The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering—rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer’s words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.

What revolted the mature Goethe in the young Kleist, who submitted his work to the elder statesman of German letters “on the knees of his heart”—the morbid, the hysterical, the sense of the unhealthy, the enormous indulgence in suffering out of which Kleist’s plays and tales were mined—is just what we value today. Today Kleist gives pleasure, Goethe is to some a duty. In the same way, such writers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Genet—and Simone Weil—have their authority with us because of their air of unhealthiness. Their unhealthiness is their soundness, and is what carries conviction.

Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination. I, for one, do not doubt that the sane view of the world is the true one. But is that what is always wanted, truth? The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit, which vary. The truth is balance, but the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Thus I do not mean to decry a fashion, but to underscore the motive behind the contemporary taste for the extreme in art and thought. All that is necessary is that we not be hypocritical, that we recognize why we read and admire writers like Simone Weil. I cannot believe that more than a handful of the tens of thousands of readers she has won since the posthumous publication of her books and essays really share her ideas. Nor is it necessary—necessary to share Simone Weil’s anguished and unconsummated love affair with the Catholic Church, or accept her gnostic theology of divine absence, or espouse her ideals of body denial, or concur in her violently unfair hatred of Roman civilization and the Jews. Similarly, with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; most of their modern admirers could not, and do not embrace their ideas. We read writers of such scathing originality for their personal authority, for the example of their seriousness, for their manifest willingness to sacrifice themselves for their truths, and—only piecemeal—for their “views.” As the corrupt Alcibiades followed Socrates, unable and unwilling to change his own life, but moved, enriched, and full of love; so the sensitive modern reader pays his respect to a level of spiritual reality which is not, could not, be his own.

Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence. It is, roughly, the difference between the hero and the saint (if one may use the latter term in an aesthetic, rather than a religious sense). Such a life, absurd in its exaggerations and degree of self-mutilation—like Kleist’s, like Kierkegaard’s—was Simone Weil’s. I am thinking of the fanatical asceticism of Simone Weil’s life, her contempt for pleasure and for happiness, her noble and ridiculous political gestures, her elaborate self-denials, her tireless courting of affliction; and I do not exclude her homeliness, her physical clumsiness, her migraines, her tuberculosis. No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it. In the respect we pay to such lives, we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world—and mystery is just what the secure possession of the truth, an objective truth, denies. In this sense, all truth is superficial; and some (but not all) distortions of the truth, some (but not all) insanity, some (but not all) unhealthiness, some (but not all) denials of life are truth-giving, sanity-producing, health-creating, and life-enhancing.

This new volume of translations from Simone Weil’s work, Selected Essays 1934–43, displays her somewhat marginally. It contains one great essay, the opening essay here titled “Human Personality” which was written in 1943, the year of her death in England at the age of thirty-four. The longest argument of the book, spanning several essays, develops the parallel between Rome (and the ancient Hebrew theocracy!) and Nazi Germany. According to Simone Weil, who displays an unpleasant silence on the Nazi persecution of the Jews, Hitler is no worse than Napoleon, than Richelieu, than Caesar. Hitler’s racialism, she says, is nothing more than “a rather more romantic name for nationalism.” Her fascination with the psychological effects of wielding power and submitting to coercion, combined with her strict denial of any idea of historical progress, led her to equate all forms of state authority as manifestations of what she calls “the great beast.”

I cannot accept Simone Weil’s gnostic reading of Christianity as historically sound (its religious truth is another matter); nor can I fail to be offended by the vindictive parallels she draws between Nazism, Rome, and Israel. Impartiality, no more than a sense of humor, is not the virtue of a writer like Simone Weil. Like Gibbon (whose view of the Roman Empire she absolutely contradicts), Simone Weil as a historical writer is tendentious, exhaustive, and infuriatingly certain. As a historian she is simply not at her best; no one who disbelieves so fundamentally in the phenomena of historical change and innovation can be wholly satisfying as a historian. This is not to deny that there are subtle historical insights in these essays: as for example, when she points out that Hitlerism consists in the application by Germany to the European continent, and the white race generally, of colonial methods of conquest and domination. (Immediately after, of course, she says that these—both Hitler’s methods and the “normal colonial ones”—are derived from the Roman model.)

The principal value of the collection is simply that anything from Simone Weil’s pen is worth reading. It is perhaps not the book to start one’s acquaintance with this writer—Waiting for God, I think, is the best for that. The originality of her psychological insight, the passion and subtlety of her theological imagination, the fecundity of her exegetical talents are unevenly displayed here. Yet the person of Simone Weil is here as surely as in any of her other books—the person who is excruciatingly identical with her ideas, the person who is rightly regarded as one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit.

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In his review of Leonid Tsypkin’s novel Summer in Baden-Baden [“In Search of Dostoevsky,” NYR, May 23], the ever admirable Joseph Frank mentions that in my introduction I have conflated the two books by Dostoevsky’s widow, Anna Dostoevsky, both of which appeared after she died in 1918. One is her Diary, first published in 1923. The other is her Reminiscences, edited by Leonid Grossman and published in 1925. The error was corrected in the introduction as it appeared in The New Yorker last October, before Summer in Baden-Baden, with my introduction, was published by New Directions. Alas, it was too late to fix the mistake in the book itself, which, though not yet in the bookstores, had already gone to press. It will be corrected in the next edition.

Susan Sontag

New York City

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It is the job of the writer to depict the realities, the foul realities, the realities of rapture. It is the essence of the wisdom furnished by literature (the plurality of literary achievement) to help us to understand that, whatever is happening, something else is always going on. I am haunted by that “something else.”

I am haunted by the conflict of rights and of values I cherish. For instance that—sometimes—telling the truth does not further justice. That—sometimes—the furthering of justice may entail suppressing a good part of the truth.

Many of the twentieth century’s most notable writers, in their activity as public voices, were accomplices in the suppression of truth to further what they understood to be (what were, in many cases) just causes.

My own view is, if I have to choose between truth and justice—of course, I don’t want to choose—I choose truth.

Of course, I believe in righteous action. But is it the writer who is performing it? These are three different things: speaking, which I am doing now; writing, which gives me whatever claim I have to this incomparable prize; and being, being a person who believes in righteous action, and solidarity with others. As Roland Barthes once observed: “Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.”

And of course I have opinions, political opinions, some of them formed from reading and discussing and reflecting, but not from firsthand experience. Let me share with you two opinions of mine—quite predictable opinions, in the light of public positions I’ve taken on matters about which I have some direct knowledge.

I believe that the doctrine of collective responsibility, as a rationale for collective punishment, is never justified, militarily or ethically. I mean the use of disproportionate firepower against civilians, the demolition of their homes and destruction of their orchards and groves, the deprivation of their livelihood and their access to employment, schooling, medical services, free access to neighboring towns and communities…all as a punishment for hostile military activity which may or may not even be in the vicinity of these civilians.

I also believe that there can be no peace here until the planting of Israeli communities in the Territories is halted, followed by the eventual dismantling of these settlements.

I wager that these two opinions of mine are shared by many people here in this hall. I suspect that, to use an old American expression, I’m preaching to the choir.

But do I hold these predictable opinions as a writer? Or do I not hold them as a person of conscience and then use my position as a writer to add my voice to others saying the same thing? The influence a writer can exert is purely adventitious. It is, now, an aspect of the culture of celebrity.

There is something vulgar about public dissemination of opinions on matters about which one does not have extensive firsthand knowledge. If I speak of what I do not know, or know hastily, this is mere opinion-mongering.

I say this as a matter of honor. The honor of literature. The project of having an individual voice. Serious writers, creators of literature, shouldn’t just express themselves differently from the way the mass media does. They should be in opposition to the communal drone of the newscast and the talk show.

If literature itself, the great enterprise that has been conducted (within our purview) for some two and a half millennia—if literature itself as such embodies a wisdom, and I think it does, and is indeed the root of the importance we give to literature—it is by demonstrating the multiplicity and contradictions of our private and communal destinies. It will remind us that there can be contradictions, sometimes irreducible conflicts, among the values we most cherish. (This is what is meant by “tragedy.”) Literature will remind us of the “also” and “the something else.”

The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. “Nothing is my last word about anything,” said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions—whenever asked—cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to perceive complexity.

Let the others, the celebrities and the politicians, talk down to us; lie. If being both a writer and a public voice could stand for anything better, it would be that writers would consider the formulation of opinions and judgments to be a grave responsibility.

Another problem with opinions. They are agencies of self-immobilization. What writers do should free us up, shake us up. Open avenues of compassion and new interests. Remind us that we might, just might, aspire to become different, and better, than we are. Remind us that we can change.

As Cardinal Newman said, “In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”

I am grateful to have been awarded the Jerusalem Prize. I accept it as an honor to all those committed to the enterprise of literature. I accept it in homage to all the writers and readers in Israel and in Palestine struggling to create literature made of singular voices and the multiplicity of truths. I accept the prize in the name of peace and the reconciliation of injured and fearful communities. Necessary peace. Necessary concessions and new arrangements. Necessary abatement of stereotypes. Necessary persistence of dialogue. I accept the prize—this international prize, sponsored by an international book fair—as an event that honors, above all, the international republic of letters.

The post In Jerusalem appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Your Excellency,

It has been widely reported, as in The New York Times for Sunday, August 26, 1996 (“Palestine Security Agents Ban Books by Critic of Arafat”), that security services responsible to you have seized books written by Edward W. Said and carried them off from all bookstores in the Palestinian Autonomous Zones in Gaza and the West Bank. Furthermore, that the sale of his books has been forbidden in these same areas and in Palestinian bookstores in East Jerusalem.

This news is especially alarming at a time when those around the world who support the aspirations of the Palestinian people are looking to your Administration for evidence that any emerging Palestinian entity will try to found itself on basic democratic principles and most specifically on the principle of freedom of expression and dissent. This freedom necessarily includes Edward Said’s expressions of difference with some of your current policies.

Edward Said is one of the most prominent, influential, and admired of cultural critics. In particular, his writings about the Palestinian experience have been an essential instrument in shaping opinions in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and the Middle East that are favorably informed about the Palestinian cause. We therefore urge you in your own interests as well as in the interests of people everywhere to reaffirm his right to be heard in the areas where an effort has been made to silence him.

Ronald Harwood
President of International PEN
Anne Hollander
President of PEN American Center
Karen Kennerly
Executive Director of PEN American Center
Adonis
K. Anthony Appiah
Paul Auster
Niels Barfoed
Mahmoud Darwish
Jacques Derrida
Allen Ginsberg
Gamal al-Ghitani
Günter Grass
David Grossman
Naguib Mahfouz
Kenzaburo Oe
Orhan Pamuk
Richard Poirier
Anton Shammas
Susan Sontag
William Styron
Jean Stein
Gore Vidal
Torsten Wiesel
Saadi Youssef

The post Censored in Palestine appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

To the Editors:

The following is an open letter from PEN, concerning the trial on December 13, 1995, of Wei Jingsheng, which resulted in his being sentenced to fourteen years in prison. It is addressed to:

Prime Minister Paul Keating
Prime Minister Paul Nyrup Rasmussen
Chancellor Helmut Kohl
President Kim Young-sam
Prime Minister John Major
Prime Minister Jean Chrétien
President Jacques Chirac
Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama
Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson
President Bill Clinton

“Dissent may not always be pleasant to listen to, and it is inevitable that it will sometimes be misguided. But it is everyone’s sovereign right. Indeed, when government is seen as defective or unreasonable, criticizing it is an unshirkable duty.”
—Wei Jingsheng

We, the undersigned, are writers of the developed world who are privileged to live and work under circumstances that allow us to express our opinions freely. We come together now in hopes of focusing your attention on the urgent plight of our Chinese colleague Wei Jingsheng.

On November 21, 1995, Wei, who disappeared from sight after being arrested by Chinese secret police agents in April 1994, was formally charged by the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party with “conducting activities in an attempt to overthrow the government.” This is a grave criminal offense, which guarantees, at the least, a long incarceration and harsh treatment—in this case, for a man who is in the forefront of the battle for human rights in his country.

As a young man, Wei Jingsheng first protested publicly against repression during the so-called Beijing Spring of 1978-1979, when only the bravest spirits dared speak out after the Orwellian silence and darkness in which China had been wrapped for years. All China’s “springs” have failed Wei since then, but he has never failed his country, repeatedly protesting and being repeatedly and inhumanely punished for it. Now at the age of forty-five, he has served nearly sixteen years in prison for stating his opinions.

In 1993, pressure from the United States and other Western nations helped obtain Wei Jingsheng’s release from prison. He immediately recommenced his campaign for democracy, was soon detained again, and, if convicted at his December 13 trial, faces potentially life-threatening punishment.

Recently, a former Chinese Communist Party official living abroad remarked that the Chinese government’s policy toward dissidents would be tested in the wake of President Jiang Zemin’s “summit meeting” with President Clinton.

“When Jiang came back from the summit with Clinton,” said the former official, “instead of releasing Wei the government charged him…. This proves the hard-liners still have the upper hand.”

We believe that the hard-liners will continue to have the upper hand so long as they convince their colleagues in government that economic opportunities for Western business will take precedence over Western concern for democratic freedoms and basic rights. As Wei wrote in The New York Times after his release in 1993, they are asking:

Is it really likely that Americans would abandon an opportunity to make money just to protect the human rights of those they have befriended?

Is it really likely that the American people’s determinations of right and wrong could ever influence the judgment of the US government?

And Wei concluded,

It looks as if the Communist Party has answered these questions in the negative. So even though it may have realized that its own conduct might have been in error, it still firmly pursues a strategy of brinkmanship, giving ground only when absolutely necessary and always in the last five minutes….

The Chinese people’s understanding of the new direction of US policy toward China leads them to believe that the party was right all these years in saying that the American government is controlled by rich capitalists. All you have to do is offer them a chance to make money and anything goes. Their consciences never stopped them from making money.

Wei’s words about the United States might apply to any of our countries in their relations with China. We cannot know whether Wei Jingsheng, in the cell where he is at present confined, is aware of what happened in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, on November 10. That day, the repressive military government of Nigeria, secure in its belief that oil and profits matter more to the West than human rights, hanged the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his codefendants on charges universally regarded as false, committing a brutal act of judicial murder. It is easy to imagine that Nigeria’s indifference to belated pleas and threats was not lost on Wei Jingsheng’s jailers.

We, writers living in freedom, request with the greatest urgency that you not allow a repetition of the Port Harcourt murders to occur in China. We ask that you act to justify Wei Jingsheng’s faith in our shared principles. We fervently request that every available influence be brought to bear to secure his release and that of other patriots and prisoners of conscience in China. The day will surely arrive when a generation of leadership comes to understand the necessity for tolerance as an emblem of participation in a civilized world community. Until that day, if our hopes for such a community are to mean anything, we must help and support those who work toward it. This test of our countries’ concern in the matter of human rights is being observed by the whole world. We must not be found wanting, thereby giving satisfaction to the enemies of freedom everywhere.

Peter Carey, Elizabeth Jolley
Australia
Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje
Canada
Niels Barfoed, Peter Hoeg
Denmark
Jacques Derrida
France
Günter Grass, Peter Schneider
Germany
Kenzaburo Oe
Japan
Ko Eun, Paik Nak-chung
South Korea
Göran Mälmqvist, Arne Ruth, Per Wästberg
Sweden
A.S. Byatt, Ronald Harwood
United Kingdom
Anne Hollander,
Norman Mailer,
Arthur Miller, Faith Sale,
Stephen King, Susan Sontag,
Robert Stone, William Styron,
Amy Tan
United States

The post The Case of Wei Jingsheng appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

I have been in China only two times, neither of them recent. The first time was in the early 1970s, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, when relatively few foreigners made their way there. And I went again for about a month at the beginning of the 1980s. Before that second trip, I already knew something about Wei Jingsheng. He was in the early years of his longest period of imprisonment, following his arrest in 1978 for writing his essay “The Fifth Modernization—Democracy” and posting it on the Democracy Wall in Beijing, and I’d promised myself that when I went to China I would bring his name up with every official I met—including those who were, officially, not officials, like the President of Chinese PEN. Each time that I mentioned his name, the answer, without exception, was: “I don’t know what person you’re talking about.” And I would repeat his name, and write it out in English, saying, “I’m sure I’m mispronouncing it, but still…” And I’d be told, “I’m sorry. You have been misinformed. I definitely never heard of anyone with that name.” This, as I said, was in the early 1980s. I tell the story to give you an idea of the kind of wall that Chinese officials erect to fend off our efforts to contact writers and human rights activists there who are being persecuted and to draw attention to their plight.

Such efforts always encounter many obstacles. Perhaps there are even more obstacles now, since the end of the cold war. Understandably, people are relieved to be no longer obliged to think in terms of a perennial “us” versus “them,” the mostly imperfect democracies under American leadership versus dictatorships of the Soviet stripe. But in that not-to-be-regretted bipolar world, where some—but hardly all—of the greatest abuses were occurring in Communist countries, it was easier to mobilize people and governments on behalf of human rights violations than it is now. And quite a few dictatorships did show themselves responsive to such pressure.

This is less the case now than a few years ago. As economic rivalries have replaced the old competition of political systems, governments are less rather than more willing to take on the human rights agenda. Thus our own government has for some time decoupled trade agreements and correction of human rights violations, and, apparently intimidated by the vehemence of the Chinese rulers and concerned about sustaining lucrative economic ties, has failed to take a strong stand on Wei Jingsheng’s behalf. And dictatorships round the world have been emboldened by the new post-ideological primacy of export considerations. People at PEN have had a devastating experience in this last month, after working hard on appeals to bring pressure on the Nigerian government not to do its worst to the eminent Nigerian writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was brought to trial on trumped-up charges for which the likely sentence was death. We expected that Ken Saro-Wiwa would be found guilty, and feared that he would receive a terrible sentence, perhaps life imprisonment, and remain in prison for many years. We thought it unlikely that he would be executed. But dictatorships aren’t playing by the old cold war rules: Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed—immediately, a couple of days after the court’s verdict. And the shock of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s murder by the Nigerian state gives an extra intensity to our concern for Wei Jingsheng. We know now that we must move more quickly in the new, post-1989 world, and speak as loudly as we can.

One final point. The history of response to the human rights and democracy movements in China has, I think, a special inflection. For a long time almost all influential foreign scholarship and thinking about China started from the assumption that China was an essentially collectivist society with no indigenous tradition of individual rights. Hence, Sinologists argued, we shouldn’t expect a real movement for democracy and for individual rights as these are understood in the West to emerge in China. This double-standard thinking about China reflects the general decline of universalist moral and political standards—of Enlightenment values—in the past generation. There is an increasing reluctance to apply a single standard of political justice, of freedom, and of individual rights and of democracy. The usual justifications for this reluctance are that it is “colonialist” (the label used by people on the left) or “Euro-centric” (the label used both by multiculturalist academics and by businessmen, who talk admiringly of authoritarian “Confucian cultures”) to expect or to want non-European peoples to have “our” values. My own view is that it is precisely the reluctance to apply these standards—as if “we” in the European and the neo-European countries need them, but the Chinese and the peoples of Africa don’t—that is colonialist and condescending.

Those of us who are active in the human rights movement have understood that it is our duty to hold to a universal standard of individual rights and democracy, and not be talked into thinking that some cultures and societies don’t need these as much as we Westerners do. And, as far as I know, Sinologists of high repute no longer hold such views. For the recent history of the democracy movement in China has shown that notions of the individual and of democratic freedoms like ours do have Chinese roots. (Certainly more than the doctrines of Marxist-Leninism.) Nevertheless, as the heroism of activists like Wei Jingsheng have shamed foreign China experts into abandoning their view that these are uniquely “Western” standards, “Western” ideas, the Chinese government continues, very conveniently, to invoke its own, lethal version of the double standard. Being a government, a dictatorship, it can draw the unpleasant conclusion—and enforce it—that those Chinese citizens active in pressing for democracy and individual rights have to be sponsored from abroad, and are traitors. Actual charges of spying often go with charges of treason, and such charges have been made against Wei Jingsheng.

So, beyond the human dimensions of this case, the moral greatness of Wei Jingsheng the individual, the injustice of his continued suffering at the hands of his government, and the importance of what he has written, all of which more than justifies our passionate concern for him, and our demand that the Clinton administration and other governments take steps to secure his freedom—beyond all this, there is the fact that Wei is the living proof that human rights and democracy are not foreign importations. They are Chinese ideas. It is our privilege to support them.

The post On Wei Jingsheng appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The trial against Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian writer and Honorary Member of PEN American Center, finally began on February 21 after numerous false starts. Saro-Wiwa, who is being tried by a special tribunal consisting of government-appointed judges, faces a charge of “incitement to murder.”

Saro-Wiwa is the author of the country’s most popular soap opera, Basi & Company; a novel, Sozaboy, written in a mix of idiomatic and pidgin English; a book of poems, Songs in a Time of War; a book of short stories, A Forest of Flowers; radio plays, and children’s books.

He is also the leader of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), and was arrested on May 22 on charges of allegedly inciting Ogoni youths to kill four leading Ogoni figures during a rally on May 21. Colleagues the world over believe the charges have been fabricated to silence Mr. Saro-Wiwa who for years has campaigned to secure basic rights for the Ogoni people. In addition, Saro-Wiwa has waged a campaign against government policies in River State, a rich, oil-producing region, which he alleges has been polluted by Shell, Chevron and other oil companies.

PEN deplores reports that upon his arrest, Saro-Wiwa was held in shackles in a military prison and was badly beaten on several occasions. His trial, which we fear may not meet the standards established by international law, was scheduled to begin first on January 16 and then on February 6 but was postponed each time at the prosecution’s request. Special tribunals have been condemned as grossly unfair by human rights organizations.

PEN also objects to the tactics used by security officers guarding the courthouse where Saro-Wiwa is being tried. At the start of the trial on February 21, military guards blocking access to the court building reportedly allowed entry to an observer from the International Commission of Jurists and to another from Shell Oil Company but impeded access to correspondents from the British Broadcasting Corporation and the opposition press. In addition, unconfirmed reports claim that when defense lawyers objected to the military’s heavy-handed screening policy, military personnel assaulted them. While PEN welcomes the presence of an envoy from Shell, we urge the government to ensure that the proceedings be open to members of the press and nongovernmental organizations.

In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we in PEN believe that Ken Saro-Wiwa has been arrested solely for his work with the MOSOP, including his articles critical of the Nigerian government’s environmental policies in Ogoniland and its treatment of the Ogoni people.

On behalf of the international community of letters, we the undersigned urge the government of Nigeria to release Mr. SaroWiwa immediately and unconditionally. At the very least, we ask the government to:

• Immediately transfer Ken Saro-Wiwa’s case to a standard, civil court;
• Allow international media and legal observers full access to all parts of Saro-Wiwa’s trial;

• Investigate Saro-Wiwa’s allegations that he has been mistreated while in detention.

Chinua Achebe
G.F. Michelsen
Ben Okri
Harold Pinter
Norman Rush
Susan Sontag
Robert Stone
PEN American Center
New York City

The post The Case of Ken Saro-Wiwa appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

“Nothing to be done.”
“Nista ne moze da se uradi.”
—opening line of Waiting for Godot

1.

I went to Sarajevo in mid-July to stage a production of Waiting for Godot not so much because I’d always wanted to direct Beckett’s play (although I had), as because it gave me a practical reason to return to Sarajevo and stay for a month or more. I had spent two weeks there in April, and had come to care intensely about the battered city and what it stands for; some of its citizens had become friends. But I couldn’t again be just a witness: that is, meet and visit, tremble with fear, feel brave, feel depressed, have heart-breaking conversations, grow ever more indignant, lose weight. If I went back, it would be to pitch in and do something.

No longer can a writer consider that the imperative task is to bring the news to the outside world. The news is out. Plenty of excellent foreign journalists (most of them in favor of intervention, as am I) have been reporting the lies and the slaughter since the beginning of the siege, while the decision of the western European powers and the United States not to intervene remains firm, thereby giving the victory to Serb fascism. I was not under the illusion that going to Sarajevo to direct a play would make me useful in the way I could be if I were a doctor or a water systems engineer. It would be a small contribution. But it was the only one of the three things I do—write, make films, and direct in the theater—which yields something that would exist only in Sarajevo, that would be made and consumed there.

Among the people I’d met in April was a young Sarajevo-born theater director, Haris Pasovic, who had left the city after he finished school and made his considerable reputation working mainly in Serbia. When the Serbs started the war in April 1992, Pasovic went abroad, but in the fall, while working on a spectacle called Sarajevo in Antwerp, he decided that he could no longer remain in safe exile, and at the end of the year managed to crawl back past UN patrols and under Serb gunfire into the freezing, besieged city. Pasovic invited me to see his Grad (“City”)—a collage, with music, of declamations, partly drawn from texts by Constantine Cavafy, Zbigniew Herbert, and Sylvia Plath, using a dozen actors—which he had put together in eight days. Now he was preparing a far more ambitious production, Euripides’ Alcestis, after which one of his students (Pasovic teaches at the still-functioning Academy of Drama) would be directing Sophocles’ Ajax. Realizing suddenly that I was talking to a producer as well as to a director, I asked Pasovic if he would be interested in my coming back in a few months to direct a play.

“Of course,” he said.

Before I could add, “Then let me think for a while about what I might want to do,” he went on, “What play will you do?” And bravado, following the impulsiveness of my proposal, suggested to me in an instant what I might not have seen had I taken longer to reflect: there was one obvious play for me to direct. Beckett’s play, written over forty years ago, seems written for, and about, Sarajevo.

Having often been asked since my return from Sarajevo if I worked with professional actors, I’ve come to understand that many people find it surprising that theater goes on at all in the besieged city. In fact, of the five theaters in Sarajevo before the war, two are still, sporadically, in use: Chamber Theater 55 (Kamerni Teater 55), where in April I’d seen a charmless production of Hair as well as Pasovic’s Grad; and the Youth Theater (Pozoriste Mladih), where I decided to stage Godot. These are both small houses. The large house, closed since the beginning of the war, is the National Theater, which presented opera and the Sarajevo Ballet as well as plays. In front of the handsome ochre building (only lightly damaged by shelling), there is still a poster from early April 1992 announcing a new production of Rigoletto, which never opened. Most of the singers and musicians and ballet dancers left the city to seek work abroad soon after the Serbs attacked, but many of the most talented actors stayed, and want nothing more than to work.

Images of today’s shattered city must make it hard to grasp that Sarajevo was once an extremely lively and attractive provincial capital, with a cultural life comparable to that of other middle-sized old European cities, including an audience for theater. Theater in Sarajevo, as elsewhere in Central Europe, was largely repertory: masterpieces from the past and the most admired twentieth-century plays. Just as good actors still live in Sarajevo, so do members of this cultivated audience. The difference is that actors and spectators alike can be murdered or maimed by a sniper’s bullet or a mortar shell on their way to and from the theater; but then, that can happen to people in Sarajevo in their living rooms, while they sleep in their bedrooms, or fetch something from their kitchens, or go out their front doors.

But isn’t this play rather pessimistic, I’ve been asked. Meaning, wasn’t it depressing for an audience in Sarajevo; meaning, wasn’t it pretentious or insensitive to stage Godot there?—as if the representation of despair were redundant when people really are in despair; as if what people want to see in such a situation would be, say, The Odd Couple. But it’s not true that what everyone in Sarajevo wants is entertainment that offers them an escape from their own reality. In Sarajevo, as anywhere else, there are more than a few people who feel strengthened and consoled by having their sense of reality affirmed and transfigured by art. This is not to say that people in Sarajevo don’t miss being merely entertained. The dramaturge of the National Theater, who began sitting in on the rehearsals of Godot after the first week, and who had studied at Columbia University, asked me before I left to bring some copies of Vogue and Vanity Fair when I return later this month, so she could be reminded of all the things that had gone out of her life. Certainly there are more Sarajevans who would rather see a Harrison Ford movie or attend a Guns n’ Roses concert than watch Waiting for Godot. That was true before the war, too. It is, if anything, a little less true now.

And if one considers what plays were produced in Sarajevo before the siege began—as opposed to the movies shown, almost entirely the big Hollywood successes (the small cinémathèque was on the verge of closing just before the war, for lack of an audience, I was told)—there was nothing odd or gloomy for the Sarajevan audience in the choice of Waiting for Godot. The other productions currently in rehearsal or performance in Sarajevo are Alcestis (about the inevitability of death and the meaning of sacrifice); Ajax (about a warrior’s madness and suicide); and In Agony, the first play of the Croatian Miroslav Krleza, who is, with the Bosnian Ivo Andric, one of the two internationally celebrated writers of the first half of the century from former Yugoslavia (the play’s title speaks for itself). Compared with these, Waiting for Godot may have been the “lightest” entertainment of all.

Indeed, the question is not why there is any cultural activity in Sarajevo now after seventeen months of siege, but why there isn’t more. Outside a boarded-up movie theater next to the Chamber Theater is a sun-bleached poster for The Silence of the Lambs with a diagonal strip across it that says DANAS (today), which was April 6, 1992, the day movie-going stopped. Since the war began, all of the movie theaters in Sarajevo have stayed shut, even if not all have been severely damaged by shelling. A building in which people gather so predictably would be too tempting a target for the Serb guns; anyway, there is no electricity to run a projector. There are no concerts, except for those given by a lone string quartet that rehearses every morning and performs very occasionally in a small room seating forty people, which also doubles as an art gallery. (It’s in the same building on Marshal Tito Street that houses the Chamber Theater.) There is only one active space for painting and photography—the Obala Gallery, whose exhibits sometimes stay up only one day and never more than a week.

No one I talked to in Sarajevo disputes the sparseness of cultural life in this city where, after all, between 300,000 and 400,000 inhabitants still live. The majority of the city’s intellectuals and creative people, including most of the faculty of the University of Sarajevo, fled at the beginning of the war, before the city was completely encircled. Besides, many Sarajevans are reluctant to leave their apartments except when it is absolutely necessary, to collect water and their UNHCR rations; though no one is safe anywhere, they have more to fear when they are in the street. And beyond fear, there is depression—most Sarajevans are very depressed—which produces lethargy, exhaustion, apathy.

Moreover, Belgrade was the cultural capital of former Yugoslavia, and I have the impression that in Sarajevo the visual arts were derivative; that ballet, opera, and musical life were routine. Only film and theater were distinguished, so it is not surprising that these continue in Sarajevo under siege. A film production company, SAGA, makes both documentary and fiction films, and there are the two functioning theaters.

In fact, the audience for theater expects to see a play like Waiting for Godot. What my production of Godot signifies to them, apart from the fact that an eccentric American writer and part-time director volunteered to work in the theater as an expression of solidarity with the city (a fact inflated by the local press and radio as evidence that the rest of the world “does care”—when I knew, to my indignation and shame, that I represented nobody but myself), is that this is a great European play and that they are members of European culture. For all their attachment to American popular culture, which is as intense here as anywhere else, it is the high culture of Europe that represents for them their ideal, their passport to a European identity. People had told me again and again on my earlier visit in April: We’re part of Europe. We’re the people in former Yugoslavia who stand for European values: secularism, religious tolerance, and multi-ethnicity. How can the rest of Europe let this happen to us? When I replied that Europe is and always has been as much a place of barbarism as a place of civilization, they didn’t want to hear. Now, a few months later, no one would dispute such a statement.

People in Sarajevo know themselves to be terminally weak: waiting, hoping, not wanting to hope, knowing that they aren’t going to be saved. They are humiliated by their disappointment, by their fear, and by the indignities of daily life—for instance, by having to spend a good part of each day seeing to it that their toilets flush, so that their bathrooms don’t become cesspools. That is how they use most of the water they queue for in public spaces, at great risk to their lives. This sense of humiliation may be even greater than their fear.

Putting on a play means so much to the local theater professionals in Sarajevo because it allows them to be normal, that is, to do what they did before the war; to be not just haulers of water or passive recipients of “humanitarian aid.” Indeed, the lucky people in Sarajevo are those who can carry on with their professional work. It is not a question of money, since Sarajevo has only a black-market economy whose currency is German marks; and many are living on their savings, which were always in deutsche marks, or on remittances from abroad. (To get an idea of the city’s economy, consider that a skilled professional—say, a surgeon at the city’s main hospital or a television journalist—earns three deutsche marks a month; while cigarettes—a local version of Marlboros—cost ten deutsche marks a pack.) The actors and I, of course, were not on salary. Other theater people would sit in on rehearsals not only because they wanted to watch our work, but because they were glad to have, once again, a theater to go to every day.

Far from it being frivolous to put on a play—this play or any other—it is a serious expression of normality. “Isn’t putting on a play like fiddling while Rome burns?” a journalist asked one of the actors. “Just asking a provocative question,” the journalist explained to me when I reproached her, worried that the actor might have been offended. He was not. He didn’t know what she was talking about.

2.

I started auditioning actors the day after I arrived, one role already cast in my head. I remembered, at a meeting with theater people in April, a stout older woman wearing a large broad-brimmed black hat, who sat silently, imperiously, in a corner of the room. A few days later when I saw her in Pasovic’s Grad, I learned that she was the senior actor of the pre-siege Sarajevo theater, and, when I decided to direct Godot, I immediately thought of her as Pozzo. Pasovic concluded that I would cast only women (he told me that an all-woman Godot had been done in Belgrade some years ago). But that wasn’t my intention. I wanted the casting to be gender-blind, confident that this is one of the few plays where it makes sense, since the characters are representative, even allegorical figures. If Everyman (like the pronoun “he”) really does stand for everybody—as women are always being told—then Everyman doesn’t have to be played by a man. I was not making the statement that a woman can also be a tyrant—which Pasovic then decided I meant by casting Ines Fancovic in the role—but rather that a woman can play the role of a tyrant. In contrast, Admir (“Atko”) Glamocak, the actor I cast as Lucky, a gaunt, lithe man of thirty whom I’d admired as Death in Alcestis, fit perfectly the traditional conception of Pozzo’s slave.

Three other roles were left: Vladimir and Estragon, the pair of forlorn tramps, and Godot’s messenger, a small boy. It was troubling that there were more good actors available than parts, since I knew how much it meant to the actors I auditioned to be in the play. Three seemed particularly gifted: Velibor Topic, who also plays Death in Alcestis; Izudin (“Izo”) Bajrovic, who is Alcestis’s Hercules; and Nada Djurevska, who has the lead in the Krleza play.

Then it occurred to me I could have three pairs of Vladimir and Estragon and put them all on the stage at once. Velibor and Izo seemed to me likely to make the most powerful, fluent couple; there was no reason not to use what Beckett envisaged, two men, at the center; but they would be flanked on the left side of the stage by two women and on the right by a woman and a man—three variations on the theme of the couple.

Since no child actors were available and I dreaded using a nonprofessional, I decided to make the messenger an adult: the boyish-looking Mirza Halilovic, a talented actor who happened to speak the best English of anyone in the cast. Of the other eight actors, three knew no English at all. It was a great help to have Mirza as my interpreter, so I could communicate with everyone at the same time.

By the second day of rehearsal, I had begun to divide up and apportion the text, like a musical score, among the three pairs of Vladimir and Estragon. I had once before worked in a foreign language, when I directed Pirandello’s As You Desire Me at the Teatro Stabile in Turin. But I knew some Italian, while my Serbo-Croatian (or “the mother tongue,” as people in Sarajevo call it, the words “Serbo-Croatian” being hard to utter now) was limited when I arrived to “Please,” “Hello,” “Thank you,” and “Not now.” I had brought with me an English-Serbo-Croatian dictionary, paperback copies of the play in English, and an enlarged photocopy of the text into which I copied in pencil the “Bosnian” translation, line by line, as soon as I received it. I also copied the English text line by line into the Bosnian script. In about ten days I managed to learn by heart the words of Beckett’s play in the language in which my actors were speaking it.

The population of Sarajevo is so mixed, and there are so many intermarriages, that it would be hard to assemble any kind of group in which all three “ethnic” groups are not represented—and I never inquired what anyone was. It was by chance that I eventually learned that Velibor Topic (Estragon I) had a Muslim mother and a Serb father, though his name does not reveal that; while Ines Fancovic (Pozzo) had to be Croatian, since Ines is a Croat name, and she was born and grew up in the coastal town of Split and came to Sarajevo thirty years ago. Both parents of Milijana Zirojevic (Estragon II) are Serb, while Irena Mulamuhic (Estragon III) must have had at least a Muslim father. I never learned the ethnic origins of all the actors. They knew them and took them for granted because they are colleagues—they’ve acted in many plays together—and friends.

The propaganda of the aggressors holds that this war is caused by ageold hatreds; that it is a civil war or a war of secession, with Milosevic trying to save the union; that in crushing the Bosnians, whom Serb propaganda often refers to as the Turks, the Serbs are saving Europe from Muslim fundamentalism. Perhaps I should not have been surprised to be asked if I saw many women in Sarajevo who are veiled, or who wear the chador; one can’t underestimate the extent to which the prevailing stereotypes about Muslims have shaped “Western” reactions to the Serb aggression in Bosnia.

In fact, the proportion of religiously observant people in Sarajevo is about the same as it is among the native-born in London or Paris or Berlin or Venice. In the prewar city, it was no odder for a “Muslim” to marry a Serb or a Croat than for someone from New York to marry someone from Massachusetts or California. Sixty percent of the marriages in Sarajevo in the year before the Serb attack took place between people from different religious backgrounds—a strong index of secularism. The Sarajevans of Muslim origin come from families that converted to Islam when Bosnia became a province of the Ottoman Empire, and they look the same as their southern Slav neighbors, spouses, and compatriots, since they are, in fact, descendants of Christian southern Slavs.

What Muslim faith existed throughout this century was already a diluted version of the moderate, Sunni faith brought by the Turks, with nothing of what could be called fundamentalism. When I asked friends who in their families are or were religiously observant, they invariably said: my grandparents. If they were under thirty-five, they usually said: my great-grandparents. Of the nine actors in Godot the only one with religious leanings was Nada, who is the disciple of an Indian guru; as her farewell present she gave me a copy of the Penguin edition of The Teachings of Shiva.

3.

Pozzo: “There is no denying
it is still day.”
(They all look up at the sky.)

“Good.”

(They stop looking at the sky.)

We rehearsed in the dark. The bare proscenium stage was lit usually by only three or four candles, supplemented by the four flashlights I’d brought with me. When I asked for additional candles, I was told there weren’t any; later I was told that they were being saved for our performances. In fact, I never learned who doled out the candles; they were simply in place on the floor when I arrived each morning at the theater, having walked through alleys and courtyards to reach the stage door, the only usable entrance, at the rear of the free-standing modern building. The theater’s façade, lobby, cloakroom, and bar had been wrecked by shelling more than a year ago and the debris still had not been cleared away.

Actors in Sarajevo, Pasovic had explained to me with comradely regret, expect to work only four hours a day. “We have many bad habits here left over from the bad old socialist days.” But that was not my experience; after a bumpy start—during the first week everyone seemed preoccupied by other performances and rehearsals or obligations at home—I could not have asked for actors more zealous, more eager. The main obstacle, apart from the siege lighting, was the fatigue of the malnourished actors, many of whom, before they arrived for rehearsal at ten, had for several hours been queuing for water and then lugging heavy plastic containers up eight or ten flights of stairs. Some of them had to walk two hours to get to the theater, and, of course, would have to follow the same dangerous route at the end of the day.

The only actor who seemed to have normal stamina was the oldest member of the cast, Ines Fancovic, who is sixty-eight. Still a stout woman, she has lost more than sixty pounds since the beginning of the siege, and this may have accounted for her remarkable energy. The other actors were visibly underweight and tired easily. Lucky must stand motionless through most of his long scene but never sets down the heavy bag he carries. Atko, who plays him (and now weighs no more than one hundred pounds) asked me to excuse him if he occasionally rested his empty suitcase on the floor throughout the rehearsal period. Whenever I halted the run-through for a few minutes to change a movement or a line reading, all the actors, with the exception of Ines, would instantly lie down on the stage.

Another symptom of fatigue: the actors were slower to memorize their lines than any I have ever worked with. Ten days before the opening they still needed to consult their scripts, and were not word-perfect until the day before the dress rehearsal. This might have been less of a problem had it not been too dark for them to read the scripts they held in their hands. An actor crossing the stage while saying some lines, who then forgot them, was obliged to make a detour to the nearest candle and peer at his or her script. (A script was loose pages, since binders and paper clips are virtually unobtainable in Sarajevo. The play had been typed once in Pasovic’s office on a little manual typewriter whose ribbon looked as if it had been in use since the beginning of the siege. I was given the original and the actors the nine carbon copies, the last five of which would have been hard to read in any light.)

Not only could they not read their scripts; unless standing face to face, they could barely see one another. Lacking the normal peripheral vision that anybody has in daylight or when there is electric light, they could not do something as simple as put on or take off their bowler hats at the same time. And they appeared to me for a long time, to my despair, mostly as silhouettes. At the moment early in Act I when Vladimir “smiles suddenly from ear to ear, keeps smiling, ceases as suddenly”—in my version, three Vladimirs—I couldn’t see a single one of those false smiles from my stool some ten feet in front of them, my flashlight lying across my scripts. Gradually, my night vision improved.

Of course, it was not just fatigue that made the actors slower to learn their lines and their movements and to be, often, inattentive and forgetful. It was distraction, and fear. Each time we heard the noise of a shell exploding, there was not only relief that the theater had not been hit. The actors had to be wondering where it was landing. Only the youngest in my cast, Velibor, and the oldest, Ines, lived alone. The others left wives and husbands, parents and children at home when they came to the theater each day, and several of them lived very close to the front lines, near Grbavica, a part of the city taken by the Serbs last year, or in Alipasino Polje, which is near the Serb-held airport.

On July 30, at two o’clock in the afternoon, Nada, who was often late during the first two weeks of rehearsal, arrived with the news that at eleven that morning Zlajko Sparavolo, a well-known older actor who specialized in Shakespearean roles, had been killed, along with two neighbors, when a shell landed outside his front door. The actors left the stage and went silently to an adjacent room. I followed them and the first to speak told me that this news was particularly upsetting to everyone because, up till then, no actor had been killed. (I had heard earlier about two actors who had each lost a leg to the shelling; and I knew Nermin Tulic, the actor who last year had lost both legs at the hip and now was the administrative director of the Youth Theater.) When I asked the actors if they felt up to continuing the rehearsal, all but one, Izo, said yes. But after working for another hour, some of the actors found they couldn’t continue. That was the only day that rehearsals stopped early.

The set I had designed—as minimally furnished, I thought, as Beckett himself could have desired—had two levels. Pozzo and Lucky entered, acted on, and exited from a rickety platform eight feet deep and four feet high, running the whole length of upstage, with the tree toward the left; the front of the platform was covered with the translucent polyurethane sheeting that the UNHCR brought in last winter to seal the shattered windows of Sarajevo. The three couples stayed mostly on the stage floor, though sometimes one or more of the Vladimirs and Estragons went to the upper stage. It took several weeks of rehearsal to arrive at three distinct identities for them. The central Vladimir and Estragon (Izo and Velibor) were the classic buddy pair. After several false starts, the two women (Nada and Milijana) turned into another kind of couple in which affection and dependence are mixed with exasperation and resentment: mother in her early forties and grown daughter. And Sejo and Irena, who were also the oldest couple, played a quarrelsome, cranky husband and wife, modeled on homeless people I’d seen in downtown Manhattan. But when Lucky and Pozzo were on stage the Vladimirs and Estragons could join together, becoming something of a Greek Chorus as well as an audience to the show put on by the master and slave.

Tripling the parts of Vladimir and Estragon, and expanding the play with stage business, as well as silences, was making it a good deal longer than it usually is. I soon realized that Act I would run at least ninety minutes. Act II would be shorter, for my idea was to use only Izo and Velibor as Vladimir and Estragon. But even with a stripped-down and speeded-up Act II, the play would be two and a half hours long. And I could not envisage asking people to watch the play from the Youth Theater’s auditorium, whose nine small chandeliers could come crashing down if the building suffered a direct hit from a shell, or even if an adjacent building were hit. Further, there was no way five hundred people in the auditorium could see what was taking place on a deep proscenium stage lit only by a few candles. But as many as a hundred people could be seated close to the actors, at the front of the stage, on a tier of six rows of seats made from wood planks. They would be hot, since it was high summer, and they would be squeezed together; I knew that many more people would be lining up outside the stage door for each performance than could be seated (tickets are free). How could I ask the audience, which would have no lobby, bathroom, or water, to sit so uncomfortably, without moving, for two and a half hours?

I concluded that I could not do all of Waiting for Godot. But the very choices I had made about the staging which made Act I as long as it was also meant that the staging could represent the whole of Waiting for Godot, while using only the words of Act I. For this may be the only work in dramatic literature in which Act I is itself a complete play. The place and time of Act I are: “A country road. A tree. Evening.” (For Act II: “Next day. Same time. Same place.”) Although the time is “Evening,” both acts show a complete day, the day beginning with Vladimir and Estragon meeting again (though in every sense except the sexual one a couple, they separate each evening), and with Vladimir (the dominant one, the reasoner and information-gatherer, who is better at fending off despair) inquiring where Estragon has spent the night. They talk about waiting for Godot (whoever he may be), straining to pass the time. Pozzo and Lucky arrive, stay for a while and perform their “routines,” for which Vladimir and Estragon are the audience, then depart. After this there is a time of deflation and relief: they are waiting again. Then the messenger arrives to tell them that they have waited once more in vain.

Of course, there is a difference between Act I and the replay of Act I which is Act II. Not only has one more day gone by. Everything is worse. Lucky no longer can speak, Pozzo is now pathetic and blind, Vladimir has given in to despair. Perhaps I felt that the despair of Act I was enough for the Sarajevo audience, and that I wanted to spare them a second time when Godot does not arrive. Maybe I wanted to propose, subliminally, that Act II might be different. For, precisely as Waiting for Godot was so apt an illustration of the feelings of Sarajevans now—bereft, hungry, dejected, waiting for an arbitrary, alien power to save them or take them under its protection—it seemed apt, too, to be staging Waiting for Godot, Act I.

4.

“Alas, alas…”/”Ovai, ovai…”
—from Lucky’s monologue

People in Sarajevo live harrowing lives; this was a harrowing Godot. Ines was flamboyantly theatrical as Pozzo, and Atko was the most heart-rending Lucky I have ever seen. Atko, who had ballet training and was a movement teacher at the Academy, quickly mastered the postures and gestures of decrepitude, and responded inventively to my suggestions for Lucky’s dance of freedom. It took longer to work out Lucky’s monologue—which in every other production of Godot I’d seen (including the one Beckett himself directed in 1975 at the Schiller Theater in Berlin) was, to my taste, delivered too fast, as nonsense. I divided this speech into five parts, and we discussed it line by line, as an argument, as a series of images and sounds, as a lament, as a cry. I wanted Atko to deliver Beckett’s aria about divine apathy and indifference, about a heartless, petrifying world, as if it made perfect sense. Which it does, especially in Sarajevo.

It has always seemed to me that Waiting for Godot is a supremely realistic play, though it is generally acted in something like a minimalist, or vaudeville, style. The Godot that the Sarajevo actors were by inclination, temperament, previous theater experience, and present (atrocious) circumstances most able to perform, and the one I chose as a director, was full of anguish, of immense sadness, and toward the end, violence. That the messenger is a strapping adult meant that when he announces the bad news Vladimir and Estragon could express not only disappointment but rage: manhandling him as they could never have done were the role played by a small child. (And there are six, not two, of them, and only one of him.) After he escapes, they subside into a long, terrible silence. It was a Chekhovian moment of absolute pathos, as at the end of The Cherry Orchard, when the ancient butler Firs wakes up to find that he’s been left behind in the abandoned house.

During the production of Godot and this second stay in Sarajevo it felt as if I were going through the replay of a familiar cycle. Some of the severest shelling of the central city since the beginning of the siege took place during the first ten days I was there. On one day Sarajevo was hit by nearly 4,000 shells. Once more hopes were raised of American intervention, but Clinton was outwitted (if that is not too strong a term to describe so weak a resolve) by the pro-Serb UNPROFOR command, which claimed that intervention would endanger UN troops. The despair and disbelief of the Sarajevans steadily mounted. A mock cease-fire was called, which meant just a little shelling and sniping, but since more people ventured out in the street, almost as many were murdered and maimed each day.

The cast and I tried to avoid jokes about “waiting for Clinton” but that was very much what we were doing in late July, when the Serbs took, or seemed to take, Mt. Igman, just above the airport. The capture of Mt. Igman would allow them to fire shells horizontally into the central city, and hope rose again that there would be American airstrikes against the Serb gun positions, or at least a lifting of the arms embargo. Although people were afraid to hope, for fear of being disappointed, at the same time no one could believe that Clinton would again speak of intervention and again do nothing. I myself had succumbed to hope again when a journalist friend showed me a dim satellite fax transmission of Senator Biden’s superb speech in favor of intervention, twelve single-spaced pages, which he had delivered on the floor of the Senate on July 29. The Holiday Inn, the only functioning hotel in Sarajevo, which is on the western side of the central city, four blocks from the nearest Serb snipers, was crowded with journalists waiting for the fall of Sarajevo or the intervention; one of the hotel staff said the place hadn’t been this full since the 1984 Winter Olympics.

Sometimes I thought we were not waiting for Godot, or Clinton. We were waiting for our props. There seemed no way to find Lucky’s suitcase and picnic basket, Pozzo’s cigarette holder (to substitute for the pipe) and whip. As for the carrot that Estragon munches slowly, rapturously: until two days before we opened, we had to rehearse with three of the dry rolls I scavenged each morning from the Holiday Inn dining room (rolls were the breakfast offered) to feed the actors and assistants, and the all-too-rare stagehand. We could not find any rope for Pozzo until a week after we started on the stage, and Ines got understandably cranky when, after three weeks of rehearsal, she still did not have the right length of rope, a proper whip, a cigarette holder, an atomizer. The bowler hats and the boots for the Estragons materialized only in the last days of rehearsal. And the costumes—whose designs I had suggested and the sketches of which I had approved in the first week—did not come until the day before we opened.

Some of this was owing to the scarcity of virtually everything in Sarajevo. Some of it, I had to conclude, was typically “southern” (or Balkan) mañana-ism. (“You’ll definitely have the cigarette holder tomorrow,” I was told every morning for three weeks.) But some of the shortages were the result of rivalry between theaters. There had to be props at the closed National Theater. Why were they not available to us? I discovered, shortly before the opening, that I was not just a visiting member of the Sarajevo “theater world,” but that there were several theater tribes in Sarajevo and that, being allied with Haris Pasovic’s, I could not count on the good will of the others. (It would work the other way around, too. On one occasion, when precious help was offered me by another producer, who on my last visit had become a friend, I was told by Pasovic, who was otherwise reasonable and helpful: “I don’t want you to take anything from that person.”)

Of course this would be normal behavior anywhere else. Why not in besieged Sarajevo? Theater in prewar Sarajevo must have had the same feuds, pettiness, and jealousy as in any other European city. I think my assistants, as well as Ognjenka Finci, the set and costume designer, and Pasovic himself were anxious to shield me from the knowledge that not everybody in Sarajevo was to be trusted. When I began to catch on that some of our difficulties reflected a degree of hostility or even sabotage, one of my assistants said to me sadly: “Now that you know us, you won’t want to come back any more.”

Sarajevo is not only a city that represents an ideal of pluralism; it was regarded by many of its citizens as an ideal place: though not important (because not big enough, not rich enough), it was still the best place to be, even if, being ambitious, you had to leave it to make a real career, as people from San Francisco eventually go to Los Angeles or New York. “You can’t imagine what it used to be like here,” Pasovic said to me. “It was paradise.” That kind of idealization produces a very acute disillusionment, so that now almost all the people I know in Sarajevo cannot stop lamenting the city’s moral deterioration: the increasing number of muggings and thefts, the gangsterism, the predatory black marketeers, the banditry of some army units, the absence of civic cooperation. One would think that they could forgive themselves, and their city. For seventeen months it has been a shooting gallery. There is virtually no municipal government; hence, debris from shelling doesn’t get picked up, schooling isn’t organized for small children, etc., etc. A city under siege must, sooner or later, become a city of rackets.

But most Sarajevans are pitiless in their condemnation of conditions now, and of many “elements,” as they would call them with pained vagueness, in the city. “Anything good that happens here is a miracle,” one of my friends said to me. And another: “This is a city of bad people.” When an English photojournalist made us the invaluable gift of nine candles, three were immediately stolen. One day Mirza’s lunch—a chunk of homebaked bread and a pear—was taken from his knapsack while he was on the stage. It could not have been one of the other actors. But it could have been anyone else, say, one of the stagehands or any of the students from the Academy of Drama who wandered in and out of the rehearsals. The discovery of this theft was very depressing to the actors.

Yet although a lot of people want to leave, and will leave when they can, a surprising number say that their lives are not unbearable. “We can live this life forever,” said one of my friends from my April visit, Hrvoje Batinic, a local journalist. “I can live this life a hundred years,” a new friend, Zehra Kreho—the dramaturge of the National Theater—said to me one evening. Both are in their late thirties.

Sometimes I felt the same way. Of course it was different for me. “I haven’t taken a bath in sixteen months,” a middle-aged matron said to me. “Do you know how that feels?” And of course I don’t; I only know what it’s like not to take a bath for a month. I was elated, full of energy, because of the challenge of the work I was doing, because of the valor and enthusiasm of everyone I worked with—while I could not ever forget how hard it has been for each of them, and how hopeless the future looks for their city. What made my lesser hardships and the danger relatively easy to bear, apart from the fact that I can leave and they can’t, was that I was totally concentrated on them and on Beckett’s play .

5.

Until about a week before it opened, I did not think the play would be very good. I feared that the choreography and emotional design I had constructed for the two-level stage and the nine actors in five roles were too complicated for them to master in so short a time; or, simply, that I had not been as demanding as I should have been. Two of my assistants, as well as Pasovic, told me that I was being too amicable, too “maternal,” and that I should throw a tantrum now and then and, in particular, threaten to replace the actors who had not yet learned all their lines. But I went on, hoping that it would be not too bad; then, suddenly, in the last week, they turned a corner, it all came together, and at our dress rehearsal it seemed to me the production was; after all, affecting, continually interesting, well-made, and that this was an effort which did honor to Beckett’s play.

I was also surprised by the amount of attention from the international press that Godot was getting. I had told few people that I was going to Sarajevo to direct Waiting for Godot, intending perhaps to write something about it later. I forgot that I would be living in a journalists’ dormitory. The day after I arrived there were a dozen requests in the Holiday Inn lobby and in the dining room for interviews; and the next day; and the next. I said there was nothing to tell, I was still auditioning; and after that, the actors were simply reading the play aloud at a table; and after that, I said, we’ve just begun on the stage, there’s hardly any light, there’s nothing to see.

But when after a week I mentioned the journalists’ requests to Pasovic, and my desire to keep the actors free from such distractions, I learned that he had scheduled a press conference for me and that he wanted me to admit journalists to rehearsals, give interviews, and get the maximum amount of publicity not just for the play but for an enterprise of which I had not altogether taken in that I was a part: the Sarajevo International Festival of Theater and Film, directed by Haris Pasovic, whose second production, following his Alcestis, was my Godot. When I apologized to the actors for the interruptions to come, I found that they too wanted the journalists to be there. All the friends I consulted in the city told me that the story of the production would be “good for Sarajevo.”

Television, print, and radio journalism are an important part of this war. When, in April, I heard the French intellectual André Glucksmann, on his twenty-four-hour trip to Sarajevo, explain to the people of Sarajevo who had come to his press conference, that “war is now a media event,” and “wars are won or lost on TV,” I thought to myself: try telling that to all the people here who have lost their arms and legs. But there is a sense in which Glucksmann’s indecent statement was on the mark. It’s not that war has completely changed its nature, and is only or principally a media event, but that the media’s coverage is a principal object of attention, and the very fact of media attention, sometimes becomes the main story.

While I was in Sarajevo, for example, my best friend among the journalists at the Holiday Inn, the BBC’s admirable Alan Little, visited one of the city’s hospitals and was shown a semiconscious five-year-old girl with severe head injuries, whose mother had been killed by the same mortar shell. The doctor said she would die in a few days if she could not be airlifted out to a hospital where she could be given a brain scan and sophisticated treatment. Moved by the child’s plight, Alan began to talk about her in his reports. For days nothing happened. Then other journalists picked up the story, and the case of “Little Irma” became the front-page story day after day in the British tabloids and virtually the only Bosnia story on the TV news. John Major, eager to be seen as doing something, sent a plane to take the girl to London.

Then came the backlash. Alan, unaware at first that the story had become so big, then delighted because it meant that the pressure would help to bring the child out, was dismayed by the attacks on a “media circus” that was exploiting a child’s suffering. It was morally obscene, the critics said, to concentrate on one child when thousands of children and adults, including many amputees and paraplegics, languish in the understaffed, undersupplied hospitals of Sarajevo and are not allowed to be transported out, thanks to the UN (but that is another story). That it was a good thing to do—that to try to save the life of one child is better than doing nothing at all should have been obvious, and in fact others were brought out as a result. But a story that needed to be told about the wretched hospitals of Sarajevo degenerated into a controversy over what the press did.

This is the first of the three European genocides of our century to be tracked by the world press, and documented nightly on TV. There were no reporters in 1915 sending daily stories to the world press from Armenia, and no foreign camera crews in Dachau and Auschwitz. Until the Bosnian genocide, one might have thought—this was indeed the conviction of many of the best reporters there, like Roy Guttman of Newsday and John Burns of The New York Times—that if the story could be gotten out, the world would do something. The coverage of the genocide in Bosnia has ended that illusion.

Newspaper and radio reporting and, above all, TV coverage have shown the war in Bosnia in extraordinary detail, but in the absence of a will to intervene by those few people in the world who make political and military decisions, the war becomes another remote disaster; the people suffering and being murdered there become disaster “victims.” Suffering is visibly present, and can be seen in close-up; and no doubt many people feel sympathy for the victims. What cannot be recorded is an absence—the absence of any political will to end the suffering: more exactly, the decision not to intervene in Bosnia, primarily Europe’s responsibility, which has its origins in the traditional pro-Serb slant of the Quai d’Orsay and the British Foreign Office. It is being implemented by the UN occupation of Sarajevo, which is largely a French operation.

I do not believe the standard argument made by critics of television that watching terrible events on the small screen distances them as much as it makes them real. It is the continuing coverage of the war in the absence of action to stop it that makes us mere spectators. Not television but our politicians have made history come to seem like re-runs. We get tired of watching the same show. If it seems unreal, it is because it’s both so appalling and apparently so unstoppable.

Even people in Sarajevo sometimes say it seems to them unreal. They are in a state of shock, which does not diminish, which takes the form of a rhetorical incredulity (“How could this happen? I still can’t believe this is happening.”). They are genuinely astonished by the Serb atrocities, and by the starkness and sheer unfamiliarity of the lives they are now obliged to lead. “We’re living in the Middle Ages,” someone said to me. “This is science fiction,” another friend said.

People ask me if Sarajevo ever seemed to me unreal while I was there. The truth is, since I’ve started going to Sarajevo—this winter I plan to return to direct The Cherry Orchard with Nada as Madame Ranevsky and Velibor as Lopakhin—it seems the most real place in the world.

Waiting for Godot opened, with twelve candles on the stage, on August 17. There were two performances that day, one at 2:00 PM and the other at 4:00 PM. In Sarajevo there are only matinees; hardly anybody goes out after dark. Many people were turned away. For the first few performances I was tense with anxiety. But there was a moment, I think it was the third performance, when I began to relax. For the first time I was seeing the play as a spectator. It was time to stop worrying that Ines would let the rope linking her and Atko sag while she devoured her papier-mâché chicken; that Sejo, the third Vladimir, would forget to keep shifting from foot to foot just before he suddenly rushes off to pee. The play now belonged to the actors, and I knew it was in good hands. And I think it was at the end of that performance—on Wednesday, August 18 at 2:00 PM—during the long tragic silence of the Vladimirs and Estragons which follows the messenger’s announcement that Mr. Godot isn’t coming today, but will surely come tomorrow, that my eyes began to sting with tears. Velibor was crying too. No one in the audience made a sound. The only sounds were those coming from outside the theater: a UN APC thundering down the street and the crack of sniper fire.

—September 7, 1993

The post Godot Comes to Sarajevo appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

On February 14, four years will have gone by since the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran pronounced his nefarious death sentence upon Salman Rushdie and those responsible for the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. During these four years the million-dollar bounty on Rushdie’s head has been increased twice, the fatwa has been repeatedly reaffirmed by Iran, and the Italian and Japanese translators of Rushdie’s novel have been assaulted, the latter fatally. The British government, at first resolute in its denunciation of the fatwa, has now retreated into silence, and diplomatic relations between Britain and Iran have been partially restored. The Bush administration lamentably failed to take concrete action in the affair and declined to meet with Rushdie during his visit to Washington in 1992 on the grounds that—according to White House spokesman Marlin Fitz-water—“there’s no reason for us to have any special interest in him.”

More promising in recent months have been the strongly worded resolutions on Rushdie’s behalf in the German and Canadian parliaments and the public undertaking by the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish governments to do their utmost to have the death sentence lifted by bringing the Rushdie issue before the United Nations Human Rights Commission. These efforts are highly laudable, but might well be crucially strengthened by the American government’s joining in this undertaking. If our democracy and others around the world fail to recognize this horrifying act of international terrorism for what it is and to challenge it energetically, we can expect that other chilling decrees of this kind will be issued in the future, endangering the lives of writers, their translators, and their publishers.

It is imperative that the Clinton administration follow a path different from that of its predecessor. We feel that President Clinton has an obligation, in keeping with our nation’s traditional defense of human rights, to do his utmost to defend the principle of freedom of expression that has been violated in the Rushdie affair. We urge our new president to declare his intention of supporting this principle and to make it a condition underlying his negotiations not only with Iran but with other countries involved in the current round of international trade deliberations.

The strategy of silence in the Rushdie affair has manifestly not worked. Four years has been long enough to establish the fact that the fatwa will be rescinded only when the Iranian government understands that not to do so will be seriously detrimental to Iran’s standing in the community of nations.

Edmund Keeley
President
Larry McMurtry, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer
Former Presidents
Robert Stone
Vice-President
Faith Sale
Co-Chair, Freedom-to-Write Committee
John Irving
Executive Board Member

The post An Urgent Appeal from Pen American Center appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

As members of PEN American Center, we write to call attention to grave freedom-to-write violations in Sudan, and encourage other writers to lend their voice to an international campaign to bring about the restoration of fundamental human rights in that country.

Until a coup which took place on June 30 of last year, Sudan had one of the freest presses in sub-Saharan Africa. As documented by Africa Watch and other human rights organizations, at least nine writers are now imprisoned, without charges, under degrading conditions of confinement. They include Writers’ Union leader Kamal al Gizouli, poet and teacher Mahjoub Sharif, Al-Ayam editor Mohamed Mahjoub Osman, Al-Midan editor Tijani el Tayeb and al R’ay al Amm editor Mohamed Medani Tawfiq. Where a year ago there were forty independent newspapers and journals, now only three government-sponsored newspapers are permitted to publish. The government must approve all travel by journalists.

We have called upon the Sudanese authorities to release all those imprisoned for exercising internationally protected rights of freedom of expression, and to permit independent newspapers to re-open. We urge other concerned writers to do the same. Appeals may be addressed to His Excellency Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Head of State, Defense Minister and Commander-in-Chief, Army Headquarters, Khartoum, Sudan.

Edward Albee
Hortense Calisher
Allen Ginsberg
John Irving
Larry McMurtry
Arthur Miller
Grace Paley
Faith Sale
Susan Sontag
Rose Styron
William Styron
Leon Wieseltier
PEN American Center
New York City

The post Writers in Prison appeared first on The New York Review of Books.