Deweaponise Your Thoughts

Last month, in danger of lapsing once again into the comforting embrace of Mother Inertia, I did myself a favor and attended some of the lectures and panel discussions at the third PEN World Voices festival of International Literature. Among the writers reading/performing/discussing their work and our collective reality were ‘gorilla of the imagination’ Nadine Gordimer, New York cultural icons Patti Smith, Saul Williams and Paul Auster, Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai, filmmaker Steve Martin, screenwriter Guillermo Arriega, the ‘Muslim worlds’ erstwhile literary dartboard Salman Rushdie, and many others.

But while I was awed/inspired/amused by Gordimer’s incisive intellect, Rushdie’s effortlessly muscular imagery, Patti Smith’s sublime control of the space she inhabited, and Guillermo Arriega’s real-time dialogue writing (“Pain is inevitable but suffering is a choice”, “I’m in touch with my feminine side and she’s a lesbian”), it was the words of David Grossman, author of many novels and essays- none of which I’ve ever read or heard of- that I have been haunted by since, even before the events of May 12th confirmed the universality of the truths he offered. I have reproduced substantial extracts from the Arthur Miller Freedom To Write lecture which he delivered on the 27th of April below, the wrath of the gods of copyright notwithstanding, I do not think Mr. Grossman would mind.

Ponder for a minute, before you begin to read his words, the situation in our own country. There is no outright war raging within our borders, no easily identifiable other with whom we do ceaseless, bloody battle, no democratically mandated ‘enemy’. But to deny that we have lived with and continue to live with conflicts that have shaped, warped and culled several generations would be far greater disrespect to the memory of those who died of unnatural causes on 26th August 2006, 20th Feb 2007, 4th April 1979, and other innumerable, irreversible days than the drums that beat on the evening of May 12th, our latest ‘black Saturday’.

Before discussing his own writing, Grossman said “I wish to make a few observations about the impact that () a traumatic situation, has on an entire society, an entire people. I immediately recall the words of the mouse in Kafka’s short story “A Little Fable.” The mouse who, as the trap closes on him, and the cat looms behind, says, “Alas . . . the world is growing narrower every day.”

Indeed, after many years of living in the extreme and violent reality of a political, military and religious conflict, I can report, sadly, that Kafka’s mouse was right: the world is, indeed, growing increasingly narrow, increasingly diminished, with every day that goes by. And I can also tell you about the void that is growing ever so slowly between the individual human being and the external, violent and chaotic situation within which he lives…this void never remains empty. It is filled rapidly — with apathy, with cynicism and, more than anything else, with despair: the despair that fuels distorted situations, allowing them to persist on and on, in some cases even for generations. Despair of the possibility of ever changing the prevailing state of affairs, of ever being redeemed from it. And the despair that is deeper still — despair of what this distorted situation exposes, finally, in each and every one of us.

And I feel the heavy toll that I, and the people I know and see around me, pay for this ongoing state…The shrinking of the “surface area” of the soul that comes in contact with the bloody and menacing world out there. The limiting of one’s ability and willingness to identify, even a little, with the pain of others; the suspension of moral judgment. The despair most of us experience of possibly understanding our own true thoughts in a state of affairs that is so terrifying and deceptive and complex, both morally and practically. Hence, you become convinced I might be better off not thinking and opt not to know. Perhaps I’m better off leaving the task of thinking and doing and establishing moral norms in the hands of those who might “know better.”

Most of all, I’m better off not feeling too much — at least until this shall pass. And if it doesn’t, at least I relieved my suffering somewhat, I developed a useful numbness, I protected myself as best I could with the help of a bit of indifference, a bit of sublimation, a bit of intended blindness and large doses of self-anesthetization.

In other words: Because of the perpetual — and all-too-real — fear of being hurt, or of death, or of unbearable loss, or even of “mere” humiliation, each and every one of us, the conflict’s citizens, its prisoners, trim down our own vivacity, our internal mental and cognitive diapason, ever enveloping ourselves with protective layers, which end up suffocating us.

Kafka’s mouse is right: when the predator is closing in on you, the world does indeed become increasingly narrow. So does the language that describes it.”


Consider, before you continue, the words we in Pakistan fire at each other even when guns are silent. ‘Fascist thugs’. ‘Ignorant tribals’. ‘The fundamentalist threat’. ‘The westernized elite’. ‘Backward areas’. ‘Enemies of progress’. ‘Terrorist’. ‘Extortionist’. ‘Chauvinist’. ‘West sponsored obscenity.’ ‘Imperialist lapdogs.’ ‘Obscurantists’. ‘Irresponsible media’. ‘Rampant lawlessness’. ‘Vested interests’.

Grossman continued, “..the language with which the citizens of a sustained conflict describe their predicament becomes progressively shallower the longer the conflict endures. Language gradually becomes a sequence of clichés and slogans. This begins with the language created by the institutions that manage the conflict directly — the army, the police, the different government ministries; it quickly filters down to the mass media that are reporting about the conflict, germinating an even more cunning language that aims to tell its target audience the story easiest for digestion; and this process ultimately seeps into the private, intimate language of the conflict’s citizens, even if they deny it.”


Consider, before you continue, the poverty of most of our personal relationships, the intolerant rigidity of the average Pakistani world view, the defensiveness of our physical and intellectual postures, the shallowness of our contemporary love songs.


“Actually, this process is all too understandable: after all, the natural riches of human language, and their ability to touch on the finest and most delicate nuances and strings of existence, can hurt deeply in such circumstances, because they remind us of the bountiful reality of which we are being robbed, of its true complexity, of its subtleties. And the more this state of affairs goes on, and as the language used to describe this state of affairs grows shallower, public discourse dwindles further. What remain are the fixed and banal mutual accusations…What remain are the clichés…the clichés that are, ultimately, a collection of superstitions and crude generalizations, in which we capture ourselves and entrap our enemies. The world is, indeed, growing increasingly narrow.”


Grossman, an Israeli peace activist, talked about how he wrote for countless newspapers and magazines about the “immediate fiery reality of my country, the reality of the latest news bulletin”, but kept it out of his literature, preferring stories about homeless children, biblical heroes, love, and jealously to musings on the ‘disaster zone.’ But that changed four years ago when his second eldest son Uri joined the army.


“I could no longer follow my recent ways. A sense of urgency and alarm washed over me, leaving me restless. I then began writing a novel that treats directly the bleak reality in which I live. A novel that depicts how external violence and the cruelty of the general political and military reality penetrate the tender and vulnerable tissue of a single family, ultimately tearing it asunder. “

Uri was killed in the ‘war between Israel and Lebanon’ last summer, even as his father and other Israeli peace activists were pressurizing their government to cease fire. Grossman articulated with heart stopping eloquence the cathartic qualities of the ‘peculiar Don-Quixote-like craft of creation’ he practices.

“I write. In the wake of the death of my son…the awareness of what happened has sunk into every cell of mine. The power of memory is indeed enormous and heavy, and at times has a paralyzing quality to it.

Nevertheless, the act of writing itself at this time creates for me a type of “space,” a mental territory that I’ve never experienced before, where death is not only the absolute and one-dimensional negation of life.

I write. I feel the wealth of possibilities inherent in any human situation. I sense my ability to choose between them. The sweetness of liberty, which I believed that I had already lost. I indulge in the richness of true, personal, intimate language. I recall the delight of natural, full breathing when I manage to escape the claustrophobia of slogan and cliché. Suddenly I begin to breathe with both lungs.

I write, and I feel how the correct and precise use of words is sometimes like a remedy to an illness. ..I write and I feel how the tenderness and intimacy I maintain with language, with its different layers, its eroticism and humor and soul, give me back the person I used to be, me, before my self became nationalized and confiscated by the conflict, by governments and armies, by despair and tragedy.

I write...All of a sudden I am not condemned to this absolute, fallacious and suffocating dichotomy — this inhumane choice to “be victim or aggressor,” without having any third, more humane alternative.

And I write also about that which cannot be brought back. And about that which is inconsolable. Then, too, in a manner I still find inexplicable, the circumstances of my life do not close in on me in a way that would leave me paralyzed. Many times every day, as I sit at my desk, I touch on grief and loss like one touching electricity with his bare hands, and yet I do not die.”


Grossman ended his exploration of the nexus between the personal and the political with words that provide solace and inspiration to the walking wounded among us. Words that stilled the rage that rose in me after May 12th, and made me glad I had not, as intended, filed a column two weeks ago loaded with emotional knee jerk reaction and slogan ridden invective against ‘megalomaniac monarchs’, fascist thugs’, ‘strategic stupidities’ and ‘cultural chasms’. Addressed though it was to ‘writers’, his summation of the need for a life of the mind and an environment that nurtures rather than batters the spirit applies to all artists.


“We writers go through times of despair and times of self-devaluation. Our work is in essence the work of deconstructing personality, of doing away with some of the most effective human-defense mechanisms. We treat, voluntarily, the harshest, ugliest and also rawest materials of the soul. Our work leads us time and again to acknowledge our shortcomings, as both humans and artists.

And yet, and this is the great mystery and the alchemy of our actions: In a sense, as soon as we lay our hand on the pen, or the computer keyboard, we already cease to be the helpless victims of whatever it was that enslaved and diminished us before we began to write. Not the slaves of our predicament nor of our private anxieties; not of the “official narrative” of our country, nor of fate itself.

We write. The world is not closing in on us. How fortunate we are. The world is not growing increasingly narrow.”


How fortunate I was the Sunday after to be lost in the benevolent cadence of these words, to be reminded of the need to look beyond the immediate and take a collective axe to the roots of the poison tree rather than simply pelting each other with the rotten fruits it ceaselessly bears us.