The Fifth PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature was a literal, cultural and international exchange, featuring 160 writers from 41 countries where 18 different languages are spoken.
The What’s Taboo? segment revealed the back-story behind the love story of acclaimed works through the mouths of the creators. Authors Salwa Al-Neimi, Zsófia Bán, Nicole Brossard, and Rakesh Satyal described how their confronting issues of sex, gender and identity in their works gave been provocative ins cultures across the globe. Sex, Religion and politics, are the infernal trio, according to Al-Neimi. “All writers know about this. All writers write about this,” she said. Controversy and censorship have and still are the consequences facing gutsy writers who tackle the sex taboo.
“If people were so stupid as to censor the book, then I would become famous. It’s like that in the Arab world. As soon as you get censored, you become famous,” said Al-Neimi, Syrian author of the erotic novella The Proof of Honey. Brossard then humorously added, “or you might go to jail.”
In non-democratic societies where freedom of expression and action are lacking all taboos are political, according to Al-Neimi. “You can’t separate sex from religion,” she said about the political structure that controls censorship and encompasses all. Banned in many Islamic countries, The Proof of Honey, written in a feminist view with slathers of male chauvinism, put forward an Arab outlook on sex. The books eroticism and lyricism generated controversy in narrow-minded and sexually guarded worlds. Exploration of this taboo provoked the Arab world, threatening its status as a sexually veiled culture.
The writers confessed their misdemeanors for unleashing the “taboo” in their writings, and a solution seem to emerge. If a merger of the forbidden and the writers’ storytelling hits a harmonious note, or at least a humorous one, the taboo may be broken. “One thing that will cross censorship is the beauty; if there is beauty in the transgression, no matter how it’s being made, somehow the taboo falls apart,” said Brossard, a French Canadian poet, novelist and essayist.
“I belong to a generation that has been naturally transgressing their sexuality and for me that and subverting is natural because it’s almost a duty and responsibility. Sexuality as a taboo can concern parts of the body, parts you can touch and parts you cannot, an animal as well,” she said. Brossard has published more than 30 books, which have been widely translated and anthologized.
Satyal, bouncing off that theory, said, “When people laugh, they let their guard down, which is what breaking the taboo really is. Comedy is a medium that speaks very well, especially in American culture. The smartest political commentaries express themselves in a comedic way; those are the more insightful vehicles we have for discussing taboo and delivering it.”
He further said that comedians are popular because they are “beautiful, funny and they have a way of leveling out that tension.” Even if literary artists juggle the outside reality and the inner fiction within the binds of their books, interior censorship was never a resort to appeal to societal demands. They declined to be restricted.
Upon exploration of the feminine body through lesbian feminist poetry, Notebook of Roses and Civilization, Brossard didn’t reduce the intensity in her lyrical descriptions of lesbian desire. “It just came natural for me to write them. There was a dimension of being which was sexual, spiritual and affectionate,” she said. When passion is involved, writers shouldn’t think twice about their intentions. “I never felt I was courageous, I just wanted to make space for another dimension in the imagination,” said Brossard.
“I just write, write, write and think later, Oh my god, what the hell did I just write?” Satyal said. When in the zone, he said he tells more than he thought he would. The author elaborated on the nuisances and criticisms that he’s been subjected to. In regards to his debut novel, Blue Boy, Satyal said, “People told me, ‘Don’t you feel you’re making fun of Hinduism? How can you take this god and recast in such a way? That’s horrible.’”
Blue Boy tells the story of a pre-teen, Indian-American boy, convinced he’s a Hindu deity, struggling with his homosexual identity as he is surrounded by Midwestern stereotypes in America. According Satyal, writers have to be aware on how they transgress a taboo.
On the flip side, the unwavering attitude in these writers hasn’t paralyzed their desires to relate to their audiences. Criticism and controversy are always evident when foreign ideas are unleashed on the public. Thus, the refashioning and altering of raw thoughts and bold intentions are actions that writers need to sacrifice themselves for, at times.
“What I say to people is that I wrote the book I needed as a kid, and definitely did not have,” acknowledged Satyal. He wanted to create a fresh, inheritably gay Indian story and, being Indian and gay, he knew these affiliations were “very much at war with each other.” In regards to the taboo, Satyal said, “Our first reaction is to be ourselves, our default is ourselves, and then we are told by other people that it’s taboo and forbidden. So then we refashion our sexuality especially.”
“Writers nowadays have to refashion their whole language and readers have to refashion their way of reading,” said Bán. “It’s a change of language, like changing from your mother tongue to a different language.” Her story collection Night School: A Reader for Adults, received the Attila József Prize for literature, another award among the many she has garnered as a writer, literary historian and critic. Born in Rio de Janeiro, raised in Hungary and currently working in Budapest, Bán would have the passport to prove her awareness of the impact literature has on diverse cultures.
What’s Taboo? was held at the Austrian Cultural Forum, 11 East 52nd street on May 1, 2009, 3-4 p.m. Free admission but, reservation was required. It was cosponsored by the Austrian Cultural Forum and the Québec Government Office in New York. Festivities ran from April 27- May 3.