The Word of Our Testimony — Writing the World we Want into Existence

Yesterday, I attended the Writers Resist event in New Orleans. PEN organized such events all over the country, as many writers are concerned that the new administration will censor words and limit access to the press.  The alt-right has tried to characterize the writers of our media as “lugenpresse,” a Hitlerian term used to call the media that criticized the dictator “lying press.”  We declared collectively that we would sooner call them  “Wahrheitsgemäße Presse,” or truth-telling press. We came to listen to words that would tell the truth and give us the sense, as all good writing does, that our own thoughts are not held in isolation, that we have kindred spirits that transcend geography and time.

Writers Resist New Orleans, January 15, 2017. It’s remarkable how a room full of writers looks the same whether it is in New Orleans, New York, or the New Hebrides.

Forrest Farjadian, a school interpreter and assistant, sat next to me and told me he hoped to receive poetic inspiration. Indeed, the words spoken were adamant and unapologetic. Authors recited included Audre Lorde, June Jordan, first-person accounts of torture at Guantanamo, contemporary Syrian poetry, letters from elementary school students who are worried about the incoming administration’s intentions toward people of color, and even J.K. Rowling, for whom magic is a metaphor for the freedom of creativity.

Readers at Writers Resist New Orleans, January 15, 2017

Sadly no magic wand, no “Accio Hillary” could take away the spectre of Voldemort that hangs over the future, but not in New Orleans, as not even voodoo curses stick for very long in such a festive town. The Art Garage was filled with people of every ethnicity, women in head scarves, men of color with long beards, lesbians holding hands, Latinas in leather jackets, white men in hipster jeans and glasses. The readers were gender-diverse and racially mixed. The readings all pointed heterogeneously to one conclusion — the words we speak and write are testimonies to combat dark nights of the national zeitgeist. Indeed, we were the nightmare embodied of at least a few of the stadium rally-goers who wore obscene t-shirts chanting “lock her up.” We are the cultural elite that they cannot understand, smugly vegan, hemp-woven accessories, internationally minded, welcoming of difference, brainiac urbanites. How different we are from they are, and how frightened each faction defining America is from one another.

All we can promise to do is to keep thinking freely, keep writing despite pressures to the contrary, keep producing evidence that we will not be silenced.