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Tag: Harold Pinter

  • Naomi Klein: An Encomium to Arundhati Roy and Alaa Abd el-Fattah

    Naomi Klein: An Encomium to Arundhati Roy and Alaa Abd el-Fattah

    Naomi Klein’s PEN Pinter Prize 2024 encomium.

    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.

    This speech was delivered at the PEN Pinter Prize ceremony at the British Library on 10 October 2024. It was first published as an exclusive in Mada Masr.

    ~

    Thank you for this invitation. There are few activities I enjoy more than praising Arundhati Roy.

    Under normal circumstances, I would be more than happy to spend all of my time on stage recalling favourite characters in her gorgeous novels, and reminding all of you of some of her greatest one-liners.

    And no, I’m not talking about the ones about another world breathing that were the italicized email signatures of half the people you knew in early 2000s.

    I’m not even referring to the ‘pandemic is a portal’ – those words that pierced the early shock of Covid-19 and helped so many of us to grasp that this cataclysm was going to take us somewhere new and different, and that we had urgent choices to make about what we wanted to bring on that journey.

    I’m talking about deeper Arundhati cuts, lesser-known framings that also helped us get our bearings and keep our wits when history suddenly started moving in fast forward.

    Like after 9/11, when George W. Bush declared ‘you are either with us or with the terrorists’ and Arundhati reminded us then that we did not have to choose between ‘a malevolent Mickey Mouse and the Mad Mullahs’ – that all the beauty on Earth existed between those two poles.

    Or when US fighter jets pummelled Afghanistan with bunker busters, and then followed up by airdropping packets of food aid, and Roy described the display as ‘brutality smeared in peanut butter and strawberry jam’.

    Or what she said about the way our phones have become extensions of bodies: ‘Imagine if your liver or your gallbladder didn’t have your best interest at heart.’

    Or her scathing take on middle class, professionalized environmentalism, which, she says, ‘Asks the question: How can we change without changing?’

    I could go on – I’m a collector, you see, an Arundhati-ologist.

    Her novels create worlds nestled within worlds and then worlds within those. The characters in The Ministry of Upmost Happiness embody and inhabit the riotous, uncontrollable diversity that Roy has, for so long, been trying to defend against the dull, monocrop twins of global capitalism and ethnonationalism.

    John Berger once observed that Arundhati’s fiction and non-fiction walk her around the world on two legs. Which means that if we want to understand the uniqueness of her stride, we must look and them together, as companions.

    Roy has written dozens of non-fiction essay and lectures, enough to fill over 1000 pages in her beautiful anthology, My Seditious Heart, and then some in her recent follow-up, Azadi.

    What becomes clear in these pages is that, after God of Small Things, Arundhati became a kind of self-assigning war correspondent, seeking out the places of maximum pain, maximum injustice, maximum state violence – from Kashmir, the Maoist insurgency, the aftermath of the Gujarat Massacre, nuclear weapons tests, and the movement to defend the Narmada valley from drowning.

    But she is Arundhati so she did not write about these conflicts and issues like a war reporter, she wrote about them like a novelist.  She brought her tremendous gifts as a writer – her bottomless capacity for imagination, her devastating eye for detail and for the perfect, unforgettable metaphor, to find poetry in protest chants, and gallows humour in guerrilla warfare. So many struggles for justice and survival were better understood, more deeply felt, because she chose to help us see them through her artist’s eyes.

    There are some writers, though not enough of them, who are willing to confront the ugliest acts that humans are capable of unleashing onto other humans and the natural world. And there are also writers who search out beauty with great insistence, who fall recklessly in love with the world again and again. 

    But it is vanishingly rare for the same writer to do both of these things: confront the ugly and still search for beauty. Look squarely into the dead eyes of the mob bent on annihilation – and still hold on to a belief in the potential of masses of people to come together to change the world for the better.

    Arundhati Roy is that rare writer. So, too, is Alaa Abd el-Fattah. I was not at all surprised when I learned that Roy had chosen Alaa as this year’s Writer of Courage. Though very different stylistically, their spirits are connected in an almost sibling-like way.

    It was my honour to write the foreword to Alaa mind-altering book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. Having spent many weeks immersed in his writing, I would also have been happy to spend this short speech tonight praising Alaa’s work – pulling out the insights and sentences that are now permanent parts of my mental architecture.

    I could speak to you about his warnings about nationalism, his devotion to participatory democracy, his bold experimentations with form and style. I could share some of the endlessly original ways he finds to express disdain for tyrants, liars and cowards (a trait he shares with Arundhati). I could talk about how rare it is for revolutionaries to look honestly at their own movement’s failures and missteps, which Alaa does with great rigour and care.

    All of these qualities, along with his strategic mind and acute analysis of power, made him one of the most important figures the 2011 pro-democracy revolution in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that overthrew the three-decade rule of Hosni Mubarak. There is so much to say.

    And yet as I sat down to write this appreciation, of both Arundhati and Alaa, it felt impossible to simply focus on their words – the books, essays and turns of phrase. Nor did it seem appropriate to focus on their impacts – the significance they hold to millions of people fighting for justice, liberation and dignified lives inside and outside their home countries.

    I kept getting stuck on a simple fact. That, though their circumstances differ greatly, both Arundhati and Alaa are in danger. In fact, when English PEN invited me to deliver this encomium, the letter contained a caveat, one that should startle us: ‘Given the state of the world, and the targeting by governments of both Alaa and Arundhati, we’re aware that it’s possible that both will be able to join us in person, but also that neither will.’

    Alaa should be with us tonight, having finished serving his latest, absurd, sentence twelve days ago. The British government should have used every bit of leverage that it has – and it plenty – to make sure that he was here. They clearly did not. Alaa has already lost more than a decade of his life to Egypt’s dungeons – an incarceration so prolonged, torturous and arbitrary that his mother, Laila Soueif, calls this latest extension ‘a kidnapping’.

    Meanwhile, just as English PEN’s decision to award the Pinter Prize to Arundhati Roy was announced, reports came that she could face charges under India’s draconian anti-terrorism laws, with very severe implications for her freedom. That news led to a media frenzy, which put her in further danger, the kind of thing that has brought angry mobs to her door before.

    Arundhati is here, thank goodness. But it’s a reminder that we cannot take any writer’s freedom or safety for granted, no matter how renowned or celebrated.

    A huge part of what I cherish about Arundhati and Alaa is that, like the best public intellectuals, they help us understand our moment in history. This is hard: change is constant and mostly incremental; the big shifts tend to sneak up on us. So how do we know when we are in a new chapter, one that requires different things of us? We know, partly, because our writers tell us.

    ‘The pandemic is a portal’, Roy said, we’re going somewhere new. Pay attention.

    Alaa, from jail, helped his comrades understand that the Tahrir revolutionary moment had passed, and new strategies were required. A defeat did not need to be the end of the story, but he knew that you can’t write a new chapter if you are stuck in the old one.

    I point this out because I think that this night – when it was entirely possibly that neither of our honourees would be free enough to be with us – is telling us something important. I think it’s telling us that we have entered a new era. I think it’s telling us to pay close attention.

    Arundhati and Alaa are famous writers so we know about their cases. But thousands of lesser- known activists, journalists, academics, and lawyers are currently imprisoned in India’s jails on draconian or entirely trumped-up charges. And those are the ones who have not been assassinated in the streets after being declared enemies of the state.

    In Egypt, human rights group estimate that there are some 60,000 political prisoners behind bars. An unfathomable number, one that helps explain why building shiny new prisons is one of the current regime’s most successful enterprises.

    In light of these facts, I want to underline something that can get lost in the apolitical discourse of human rights. Arundhati and Alaa are movement writers – writers whose voices are inseparable from the international resistance to the steamroller of corporate globalism and militarism that surged at the turn of the millennium. The movement looked different in every country, but before social media existed, we were connected to each other and we understood that we were fighting different fronts of the same struggle. From Chiapas to Palestine, Narmada to Genoa, Tahrir to Occupy Wall Street.

    This was the other world that Arundhati could hear breathing on a quiet day, the worlds that were always there.

    I point this out because the state repression and harassment that these two writers face cannot be pried apart from the repression of the movements they helped build and that built them. Nor can the repression of these movements be pried apart from the fascistic political forces that are currently rising globally to fill their vacuum. Filling it with hate-filled ideologies that feed off legitimate anger at elites but systematically redirect that anger towards the most vulnerable people in our respective societies. Particularly at the migrants who have been displaced by the wars, climate disasters and policies of economic immiseration that our global movements tried very hard to stop.

    As multinational corporations rearranged India in their image, Roy described it as ‘the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged […] – the secession of the middle and upper classes to a country of their own, somewhere up in the stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world’s elite. This Kingdom in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically sealed from the rest of India.’

    It’s not just India, of course. That successful succession is our world now. And a world like that needs a lot of jails. It needs all kinds of weapons. It needs iron domes – not just in Israel, but everywhere.

    Writers with compulsions to tell the truth? Not so much. In fact, there is a special kind of pure, distilled hatred that fascists and tyrants reserve for the people who see them. Truly see them. Or rather, see through them.

    And not only see through them but represent a true alternative to them – a politics built on love, solidarity and an open-armed embrace of the magnificence of our differences.

    At English PEN, you know that writing is always dangerous business somewhere. That’s why you exist: to champion the pen over the gun and the prison cell. But as we honour these two writers who are both at escalating risk, from countries where the jails and morgues are crowded with other truth-tellers, we must contend with the reality that we have entered a brazen new stage of state violence.

    And nowhere more so than in Palestine. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, the total number of journalists killed in Gaza in the past year has reached 176, with 32 journalists in prison.

    Just a few days ago, an Israeli strike murdered the 19-year-old Palestinian journalist Hassan Hamad in his home in the Jabalia camp in North Gaza. His remains were reduced to a shoe box.

    His colleagues shared a WhatsApp message he had received. It said: ‘Listen, If you continue spreading lies about Israel, we’ll come for you next […]. This is your last warning.’

    Yesterday Israel shot and killed Al-Aqsa TV photojournalist Mohammed al-Tannani. Al Jazeera’s Fadi al-Wahdi was shot in the neck. Also yesterday.

    So if you don’t mind, tonight’s encomium is for Arundhati, and for Alaa. But it is also for Hassan and Mohammed and Fadi and so many others who believed so fiercely in the power of witnessing that they risked everything to try to shake us into action.

    None of this is safely over there. In North America, solidarity with Palestine is costing jobs and reputations. Students and professors calling for divestment have been brutalised on their own campuses. Climate activists in this country are getting multiyear sentences for trying to peacefully raise the alarm about the kind of cataclysmic storm that is bearing down on Florida as we meet. And just a few weeks ago, anti-migrant pogroms broke out in the streets of your major cities.

    We are all inside this dangerous new chapter, connected to one another. There is fear in that, but there is strength too. It means there are many new alliances to make, new solidarities to forge, new strategies to devise. And new courage to find. Because as Alaa’s words remind us we ‘have not yet been defeated’.

    Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and the international bestselling author of nine books published in over 35 languages including No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything, No Is Not Enough, On Fire, and Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World which won the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction in 2024. A columnist for The Guardian, her writing has appeared in leading publications around the world. She is the honorary professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers University and is Associate Professor in Geography at the University of British Columbia where she is the founding co-director of UBC’s Centre for Climate Justice. 

    Photo credit: George Torode

  • Lina Attalah’s Speech for Alaa Abd el-Fattah, 2024 PEN Pinter Prize Writer of Courage

    Lina Attalah’s Speech for Alaa Abd el-Fattah, 2024 PEN Pinter Prize Writer of Courage

    Lina Attalah’s PEN Pinter Prize 2024 speech.

    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.

    This speech was delivered at the PEN Pinter Prize ceremony at the British Library on 10 October 2024.

    ~

    I met Alaa for the first time at a protest calling for the independence of the judiciary in 2006. We were in our 20s. He was effervescently protesting with his whole body, jumping up and down like fire. Shortly after, he was pulled by several cops to a police truck. Judging from the scene, he seemed to be enacting a bodily resistance as he was dragged by the police. We always smile when we remember how our first physical encounter is one where his full presence is being actively negated by the police. We laugh at how unflattering the scene was for a first meeting.

    Shortly after Alaa came out from his imprisonment, he had an idea. He wanted to convene an assemblage of inventive techies with a heightened sense of political consciousness. He was of the blogging generation and was on the forefront of it; but he was never content with sitting back to think on his own and perform to an invisible public from behind a computer screen. He wanted to go wider and deeper; wider by summoning a convention and deeper by interrogating the very techne through which a whole new politics of expression was emerging.

    He wanted to test what it means to work with tech tools to open up channels of knowledge making, ideating and developing discourse. The quest was political, the façade technological, the approach philosophical. We convened techies from across the Arab World, who are also artists, organisers, writers and thinkers. It was our first encounter with how to think and organise intersectionally, with how to break categories open and smuggle their substance from one to the other; technology to politics, philosophy to technology, technology to art and journalism, and so on. You could say it was a kind of rehearsal for the Arab Spring, with our newborn community boasting members from Tunisia, Syria, Palestine, Bahrain and Lebanon among others.

    When the Tunisian revolution erupted in December 2010, I was with Alaa in Pretoria, South Africa. He had then moved there to work with localisation software, a technology he was militant about; he wanted to see an Internet where Arabic content flowed seamlessly as though it was its native language; the Internet being, back then, a possible site for an embodied universality.

    I cut my trip short to rush back home, get a visa and go to Tunisia – but the wave of Arab revolutions was moving faster than flights – and Egypt’s own revolution broke out on 25 January. I was beaten by the police, who broke my glasses. I wrote to Alaa that day about how he had missed an unflattering scene of me being beaten up and losing a shoe and, most importantly, my glasses – and my vision with them. But we agreed that something new was emerging in the blur.

    A few days later, Alaa would pack and come back home; at the time, home was Tahrir Square. Days after, the president had fallen, the government had fallen, the parliament had fallen, the constitution had fallen. I met Alaa in Tahrir Square: he had a list on a draft paper that he was crossing out. Revolutionary change was a laundry list in Alaa’s hands. He was striking out items, and writing out new ones that now needed attention.

    What comes next is yet another formidable presence, not confined to protest squares. Alaa went on working with different formations, students, activists, journalists, techies, artists. He taught workshops on how to write a political statement as a poetic act. He worked with youths on how to inhabit the formulaic informational space of Wikipedia with homegrown narratives. He led code sprints for localisation tools. He led meetings on how practicing politics online – as opposed to through the political party – had restored space for emotion.

    Let’s Write Our Own Constitution – one of Alaa’s initiatives. He admired South Africa’s experience with the Freedom Charter, primarily for the process of assembling its content through the active instruction of the public to politicians. Rescuing democracy from its representational reductionism, he was dreaming of smuggling Kilptown’s democratic experiment to Egypt, where people, clustered in communities, would convene to write parts of a proposed new collective constitution. Its content inside, he had his eyes on how this form of convening, of coming together, would affect the outcome.

    In the months to follow, there were many reversals to the revolutionary triumphalism that we experienced in the early days of 2011. But the ultimate reversal was in 2013: a military coup. By then, my newspaper’s management had decided to pull our funding – as an act of censorship. I became jobless alongside 25 journalists colleagues. I had an intuition that this was going to be the summer of unprecedented political violence and finitudes. I asked Alaa to help us build a website where we could house our displaced journalism, to at least bear witness to the coming summer of violence. He spent days and nights with his partner Manal back then, writing code for our new website. Meanwhile, I was diverting my anxiety about a starting our new project, a project that may stand in the face of the violent annihilation of our voices by playing with Khaled on Alaa and Manal’s couch, as both were busy writing code. Khaled, their son, was almost one by then; he was birthed in a moment of birthing, when the revolution was ascendant – and was now wrestling to make his way into so much uncertainty.

    By the time our website, Mada, was up and running, the military was in power and Alaa was in prison. He finished developing our code in smuggled letters and instructions during prison visits. In the ten years that followed, there would be two active bodies of archives of the military’s violent cancelation of public politics: sustained publishing in Mada, and letters to and from Alaa.

    Alaa’s handwriting in the letters is barely legible, and reading them is an exercise of deciphering. Sometimes I do it with a common friend, Sarah, who also sends and receives letters. The exercise reminds me of an eerie image described by Frantz Fanon from 1954 of Algerians trying to tune to the jammed transmission of the revolutionaries of Radio Free Algeria. We would start reading some of the letters together, it would turn into a spiritual ritual of some sort, where Alaa is summoned, and suddenly there is much more to the content we are reading. Such is the possibility of form that Alaa was always militant about.

    Sometimes, the two archives of Mada and the letters would converge; Alaa’s first years of imprisonment were marked by a determination that a voice can transcend confinement and trespass. His body was incarcerated, but his voice was fugitive. With profound depth, the kind he is ordered to summon within a prison architecture, he wrote about failure as instruction, progress as ideology, Palestine as universal politics.

    In his later years of imprisonment, Alaa’s writings shifted to his own predicament as a prisoner, again universalising it to urge a solidarity embodied in a belief that this concerns us all, that we too can be prisoners like him one day. Why? Because states ultimately survive through preserving their right to enact power on our bodies. In a text he wrote in 2019, he described with graphic precision a violent account of his incarceration. He did not do it to invite us to pity him, but to understand that the Authority’s enmity with its opponents is predicated on the negation of the voice and the body. This is a moment when the political failure of the collective has returned us to the body as an ultimate site of resistance.

    In 2017 Alaa wrote, ‘I am in prison because the regime wants to make an example of us. So let us be an example but of our own choosing. Let us be an example, not a warning.’ Five years later, he went on his longest hunger strike to demand freedom, and escalated it to a water strike. He survives an imminent death in a moment he movingly describes in a letter. He is woken from unconsciousness to find himself in the arms of his cell mates, some looking at him with eyes terrified by yet another possible loss. Some held his head with care, others held his back. He put it in words and an image was born. Ordained to a jail cell with no exit in sight, Alaa restores his attachment to life through inmate solidarity, not just as his own particular condition, but as a reminder that unrestrained power is built on confinement. And that those in confinement must not to be bracketed off to a margin, a human rights category – they need to become the issue of all issues, the cause of all causes. And for this to happen, there needs to be solidarity.

    Today, his mother, Laila Soueif, is on hunger strike for him. Today is Day 11, because 11 days ago, Alaa actually completed his latest prison sentence of five years, but still has not been released.

    Sometime in the 1930s, Bertolt Brecht orated a speech to an anti-fascist gathering, in which he spoke about the courage of recognising the truth when it is hidden, the skill to turn it into something we can fight with, the cunning of finding in whose hands to put it and spread it. Through years of a friendship I am so privileged to have with Alaa, I witnessed his digging into origins like a philosopher, turning his findings into political artifacts for organising and mobilising like a politician, and then, essentially putting it all in our hands in codes, letters and articles like an orator. 

    Alaa’s is a friendship that unleashes political imagination He is a pedagogy that keeps giving, through words and silence. He is the ghost of spring past; he is the absentee we should all summon to presence. 

    Lina Attalah is a journalist and founding editor of Mada Masr, a Cairo-based independent media platform, where Alaa Abd el-Fattah published many of his writings. 

    Photo credit: George Torode

  • No Propaganda on Earth Can Hide the Wound that is Palestine: Arundhati Roy’s PEN Pinter Prize 2024 Speech

    No Propaganda on Earth Can Hide the Wound that is Palestine: Arundhati Roy’s PEN Pinter Prize 2024 Speech

    Arundhati Roy’s PEN Pinter Prize 2024 speech.

    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.

    This speech was delivered at the PEN Pinter Prize ceremony at the British Library on 10 October 2024. It was first published as an exclusive in the Wire.

    ~

    I thank you, members of English PEN and members of the jury, for honouring me with the PEN Pinter Prize. I would like to begin by announcing the name of this year’s Writer of Courage who I have chosen to share this award with.

    My greetings to you, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, writer of courage and my fellow awardee. We hoped and prayed that you would be released in September, but the Egyptian government decided that you were too beautiful a writer and too dangerous a thinker to be freed yet. But you are here in this room with us. You are the most important person here. From prison you wrote, ‘[M]y words lost any power and yet they continued to pour out of me. I still had a voice, even if only a handful would listen.’ We are listening, Alaa. Closely.

    Greetings to you, too, my beloved Naomi Klein, friend to both Alaa and me. Thank you for being here tonight. It means the world to me.

    Greetings to all of you gathered here, as well to as those who are invisible perhaps to this wonderful audience but as visible to me as anybody else in this room. I am speaking of my friends and comrades in prison in India – lawyers, academics, students, journalists – Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Khalid Saifi, Sharjeel Imam, Rona Wilson, Surendra Gadling, Mahesh Raut. I speak to you, my friend Khurram Parvaiz, one of the most remarkable people I know, you’ve been in prison for three years, and to you too Irfan Mehraj and to the thousands incarcerated in Kashmir and across the country whose lives have been devastated.

    When Ruth Borthwick, Chair of English PEN and of the Pinter panel first wrote to me about this honour, she said the Pinter Prize is awarded to a writer who has sought to define ‘the real truth of our lives and our societies’ through ‘unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination’. That is a quote from Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

    The word ‘unflinching’ made me pause for a moment, because I think of myself as someone who is almost permanently flinching.

    I would like to dwell a little on the theme of ‘flinching’ and ‘unflinching’. Which may be best illustrated by Harold Pinter himself:

    I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

    The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’

    Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

    Remember that President Reagan called the Contras ‘the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.’ A turn of phrase that he was clearly fond of. He also used it to describe the CIA-backed Afghan Mujahideen, who then morphed into the Taliban. And it is the Taliban who rule Afghanistan today after waging a twenty-year-long war against the US invasion and occupation. Before the Contras and the Mujahideen, there was the war in Vietnam and the unflinching US military doctrine that ordered its soldiers to ‘Kill Anything That Moves’. If you read the Pentagon Papers and other documents on US war aims in Vietnam, you can enjoy some lively unflinching discussions about how to commit genocide—is it better to kill people outright or to starve them slowly? Which would look better? The problem that the compassionate mandarins in the Pentagon faced was that, unlike Americans, who, according to them, want ‘life, happiness, wealth, power’, Asians ‘stoically accept […] the destruction of wealth and the loss of lives’—and force America to carry their ‘strategic logic to its conclusion, which is genocide.’ A terrible burden to be borne unflinchingly.

    And here we are, all these years later, more than a year into yet another genocide. The US and Israel’s unflinching and ongoing televised genocide in Gaza and now Lebanon in defence of a colonial occupation and an Apartheid state. The death toll so far, is officially 42,000, a majority of them women and children. This does not include those who died screaming under the rubble of buildings, neighbourhoods, whole cities, and those whose bodies have not yet been recovered. A recent study by Oxfam says that more children have been killed by Israel in Gaza than in the equivalent period of any other war in the last twenty years.

    To assuage their collective guilt for their early years of indifference towards one genocide – the Nazi extermination of millions of European Jews – the United States and Europe have prepared the grounds for another.

    Like every state that has carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide in history, Zionists in Israel – who believe themselves to be ‘the chosen people’ – began by dehumanising Palestinians before driving them off their land and murdering them.

    Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians ‘two-legged beasts’, Yitzhak Rabin called them ‘grasshoppers’ who ‘could be crushed’ and Golda Meir said ‘There was no such thing as Palestinians’. Winston Churchill, that famous warrior against fascism, said, ‘I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time’ and then went on to declare that a ‘higher race’ had the final right to the manger. Once those two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, dogs and non-existent people were murdered, ethnically cleansed, and ghettoised, a new country was born. It was celebrated as a ‘land without people for people without a land’. The nuclear-armed state of Israel was to serve as a military outpost and gateway to the natural wealth and resources of the Middle East for US and Europe. A lovely coincidence of aims and objectives.

    The new state was supported unhesitatingly and unflinchingly, armed and bankrolled, coddled and applauded, no matter what crimes it committed. It grew up like a protected child in a wealthy home whose parents smile proudly as it commits atrocity upon atrocity. No wonder today it feels free to boast openly about committing genocide. (At least The Pentagon Papers were secret. They had to be stolen. And leaked.) No wonder Israeli soldiers seem to have lost all sense of decency. No wonder they flood the social media with depraved videos of themselves wearing the lingerie of women they have killed or displaced, videos of themselves mimicking dying Palestinians and wounded children or raped and tortured prisoners, images of themselves blowing up buildings while they smoke cigarettes or jive to music on their headphones. Who are these people?

    What can possibly justify what Israel is doing?

    The answer, according to Israel and its allies, as well as the Western media, is the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th last year. The killing of Israeli civilians and the taking of Israeli hostages. According to them, history only began a year ago.

    So, this is the part in my speech where I am expected to equivocate to protect myself, my ‘neutrality’, my intellectual standing. This is the part where I am meant to lapse into moral equivalence and condemn Hamas, the other militant groups in Gaza and their ally Hezbollah, in Lebanon, for killing civilians and taking people hostage. And to condemn the people of Gaza who celebrated the Hamas attack. Once that’s done it all becomes easy, doesn’t it? Ah well. Everybody is terrible, what can one do? Let’s go shopping instead…

    I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.

    When US President Joe Biden met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli war cabinet during a visit to Israel in October 2023, he said, ‘I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.’

    Unlike President Joe Biden, who calls himself a non-Jewish Zionist and unflinchingly bankrolls and arms Israel while it commits its war crimes, I am not going to declare myself or define myself in any way that is narrower than my writing. I am what I write.

    I am acutely aware that being the writer that I am, the non-Muslim that I am and the woman that I am, it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible for me to survive very long under the rule of Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Iranian regime. But that is not the point here. The point is to educate ourselves about the history and the circumstances under which they came to exist. The point is that right now they are fighting against an ongoing genocide. The point is to ask ourselves whether a liberal, secular fighting force can go up against a genocidal war machine. Because, when all the powers of the world are against them, who do they have to turn to but God? I am aware that Hezbollah and the Iranian regime have vocal detractors in their own countries, some who also languish in jails or have faced far worse outcomes. I am aware that some of their actions – the killing of civilians and the taking of hostages on October 7th by Hamas – constitute war crimes. However, there cannot be an equivalence between this and what Israel and the United States are doing in Gaza, in the West Bank and now in Lebanon. The root of all the violence, including the violence of October 7th, is Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and its subjugation of the Palestinian people. History did not begin on 7 October 2023.

    I ask you, which of us sitting in this hall would willingly submit to the indignity that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to for decades? What peaceful means have the Palestinian people not tried? What compromise have they not accepted – other than the one that requires them to crawl on their knees and eat dirt?

    Israel is not fighting a war of self-defence. It is fighting a war of aggression. A war to occupy more territory, to strengthen its Apartheid apparatus and tighten its control on Palestinian people and the region.

    Since October 7th 2023, apart from the tens of thousands of people it has killed, Israel has displaced the majority of Gaza’s population, many times over. It has bombed hospitals. It has deliberately targeted and killed doctors, aid workers and journalists. A whole population is being starved – their history is sought to be erased. All this is supported both morally and materially by the wealthiest, most powerful governments in the world. And their media. (Here I include my country, India which supplies Israel with weapons, as well as thousands of workers.) There is no daylight between these countries and Israel. In the last year alone, the US has spent 17.9 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. So, let us once and for all dispense with the lie about the US being a mediator, a restraining influence, or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (considered to be on the extreme Left of mainstream US politics) put it, ‘working tirelessly for a ceasefire’. A party to the genocide cannot be a mediator.

    Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds.

    Polls show that a majority of the citizens in the countries whose governments enable the Israeli genocide have made it clear that they do not agree with this. We have watched those marches of hundreds of thousands of people – including a young generation of Jews who are tired of being used, tired of being lied to. Who would have imagined that we would live to see the day when German police would arrest Jewish citizens for protesting against Israel and Zionism and accuse them of anti-Semitism? Who would have thought the US government would, in the service of the Israeli state, undermine its cardinal principle of Free Speech by banning pro-Palestine slogans? The so-called moral architecture of western democracies – with a few honourable exceptions – has become a grim laughingstock in the rest of the world.

    When Benjamin Netanyahu holds up a map of the Middle East in which Palestine has been erased and Israel stretches from the river to the sea, he is applauded as a visionary who is working to realise the dream of a Jewish homeland.

    But when Palestinians and their supporters chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, they are accused of explicitly calling for the genocide of Jews.

    Are they really? Or is that a sick imagination projecting its own darkness onto others? An imagination that cannot countenance diversity, cannot countenance the idea of living in a country alongside other people, equally, with equal rights. Like everybody else in the world does. An imagination that cannot afford to acknowledge that Palestinians want to be free, like South Africa is, like India is, like all countries that have thrown off the yoke of colonialism are. Countries that are diverse, deeply, maybe even fatally, flawed, but free. When South Africans were chanting their popular rallying cry, Amandla! Power to the people, were they calling for the genocide of white people? They were not. They were calling for the dismantling of the Apartheid state. Just as the Palestinians are.

    The war that has now begun will be terrible. But it will eventually dismantle Israeli Apartheid. The whole world will be far safer for everyone – including for Jewish people – and far more just. It will be like pulling an arrow from our wounded heart.

    If the US government withdrew its support of Israel, the war could stop today. Hostilities could end right this minute. Israeli hostages could be freed, Palestinian prisoners could be released. The negotiations with Hamas and the other Palestinian stakeholders that must inevitably follow the war could instead take place now and prevent the suffering of millions of people. How sad that most people would consider this a naïve, laughable proposition.

    As I conclude, let me turn to your words, Alaa Abd el-Fatah, from your book of prison writing, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. I have rarely read such beautiful words about the meaning of victory and defeat – and the political necessity of honestly looking despair in the eye. I have rarely seen writing in which a citizen separates himself from the state, from the generals and even from the slogans of the Square with such bell-like clarity.

    The centre is treason because there’s room in it only for the General…. The centre is treason and I have never been a traitor. They think they’ve pushed us back into the margins. They don’t realise that we never left it, we just got lost for a brief while. Neither the ballot boxes not the palaces or the ministries or the prisons or even the graves are big enough for our dreams. We never sought the centre because it has no room except for those who abandon the dream. Even the square was not big enough for us, so most of the battles of the revolution happened outside it, and most of the heroes remained outside the frame.

    As the horror we are witnessing in Gaza, and now Lebanon, quickly escalates into a regional war, its real heroes remain outside the frame. But they fight on because they know that one day–

    From the river to the sea

    Palestine will be Free.

    It will. Keep your eye on your calendar. Not on your clock. That’s how the people – not the generals – the people fighting for their liberation measure time.

    Arundhati Roy was trained as an architect. She worked in cinema as an actress, screenplay writer and production designer. In 1997 she won the Booker Prize for her first novel The God of Small Things which was translated into more than 40 languages. Her second novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) has been translated into more than 50 languages.  

    Her non-fiction books include Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2014), Broken Republic: Three Essays (2011), Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (2009), The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2002), The Doctor and the Saint (2013), and My Seditious Heart (2018). Her latest book of essays is Azadi: Freedom, Fiction, Fascism (2019). 

    She has been honoured with the Norman Mailer Prize for Distinguished Writing (2011), the Sydney Peace Prize (2004), the Mahmoud Darwish Award (2016), and the Lannan Foundation’s Cultural Freedom Award (2002). 

    Photo credit: George Torode

  • 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

  • In the Midst of This, I Write

    In the Midst of This, I Write

    Michael Rosen’s PEN Pinter Prize 2023 speech

    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.

    This speech was delivered at the PEN Pinter Prize ceremony at the British Library on 11 October 2023.

    ~

    I’ve known of the PEN Pinter Prize since its inauguration, and I have to say it had never crossed my mind that the work I do would ever be regarded as worthy for this honour. Lucky I wasn’t a judge, then. Well, no, as it’s me standing here, I wouldn’t have been, would I? I’ll try not to be overwhelmed by the company I’m keeping here: previous winners, and of course Harold Pinter himself, who we must thank for having created the prize.

    Can I spend a few moments talking about Pinter? He was innovative, daring, outspoken and brave. I first came across his work when I was a teenager going along to the Questors Theatre in Ealing, as part of being in the Young Questors Club. This was December 1959. I was 13. I sat in the old converted church on my own, watching a matinee of The Birthday Party. You must remember that Pinter was a new voice in theatre at this time. The word ‘Pinteresque’ hadn’t been invented – not quite. The OED gives its first appearance as being a year later.

    So there I am on my own in a draughty old church watching this play with a mix of amazement, horror and mystery. The words being spoken – were they real? Ironic? Or were they, in effect, what I might call ‘shadow’ words – the words that people would speak if they dared or could?

    And there’s the word ‘dared’. Even as a 13-year-old, I had a sense that there was something daring about a play that revealed what people secretly thought, desired, and feared. And, for those of you who know the play, you’ll know that it conjures up the image of arbitrary menace, control and punishment. When asked about the play 30 years later, Pinter said, ‘The character of the old man, Petey, says one of the most important lines I’ve ever written. As Stanley is taken away, Petey says, “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do.” I’ve lived that line all my damn life. Never more than now.’

    And then, talking about three of his plays, Pinter added: ‘It’s the destruction of an individual, the independent voice of an individual. I believe that is precisely what the United States is doing in Nicaragua.’

    The critic Michael Billington wrote of The Birthday Party that it’s ‘a deeply political play about the individual’s imperative need for resistance.’ Now, even though I’ve written screeds about the matter, I don’t fully know what we mean when we say a play, a film, a poem – any work of art – has an ‘effect’ on us. Even so, I’m pretty sure something was cooking in 13-year-old Rosen’s head watching The Birthday Party, and some of that was to do with Harold Pinter’s conscious or unconscious mind.

    Do you see where I’m going with this?

    Writing is often – but not always – very individualistic. Being a reader, a viewer or even a theatre-goer can be individual at the very moment of reception. The thing that is written – play, poem, novel – might be about individuals, but both Pinter and Billington were keen to locate that individualism in something social, something political and, in Pinter’s case, something to do with resistance. I can honestly say that I’ve struggled with this for most of my writing life.

    Let me put my cards on the table: there’s a lot about the world I live in, the world that my contemporaries have created, that I find profoundly unsatisfactory, unfair, or utterly horrifying. As the PEN Pinter Prize records, all over the world there are people being silenced, incarcerated, persecuted and killed. The world is unjustly, absurdly, grotesquely unequal. And incredibly, after hundreds of years of this unjust, absurd, grotesque inequality, it hasn’t got any better. If anything, it’s got worse. The twin powers of exploitation and oppression seem to be as strong – if not stronger – than they have ever been. As I speak, there are several wars going on, in which civilians are being killed in their thousands – or is it tens of thousands?

    In the midst of this, I write. I look around the room: the previous winners, the judges, many of you – perhaps most of you – write too. I know that many of us hover over our bits of paper and keyboards wondering whether what we do makes any difference whatsoever to the wicked way of the world. Or we might wonder: should it?

    A few years after I was sitting in that church watching The Birthday Party, I read Jean-Paul Sartre’s What is Literature? Sartre, as you may know, is a hard taskmaster, demanding of us in the Republic of Letters to be committed – ‘engagé’. I confess, I did wonder at the time, But, Jean-Paul, what about jokes? Sometimes they’re important and necessary too, aren’t they?

    But don’t let me get distracted.

    Let me stay with this concern with writers writing on their own, about individuals, while being perturbed, worried, or, like Pinter, furious with the socio-political torments. What did Michael Billington mean when he said The Birthday Party was deeply political? Ah, yes, he located it in, ‘the individual’s imperative need for resistance’. So let me tease this out a bit: are both Pinter and Billington saying that, through these spectacles we create in writing, it’s possible to show unjust power, or plain injustice, in such a way as to invite readers and watchers to feel a need to resist?

    The first winner of this prize was Tony Harrison. Many of you here will know his poems and plays. In one poem he focusses on just one word, a word that I say as ‘us’ but that he, as a boy, pronounced ‘uz’. As a boy at Leeds Grammar School, this was noted and commented on. Socially aspirant Leeds Grammar School boys of the 1950s weren’t supposed to say ‘uz’. It’s as if we are looking through a keyhole – or an even smaller chink or crack than that – into the workings of social class, regionalism, oppression by looking at the use of one word. Or, in the words of modern linguists, ‘at the level of the signifier’.

    Despite my doubts as to whether I merit it, I have accepted this award. Nay, been delighted to accept it, if a little overawed by it. I’m no Harold Pinter, no Tony Harrison. Both of them, I think, overcame that problem of how to foster a social reaction – social resistance, even – through individualistic forms.

    So can I put it like this: I think this award throws me a challenge; it invites me to ask myself, ‘What have you done, Rosen, to make you think you can accept this award?’

    By the way, saying ‘Rosen’ like that to myself conjures up streams of grammar school teachers from the 1950s and 60s – from the benign to the boring, from the encouraging to the crushing, many of them full of the contradictions that stay with you for the rest of your life. For example, imagine this: one teacher once said to me, ‘If we’d had any sense, Rosen, we would have been on the side of the Germans in the Second World War’. Not the most tactful thing to say to a Jewish kid in the 1950s. However, he was the very same teacher who said, as I left the school, ‘Don’t get rubbed out, will you, Rosen?’

    Another voice echoing in my head as I say ‘Rosen’ to myself is that of Christopher Hitchens. For some reason, he always called me ‘Rosen’. Perhaps not the Hitchens many of you knew from TV but the earlier version (we all have one of them) who I knew at university. That Hitchens was, I guess, a pub Jean-Paul Sartre. While I drank my orange juice mixed with sparkling water, eating rollmops, Hitchens spent many hours telling me how I ought to sharpen up my act and spend less time pissing about. Well, I say to the late Christopher Hitchens, I like doing both. And, to tell the truth, I rate both. In fact, to complicate matters, sometimes I sharpen up my pissing about. As Shakespeare suggests with the character of Fool in King Lear, there are times when absurdism is a legitimate answer to hate and cruelty.

    So, yes, Jean-Paul; yes, Hitchens: there have been times when I’ve been polemical. This may have come out that way because matters seemed to be so pressing – or because Michael Gove was running education – that you couldn’t have stopped me. At other times, it’s been because people have asked me. For ten years or so, the Guardian asked me to write about education from the point of view of curious parent. In fact, more often than not, it was as a furious parent.

    Only a couple of weeks ago we read in the Guardian’s sister paper that people who have spoken out against the government’s education policies have been noted, documented and cancelled.  What is it about education that seems to invite people at the top to be so totalitarian even as they insist that education is one of the duties and virtues of democracy? Anyone might think that right-wing libertarianism imposes limits on its libertarianism.

    Unless I’ve misunderstood him, I think Sartre rather thought that poetry had its place alongside music, and so didn’t have to obey his demands for commitment. His gaze was fixed on prose writing. By the way, to even things up as regards teachers, a big shoutout for my A-level French teachers, Mr and Mrs Emmans, who taught me Sartre’s Les Mains sales and Voltaire’s Candide.

    Isn’t it interesting how preparing a talk like this, starts to throw up connections and disruptions? The Birthday Party, Tony Harrison, Voltaire, and Michael Gove.

    Another pressure on my writing – a welcome one – has come from Professor Helen Weinstein, as you’ve heard. Pressures and needs. We could say a lot about that aspect of writing. We often focus on what we call ‘influence’, in the sense of artistic precursors, and not so much on the social circumstances that create pressure, need, and indeed necessity.

    What were the pressures that came to bear on Pinter that led him to write The Birthday Party? What hidden forces lay behind the two men who take Stanley away at the end of the play? Less mysterious, perhaps, but no less potent are the ones expressed through the fault lines in Tony Harrison’s poem ‘Uz’.

    But again, fixing that gaze on what I’ve been on about, I come to a good deal of work that slots into the category we call ‘children’s literature’. I fell into it by mistake. In my late teens and early 20s, I experimented with writing in a voice that was meant to be something like my own from when I was about 10. For some reason that I am not fully conscious of, I wanted to be an archaeologist of my childhood, and the most suitable form seemed to me then (and still is) a kind of oral writing – a spoken-word narrative, a form of memorable speech, a kind of free verse monologue.

    Alongside these, I inherited the wordplay and nonsense of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Spike Milligan – which was, in a way, the unconscious wordplay that that 10-year-old me liked or would have liked.

    Thanks to the BBC School Radio producer Joan Griffiths, the great educator Margaret Meek Spencer, and the editor Pam Royds, I was discovered and reframed as a writer for children, and I’ve been doing this for 60 years!

    That sentence has an exclamation mark on it.

    And what a far cry this is from all that Pinteresque, Sartrean stuff. Or is it? Let me put it this way: if, as an adult, you imagine the world as a 10-year-old might see it, or the way that you saw it when you were 10, it may not be the most subversive thing in the known world, but it sure does bring you up against many of the strange power trips that we as adults go in for.

    Right up until this week, I am delighted and amazed to stand in front of 200, 500, on occasions 1500 children, relating stories that happened to me when I was a child in the 1950s in north London to school students and children living lives that are, in many ways, eons away from mine.

    I’m very lucky: right from 1974, when my first book came out, teachers, librarians and teacher trainers have asked me to read and perform my poems, even as I’m relating the grossly hyperbolic saga of the teacher who wouldn’t let us breathe in her lessons and who strung us up on the wall bars in the school prison for three weeks with the rats nibbling our toenails. You’ll note, here, that I always believe in telling children the truth.

    What’s the laughter doing when I perform this stuff? Is it what the great Russian critic, Mikhail Bakhtin called subversive laughter and the carnivalesque? Bakhtin answers my plea to Sartre – what about jokes? He asked, what happens when we writers turn the world upside down? That’s what my precursor Malorie Blackman did with her wonderful Noughts & Crosses series, inviting us to see the world we know through a new inverting prism, and so making us see the oppression in the known world.

    And that nonsense and word-play stuff? Well, remember what I said about the signifier, the words, the signs we make in order to express meaning? I say, to children, ‘I’ve got a new way to spell the word “everybody”: take one letter at a time off the front of the word, and say what you’ve got left. And you get: everybody, verybody, erybody, rybody, ybody, body, ody, dy, y.’

    Is this a disruption at the level of the signifier?

    By the way, one of the great mysteries about Lewis Carroll is that he created some of the most disruptive writing ever but was himself a desperately conformist person – not that we have to bother too much about that. I mean, apart from the fun of being nosy, don’t we say let the work stand for itself? Well, the fun of being nosy is such a lot of fun that not many of us stick to that principle. I remember the great subversive poet Adrian Mitchell ticking me off once because I said that I liked the Daniel Craig and Gwyneth Paltrow movie about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. ‘Leave them alone,’ he cried out to me on a night-time car journey. Well, in the nicest possible way, you haven’t left me alone. Thanks very much indeed.

    Finally, a brief word about Covid. Well, it’s needs and pressures again, isn’t it? You may have noticed that there is an inquiry going on. I don’t know how long it’ll take. I hope it will tell us that happened. I hope it’ll help us do things better next time. But I couldn’t wait. I did my own enquiry. Well, that’s partly (or perhaps mostly) what writing is. It enquires, investigates, interprets, unearths. It goes somewhere (inside our heads or outside) and reports back. When something is as immense and awful as the pandemic was, I want to be a witness. Because I couldn’t wait, I’ve been my own statutory enquiry.

    Before I go, I must thank some people who’ve nurtured and supported me: my parents and brother were (and, in my brother’s case, still is) among the greatest questioners, jokers, probers, wordsmiths I have ever known. My children have done their best to bring me up. They’ve found it to be quite a hard job. Emma took up the pieces of a fragmented person back in 2000 and has done the best she could with challenging material – me. Talking of challenging circumstances, it wasn’t my intention to lumber her and the family with 48 days in intensive care. Her solid stoicism, down to earth realism, is a wonder.

    And that reminds me of all those people in the NHS striving to mend and cure people in spite of what look like efforts to hinder them through cuts and privatisation.  The people who looked after me – men and women, many of them with origins from all over the world, working together for the good of humankind – offered a glimpse of something of how we could live if we had the resolve and solidarity to make it happen.

    Each year, the PEN Pinter Prize is shared with a Writer of Courage, who is chosen by the winner from a shortlist of PEN’s current cases of concern. This half of the prize is awarded to someone who has been persecuted for speaking out about their beliefs. 

    This year’s winner is an acclaimed academic, anthropologist, and a leading expert on Uyghur folklore and cultural traditions, recognised internationally for her unique contribution to the study and cataloguing of Uyghur cultural heritage. She disappeared in late 2017, shortly after making plans to travel to Beijing to participate in an academic conference. She never reached her destination, and it was widely believed that she had been disappeared by the Chinese authorities. Despite international condemnation of her disappearance and a campaign calling for her release, more than three years passed before reports confirmed that the Chinese authorities had sentenced and imprisoned her. Last month, it was widely reported that a sentence of life imprisonment on charges of endangering state security by promoting ‘splittism’, originally handed down in 2018, has now been upheld. Six years since she first disappeared, she continues to be held incommunicado, and her whereabouts remain unknown. 

    Standing here in the British library, I could not be more aware of the huge gulf between the kind of freedoms I have, or often take for granted, but are denied to many others in the world.  

    I have devoted many hours in my life to the enjoyment and study of folklore – story and song in particular – trying to understand the values, ideas and feelings that these express. I’ve learned a huge amount from this and applied it many times over in my life. My version of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt came out of this interest. 

    But my passion for what the American poet Carl Sandburg once called The People, Yes is pushed towards sorrow and anger on hearing that someone could be imprisoned for precisely the kind of interest that I have. This is why I have chosen Rahile Dawut to be this year’s Writer of Courage.  

    I should note here that I’ve sometimes moved in circles in my life where people have argued furiously over whether folk music was mired in nostalgia or it was the voice of the exploited, the oppressed and the suppressed. Here, with Rahile Dawut, we can see that the Chinese authorities have in effect decided that argument: simply to record, study and catalogue a people’s culture has been, and continues to be, an act of resistance.  

    I must wish her well, fervently hope that whatever we are doing here today helps her case. I want to express admiration for what she has done, and I wish her all the mental and physical strength she needs. Or, as my parents would say: ‘sh’koyech’ a Hebraic Yiddish saying meaning something like a mix of appreciation and wishing strength to someone.

    Michael Rosen is one of Britain’s best loved writers and performance poets for children and adults. His first degree in English Literature and Language was from Wadham College, Oxford and he went on to study for an MA at the University of Reading and a PhD at the former University of North London, now London Metropolitan. He is currently Professor of Children’s Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London where he teaches critical approaches to reading on an MA in Children’s Literature. He has taught on MA courses in universities since 1994. He was the Children’s Laureate from 2007–2009 and has published over 200 books for children and adults, including the recent bestseller Many Different Kinds of Love and On the Move: Poems about Migration.

    Photo credit: George Torode

  • For Malorie

    For Malorie

    Dapo Adeola on his illustration marking Malorie Blackman winning the 2022 PEN Pinter Prize

    I’m not going to lie, when I first received the email containing this commission, I was quite nervous. Malorie Blackman has been writing amazing stories that have impacted British culture for over three decades. Over the years, she’s written children’s books for kids of various ages, stage plays, and award-winning television scripts. How was I going to sum up the career of someone like that in one piece of art? Nervous as I was, there was no way I was going to pass on this.

    I decided to take a few well-known, key moments in Malorie’s career and pay tribute to them in a piece that captures her playful imagination. This is a breakdown of the key elements that make up the image. There’s a little something for every Malorie Blackman fan.

    Pig-heart boy

    Floating in a bubble in the top left is 13-year-old Cameron, the protagonist of one of Malorie’s best-known books: Pig-Heart Boy, published in 1999. Cameron has a serious heart condition and urgently needs a transplant. After being declined twice for an operation, he’s chosen for a revolutionary procedure that involves him receiving the heart of a pig. Things become strained when the nature of Cameron’s operation leaks to the media, and chaos ensues in his personal and family life. Pig-Heart Boy was adapted for television, winning several awards, including a BAFTA for Best Children’s Drama. Malorie’s writing turned out to be about two decades ahead of the science; January 2022 saw the first successful case of a human patient receiving a transplanted pig heart. I like to think this is a testament to the genius of Malorie’s imagination.

    Children’s laureate

    In the top right, framing the drawing of Callum and Sephy kissing, is Malorie’s laureate medal. In 2013, Malorie made history as the first Black Waterstones UK Children’s laureate. Despite this appointment coming with its share of racially motivated difficulties, she stepped up to her role with grace, knowledge and passion. Along with inspiring children around the country to enjoy reading and feel seen, she ran a nationwide creative writing competition called Project Remix, and helped set up the first Young Adult Literature Convention (YALC). She finished her term in 2015, leaving behind a legacy that helped pave the way for talents like myself to come into the industry years later.

    Noughts & crosses

    The Noughts & Crosses series is arguably Malorie’s most impactful body of work to date. It’s the story of Sephy and Callum, who live in a world where racial injustice is flipped on its head, with Black people as the dominant social power/class and White people as the oppressed. It’s a masterfully written story about forbidden love and racial issues. To represent this, I’ve drawn a picture of the couple locked in a kiss, and butterflies with a noughts-and-crosses pattern on their wings. 

    Dr Who

    In the far left of my piece is the most well-recognised phone box in history, the Tardis from Dr Who. I love that Malorie is a sci-fi fan. Back in October 2018, the Dr Who episode ‘Rosa’, which she co-wrote with screen writer Chris Chibnall, debuted on the BBC, with Malorie making history as the first non-white writer to contribute to a script for the show. The episode sees the Dr and her companions travel to 1955 Alabama, to stop a time-travelling criminal from preventing Rosa Parks influencing the American Civil rights movement during the Montgomery bus boycott.

    We’re going to find the monster

    Floating in bubbles just beneath our forbidden lovers are Charlie and Eddie, the protagonists of mine and Malorie’s picture book. There was no way I wasn’t going to include these two in this artwork. The story is a wonderful, imaginative retelling of Malorie’s 1999 book Marty Monster. Published in 2021, We’re Going to Find the Monster follows Charlie and Eddie journeying through magical lands, trying to find a monster before breakfast-time. Working on this book was a highlight of my young career; not only did I get to work with a living legend, I also got to bring to life this wonderful, witty story, which has had an impact on children across the country. Malorie gave me free rein to bring my imagination out to play in the telling of this story, and this led to a small bit of history being made: the first time a protagonist with vitiligo was seen front and centre on the cover of a commercially published children’s book – a book in which the story in no way centred on her skin condition, just her and her brother’s vibrant and wonderful imagination.

    Hacker

    Chilling out on her laptop in the bottom-right corner is Vicky, the protagonist of Malorie’s  1991 debut Hacker – the one that started it all. Vicky’s father gets arrested on suspicion of stealing from the bank he works for, and Vicky turns detective in an attempt to clear her dad’s name and find the real thief, before they find her.

    Ellie, as a cat

    In her cat form, sitting next to our talented hacker Vicky, is Ellie from Ellie and the Cat. Ellie is outwardly rude, angry and unkind, but her demeanour masks her isolation and sadness. Her grandma magically makes Ellie swap bodies with her cat, Jolly, and sets her the challenge of finding her missing wedding ring in 24 hours to break the spell. Ellie and the Cat is a brilliant example of what Malorie so often does with her stories: Black children get to have fantastically written adventures that don’t revolve around their race, or an experience of trauma; representation for Black kids, without that representation being the story.

    Dapo Adeola is an illustrator, author and character designer who was awarded Illustrator of the Year at The British Book Awards in 2022. Dapo rocketed into the picture book world with his greatly acclaimed illustrator debut, Look Up!, written by Nathan Bryon and published by Puffin in 2019, which won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize in 2020. Dapo illustrated My Dad is a Grizzly Bear and My Mum Is a Lioness written by award-winning author Swapna Haddow (both published by Macmillan Children’s Books), and collaborated with Malorie Blackman on their picture book We’re Going to Find the Monster!

    Dapo made his author debut in 2021 with the Puffin published picture book Hey You!: An Empowering Celebration of Growing Up Black, featuring 18 talented Black British illustrators, which also went on to win Illustrated book of the year at The British Book Awards in 2022.

    Illustration: (c) Dapo Adeola

    Photo credit: Tim Lane

  • Just Sayin’

    Just Sayin’

    Malorie Blackman’s PEN Pinter Prize 2022 speech

    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.

    This speech was delivered at the PEN Pinter Prize ceremony at the British Library on 10 October 2022.

    ~

    I am thrilled – and more than a little stunned – to be standing before you today, having been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2022. I am only too aware that I am slipping into some very large shoes indeed. The list of the past PEN Pinter Prize winners is a list of the notable and phenomenal – from the first winner Tony Harrison in 2009, to last year’s winner, Tsitsi Dangarembga.

    My sincere thanks to author and supporter of the prize, Lady Antonia Fraser; Daniel Gorman, Director of English PEN; the PEN Pinter Prize judges – Margaret Busby, Daniel Hahn and the Chair of English PEN, Ruth Borthwick; and all those at English PEN who are responsible for me standing here today.

    And I am very aware of the legacy left by Harold Pinter, who cared passionately about freedom of speech and human rights. That’s why I’m honoured to share this prize with this year’s International Writer of Courage.

    There are many fearless authors who write for young adults and children, tackling complex issues in an entertaining, informative, understandable, and unflinching way. That’s why I know that, although I may be the first author of children’s and YA books to receive this prestigious award, I certainly won’t be the last. I hope this speaks to a recognition of not just the ever-growing depth and breadth of stories available to all our children, but also the undeniable quality of the stories available.

    Now I must confess, I feel a bit of a fraud standing here. I feel you’re all expecting me to talk about how you square the circle of freedom of expression versus the freedom to say whatever you want, no matter how inflammatory, hateful or hurtful. I have yet to find a way to make those parallel lines meet. 

    I never set out to be a mouth almighty, either in my writing or when I speak. My heaven is to sit down at a computer and create stories. But no author writes in a vacuum. The real world impinges and impacts as it does, as it should, as it must. It would not be healthy for any writer to find themselves detached from the real world. I am a citizen of Britain, but I am also a citizen of this planet. What happens on the other side of the world has an impact on me and on us all. 

    Freedom of expression and freedom of speech are rights and privileges that must be fought for. But should we be free to say whatever we want? Is that what freedom of speech means? If you have a point of view and I disagree with it, then I should be perfectly at liberty to say so. I would argue that intent matters, and the context within which the intent sits matters, too.

    But freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences. If my speech is filled with hate, vitriol and bigoted invective, then shouldn’t I be held accountable for it? If my speech is designed to marginalise or divide or incite hatred to the extent that others are harmed, shouldn’t I be held responsible for my words? 

    But here’s the crucial thing, we authors will frequently – if not always – create characters who espouse views or who do things that readers don’t like or agree with. That’s a facet of our job – but it doesn’t give anyone, anywhere, the right to threaten us because one or more of our characters speak, or live, or love in a way that meets with disapproval. Quite simply, if you don’t like the idea of one of my books, other books I’ve written are available. Other books from other authors are available. Move on.

    All I’ve ever sought to do with my stories is tell the truth – the truth behind being marginalised or misunderstood, being a sinner or being sinned against.         

    Not all my books are about overtly political issues, but I feel that it’s incredibly important to be honest in the ones that do tackle such topics. Honesty means presenting characters with their complex thoughts, feelings and emotions truthfully, and situations and societies in believable, relatable and accessible ways. When I present societies or situations that are uncomfortable or unsettling, it is so that they may be better understood – yes, by my readers, but sometimes particularly by me. 

    I entitled this talk ‘Just Sayin’’, which is also the title of my autobiography that’s published next week – and yes, that was a shameless plug – because for far too many of us, finding our voice and speaking our truth has not always been encouraged. Indeed, far too often our voices are actively suppressed. 

    A love of reading made me want to create my own stories in the first place. As a child and a teenager, I must’ve read thousands of books, but I never read a single book that featured a black child like me. Not one. Reading was my lifeline, my escape route, my greatest pleasure. And ironically, being invisible in the world of literature made me fight even harder to have my own voice within it.

    The late and very great Toni Morrison wrote: ‘If there’s a story you want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.’ That was the major reason I became an author in the first place. Toni Morrison’s mantra and the feedback I get from children and young adults have kept me writing for over three decades.

    Now there’s no two ways about it: we are living in a time marked by impatience, suspicion, anger and fear, when some people unfortunately feel that the written or spoken word should not be used to express views different to their own, and in which, if such words are used, they are then met with intimidation, threats, and sometimes even violence.

    Sadly, these are not the days of nuance.

    I know we were all shocked to hear what happened to Salman Rushdie on 12 August this year. The man who allegedly stabbed him is reported to have read two pages of The Satanic Verses. Two pages. If that is true, it sadly speaks to the times in which we currently find ourselves. An excerpt, a tweet, an opinion, a headline – they are all that are required by some in the rush to judgment. What happened to Salman Rushdie earlier this year is a reminder of the risks faced by authors with a commitment to free speech.

    In August 2014, when I was UK Children’s Laureate, I was interviewed by Sky News and asked about diversity in children’s publishing. No surprise there – I’m always asked about diversity in children’s publishing. My comments were along the lines of: progress has been made, but there is more to do. We need to have more stories written by authors from LGBTQ+ communities, by authors of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller heritage, more authors of colour, more ill and disabled writers and more writers from working class backgrounds. And the stories these authors produce don’t necessarily have to have, as their sole focus, what it’s like to be a minority in society. That would be so limiting.

    I said something like: ‘I think what we need, especially in publishing, are more commissioning editors who are people of colour. Readers also want to escape into fiction beyond themselves. But I think there is a very significant message that goes out when you cannot see yourself at all in the books you are reading.’

    This was reported with the headline: children’s books ‘have too many white faces’. For the next several weeks I had to contend with some of the worst and scariest racist abuse I’d ever received, threats of rape and harm against me and my family, and death threats. All of which happened in this country. Now I never said the statement reported in the Sky headline. Sky admitted as much, apologised and changed it. But to the haters, it didn’t matter. The abuse continued. The threats continued. 

    Do stories unite us? Maybe. Maybe not. But they do connect us. A character I create may express an idea with which you fundamentally disagree. Hell, a character I create may and frequently does express an idea with which I fundamentally disagree. And isn’t that wonderful? As a reader I love that alternative or even opposite views to my own, as expressed by the characters in the books I read, allow me to analyse other points of view, to consider and maybe even embrace new ideas and concepts, new ways of thinking.  

    That’s part of the beauty of stories, in all their forms. How mean and narrow life would be if all the arts did was reflect our own life, views and fixed ideas back at us. How narrow. How shallow. How sad.

    It can be a tremendous act of courage to tell the truth through art, and every creative person who does so is doing humanity an unparalleled service. But we live in times where there are those who wish to deny certain sections of society their voice. School boards across American are trying to have books written predominantly by LGBTQ+ authors and authors of colour withdrawn or banned. 

    John Green – author of The Fault in Our Stars, and other insightful, wonderful YA books – tweeted in September 2022: ‘Looking for Alaska has been in print for 17 years, and it has been challenged countless times, but I’ve never seen anything like the concerted effort in 2022 to remove it and so many other books from libraries and schools around the country.’

    Closer to home, Robin Stevens, author of the excellent ‘Detective Society’ series, spoke of her book Death in the Spotlight being banned by a school after a teacher discovered Robin had retweeted posts from Mermaids, an organisation supporting gender diverse and transgender young people. The author stated, ‘The thing that I found upsetting was not that they disagreed with me, but that they were using the disagreement to ban my books at their school.  Seeing a queer character children can relate to in a popular children’s book series has given them a lot of joy and confidence, and it’s deeply saddening that both straight and queer kids at this teacher’s school won’t have the chance to read the book.’

    In my own case, a few years ago, a school librarian told me with pleasure and a great deal of pride that she didn’t keep my book Boys Don’t Cry – the story of two brothers, one of whom is gay – on the school library shelves. It had to be asked for specifically. When I asked why, I was told it was so that the school librarian could assess whether or not the requester should get the book. Now I have a great deal of respect for public and school librarians, but this is not right. She didn’t hide my book away so that she could ensure it was age appropriate for the potential reader. No, she took delight in telling me that it was the subject matter that she deemed troublesome, and she had made it her business to assess who should and should not have access to that subject matter. I told her it was a pity she was policing the book in that way as the mere fact that the book had to be asked for might put some readers off. My concerns were dismissed.

    I once had a white teenage girl in a signing queue tell me how much she loved my books. She confessed that she bought my books whenever she could afford them but then had to hide them from her mum. When I asked why, she admitted that her mum didn’t want her reading ‘race books’. I said, ‘What does your mum mean by “a race book”?’, to which the girl replied, ‘Books with black people in them. She thinks they’re all anti-white’.  I asked, ‘Has she actually read any of my books?’ The girl shook her head. Enough said. But I’m grateful that my books had given that girl enough ammunition to think for herself and not just take on the views of her mother.

    Here we are in the twenty-first century and there are those who try to tell children, teens and young adults of colour, children and young adults who may be neurodivergent, disabled, or part of the LGBTQ+ community, that they don’t have a right to exist in public if it makes certain grown-ups uncomfortable. All of our children have a right to see themselves and their lives reflected in literature, and to be the creators of stories themselves. All of them.

    Freedom of speech, of expression, is one of the basic tenets on which any true democracy stands or falls. I was born in Britain. It’s my home and I love it. That’s why I feel able to criticise it and call out certain political behaviours, with a view to making it better. That’s why we vote, why we protest, march and demonstrate – to make our voices heard. That’s why I speak out regarding the need to feed all children who need it during the summer holidays, when most of those in government initially voted against such action. But when I express such an opinion on social media, I get told that this not my country and if I don’t like it I should go back to where I came from.

    I’ve been called a race-baiter and a racist basher for using my voice. Racist basher! I ask you! Racist bashing is a negative thing now? I hope I am a racist basher. Every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Me and my voice aren’t going away.

    Citizenship should not end at land boundaries. We are all citizens of the same planet. Didn’t Covid teach us that what starts on the other side of the world may affect us sooner or later? If some are not free can any of us say we truly are? And what do I mean by free? I mean having the chance to fulfil one’s own potential.

    I’ve been accused of being ‘woke’. Well, God I hope so. How extraordinary that a positive word used by the African American community since the 1940s to mean ‘alert to social injustice’ should have been so co-opted by the white right-wing and have its meaning changed to something pejorative. The opposite of woke is asleep. I hope I’m not asleep to injustice, bigotry and unkindness. I hope I never will be.

    In tribute, I would like to give the last word before announcing the International Writer of Courage to last year’s PEN Pinter Prize winner, Tsitsi Dangarembga, who was recently given a suspended sentence in Zimbabwe after being found guilty of inciting violence by staging a peaceful protest calling for political reform. She was holding a placard that said ‘We want better. Reform our institutions’. She wrote: ‘Every moment is a moment for potential resolution. It just needs somebody to say, in that moment, “OK, we’re going to do things differently – and mean it”.

    The PEN Pinter Prize is shared with an International Writer of Courage, someone who has been persecuted for speaking out about their beliefs and denied the basic rights I have just described.

    I am grateful that I have been given the opportunity to highlight the life and work of a writer who has had to face harassment, torture and incarceration. When I first heard of the plight endured by this individual – an engineer, blogger and activist – I was immediately struck by his commitment regarding effecting change in his homeland of Bahrain, including by highlighting the methods used to supress freedom of expression. He has been incarcerated for over a decade and has been on hunger strike and without solid food for over 400 days, which shines a spotlight on an immensely brave man who defines the word courage.

    I hope that this award raises awareness of his persecution around the world and affirms to him that he has not been forgotten, his voice has not been silenced. It is my honour to announce that the PEN Pinter Prize International Writer of Courage 2022 is, Dr Abduljalil Al-Singace.

    Malorie Blackman has written over 70 books for children and young adults, including the Noughts and Crosses series of novels (Noughts and Crosses won the Red House FCBG Children’s Book Award as well as being included in the top 100 of the BBC Big Read), Cloud Busting (winner of the Smarties Silver Award), Thief (winner of the Young Telegraph/Fully Booked Award) and Hacker (winner of the WH Smiths Children’s Book Award and the Young Telegraph/Gimme 5 Award for best children’s book of the year).  Her latest book is Endgame, the final novel of the Noughts and Crosses series.

    Malorie is a scriptwriting graduate of the National Film and Television School. Her work has appeared on TV, with Pig-Heart Boy, which was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, being adapted into a BAFTA winning 6-part TV serial.  As well as writing original and adapted drama scripts for TV, Malorie also regularly wrote for CBBC’s Byker Grove.  She also co-wrote the Doctor Who episode – Rosa.

    In 2005, Malorie was honoured with the Eleanor Farjeon Award in recognition of her distinguished contribution to the world of children’s books. In 2008, she was then honoured with an OBE for her services to Children’s Literature. Malorie was appointed Children’s Laureate 2013–2015.

    Photo credit: George Torode