By Andrea Aguilar
The attack on Salman Rushdie last Friday is a stark reminder of the pressures and threats faced by writers around the world. The latest report by PEN, founded a century ago to defend literature and freedom of expression, lists some 200 writers and journalists who have been murdered or persecuted for their views. Along with the assassination, in February 2021, of the Lebanese publisher Loqman Slim, who was critical of Hezbollah, and the disappearance of the Rwandan poet Innocent Bahati, REN mentions the writer Sergio Ramírez, against whom the President of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, issued an arrest warrant last year, forcing him to remain in exile in Spain.
Fame and international recognition do not save authors, as shown by the case of Belarusian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, who has been living in Berlin for two years, and whose books were removed from the school curriculum by the government of her country. But the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk also had problems in 2021: After the publication of his latest book, titled “Plague Nights”, he was accused of insulting the Turkish flag and Kemal Atatürk.
The case that most resembles what happened to Rushdie, however, is the stabbing of the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz in 1994 by Islamists, as a result of which the writer lost one eye and the mobility in one arm.
The banning of certain books and their authors is no doubt as old as printing. But the pursuit of Salman Rushdie and his “Satanic Verses” has certain peculiarities. Usually, the threats are launched across the borders of the country of origin or residence and originate from the state, mafia organizations (as in the cases of the Mexican Lidia Cazzo or the Italian Roberto Saviano) or terrorist organizations (such as ETA in Spain). None of this happened with Rushdie: In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a “fatfa” against the writer, who was born in Bombay and lived in London. Because of this fatfa, two translators and a publisher were retaliated against, there were riots in the streets of Britain, people were killed in India, Pakistan, Egypt and South Africa, and attacks were launched on bookstores.
No other novel of the 20th century provoked such furious reactions, as the El Salvadoran author Horacio Castegianos Moya points out, who was forced to leave his country after threats he received because of one of his books. He fled to Berlin thanks to a program launched by Rushdie in 1993, the creation of the International Parliament of Writers. Through this organization, which no longer exists, many European cities hosted for a year or two writers whose lives were in danger.
Source: Capital
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