The burning of The Satanic Verses in public squares reminds us of those who, when they heard the word culture, put their hands on their guns. Yet, however fragile books may be, they nonetheless endure and are reprinted, and the important ones have their posterity assured; the life of a man, however, is unrecoverable. The death of Salman Rushdie has not just been publicly demanded (and we know of enough authors who have been killed in secret, because of their books or political convictions) but is to be rewarded by a huge sum of money, in the style of the tempting bounties once placed on the heads of notorious malefactors.
The Rushdie case is, thus, entirely different from that of Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn. Even in the worst crimes of Stalinism, in the demonic assassination of so many artists and thinkers (always performed in the dark and camouflaged by the authorities) there was generally a certain prudence exhibited, a hint of embarrassment displayed; in short, a fear of publicity. The order to assassinate Rushdie was public, repeated, relentless, addressed to thousands of potential avengers, and, despite its obvious political motivation, it was decreed in the name of religion.
The threat against the life of Salman Rushdie, proclaimed openly, unequivocally, awakens memories of Nazi rites but it is also reminiscent of Stalinist justice; the accusation cannot be scrutinized, the faithful millions called on to repudiate the book are also forbidden to read it. As under Nazism or Stalinism, what is asked of the followers is blind obedience to a decision taken by the leaders on their behalf.
We need not necessarily admire The Satanic Verses or subscribe to its author’s polemic in order to support his right to create and to express his opinion. (This statement may sound pedestrian to Western readers; in great parts of the socialist East, however, readers and writers are still longing for this simple, banal reality.) This is imperative, especially for those who have not been seduced by the novelist’s art, or who reject his ideas. To side with Salman Rushdie despite the feeling of irritation that his work may have aroused in us is an elementary obligation, just as it is an elementary obligation not to escape into puerile comparisons or frivolous relativism when a life is at stake.
The Nazi crimes were a precise execution of Nazi ideology, which openly professed hatred and murder. The Stalinist crimes, we are told today, were actually in contradiction to Marxist ideology, which claims humanistic values at its roots. (Marx: “Man is the most precious capital.”) If Salman Rushdie’s book has truly offended the sensitivities of the Muslim faithful, is it then necessary to burn the book and to kill the author? Is such a decision in accordance with the deep beliefs of the Islamic religion or is it, in fact, an aberration, a desecration of the Muslim faith? Is this the decision of a dictator who is courageously executing the inherent, irreducible tenets of his faith, or of a dictator who is criminally subverting his own ideology?
The answer to these questions shouldn’t be proposed, I think, by Christians, Jews, or atheists; they must come from Muslims themselves, from Egyptians, Pakistanis, Turks, Moroccans, Yemenites, Palestinians, Jordanians, Iraqis, Yugoslavian and Soviet Muslims. In answering, Islam will unveil itself to the world. That answer has become important not only for Muslims but for the sake of international peace.
In recent weeks, not a few people have found the strength and common sense to repeat, even for those who do not want to hear, that: a work of fiction is to be judged by its spiritual and literary values, no matter how irritating or enraging it may be, whereas a society — as well as a secular ideology or a religion — is to be judged by the manner in which it tolerates the challenge of a work of fiction.
In the silence that comes from the socialist East, I think I also discern this message.
The Cuban Shipwreck
Reading the García Márquez article, datelined “Havana,” in the New York Times a few days ago, I took away a more vivid image of the tragedy that has overtaken Elian Gonzalez than I had previously culled from the American papers. With the powerful storytelling talent that distinguishes all his work, Márquez conveys to the reader, in less than one of four newspaper columns, the biography of the troubled marriage of an amiable Cuban couple and of their amiable divorce, and also reveals in the deliberate misapplication of a single word in his final paragraph — the word “shipwreck”—his own distinctive ideological slant on the constitutional realities of American life.
In the article, we find out about Elizabeth Brotons, “an amiable and hard-working chief housekeeper at a hotel,” who fell in love at 14 with Juan Miguel Gonzalez, whom she married at 18, and from whom she separated finally on “the most amicable terms.” Everything, according to Márquez, seemed to have been as perfectly amiable in the aftermath of the couple’s divorce as it had been during their marriage — until, that is, the mother, without the father’s knowledge or permission, decided to take their son out of Cuba.
As Márquez writes, “An infallible formula for being well-received as an immigrant in the United States is to be shipwrecked in her territorial waters.” So Elian’s 28-year-old mother, who wishes to defect to America with her son, starts to prepare just such a shipwreck. And so here begins Elian’s tragedy — not on American soil but on the Cuban shore. Foolishly, Elian’s mother undertook the illegal voyage on an illegal boat — no other means of escape was available to her — in order to bid goodbye forever to amiable Cuba. She is helped by the leader of this risky adventure, her lover — according to Márquez, not at all amiable, but in fact a neighborhood “tough”—Lazaro Munero, who takes fourteen people in his improvised aluminum boat, including his younger brother, his aged father, a convalescing mother, as well as his partner’s entire family. The trip was plagued with mechanical mishaps from the start, and ended abruptly in “an inferno of panic” at sea, when the boat capsized after the failing motor was thrown overboard by the captain. Among those who drowned was Elian’s mother.
Had the adventure succeeded without incident, mother and son would, of course, have settled in Miami, and Elian would no longer have lived more or less between two divorced parents as he did in Cuba but would have remained solely in the mother’s household on American soil. For Elian and his mother, this would have constituted a solution to their Cuban problem — surely a drastic problem, in the mother’s estimation, if it required the drastic solution of this dangerous journey by sea. But instead, remarkably, Elian survived and was received in Miami by eager relatives, who had themselves found an American solution to their own Cuban problem some decades earlier.
From the start, American public opinion was heavily in favor of the boy being returned promptly to his father, who appeared to love him, who immediately claimed him, and who, without hesitation, asked for his return. After considering the family situation in Cuba, the American legal authorities swiftly decided in favor of Elian’s father’s claim and against the claim being made by Elian’s Cuban relatives in Florida. The Florida relatives, as was their right, then utilized whatever legitimate legal channels were available to challenge the judgment of the authorities and to seek to have that judgment overthrown. Their stubbornness was fortified both by their ferocious hatred of the Cuban communist system and by their exuberant exploitation of rights as free citizens in a free country. Despite their legal efforts, however, and despite the pressure from right-wing American politicians in Washington — and also despite the clichéridden, noisy demonstrations (complete with schoolchildren making canned speeches) against America staged by the Cuban government throughout Cuba — the American judicial system, coolly, commonsensically, in accordance with the law, without an explosion of vile propaganda or stupid political rhetoric, continued to confirm its initial decision to return the boy to Cuba. All of these details are missing from the painstakingly detailed account of Elian’s tragedy as narrated by García Márquez.