Liberty's Language
In dark times like these, writers must light a beacon. Recently,
some sought the right words.
By Ariel Dorfman, Ariel Dorfman's latest book is "Other Septembers,
Many Americas: Selected Provocations, 1980-2004." His website is
www.adorfman.duke.edu.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-
dorfman29aug29,1,4969598.story


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Lincoln, the most eloquent of American presidents, trusted
meticulous and lyrical language as an instrument of gentle
persuasion, and he accepted contradiction as a necessary condition
for truth. He proclaimed his conviction that it was not might that
makes right but, rather, it is striving to be right that makes one
mighty. "Let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand
it," Lincoln said. The writers that evening joined his unquiet ghost
in hoping that words still have the power to change the world.

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NEW YORK — As the ultimate guardians of language and its complexity,
writers have always felt the need to deal with the great crises of
their time. In those troubled moments in history when the old ways
are dying and the new words with which men and women try to make
sense of the world have not yet been born, literature can be a
beacon.

Imagine the dark days of fascism in Europe without Brecht, Eluard
and Auden. Or the long nights of resistance to dictatorship in my
own Chile without the radiant poems smuggled out of our
concentration camps. How would we remember the Depression if not for
Steinbeck and his chronicles of destitution and hope, or the 1960s
without James Baldwin?

In the aftermath of the criminal attacks of Sept. 11, writers have
again been rising to the occasion as writers do: insolently,
vehemently, lucidly, defiantly. Susan Sontag and Joan Didion come to
mind, demanding that their nation look critically at itself in order
to emerge from the waters of the present catastrophe.

Early this month, some of the nation's leading literary figures met
in New York City to add their voices to this quest for
understanding. At an event organized by the PEN American Center, 15
writers brandished the brave words of today and yesterday in defense
of the core freedoms that have defined this nation and are
threatened by the current administration's attempt to curtail
liberties in the name of security and the fight against terrorism.

These weren't their own words: The coordinators of the well-attended
event — thousands of spectators lined up for hours to enter Cooper
Union's Great Hall were turned away for lack of space — had asked
the writers to choose others' passages to suit the precarious
moment. Except for one writer, who flung President Bush's words back
at him, these writers chose untainted sources, texts from which to
gather strength in a time when words are increasingly under siege
and being stripped of their deeper meanings.

The enthusiastic audience might have been witnessing a night in a
Latin American city, where writers are habitually incendiary and
committed. But the evening was most definitely American, an X-ray of
the hidden apprehensions and hopes of the United States today.

Many of the authors dug deep into their country's past for the
profound roots of today's struggle for liberty. Paul Auster read
from Thoreau's 1854 retort to the Fugitive Slave Act, which ordered
that slaves who had escaped north from the plantations be sent back
to their masters in the South. Thoreau's words were an excoriation
of the government and above all of the subservient American press.
Russell Banks used Mark Twain to oppose American imperial expansion —
yesterday in the Philippines, today in Iraq — pointing out the
madness and death that are perpetrated in the name of what passes
for civilization. Margo Jefferson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning
commentator for the New York Times, echoed the voices of suppressed
African American writers.

The talented Edward Jones chilled the audience with the words of
Dalton Trumbo's amputated protagonist in "Johnny Got His Gun," and
Laurie Anderson quoted from Dave Hickey's "Air Guitar." A.M. Homes
channeled Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and her fellow novelist Barbara
Goldsmith recalled the 1873 trial of Susan B. Anthony for flouting
the law that prohibited women from voting. Voices plucked from the
past, all with the same message: Do not be intimidated by power, do
not be afraid.

Liberty is not, of course, a purely American struggle. If some
writers found comfort in their countrymen and women, others claimed
the writers of other lands and languages, perhaps as a way of
answering Bush's arrogant unilateralism. Eve Ensler, known for
her "Vagina Monologues," read from Nawal El Saadawi's notes from an
Egyptian prison, and both Don DeLillo and Francine Prose summoned
the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. The two writers at the event who
were U.S. residents but not citizens, Salman Rushdie and me, did
something similar. Rushdie, who knows something about persecution,
spoke of a great test of civilization: how to fight the terrorists
without becoming their mirror image. He quoted from John Locke, the
Englishman who had, more than two centuries before, inspired the
founders of the United States to revolt against their colonial
masters and build a nation where the pursuit of happiness was the
primary goal of existence.

I reached out to "Don Quixote," the book that has always given me
consolation and joy in my most dismal times. And I read both in
English and in Spanish to emphasize that there are many in today's
United States who are suspect merely because they speak a foreign
language, Arabic or Persian or even French, and to recognize that of
the wonders of this country, what has always attracted people like
me and Rushdie to its shores is its capacity to welcome what seems
alien and celebrate its strangeness.

And yet, this evening of defiance ended on a somber note. Rushdie
read a concluding communication from Norman Mailer, who offered up a
mere seven words from John Dos Passos: "All right, then, we are two
nations." That 1936 denouncement of the split between the very rich
and the very poor resonated ominously, almost sorrowfully, on the
eve of the most fateful election in the history of the nation. And
it recalled Abraham Lincoln's 1860 speech against slavery in this
same place, words that were soon to propel him to the presidency of
the United States. It was from the very podium from which we were
speaking that Lincoln had set out to save the Union, preparing
himself for a civil war that would sunder the republic a bit over a
year later.

Lincoln, the most eloquent of American presidents, trusted
meticulous and lyrical language as an instrument of gentle
persuasion, and he accepted contradiction as a necessary condition
for truth. He proclaimed his conviction that it was not might that
makes right but, rather, it is striving to be right that makes one
mighty. "Let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand
it," Lincoln said. The writers that evening joined his unquiet ghost
in hoping that words still have the power to change the world.

And is this not, like then, an occasion for alarm and articulation,
a time for writers in this imperiled land of Lincoln and Whitman, of
Faulkner and Alan Ginsberg and Harriet Beecher Stowe, to plunge into
the abyss of the human heart and bring courage to a country divided
by terror and deceit and perhaps, who knows, also bring light to a
planet torn by war and grief?