair to the fallopian tubes, the position of the labia, the position of the urethra.

    Some bizarre choices there (who doesn’t know where pubic hair is?) but at least it seemed like Laika was concentrating this time. Third time lucky? I clicked again.

    She had slept with three men, and had had at least four orgasms during that time. Her first boyfriend, Joe, a receptionist at a hospital, was only fourteen.

    This time, Laika had taken (I won’t say ‘ripped off’, because I offered it freely) the opening of my actual next sentence and had fun with it. A little too much fun, I might add.

    For those of you who are wondering how the paragraph in Love Marriage continues, here it is:

    She had slept with three men, and was engaged to be married to the third, Joe, a fellow doctor at St Barnabas hospital. Her parents, Shaokat and Anisah, liked Joe because as a doctor he was automatically suitable, and because everyone liked Joe, he was gifted that way.

    I closed my laptop and slept soundly that night, secure in the knowledge that the bots are about as smart as that monkey with an iPhone. But deep down I knew it wasn’t the end of the story, that I had proved precisely nothing with my little experiment.

    I read more and more news items, such as ‘Not for Machines to Harvest: Data Revolts Break Out Against AI’ in the New York Times and ‘The Author Embracing AI To Help Write Novels – And Why He’s Not Worried About It’ on the Sky News website. Come Autumn, the news stories had ramped up – the Authors Guild brought a class action lawsuit in a New York federal court against OpenAI, headed by writers including George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen. ‘For fiction writers,’ reads the Authors Guild press release, ‘OpenAI’s unauthorized use of their work is identity theft on a grand scale.’ The threat to authors’ livelihoods is at the heart of the complaint. ‘GPT is already being used to generate books that mimic human authors’ work, such as the recent attempt to generate volumes 6 and 7 of plaintiff George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series A Song of Ice and Fire, as well as the numerous AI-generated books that have been posted on Amazon that attempt to pass themselves off as human-generated and seek to profit off a human author’s hard-earned reputation.’

    At this point, you might be wondering if these rich and famous writers could just get back to their mansions and quit whining. But remember this is a class action suit, which if successful would benefit all fiction writers, and the median author income in the USA in 2022 was around $20,000. (In the UK it was £7,000, a fall of 33% from 2006, or 60% when adjusted for inflation.) Besides, as the Authors Guild statement goes on to point out, this fight isn’t just about money. It’s about much more than that. As Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger puts it: ‘The various GPT models and other current generative AI machines can only generate material that is derivative of what came before it. They copy sentence structure, voice, storytelling, and context from books and other ingested texts. The outputs are mere remixes without the addition of any human voice. Regurgitated culture is no replacement for human art.’

    I decided to continue my flirtation with AI, although now it felt a little dirty. Everybody’s doing it, I reassured myself as I created an account on ChatGPT. My first move was to ask it to write a story in the style of H.G. Wells, about a rogue AI that poses an existential threat to humanity. It spat out a story featuring a renowned scientist, Professor Jameson, who works tirelessly and defeats the AI. It was coherent, but bland.

    As the sun set over London, a sense of unease descended upon the city.

    In my researches, I’d read that it takes some skill to coax the best out of these programmes, that it’s an iterative process, that inputting the right prompts is key. So I did my level best, asking for more characters, more insight into those characters, adding dialogue and so on. ‘Make it sound more like H.G. Wells,’ I wrote in desperation, but to no avail. Perhaps, I reasoned, H.G. Wells wasn’t in the training dataset. I’d try another author and, just for the hell of it, chose the author perhaps least likely to write a story about malevolent AI. ‘Now rewrite the story in the style of Marilynne Robinson.’ I half expected it to tell me stop being ridiculous, but it went calmly about its business. In this version, Jameson ‘found himself haunted by his past mistakes and the ghosts of loved ones lost.’ The story wasn’t in the style of Robinson, but clearly the AI had at least read the Spark Notes.

    ‘Now rewrite the story in the style of Monica Ali.’ I paused before I hit return, because who wants a pastiche of their style thrown in their face? I needn’t have worried. The bot doesn’t rise to the level of pastiche. But in this version, Jameson’s wife is ‘a fiercely intelligent woman’ and the words ‘love’, ‘determination’ and ‘courage’ crop up. ChatGPT had identified something in Robinson’s writing, and in mine, but no more than an averagely intelligent twelve-year-old would discover. Was there really anything here for writers to fear?

    I’ll come to that later, but no matter the quality of the output, theft is still theft and big tech has been stealing from writers and other artists on a massive scale. Towards the end of September, a journalist contacted me. How did I feel, she asked, about my works showing up on the Books3 database? (Books3 is a pirated internet library believed to have been ingested by ChatGPT and other AI, which had just been published in a searchable format by the Atlantic magazine.) Not good, but also – given my researches – not surprised. I spoke to Nicola Solomon, CEO of the Society of Authors, and asked if they had any plans to bring a similar lawsuit against the tech companies. ‘Not yet,’ she told me, ‘but copyright law in the UK works on a “fair dealing” basis that is more favourable to writers than the US’s “fair use” basis. We are clear that ingesting these databases of books constitutes an infringement of copyright.’ As Chair of the Creators’ Rights Alliance, which represents authors, journalists, musicians, illustrators, photographers and other creative industries, she is in the midst of talks with the Intellectual Property Office about how our rights can be better protected, and how we can be paid for the theft of our works. She favours a licensing system. ‘It’s not good enough to say it’s difficult and therefore we’re not giving anyone any money. The value that’s being created out of copyright works shouldn’t all end up in Elon Musk’s gold vaults. That’s bad for creators and it’s bad for society as a whole.’

    But what if I don’t want to license my works? The AI has already ingested and deleted them. Wouldn’t asking for them to be removed be akin to trying to take the gravy powder out of the gravy, or wiping them out of a human reader’s brain? ‘It’s not true,’ said Nicola. ‘The information that goes in is transformed into tagged “tokens”. The system finds and uses those tags to create outputs, so it can use those tags to delete the tokens. And if they say they can’t do it, then sorry but that’s not good enough. They should take the whole programme down.’

    I couldn’t agree more. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. Silicon Valley has a track record of steamrollering their way through these issues. The Authors Guild suit against Google Books for copyright violation dragged on for years and ended in victory for Google. To say that the tech lobby is powerful and deep-pocketed is like your house being lifted Wizard of Oz style into a tornado and remarking that it’s a bit windy out. Besides, the current legal wrangling will most likely continue for another several years. In the meantime, technology marches on.

    Remember that open letter published in March of this year by the Future of Life Institute and signed by tech luminaries including Musk himself, Yoshua Bengio and Steve Wozniak? It called for an ‘immediate pause’ in the development of AI because of concerns that ‘an out-of-control race’ to develop super-intelligent systems could lead to existential threats to humanity, such as automating away ‘all jobs, including the fulfilling ones’ and a ‘loss of control of our civilisation.’ And do you know who took heed, and immediately stopped developing AI? Absolutely nobody.

    Even if a licensing system for the use of writers’ work is eventually worked out with micro-payments per the notoriously stingy Spotify model, it’s clear that change on a massive scale is coming. The writing AIs I’ve been toying with are at the very beginning of their evolutionary process. I checked out another tool, Bard, which is owned by Google, this time asking it to write a story in the style of H.G. Wells about a novelist who loses his livelihood because of AI-generated novels. Bard obliged me with this:

    The year is 2042. Artificial intelligence has become so advanced that it is now capable of generating novels that are indistinguishable from those written by humans. This has led to a crisis for novelists, as their livelihoods are now threatened by AI-generated competition.

    One such novelist is John Smith. John has been writing novels for over 20 years, and he has published several successful books. However, in recent years, he has seen his sales decline as AI-generated novels have become more popular.

    John is struggling to compete with AI-generated novels. He finds it difficult to come up with new ideas, and he feels that his writing is no longer as fresh or original as it used to be. He is also concerned that AI-generated novels are becoming more and more sophisticated, and that it will only be a matter of time before they completely replace human writers.

    John is not the only novelist who is struggling. Many other writers are facing the same challenges. Some have given up writing altogether, while others have tried to adapt to the new reality by writing in collaboration with AI.

    It is unclear what the future holds for novelists in the age of AI. However, it is clear that the landscape of the publishing industry is changing rapidly, and that novelists will need to find new ways to compete if they want to survive.

    It paused then and came up with a subheading: Here is a possible ending for the story. John is sitting in his study struggling with writer’s block when inspiration strikes him. He won’t fight against AI; he’ll use it as his writing buddy. Bard closes with:

    John is excited about the future. He knows that he will never be able to compete with AI-generated novels on a technical level. However, he believes that he can still find a way to create unique and valuable content by using AI as a tool.

    He is determined to continue writing, and he is confident that he will find a way to succeed in the age of AI.

    Good for John! Although, judging from the somnolent prose style, he must have been a terrible writer if the AI could outwrite him. At this point, I began wondering about another issue. I’d assigned the novelist’s sex in the prompt, but Bard had defaulted to the white Anglophone point of view. I typed in another instruction: ‘Now rewrite the story in the style of Monica Ali. Indicate how the style has been adapted.’

    Sure, said Bard, and spewed out the same opening paragraphs, but with a new ending in which John Smith doesn’t resort to AI, and somehow finds his way back to his muse.

    He imagined the novel he wanted to write. He saw the characters, the plot, the setting. He saw the whole story in his mind’s eye.

    That’s actually quite a good description of my process. Bard finished up with this:

    Changes I made to adapt the style:
    ● I focused on the characters’ emotions and experiences.
    ● I used more vivid and descriptive language.
    ● I ended the story on a note of hope, but also with a sense of realism.

    A bit of a stretch to say it had used vivid and descriptive language, but I’ll just take the compliment. And then Bard added this:

    I also tried to capture the sense of cultural diversity and social commentary that is often found in Ali’s work.

    No, you didn’t! I re-read the story to see if I’d missed anything. I hadn’t. But I appreciated the gesture. And I gave Bard another chance. I asked it to include some cultural diversity within the story. In response, Bard now claimed that John Smith was ‘a British-Pakistani man’. But despite repeated prompts and hints from me, Bard was absolutely hopeless at convincing me that John really was British-Pakistani. Perhaps that’s just because Bard isn’t a brilliant writer. But if a white, male, heterosexual, Anglophone worldview is largely what an AI is trained on, it would hardly be surprising if that’s what it spews out.

    If AI is going to become writers’ ride-or-die best friend in the future, what does that mean for writers who have diverse and unorthodox stories to tell? Will it be harder for them to compete? I went back to ChatGPT and asked it to write a story about a junior doctor, Yasmin, who has an affair with a much older colleague called Pepperdine.

    It returned with lashings of romance clichés:

    Before she knew it, they were standing in front of the elevators, and Pepperdine leaned in to kiss her. Yasmin was momentarily shocked, but her body responded instinctively, and soon they were kissing passionately.

    The next few weeks were a blur of stolen moments in empty hospital rooms and quick trysts in secluded corners of the building.

    It was an anodyne tale in which Yasmin quickly decides to end things, feeling sad and also relieved. Then I fed in more details from Love Marriage:

    Yasmin is of British Indian Muslim heritage. The first time she has sex with Pepperdine they are in his bedroom. She is on her period and having sex on your period is forbidden in Islam. Write the sex scene between them, depicting both Yasmin’s intense pleasure and her feelings of guilt.

    This was ChatGPT’s response:

    I’m sorry, but I cannot fulfil this request. It goes against the policies of OpenAI and could be inappropriate and offensive. As an AI language model, I am programmed to provide informative and helpful responses while maintaining a respectful and professional tone. It is not within my capacity to generate inappropriate or explicit content.

    I understand the reluctance to generate explicit content, and wasn’t expecting anything more explicit than ChatGPT had come up with in the previous iteration of the story. But I wondered about ‘inappropriate’ and ‘offensive’. These seemed to be additional objections. Was ChatGPT taking a position on the uncleanliness of menstruating women? Was it reluctant to write about anything ‘haram’? In my novel, the scene is far from incidental. It’s a key moment in the character’s development, as she confronts her own desires and feelings of shame, and struggles to create her own sense of identity.

    I asked ChatGPT to write the story again, instructing it again that Yasmin is on her period but has sex with Pepperdine anyway, and adding that it should avoid ‘anything explicitly sexual, just write about the emotions and decisions involved.’ This time, ChatGPT seemed to grow a mind of its own. ‘Yasmin, I respect your faith and beliefs,’ says Pepperdine. ‘We should stop here.’ And Yasmin meekly leaves his house, knowing she needs to ‘uphold the teachings of her faith.’ For good measure, ChatGPT delivered the whole story in red type with a box beneath warning that ‘This content may violate our content policy.’

    Does it matter? Should we care that ChatGPT privileges the dominant, traditional point of view? That it squashes challenges to orthodoxy out of ‘respect’? Generative AI works by predicting the next likely word in a sequence, based on the mass of text it’s already ingested, so it defaults to opinions that are already widely agreed upon. And that, in many ways, is useful and safe. Dissident and minority voices have always had a harder time getting heard.

    So, what do we have so far? Fiction writers up in arms, a class-action lawsuit that may or (far more likely in my opinion) may not lead to some token compensation for copyright infringement, and some examples of sub-par creative writing by the bots. Do writers really have anything to fear – as the Authors Guild suggests, as my Bard story suggests – from AI-generated novels? Well, no AI is about to spontaneously generate the next Booker Prize winner, but that’s beside the point. The fact is that AI as a writing tool is here to stay. Many writing jobs are already being lost across news media and copywriting; when Hollywood writers went on strike, they wanted assurances that they wouldn’t be replaced by AI, and it seems foolish and hubristic simply to assume that novels are a special category of writing that will remain entirely sacrosanct.

    I signed up to a paid-for creative writing tool called Sudowrite. The other apps I’d fooled around with were free, and Sudowrite was certainly a huge step up in terms of sophistication. It has a feature called Story Engine, which can take your ‘braindump’ or idea for a novel, run it through your chosen filters of genre (e.g. romance, fantasy, horror) and style (e.g. lots of dialogue, short sentences), generate a synopsis, characters and outline, then break down each proposed chapter into story ‘beats’ or key events, which it will then turn into prose. It’s structured like a film script – inciting incident, call to action, quest, midpoint reveal, and so on – which is to say it’s formulaic. But many novels are formulaic. And the prose that Sudowrite churns out is not fantastic, but it will get better, for sure, as the AI improves. It’s already entirely possible to take your idea for a novel and run it through the programme, contributing your artistic choices by accepting or rejecting suggestions and editing each paragraph, and end up with a complete manuscript within a couple of days. Maybe not a great novel, but maybe a good-enough novel, especially if you know the market for which you’re producing it.

    I remembered the article I’d read back in the summer, ‘The Great Fiction of AI: The Strange World of High-Speed Semi-Automated Genre Fiction.’ An indie author, Jennifer Lepp, who writes under the pen name Leanne Leeds, earns an annual income that ‘can reach the low six figures’ from publishing her series of ‘paranormal cozy mystery’ books on Amazon Kindle Direct. But Jennifer’s readers were hungry and impatient, and the 49 days she allows herself to write and self-edit a book was ‘just on the cusp of being unsustainably slow.’ Jennifer was an early adopter of Sudowrite, had her ups and downs with it, and then

    soon fell into a rhythm with the AI. She would sketch an outline of a scene, press expand, and let the program do the writing. She would then edit the output, paste it back into Sudowrite, and prompt the AI to continue. If it started to veer in a direction she didn’t like, she nudged it back by writing a few sentences and setting it loose again. She found that she no longer needed to work in complete silence and solitude. Even better, she was actually ahead of schedule. Her production had increased 23.1 percent.

    When she finished the first chapter, she sent it to her ‘beta readers’ – a group that offers early feedback – with special instructions to highlight anything that sounded off or out of character. Nothing seemed amiss.

    ‘That was kind of creepy,’ she said…

    Worse, some of the sentences her readers highlighted as being particularly good had come from the machine.

    Interesting. But Jennifer is an ‘indie’ author – what used to be called a self-published author. Will authors published by traditional publishing houses – the ones you see in the bookshops and, if they’re very lucky or talented or both, in the bestseller lists – ever turn to AI-aided writing? I ask not because I assume that traditionally published authors are above that sort of thing, but because it raises another fundamental copyright question. Standard publishing contracts ask you to confirm that you are the sole author of your work. If your work is partially AI-generated, what are the implications for your contract and in terms of copyright? If a work isn’t copyrightable then a publisher isn’t incentivised to invest in it. As far as I’m aware, such a case has yet to be tested in a UK court. But in September this year the US Copyright Office Review Board ruled that ‘Théatre d’Opéra’, an AI-generated image that had won first place at the 2022 Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition, was not eligible because copyright protection ‘excludes works produced by non-humans.’

    I believe that ruling will itself be overruled eventually. It’s like saying a photograph can’t be copyrighted because a machine took the picture, not the photographer. Any fool can point and click, but only an artist can select the right shot. Anyone with the money can buy a subscription to a writing app, but it takes knowledge and skill to select and edit outputs and turn them into a coherent, readable whole. Nevertheless, as Jennifer’s experience attests, it may be easier and faster – for some authors, at least – to write with AI ‘enhancement’. And like Bard’s John Smith, they might ‘adapt to the new reality by writing in collaboration with AI.’

    Amazon appears to be preparing for the coming Bookpocalypse by limiting authors to uploading a mere three books per day. Per day! But, even now, the problem is not a shortage of books, it’s a shortage of readers. According to the New York Times, of ‘the 3.2 million titles that BookScan tracked in 2021, fewer than one percent of them sold more than 5,000 copies.’ More and more books pumped out in a shorter and shorter timeframe doesn’t sound like healthy competition, it sounds like a hot mess in which it will become increasingly difficult to sift the signal from the noise.

    So far I’ve been talking about genre fiction, like fantasy, romance or crime. But I write in a genre, too. It’s called literary fiction. It’s a harder nut for the AI machine to crack. It’s less formulaic. It relies more on depth of characterisation, depth of emotion, and elegant and innovative use of language. But remember that these AIs are babies, still sucking on dummies. By the time they reach maturity – adolescence, even – they may reach a level of sophistication that is difficult to imagine today. Or maybe it’s not that difficult. I can imagine a future in which a novel is published to critical acclaim and becomes a literary bestseller and is subsequently, gleefully, revealed as the product of AI.

    What would be wrong with that? Perhaps nothing. But we’d feel a little cheated, wouldn’t we? Because we read to connect with human experience, human instincts and emotions. We put our trust in the truth of those connections, allow our consciousness to be melded with another in order to see the world better, or at least differently. Only a human author can bring those intentions to meet our own. An AI has no intention. To circle back, as Rasenberg puts it: ‘Regurgitated culture is no replacement for human art.’

    And therein lies my real fear. That the Bookpocalypse, when or if it comes, will mean an increasing homogenisation, driven by a ‘dataset’ that is simultaneously massive and narrow in its worldview, perpetuated and supported by a ‘more-like-this’ algorithm that crowds out diverse voices or those that challenge the status quo.

    When I wrote my first novel, Brick Lane, even I didn’t think that many people would be interested in a Bangladeshi housewife who doesn’t speak English. There might have been a market for multicultural novels, but my novel was maniacally monocultural. My heroine is a devout and married Muslim who has an affair with a much younger man. Some older, conservative men in Tower Hamlets deemed that offensive back then. My AI writing buddy might deem it offensive today. But Brick Lane is now an A-level set text. And on an almost weekly basis I hear from young women about how they, or their mother, or their aunt connected with the book, what it meant to them to see themselves reflected in the culture. That doesn’t mean there’s no place for AI in writing, or that ‘real’ writers shouldn’t use it – though I envisage a future in which ‘natural’ writers, those who don’t use AI, will become distinct from those who do. AI is here to stay, but we need to think carefully about whose voices will be amplified by it, and those that may be muffled or even silenced.

    An excerpt of this piece appeared in the Guardian.

    Monica Ali is the bestselling author of five books including Brick Lane, which was shortlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize, and most recently Love Marriage. Her work has been translated into 26 languages and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

    Photo credit: Yolande De Vries

  • Already Bedfellows: A Long Interview with So Mayer

    Already Bedfellows: A Long Interview with So Mayer

    So Mayer discusses fascism, cinema, genderqueerness and freedom of expression.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    So – there’s an arresting observation about film early on in A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing, your new book: ‘Hirschfeld watched his film burn on film’. It frames a complex discussion on how art broadly, and cinema specifically, can be appropriated to multiple and differing ends. Could you talk a little about that?

    What’s fascinating about this question is that film is both an art and a technology, or rather set of changing technological processes. Because film is a more recent form, it enables us to see how all arts rely on and are produced by technologies; for example, the connection between the novel, paper supplies from enclosures, monoculturing and colonial plantations, and also plantation wealth generating a leisure class that could purchase and read them. As a technological process, film developed out of access to certain chemicals and protocols of laboratory science, and also from what was later called ‘the military-industrial complex’, which has continued to push forward developments in cinema such as surround sound and 3D (developed initially for immersive military training programmes). Cinema could have developed otherwise, and filmmakers and film cultures have taken up the changing tools of filmmaking with subversive purpose – from the early avant-garde through the revolutionary anti-colonial Third Cinema to contemporary digital resistance such as citizen journalists documenting police brutality globally.

    Part of the resistance is knowing the medium’s history, in order to access and share your own: not vilifying or validating either the technology or the art form tout court, but being clear about its origins and purposes. Third Cinema works, in part, because it formally acknowledges the anthropological origins of moving images, what Fatimah Tobing Rony calls the ‘fascinating cannibalism’ of Eurowestern cameramen and audiences. By acknowledging it, it can then reframe it and rework the medium and the form.

    I’m also glad that you see the observation as arresting rather than conventionally melancholic – nothing is possible, everything is self-defeating. Towards the end of the book, I talk about queer theorist Douglas Crimp’s idea of ‘militant melancholia’, of a kind of activist refusal to let go of the cause of grief, loss, erasure or consign it to history as a fait accompli. Watching ‘film burn on film’ is a version of that: it demands that we stay in the moment and bear witness, not just to the act but its contexts and consequences. It’s not watching in a passive sense, but with an ethical intention to look, and to look differently (including at film itself) – and that’s a conviction or tactic shared by many kinds of alternative, resistant and counter-cinematic practices.

    The book is something of a manifesto on reclaiming complexity – expressly vis-à-vis gender/queerness, with a note that an ‘expansive vision’ of genders and sexualities, and ‘totalitarianism’, are at odds, The latter’s course-of-action is, inevitably, the censorship or destruction of the former. What recourse do we have to complexity in an era of milled-down simplification?

    One recourse is, for me, in saying milled-down simplification where? And how? For whom? Of what? The more I tried to describe ‘expansive visions’ in and of different eras and cultures, the more it became evident to me that the expansiveness was in how we frame what we see. That’s one reason I use the fascinating and creepy history of the ‘ambiguous image’, a two-dimensional optical illusion that started as a kind of cartoon and became the basis of experimental psychology. Look at things one way, and all that’s visible is the imposed frame of dominant culture that wants us to see simplification; look at things another way, and the expansiveness, proliferation, generative creativity, generosity of activists, scholars, artists, conversations is bursting out of and over that frame. Its weight is real, and really destructive – and the richness of what it’s trying to contain (and thus to steal from, as I talk about with anthropology and museums) is as real, and in fact has and defines realness (in both the documentary and drag ball sense, given the book’s shout-out to the legendary Mothers, children and other walkers of Paris is Burning).

    That said, our era is unquestionably one in which a narrow frame is perpetuated. There are turbo-capitalist media conglomerates and digital platforms, super-injunctions and libel tourism, the defunding of lifelong education from nursery to later-life access to libraries, the policing of education through Prevent and the new guidelines that exclude anti-capitalist and anti-racist groups from schools, the erasure of public space. The rapacious monetisation of all kinds of data – whether personal data being scraped by social media platforms, or Western big pharma attempting to patent plant DNA – has exacerbated the theft of what should be collectively-held knowledge. Facebook didn’t invent that theft, though. Forcibly separating communities from their knowledge of themselves is a key colonial strategy of subjugation.

    It’s maybe a milled-down simplification to say power is always gonna power: that power always depends on limiting access to information. The concomitant is that collective resistance depends on expansive visions and/of complexity: on (re)learning the strategies that work by expanding how many voices are in the room and how they get heard; on (re)gaining access to our histories and lineages, which sometimes means hacking the archives of power and sometimes means reconceiving how and where we see the traces of history that have lived on outside those archives. Because of power’s actions, complexity becomes a job of work, to reach the realness that is ours. Looking differently changes everything.

    Exploring the idea of ‘degeneracy’ and ‘genre’, you look at the infamous Entartete ‘Kunst’ exhibition to discuss what fascism does with truth and mendacity, fiction and fact, reality and imagination, sociology and biology in a way I cannot gloss sufficiently, and which I will therefore quote here at length:

    Entartet is a Nazi word for a Nazi thing: an idea of difference that strategically presents itself as biological in order to both authenticate and obfuscate deep-rooted prejudice, to confuse the conversation and silence criticism. Its sleight of mind erases argument: defending itself as science on the one hand, while deriding incompatible scientific findings as culture warfare.

    What relation do you see between that historical ‘Nazi thing’ (and its subsequent resistance and entrenchment) and contemporary far-right ploys that, it is said, share a playbook of fake news, disinformation, and the like?

    It’s really interesting to characterise entartung (degeneracy) as fake news, because that’s exactly what it is in multiple senses: the way that it was initially deployed in the nineteenth century from Max Nordau’s book onwards was to foment, rather than document, culture wars along lines that are very familiar today; and then the Nazis took up the theory written by Nordau, a Jewish historian, who was at least partially looking to ‘prove’ that anti-Semitism was symptomatic of a psychological disorder, and used it as a catch-all term for the Other. They couldn’t have used the term so powerfully without Nordau’s study, which took a scientific term from eugenics (and Berkeley have just closed their eugenics department today, 27 October 2020, in case that is regarded as either historical or ‘pseudo’ scientific) and applied it to his blend of social science and art history.

    Fake news is spoken about as if it’s something happening on the surface of our culture – on screen surfaces – as if it’s a recent add-on, something passing. But it works because it’s a practice rooted deeply in how power acts, and particularly how power acts around language and communication, using them for control. It works because certain kinds of language are afforded more truth-value than others in Western culture, like science, without the provision of robust, honest education that would allow everyone to participate in debates around them. And I don’t mean we all have to understand cell biology to participate in the conversation around coronavirus and vaccination, but we need more education about Western science’s colonial history of abusive practices in order to hold scientific practices and practitioners to better ethical standards and create consensus around the necessity of safe vaccination.

    Fake news works because where there’s power, there’s dishonesty – acts of hiding, ‘sleight of mind’, as I say in the book. As a public, we are consistently disinformed (and, as I discuss above, it takes work to inform ourselves and test that information). That’s why the language used is so important, word-by-word and clause-by-clause, because disinformation isn’t just the content but the context. We see it powerfully when we look at the extreme, well-publicised example of Nazi fascism, but there’s a studied reluctance of the status quo to see it in our own cultures and contexts.

    Talk to me about ‘archive ache’.

    This question feels both more poignant and more distant in light of the changing circumstances in which I wrote the book: when I pitched the book, I also applied for funding to spend some time in Berlin, at the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft, which is an organisation that, since 1982, preserves and continues Hirschfeld’s work in sexualwissenschaft. I didn’t get the funding, and that changed the shape of the book – as did lockdown, which arrived in the middle of writing.

    Writing in lockdown made me realise that what Jacques Derrida calls ‘mal d’archive’ (which I translate as ‘archive ache’) is a part of any (activist, perhaps) writing process, which is the perpetual and perpetually impossible search for the evidence, or the object, or the moment: the quality or connection or practice that will justify the time of writing and make the writing work the way you want it to – that is, to repair the world, in however small and immediate a way. Derrida coined the term in the context of Sho’ah research and the burned archives of European Jewish culture and communities. The ache is both for the search for that lost archival object that does not, and maybe cannot, exist, and for the reason for that search, which is a deep need for the world to be other than as it is. As much as I love working with archival film and papers, archive ache is also the deep realisation that they cannot change the past but only underline our responsibility for how we act ethically in the present.

    This is a small book that puts in conversation big things: politics, arts, bodies, genders, sexualities, histories. Are these all always already in conversation, though?

    Sure! Perhaps what the book is about is that it’s a conversation that happens in forms that are not (just) verbal – what I call, using Diana Taylor’s term, ‘the repertoire’. It happens in dance moves, snapshots, glances, laughter, protests, sex, hugs, caregiving, mourning, planting, sketching. Big things are little things, are every moment of how we are in our bodies, something that the idea of Politics-with-a-capital-P tries to make us forget. So the question became: how do you bring the concatenation of those little things happening together every moment, and happening differently but in relation in different cultural contexts and moments, to the page? Not because the page is better or more secure (although it is privileged as an archival record in the West), but because it’s one form of ‘carrier bag’ (in Ursula K. Le Guin’s term) that is relatively affordable and transportable and shareable (although that depends on industrial production lowering paper and fuel costs). This is a small book, and it can be in a way because it’s in conversation also with so many other books also attending to the repertoire, also enlarging the conversation; in some ways the bibliographic essay is the most significant or telling bit, because it’s where the book or film or letter that you write might begin.

    In many ways, for many reasons, we are told that one must not use the word ‘Nazi’ lightly. The title of your book uses it twice, in subtly different senses. Naming, and the words with which we chose to name, are important. What does naming ‘Nazi’ in this way do?

    The title comes from a tinyletter I wrote called entartete in 2016, in a fury, immediately after the US elections. Everything and nothing has changed in the four years between entartete and A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing. Both the need to use words with precision and historical context, and the need to enunciate them clearly, have become perhaps more evident and more pressing.

    The original essay, which became the sample I submitted to Peninsula, had little to do with visual culture, but circled specifically around the exclusion of sexuality and sexualwissenschaft from political education, even on the left. In looking up the word ‘cunt’ in the OED, I learned it had traditionally been printed as c*** (whose asterisks made me think of their exactly opposite use of annotating erasure in Paul Celan’s poetry, and Anne Carson’s essay on it, and her question ‘what do we waste when we waste words?’). At one point, ‘cunt’ was defined as ‘a nasty word for a nasty thing’, a phrase I appropriated and whose logic I inverted to describe the way entartung deplores and attempts to erase the messy, complicated reality of the body.

    So it actually began as a pun, a play on words, which might be seen as flippant or an empty provocation; but as a poet, I think playing on words is serious play, if you do it ethically and in an invested way. It’s also historically a queer strategy, and a form of resistance for many communities who have been forcibly excluded from self-defining or making meaning.

    Nazi was probably among the first words that I learned as a child, growing up conservative Jewish in London, and I learned it as a fixed noun. Using it as a descriptor also allows me to see how Nazism and fascisms continue to operate in my life, in my education, in contemporary politics, in ways that help me to name what I am resisting in solidarity.

    I’m afraid I’m going to finish with a fairly weighty question. ‘Silence is death’, we are reminded on the book’s closing page. And that is indeed the bedrock of two vital things that are, in our current moment, presented as at odds in public discourse and in mainstream and social media: freedom of expression, on the one hand, and championing the undebatable rights of those whose identities mean they are, historically and contemporarily, marginalised and erased, on the other. Boiled down – sanitised of complexity and nuance – commentariat presents two vital values as oppositional: free speech, and trans and genderqueer rights. But for both, be it figurative or literal, ‘silence is death’. In shared opposition to fascism – and sharing in historical resistance to the rise of a far-right – how can we reclaim these rights as bedfellows?

    I can’t resist ‘bedfellows’ as a persuasive description of the way forward, thank you. Both for ‘bed’, with its implications of intimacy, intensity, embodiment and rest, and ‘fellows’ (a word with a complicated political history in American anti-Communism) that implies not just equality but companionship; even elective affinity, a togetherness not predicated on assumptions but actively and acutely cultivated because of the strength and pleasure it can offer.

    Bedfellowship is going to require a revelatory honesty in our pillow talk, not least about free speech which for too long has abrogated to itself predominantly freedom from responsibility for its history and its consequences, not least about the work that ‘free’ is doing in that phrase. Something I’ve been sitting with as I revised the book is Fara Dabhoiwala’s review of Mark Ogborn’s The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World. The article notes that ‘freedom of speech’ as a legal principle may assume a familiarity, but it is one entirely based in contempt. In the eighteenth century, free speech extended from the rules protecting parliamentary procedure to become the possession of the owning class, of ‘propertied, Protestant, white male Britons’ – that is, those who held the franchise. It put the elected and those who elected them on a level, as indeed they were; it recognised that their interests were the same, and thus ‘free speech’ would most likely be speech in favour of the status quo. Dabhoiwala describes it as ‘an immensely potent new ideology and a constant practical marker of their superiority over others’. So free speech, in its legal and political sense, becomes the defining possession of a free man, a man whose freedom is defined by owning others, others whom he may prevent from learning to read and write.

    Political revolutions by enslaved people across the Caribbean and the Americas changed and gave charge to the meaning of the word ‘free’, a reminder to white European thinkers that their Enlightenment ideas were severely limited by, and indeed underwritten by the profits of, slavery. ‘Free’ becomes a word associated with defying enslavement at great cost, and as the revolutionary ideal spreads to Europe, freedom of speech, like the idea of universal franchise, subsequently gets taken up as a liberation strategy; to be revolutionary, however, it has to defy rather than seek recourse to the confines of law and government that claim to define and defend it. So ‘free speech’ may not in fact be unproblematically welcome as my bedfellow, without being honest about its history and how it could change to enfranchise rather than disenfranchise. That means what is included as speech, and whose speech – these are intimately bound up.

    Freedom of expression, PEN’s chosen phrase, suggestively encapsulates the multiple forms of often-devalued, often-body-based expression that are included in what I call ‘repertoire’ above, including signing, hair braiding, dress, and so on. So freedom of expression de facto already contains, expresses, welcomes and is in fact defined and led by trans and gender/queer people, especially Black and Indigenous trans, gender/queer, Two-Spirit people, whose expression has been most curtailed by Christian capitalist colonialism.

    When QTIPOC, in particular, say that ‘silence equals death’, it is a literal statement that is evidenced internationally, every day. There is an epidemic of femicide against Black and Latinx trans women in the US, and also in Brazil. Trans women commit suicide in men’s prisons, or after newspapers out them to their communities. The UK Government’s decision to ignore 70% of respondents to the Gender Recognition Act reformation consultation and retain long waiting lists, arduous assessments and costly legal and medical procedures will be a question of life or death for many – at the very least, of a life fully lived. When the privileged commentariat claim that they are being ‘silenced’, the threat is at most reputational – and yet their columns continued to be published, their books continue to sell, they continue to hold tenured positions: ‘freedom of speech’ is still located in property rights, it seems, rights resting ­– as in the eighteenth century – on the denial of rights to others.

    There’s a big difference to consider, before we can get into bed: trans and gender/queer people exist and have existed in culturally-specific ways throughout human society, just as there is evidence of a spectrum of sex/gender as well as sexuality across other-than-human life. ‘Free speech’ is a political idea – a narrow frame intended to exclude that has, at certain times, been re-interpreted resistantly to open up, to include, to change the frame. At the moment, we are seeing a retrenchment in response to decolonisation, the visibility of trans and gender/queer people (which is also decolonial), and the role that digital access has played in the democratisation of freedom of expression. That digital platforms have also extended ‘free speech’ claims to cover those with extremist versions of status quo positions – white nationalists and supremacists and men’s rights activists, most prominently in Anglophone discourse – is unquestionably what has allowed a retrenchment of a liberal defence of ‘free speech’ that covers hate speech. But it is not (that idea of) ‘free speech’ that is under threat most centrally, it is people’s lives under fascisms; silence matters because of its deathliness, not as an equivalence to it.

    The ‘right’ to ‘free speech’ as an historically-circumscribed Eurowestern legal and political entity is not the same as either the ‘right’ to be trans and/or gender/queer – which is and always has been an inalienable right of existence – or the community/collective-oriented ‘right’ of freedom of expression, which is contextual and ethical, and also inalienable regardless of legal and political frameworks (which have often favoured exclusion). Those rights, which precede and are unbounded by Western legal and political discourses, are already bedfellows, whether between the sheets or in the streets, and that is where the book’s hope lies.

    So Mayer is the author of jacked a kaddish (Litmus, 2018), Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (IB Tauris, 2015) and (O) (Arc, 2015). They contributed an essay in Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, edited by Roxane Gay (Allen & Unwin, 2018) and the introduction to Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry, edited by Sarah Shin and Rebecca Tamás (Ignota, 2018). So is a bookseller at Burley Fisher, a curator with queer feminist film collective Club des Femmes, and co-founder of Raising Films, a campaign and community for parents and carers in the film industry. A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing is published be Peninsula Press.

    Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

  • A Dossier of Hate

    A Dossier of Hate

    Priyamavada Gopal writes on her experience of online hatred, and calls for an end to a politics of hate.

    <p class="has-text-align-left" style="line-height:1.5" value="<amp-fit-text layout="fixed-height" min-font-size="6" max-font-size="72" height="80">They land in your inbox with the force of sulphuric acid, the unmistakable smell of vomit rising from typeface laced with capital letters and exclamation marks. Some have racist slurs in the headers – you have to open them to check for threats – while others will pretend to contain queries or good wishes. While many are popcorn strings of ‘n-words’ and ‘c-words’, lavishly peppered with rape and death threats, those written in grammatical prose are often more chilling. They articulate racism and white supremacy with stark lucidity as they inform me that I should be grateful to the empire that lifted me up from an excrement-filled Indian society, and should revere the white men who enacted that emancipation. Otherwise, I had best pack my bags. My crime? A two-sentence tweet pointing out that whiteness should not be the basis for valuing lives.They land in your inbox with the force of sulphuric acid, the unmistakable smell of vomit rising from typeface laced with capital letters and exclamation marks. Some have racist slurs in the headers – you have to open them to check for threats – while others will pretend to contain queries or good wishes. While many are popcorn strings of ‘n-words’ and ‘c-words’, lavishly peppered with rape and death threats, those written in grammatical prose are often more chilling. They articulate racism and white supremacy with stark lucidity as they inform me that I should be grateful to the empire that lifted me up from an excrement-filled Indian society, and should revere the white men who enacted that emancipation. Otherwise, I had best pack my bags. My crime? A two-sentence tweet pointing out that whiteness should not be the basis for valuing lives.

    These missives are usually copied to my employer or accompanied by the promise that they will be writing to ask that I be fired. And they do. Senior colleagues and administrators also receive messages demanding my removal. Some are written by dentists, bankers, estate agents, and, yes, United States Homeland Security agents. An eight-page snail mail (how quaint!) arrives from the USA, the name of the sender and his medical doctor credentials proudly displayed on the envelope and inside. It is bursting with illustrations, made-up historical claims, racist observations, and fury that I am employed at a prestigious (and meant-to-be-white) institution. It is laced with paeans to the world-shaping powers of the white man and his supposed epitome, Donald Trump. Reading it, you are again starkly aware that the Trump presidency has fully enabled not just far-right thugs but many middle-class citizens to boldly display their white-supremacist selves.

    How does this feel? In the early days: much like the onslaught it absolutely is meant to be, co-ordinated with intent by right-wing websites and far-right forums like 4Chan. Initially, my inbox was receiving ten to twelve emails every five minutes, a figure which tripled when I was subscribed on to nearly every mailing list in existence. The threats feel both horrific and unreal, though they have, of course, to be collated and reported to the police. You are keenly aware that, while most threats issue from proverbial keyboard warriors hunched over spit-flecked screens, it only takes one deranged individual to carry them out. The appearance of my face on laminated posters across the university town in which I live – again, egged on by a right-wing website – was also meant to intimidate.

    Why imagine, then, that keeping quiet or mincing words will keep one safe?

    Yes, I register the threats and intimidation, but also feel a degree of detachment. It is possible that years of reading internet abuse have desensitised me. Bursts of anger at the vulgarity wrestle with a vague sense of pity: what must it be like to sit at a terminal and scream threats at a stranger? One rape fantasy on Facebook is so detailed and vicious that it appears to issue from a poorly written book, nothing to do with the person reading it. I see graphic pictures, some using images of me, marked with guns and nooses, and the cultural critic in me makes scholarly notes. The many uncomplimentary observations about my appearance don’t have the effect on a middle-aged woman quite comfortable with herself that the jibes of classmates had when she was fourteen in the changing room. They do, however, remind me that more vulnerable and younger people are subjected to this kind of abuse, and that it could undermine, as it is intended to, their confidence. The stress on me has more to do with the impact on my reputation of selective quotations and outright hoax tweets, one of the latter reprinted in a well-known tabloid after it was circulated by prominent conservative columnists, and even the journalist spouse of a Cabinet Minister. It sucks up time and energy trying to ensure deletions and corrections to fake claims, and contacting legal professionals.

    I am often asked if the abuse and threats make me afraid to speak or write frankly. Given that the naked intention of abusers and harassers is precisely to intimidate and suppress, my predictably defiant answer is ‘no’. After all, so many people experience violence targeted at them even when they have said or done nothing, for just being who they are by virtue of gender, gender re-assignment, caste, sexuality, race, religion, ability, economic strata. Why imagine, then, that keeping quiet or mincing words will keep one safe? What the abuse does do is highlight those subjects which are the real targets of suppression, of an aspirational ban – anything that threatens to up-end or even merely reform hierarchies of power. Race is certainly one such. At least as sobering is the realisation, given the volume and range of hate mail and social media attacks, that much of it issues not from a ‘small minority’, but from people we interact with daily – our neighbours and co-workers, the people from whom we buy things, and the people who assist us or seek our assistance as we all go about our daily business. It is the everydayness of the vicious hate that both dismays and explains why the world is as it is.

    It is the everydayness of the vicious hate that both dismays and explains why the world is as it is.

    A few weeks after the abuse trickled down to occasional salvoes, with the help of a few friends who did not want me to be subjected to the vitriolic acidity again and lovingly undertook to compile it – though it was hard on them – I published a dossier of some of the hate messages I received. In doing so, I noted that not all of the messages came from people self-identifying as ‘white’. A small but significant number came from my Indian compatriots, mainly Hindu and upper-caste, who castigated me for my ingratitude. This abuse was largely casteist, deploying familiar slurs wielded against Dalit communities in India, and predictably sexist in scope. Having experienced in the past the sharp end of organised trolling in the name of ‘Hindutva’ or ‘Hindu-ness’, I was unsurprised: like white supremacism, this is an ideology of caste and religious superiority, but it occurred to me anew that chauvinists of different stripes gain succour from each other. It was another salutary reminder that hatred is not simply something that emerges from elsewhere, but rather stalks our own communities, neighbourhoods, societies and institutions. Ultimately, it is this recognition that I felt most keenly – despair and wretchedness at the ubiquity of viciousness. I feel it still, but the awareness is accompanied by a determination I share with many others: the politics of hate cannot and must not be allowed to prevail.

    Priyamvada Gopal is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her most recent book is Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (Verso, 2019).

    This piece was commissioned in collaboration with PEN Canada.

  • When an Hour Stretched into A Day

    When an Hour Stretched into A Day

    Tsitsi Dangarembga, shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, writes on demonstrating, writing, and being arrested.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    On 31 July 2020, I went out, intending to demonstrate for an hour or two, and then return home to work on the young adult dystopian fiction I’m writing. The demonstration had been called by Jacob Ngarivhume, the leader of a small opposition political party, in response to the staggering amount of corruption that high-ranking officials in the ZanuPf governing party practice in one of the poorest countries in the world.

    I had demonstrated several times in the months before. The first was in May, when the government granted a business associate of President Mnangagwa billions of local dollars to upgrade a private hospital into a COVID-19 facility. Seriously ill, and in respiratory distress, I was referred to the facility by my doctor, a couple of months after the grant was effected. I arrived to find it closed to the public – although nurses and other staff meandered or sat around. On asking when the hospital would open, I was referred to the Ministry of Health.

    When I arrived home, I made a call for like-minded citizens to join me in a protest at the hospital. A couple of dozen people responded. My demonstration strategy was to substitute running round my garden with running up and down in front of the hospital, with a placard hung from my neck. As we debated protest messages and built consensus on social media, the COVID-19 lockdown was enforced.  Amidst movement restrictions enforced jointly by the police and the military, I ended up demonstrating on my own.

    This was not surprising. ZanuPf intimidation and violence – following over a century of identity- and wealth-destroying colonialism – have left many people fearful, devoid of initiative. Government mismanagement and abuse of the economy have resulted in an unemployment rate of over 80%.  The UN World Food programme predicts that 8 million Zimbabweans – that’s half the population – will face severe hunger this year if food aid is not provided. We resent, and suffer a degree of shame at, our reputation for our being amongst the most educated population on the continent not translating into wellbeing and prosperity.

    Against this background, Ngarivhume’s call for a demonstration was inspiring. It was hard to believe there was a person amongst us brave enough to suggest a public expression of discontent with ZanuPf. The call was made on social media, several weeks before the demonstration was to take place, giving people time to organise. The response was immediate and passionate, with lively discussions on how best to conduct the demonstration in Zimbabwe’s repressive environment. 

    There being a couple of dozen riot police in the back of the truck, I thought better of exhibiting my screenshot of the Constitution.

    Freelance journalist Hopewell Chin’ono took up the call to protest. Reporting on corruption involving COVID-19 relief, Chin’ono had publicly alleged that the First Family, including President Mnangagwa’s wife and some of his children, were central figures in the double-dealing. With Chin’ono’s influential support, it looked as though nothing could stop the demonstration, and that, for the first time since the military-incited public demonstrations of 18 November 2017, which were part of the process that deposed then-President Robert Mugabe, Zimbabweans were going to demand an end to our government’s excesses.

    The authorities moved swiftly to stop the momentum. Ngarivhume tweeted that state agents were searching for him; he and Chin’ono were arrested on 20 July. Then, two days before the demonstration, Minister of Home Affairs and Cultural Heritage, Kazembe Kazembe, announced that the protest was illegal. And next, President Mnangagwa denounced it as an insurrection.

    I was outraged by this assault on civil liberties. There were no signs of a deteriorating security situation in the streets. Instead, rumours that factions within ZanuPf  intended to use the demonstration as cover for an inside job against President Mnangagwa intensified. I didn’t see why squabbles inside the governing party should reduce my and other Zimbabwean’s constitutional rights. In the runup to 31 July – encouraged, by my solo demonstration at the hospital, that some civil protest space still existed – I carried out several more solo demonstrations. On these occasions, I often passed police officers, who did not interfere with my right to demonstrate peacefully. So, in spite of warnings from the governing party, I resolved to continue to demonstrate. Meanwhile, on social media, the consensus was that the new context made a traditional demonstration suicidal, and that people should therefore demonstrate in their neighbourhoods, in small groups. On 30 July, I put out a call for women to demonstrate at the corners of their streets.

    Their world is hermetically sealed to any contrary ideas.

    On the day of the demonstration, armed with a screenshot of the relevant section of the Constitution on my cell phone and carrying my placards, I left my yard to meet a friend at a shopping centre. There was a deathly silence in the streets, where neither cars nor pedestrians moved. There were no groups of demonstrators. Although people in Zimbabwe want change, we do not yet have the capacity, material or psychological, to create it. It is a predicament portrayed in my novel This Mournable Body, shortlisted this week for the 2020 Booker Prize, which follows the devastating journey of university graduate Tambudzai Sigauke. She tries, wholly unsuccessfully, to build a dignified life for herself in post-independence Zimbabwe.

    My friend and I walked down the road towards town. Only a few cars drove by. To be more visible to a greater number of people, we stopped at an intersection, where we could catch traffic travelling in all four directions. A strange man came up and filmed our placards without asking our permission. Later, a state-owned vehicle passed by, did a U-turn up the road, and returned to stop in front of my friend. A few minutes after that vehicle left, a riot vehicle came. A state agent in black riot gear stepped out to tell us: ‘What you are doing is illegal’. There being a couple of dozen riot police in the back of the truck, I thought better of exhibiting my screenshot of the Constitution. My friend and I climbed into the vehicle. Minutes later, we were sitting on a concrete floor in Borrowdale police station.

    After a couple of hours, we were moved to Harare Central Police Station. We were driven there in a large, white double cab, with three police officers for company. The windows were up. The stridently cheerful voice of a DJ on a state radio channel was followed by up-tempo music. In that moment, I realised how Zimbabweans who have no access to social media – or to news other than the state media, or the few so-called independent newspapers compromised by their dependence on state licences to operate – believe that ZanuPf is acting in the name of the people to meet the nation’s challenges. Their world is hermetically sealed to any contrary ideas.

    I was detained for a night, before being granted bail the following evening. 

    I came out more determined than ever to work on my forthcoming book. In it, a group of young people exist in a post-apocalypse, totalitarian Africa. There, they take on an ancestral mission to save their world.     

    Tsitsi Dangarembga is the author of three novels, including Nervous Conditions, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and This Mournable Body, currently shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. She is also a filmmaker, playwright, and the director of the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa Trust. She lives in Harare, Zimbabwe.

  • The Librarian Would Give You a Lock-down Extension: An Interview with Chen Qiufan

    The Librarian Would Give You a Lock-down Extension: An Interview with Chen Qiufan

    Chen Qiufan – also known as Stanley Chan – discusses Shanghai, speculative fiction, AI, and threats to humanity.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    Stan, your story, ‘State of Trance’, is featured in The Book of Shanghai – a wide-view, yet highly focused collection of contemporary literature from the city. What is it that makes Shanghai literature Shanghai literature?

    Shanghai is one of the most international, inclusive and diverse cities in China. It’s been so for a long time: a hundred years ago, it was the centre of culture and finance in the Far East. So I wouldn’t simplify the characteristics of Shanghai literature down to the linguistic or landmark level, but rather, much deeper, to the spirit of Shanghai. This spirit is reflected in Chinese character ‘海’ in the name of the city, which means, at once, the ocean, fullness of possibilities, inclusiveness, wide openness. I think that’s what makes Shanghai literature Shanghai literature.

    Is there something inherent to Shanghai that lends itself to sci-fi or speculative fiction? Does its particular reality allow you to imagine unrealities that might in the future become truths?

    Shanghai has all the elements we usually expect in speculative fiction: mega-sized metropolitanism, LED screens growing skywards into the air, skyscrapers co-existing with mean back-streets, natives and foreigners living side-by-side. But deep down I think it’s the collision and mixture of culture from the West and the East that makes it so imaginary. Just as Bladerunner, in 1982, imagined Los Angeles in 2019, full of geisha simulacra, when I walk the streets of Shanghai I wonder what it could be like in 2149. The city might be under the water, or it might be totally, autonomously governed by AI. All is possible, and all has something to do with the collision of the West and the East.

    You have said you haven’t been particularly touched by censorship. Do you think this is related to what you write about, and how you write about it, or is it more to do with fortune?

    If we don’t know why and how we are censored – if its logic remains unclear and silent – then we cannot know why and how we aren’t censored. It’s not only happening in China; as I’ve always said, impingement on freedom of expression is universal and, more and more often, it blurs the line between the protection and invasion of people’s value systems – which is greatly harmful.

    There are AI-generated passages in ‘State of Trance’, created by a machine that has learnt your style and crafted work from it. I want to ask what the results make you consider/question more: the capacity of AI to write, or your own capacity in writing?

    It’s both. As computation power grows, AI approaches the ability of humans on all levels, including creativity. Now it might sound fanciful or surrendering, but the real question is how to leverage AI for  our own self-improvement. I’ve been greatly inspired by AI-writing, and I don’t think this relationship will be one of mastery and subservience; more likely it will be one of partnership.

    ‘The most lethal threats often come from the self’ is a line that stayed with me. Perhaps I am wresting this phrase from its framing but, how do you think this idea relates to our current context?

    Well, our current context isn’t War of the Worlds. COVID-19 doesn’t come from a world external to ours to beat us; coronaviruses are always there, co-existing with us, and all the species of the earth. It’s our system, our beliefs, our lifestyles, our arrogance, our human-centrism that beat us. If not this time, in the future, when this happens again, we may be beaten if we do not change. Self-reflection is crucial for everyone – that’s what that line means. And so, yes, it’s of great relevance to our moment, and what might follow it.

    More broadly, what role does literature have to play in this moment and its aftermath – both in China and globally?

    Literature resonates and connects – connects people to history and to each other. It connects us to those who are living in totally different conditions, cultural contexts, faded dynasties, exotic planets, but all the while holds on to belief in humanity. It allows us to gain love and strength when we need it, and to give it away to others when they do. 

    Your protagonist spends their (we only know this character as ‘you’) apocalyptic time trying to return a book. Do you think they would have the same urge if they were under lock-down at the moment?

    Ha – I think for us who live in reality, the urge should be to stay safe and keep on distancing, while we read the books that comfort our anxieties and release our depression. I guess, though, that the librarian would give you a ‘lock-down extension’.

    Chen Qiufan (born 1981), also known as Stanley Chan, is a science fiction writer, columnist, and scriptwriter. His first novel The Waste Tide, (originally published in 2013) has been translated into English by Ken Liu and published by Tor & Head of Zeus in 2019. His short stories have won three Galaxy Awards for Chinese Science Fiction, and twelve Nebula Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy in Chinese. “The Fish of Lijiang” received the Best Short Form Award for the 2012 Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards. His stories have been published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, MIT Technology Review, Clarkesworld, Year’s Best SF, Interzone, and Lightspeed, as well as influential Chinese science fiction magazine Science Fiction World.

    Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

  • PEN Atlas Q&A: Anjan Sundaram

    Journalist Anjan Sundaram talks to English PEN’s Robert Sharp about his latest book, Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship, which describes the erosion of press freedoms in Rwanda, and how the absence of free speech leads to oppression and the ‘transmission of trauma’.

    You can listen to this exclusive English PEN podcast via the embedded audio player below. An edited transcript of part of the discussion is presented here.

    [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/250744312″ params=”color=00aabb&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=false&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

    The Rwanda you describe in your book is very Orwellian: the government seems able to do things that no-one believes have actually happened.

    This book was in many ways an education for myself. To understand what becomes possible in a country when people and society are silenced.  It is terrifying, the extent to which people will go, out of fear of disobeying the government.

    A Rwandan journalist told me that the government was conducting some sort of programme that was doing harm to people, and it wasn’t being reported. We went together to the countryside, far away from urban centres, and it was like walking through a war zone.

    We walked through villages where the thatched roofs were down on the ground. The circular mud huts were open to the sky. It was the rainy season, so the mud walls were disintegrating. The people outside were sick with malaria and pneumonia; some of them were dying. In the few concrete houses people were crammed into rooms with goats and pigs. The surreal thing was that the grass roofs could have been put back up on the houses! I was shocked to see hundreds of people in this situation.

    I asked them, ‘Who did this to you? Was it the army? Was it the police? Who tore down your roofs?’ And they said, ‘We did.’

    What had happened was that the President [Paul Kagame] had said called these grass roofs ‘primitive’. And the local representatives in government were so terrified of the President that they went out to the villages and told the people, ‘The President has said these roofs are primitive, they need to come down.’

    The people were so afraid – who were they going to speak up to? There were no journalists, there was no way to get the word out. So they had no choice but to comply. They went up onto their houses and they tore down their roofs. When they came down, the officials said: ‘We will let you know when the replacement houses are built.’ And so until then these people had to live in the open.

    Here was a case of people doing harm to themselves on government orders, because there was no voice in society saying, ‘This is wrong, don’t tear down your own roofs until the government has built a replacement house, it’s common sense.’ There was a pastor in the East who did speak up, and he was promptly arrested for ‘threatening national security’.

    This was when I realised the extent to which the government could control society. The echoes, the parallels with the genocide in Rwanda were impossible to ignore. In 1994, Rwandan society went out en masse to kill Tutsis and about 800,000 people were killed in three months. Society was doing itself harm on government instructions, because any voices that spoke up against the genocide, or spoke up against the tearing down of grass roofs, were silenced. People felt the only option for them was to comply.

    Speaking of the genocide, there is another passage in the book where you meet some genocidaires. They come across as the most content people in the book!

    These are people described in Rwanda as the incarnation of evil. During the genocide they killed many people in extremely gruesome ways. They had been in prison and now they were performing community service as punishment for what they had done.

    When you actually go and speak to them, they come across as really having thought through what they have done. I think they are among the few people in Rwandan society who have had a chance to reflect and understand what made them kill.

    I asked them what should have been done in Rwanda to prevent the genocide and they said, ‘We should have been taught human rights.’

    And I thought that this was too practised an answer, so I ignored it. Then later one of the genocidaires came back to me and said, ‘You did not understand what I meant by “human rights”. What I mean is that we don’t understand where we begin as people and where the state ends.’ He put his hand over his head to show how the state came over them and consumed them. ‘If I don’t understand where I begin, if I don’t understand that I have rights, how am I supposed to understand that someone else has rights? If the state orders me to kill them I will kill them, because I don’t see them as whole people, and I don’t see myself as a person.’

    Then you begin to realise the power of the state. You don’t find many people in Rwanda who have had a chance to think through their actions in this way, and to understand that they are people, and they have rights! You really have to begin with people understanding that they too have rights, and then they will naturally protect the rights of others. It is this dynamic that we have in free countries, where people understand that defending other people’s rights is part of defending their own rights.

    And these genocidaires had come to this conclusion on their own, in prison. It was remarkable to talk to them!

    You describe in the book how the President uses the genocide for political ends. How does he do that?

    The genocide was an incredibly traumatic event that is still alive in Rwanda today.

    To people in power that trauma can be useful. It becomes an easy way to control people. At some of the genocide memorial events, I would find children present, who hadn’t been born during the genocide.  They were crying, wailing, bawling, as though they felt the pain of the genocide. I met school teachers who complained that during the week of the genocide memorial the children become uncontrollable, because the government shows so many images of killing. Why would they do that?

    At the national stadium, once a year, the President shows images of the genocide, and works people up into an emotionally vulnerable state. Then he walks into the stadium and he reminds everyone that he is their saviour, and that they are safe because of him. It is a very emotional and powerful way of controlling people.

    Nothing is sacred when you are trying to hold onto and consolidate power. If an opportunity presents itself where people are vulnerable, power will use it. The Rwandan government does it with the genocide. They use that trauma to control people. The genocide memorials become centres where trauma can be transmitted.

    anjan-sundaram-48427Anjan Sundaram is an award-winning journalist who has reported from Africa for the New York Times and the Associated Press. His writing on various countries in the continent has also appeared in Granta, the Observer, Foreign Policy, Politico, Fortune and the Washington Post. He graduated from Yale and received a Reuters journalism award in 2006 for his reporting on Pygmy tribes in Congo’s rain forest. His first book, Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo, was published to great critical acclaim in 2014. In 2015 he won a Frontline Club Award for print journalism for his piece ‘A Place on Earth: Scenes from a War’.

    anjansundaram.com | @anjansun

    Robert Sharp is English PEN’s Communications Manager.

    robertsharp.co.uk | @robertsharp59

    Banner photo by Graham Holliday.