Keynote, National Writers” Union Boston Annual Meeting, 2 February 2025

Thank you for having me here, today. It’s entirely Charles Coe’s fault. Who can say no to Charles Coe? Raise your hand if you can say no to Charles Coe… I didn’t think so.

Anyway, bear with me, I just got new glasses. It had been about 7 or 8 years since my last prescription and I kept noticing that I was misreading things. I have drugstore readers in increments from 1.25 to 3.00 all over the house. Depending on the time of day and how much strain I’ve put on my eyes, I change from one pair to another until I find the right one. (These, by the way, are progressive lenses, so please, if we talk later on don’t misinterpret: I am not really looking you up and down, just trying to bring you into focus.)

I had more than one moment of panic trying to come up with something to say to you, before I realized that I was trying too hard, proceeding as if I was supposed to know what needs to be said and panicked that I didn’t, that I don’t. I’m so full of shit that I think I’m supposed to come up with some kind of answer when all I can really do is pose questions. Well, maybe I’ll make a suggestion or two before my talk is finished.

Anyway, back before I got my new eyewear, prepping for today, I went online and had a look at the account of your annual meeting and book party last year. I read about last year being the return to meeting in-person, but I misread it: for a brief moment I thought it said in-prison! (Orwell said “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” but I don’t think that’s what he had in mind.)

And yet… that’s no joke, writers in prison: Some years ago I served as chair of PEN New England, and my eyes were opened to the situation of writers around the world: poets, playwrights, journalists, satirists, especially satirists, like Maung Thura, of Myanmar, known as Zargana, a comedian along the lines of Jon Stewart or John Oliver; or Nurmuhemmet Yasin, a Uigher writer who remains imprisoned since February 2005 on charges of ‘inciting separatism’ for his story “The Wild Pigeon,” an allegory about the son of a pigeon king trapped and caged while on a mission to find a new home for his flock.; or Ashraf Fayahd, a poet charged with apostasy by the Saudi government and sentenced to death, his sentence later commuted to — only! — 8 years and 800 lashes. And then there are the extrajudicial killings of writers like the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Cambodian writer Kem Ley and, more recently, Jamaal Khashoggi, a Saudi national but an American journalist, and then, just this past weekend, the body of Mexican journalist Alejandro Gallegos, who ran the news site La Voz del Pueblo, or “The Voice of the People.” was found in Tabasco.

Hashem Shabaani, a poet and founder of a library and Community Center in southern Iran, was executed by the theocracy for Moharebeh or “waging war on God”, that is, for writing in Arabic, the language of the minority in the south of Iran. I wrote this poem for him. (I think all you need to know going into it is that Khamaseen is a wind that blows out of Africa.)

FOR A SLAIN POET

i.m. Hashem Shaabani

Your killers drew the zipper across the black bag like

the sign friends made across their mouths

when you opened yours in the wrong company

and carried you out of there.

Kings, we all know, build palaces,

hoard riches, gather armies of impoverished

and fierce young men, and make war.

But a king who will kill a poet out of fear?

There remains no evil on earth he will not do.

You, however, who have reminded us

of the truth of the lovers we are, you are

already in paradise

where, solely for your pleasure,

the one god has bestowed upon you seventy-two

blank pages

and your favorite pen,

along with a whole new alphabet

made from the shadows of birds in flight,

the flash of ripples on the lake in sunlight,

letters in the shapes of the many intersecting shadows of the grass,

and the sheen of blown sand, sheared from the crest

of a shifting dune by the Khamaseen,

marks to represent the sound of weeping,

signs for the sound of laughter,

but nothing too clear, none of them

just right, nowhere the once-and-for-all expression

that would obliterate desire. If I thought

what you wanted was rest, if any of your poems

could be so construed, I would wish you rest.

The PEN Writers-at-Risk directory of those of us around the world detained, imprisoned, killed or disappeared for their writing runs to 140 pages, and it includes poets, journalists, novelists, podcasters, and other witnesses and commentators deemed dangerous by one government or another. It’s worth pointing out that in many cases, writers have been assassinated by extremists after the government has put a target on them by calling them traitors and “enemies of the people.” Thinking about these writers who have paid such a high price suggests to me that truth-telling — the fancy term is parrhesia — is a sacred duty. Parrhesia can be defined as speaking truth to power, yes, but has the sense also of an obligation to speak truth to power. It doesn’t matter whether you are a poet, novelist, essayist, memoirist, playwright, podcaster, or comedian, what Camus said holds true for all of us who write: “Whatever our personal weaknesses may be, the nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression.”

So here’s a truly hard question: we are, at least so far, protected by our constitution, which reads (it’s good to hear it aloud from time to time):

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

—so what reason do we have for not speaking out? Does the tradition of free expression count for anything? Does the first amendment really protect us? More importantly, do we believe that it does and will continue to do so?

Or have we timidly made a secret deal, secret most of the time even from ourselves, to “pipe down,” to compromise, to steer around certain things we know to be true? (After all, we live in a country that rests squarely on a mountain of lies about a greater genocide than the Nazis ever dreamed of. And the truth that the institutions of our society were largely financed by treating human beings as livestock, may soon be forbidden, history recast as “woke-ism”.) Everywhere people are encouraged to remain ignorant of the truth, or to at least talk about — and write about — something else, anything else.

How is it we have consented to our own marginalization? And have we thereby betrayed our fellow citizens of The Republic of Letters, both those I’ve mentioned and those who continue to face, even now, far worse consequences than we?

Recently I watched a video of former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s farewell press conference. Two American journalists were forcibly removed, one after the other, for asking pointed questions about the slaughter in Gaza, first Max Blumenthal and then Sam Husseini. People saw Husseini, yelling “Get your hands off me! You are hurting me! Answer my question! Why won’t you answer my question?” lifted from his chair and carried out by uniformed officers. But can I tell you what I found more striking and much more demoralizing? The silence, the acquiescence, the obedience of nearly a hundred other journalists in the room, craning their necks to look, and then turning face front to hear the carefully curated official narrative rolled out one last time. Am I the only one here who sees that as a sin against parrhesia, a betrayal of our fellow writers, and a terrifying glimpse of the future, given where we are now?

My point is that we need one another now, facing a tsunami of untruth joined to megalomania and unrestrained cruelty. There’s a meme going around, you may have seen it: First they came for the journalists. We don’t know what happened after that. Clever, and chilling; but we do know what happened after that, don’t we? Because we know what always happens after that.

Nearly 500 journalists have been killed in Gaza this past year, trying to get the world to pay attention to the slaughter there. It’s disheartening: I used to believe there was a way to document atrocity that would wake outrage, and that it was an artist’s most essential purpose to do so. That the alternative was to compose new tunes for Nero’s fiddle or paint a ceiling for some pope or another. But if it was ever so — that art could wake outrage and stir populations to action — it doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. And I find that at least as horrifying as the torrent of images of shredded children pouring out of Gaza because it ensures that such carnage will continue, there and elsewhere. Are we so deeply compromised that we cannot, dare not, act? Has history so inured us to the cries of other human beings that we’re numb? Has a callus grown over our conscience?

I mean, it’s discouraging. Why go on? Why paint “The Slaughter Of The Innocents,” or Goya’s war series, or “Guernica” if nobody gives a damn? It is said that when Alexander II read the novelist Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook, he wrote to its author saying, “Sir, you have made me weep,” and within weeks he emancipated Russia’s serfs, whose oppression Turgenev had so compellingly portrayed. Now? Now Turgenev would likely be ignored, or he would get a prize, maybe, and be celebrated while the atrocities he documented continued.

I am circling around something hard to name here. I suppose one word for it is cynicism, another would be surrender. I’m doing my best to resist that. I suppose I am asking us all to confront our own disempowerment and ask where it comes from. I’m also trying to catch myself self-censoring, to stop gaslighting myself, to stop half-consciously sequestering certain things I know to be true, and to instead find a way to live and write with my whole self, with all I know, whether in a poem or story or essay or memoir. (Or even in a keynote address to a gathering of writers?)

The reason tyrants fear poets, storytellers, journalists is because we are, first and foremost, citizens of The Republic of Letters, a commonwealth that issues no passports because it transcends borders and boundaries. There are no citizenship papers; instead there are pages and pages to fill, witness to bear, questions to ask — a whole life’s worth. Tyrants throw tantrums when they understand that our first loyalty is to our fellow writers, our colleagues in the search for the truth.

And what is that? The truth. How does one find it? That question brings me round to my title today, inspired by the late Grace Paley who advised: “Write and write and write and write, then take out all the lies, it’s not as easy as you might think, taking out the lies.” I thought I’d have more to say about this treasured advice, but it would be pedantic to list all the types and degrees of lies — from whoppers to fibs, the malicious to the merely incorrect, omissions deliberate and not. The search for the lies to take out begins with an examination of the words themselves: some were always dishonest, others have been worn thin by history, still others are stealth advertisements for a poisonous and predatory worldview. Orwell said it all in Politics and the English Language; and I’ll bet each of us can find plenty of contemporary examples of the things he points out there. But Paley’s warning: “it’s not as easy as you might think, taking out the lies”? Oh man, that’s the hard work: to not only resolve not to repeat the lies we are offered, but to identify and take out the ones we discover we’re telling ourselves. As Isak Dinesen once wrote: “The truth is seldom beautiful, but the search for it always is.” That truth is not a perfect abstraction called “the Truth” but the refusal and removal of lies, of comforting untruths, of unquestioned assumptions and biases. For all of us, the work of parrhesia begins with becoming aware of what we have accommodated, incrementally and only half-consciously.

I want to recommend a book to you: Sebastian Haffner’s memoir: Defying Hitler. In it he recalls, clearly in hindsight, how Nazism took hold in Germany while he was growing up. Written just after WWII, the book is a revelation, chilling in its parallels to the present. One of the things Haffner remarks upon several times, is how, as Hitler rose to power, he was seen as a clown, a vulgar narcissist who could not be taken seriously, who certainly could not last. Over and over, people refused to believe that the worst would come to pass. And when the apoplectic bully spoke of “annihilating the Jewish race,” it was taken for hyperbole.

It’s been said that journalism is the first draft of history, but whatever our genre, as writers we’re all historians; like Haffner, we’re representatives of our time who insist that history is not a narrative edited and maintained by the powerful, by princes and Prime Ministers, and most definitely not by corporations and their PR firms. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera wrote that “The struggle of the people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” We are the ones writing the stories, poems, essays, that will stand as witness and as counterweight to the propaganda that will be fed to our children and grandchildren.

This is no time to play it safe. Shit just got real. The promised deportations have begun, the purges of civil servants, the vindictive attacks on political opponents. The battle over books, over curricula, over descriptions of reality has begun, and its effects will shape the future. Remember that the Hitler Youth of the 1930’s became the SS of the following decade; the red brigades were indoctrinated schoolchildren set loose as young adults to wreak the murderous havoc of the cultural revolution in China.

We need solidarity like never before. I hear writers saying ‘we’ll get through this,’ echoing the voices of Haffner’s neighbors in Germany. But we’re fast approaching the point at which the only way to “get through this” is compliance, the only way to “get through this” is to violate the first of Camus’ two commitments that grant our work its nobility: “the refusal to lie about what one knows.” And silence, now, is also a lie.

I once heard the great Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, on a panel at Brown University, speaking of his exile and of the murder of his friend and colleague, the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, by the Nigerian regime. I’ll never forget what he said that day, and I pass it along to you. A young writer in the auditorium asked him what we could do here in America, as writers with the kind of privilege not enjoyed in many other parts of the world. Soyinka paused a moment and then said, “I think that when you wake up in the morning, you should ask yourself, honestly, ‘What could I write today that would REALLY get me in trouble?’

I want to finish with a poem I wrote some years ago that speaks to the practice of Parrhesia. I mean it as encouragement, a kind of pep talk. It begins with an epigraph from the Greek tragic poet Aeschylus, from his play Agamemnon, which begins with these words from a messenger who has just run onto the stage:

The house itself, if it had a voice

Would speak out clearly. As for me,

I speak to those who understand;

if they fail, memories are nothing.

The poem is called “Messengers” —

We say what we know because we must.

You can cheer us or run us out of town.

It’s nothing at first, like rain on dust,

a hairline crack in the fault line’s crust,

a tentative first-person plural pronoun.

We say what we know because we must

recall, recount, redeem, and readjust

all that we’ve known, not for renown.

It’s nothing at first, like rain on dust,

or the first few tiny flecks of rust

on barrels buried underground.

We say what we know because we must

talk back to histories we do not trust,

relearn our own, and set them down.

It’s nothing at first, like rain on dust.

What does it mean to fear what’s just?

You can cheer us or run us out of town.

We say what we know because we must.

It’s nothing at first, like rain on dust.

Thank you for your attention and for having me here today.