The Russian invasion of Ukraine has sparked a back-to-the-future Cold War frisson, both culturally and politically.
So, as 80 writers from around the world filed into the United Nations’ stately Trusteeship Council room on Friday, some may have flashed back to the heyday of high-stakes cultural diplomacy — or at least the pinnacle of the Nicole 2005 Kidman thriller “The Interpreter.”
The occasion was an Emergency World Voices Congress of Writers, convened by the writers’ organization PEN America. But after the opening hammer pounded, the group’s chief executive, Suzanne Nossel, dropped any idea that the grand setting meant a solution to the “cascade crises” of the moment was imminent.
The UN Security Council, which meets across the hall, noted them, counting among its permanent, vetoed members “the world’s most blatant aggressor” (Russia) and “the world’s worst writer’s keeper” (China).
“If these are the guardians of our freedom and security,” Nossel said, “we have a problem.”
Coinciding with PEN’s annual World Voices Festival, the convention was inspired by a similar emergency meeting held in New York City in May 1939, where some 500 writers, including Thomas Mann, Pearl Buck, and Dorothy Thompson, gathered to Europe’s slide into war. † But the writer’s role — and the nature of the emergency — has changed a lot since then.
For three hours there were impassioned statements about Ukraine, the assassination of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, social media polarization, climate change, the avalanche of disinformation and the global decline of democracy, along with pleas to remember, as a Sri Lankan novelist put it wryly: “the insignificant little countries” of the world.
There was a lot of messing around with the microphones and jokes about clumsy writers fiddling with microphones. But if there was an overarching theme, it was the belief in the old-fashioned power of stories.
“A poem cannot stop a bullet, a novel cannot defuse a bomb,” said Salman Rushdie. But writers can still “sing the truth and name the lies.”
“We need to work,” he declared, “to overthrow the false stories of tyrants, populists, and fools by telling better stories than them — stories people would actually like to live in.”
The rhetoric quickly reached a cruising altitude of about 30,000 feet and mostly stayed there. But there were also passionate calls for solidarity with Ukraine at this time from a delegation of Ukrainian writers.
Andrey Kurkov, a novelist and the president of PEN Ukraine, attacked Vladimir Putin’s attack on the territory, culture and history of Ukraine, which he described as an attack on the entire world.
“He’s not just destroying Ukraine,” Kurkov said. “He tries to destroy life on earth, threaten anyone with nuclear weapons.”
There were many complaints that, as American novelist Siri Hustvedt put it, “literature lives on the fringes of culture, especially in the United States. But some championed the less lofty forms of storytelling.
Luiza Fazio, a Brazilian screenwriter, said it was pop culture that shaped the imagination of most people, especially young people, for better or for worse. (Are superhero movies, she asked, “normalize war” and “glorify violence”?)
Shehan Karunatilaka, a Sri Lankan novelist, commented that it was not a “well-researched novel” but social media hashtags such as #GoHomeGota that have fueled recent protests against Sri Lanka’s strong president Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
“Let’s not be too snobbish about the written word,” he said. “Sometimes a well-choreographed TikTok can bring down a tyrant.”
Franco-Algerian novelist Walid Hajar Rachedi recalls his shock when he learned that one of the gunmen in the 2015 terrorist attack on the Bataclan nightclub in Paris grew up in the same suburb as him. As a writer, Rachedi said, “I believe in the power of stories.” But he asked if a novel like his own well-received debut, “What Would I Do in Paradise?” could really counterbalance the story that turned that young man into a murderer.
“We’re here in New York, and it’s very beautiful,” Rachedi said. “But does it make a difference outside the world of literature?”
The French-Moroccan writer Leila Slimani listed the estimated 700 million people in the world who, like her mother and grandmother, had never learned to read or write. “Perhaps the first thing we have to fight for is this fundamental right,” she said.
As for the United States, there have been references to Republican-led efforts to ban books and curb race education. But some speakers warned of the subtler forces that compel and limit the imagination.
Chinese-born novelist Yiyun Li recalled how, as an 18-year-old, she had excelled at writing propaganda in the Chinese military, a job she took because it was better than cleaning toilets or feeding the pigs.
Recently, she overheard her American-born son and a friend talk about how they couldn’t win a school poetry competition unless their poems contained certain “key words,” such as “injustice” and “police brutality.” Can’t a poet also ‘write about flowers’, they asked?
Our role, she said, “is to make sure they know they don’t have to write the keywords like I did when I was in China.”
Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University (and a sharp critic of American-style identity politics), called on writers to cultivate imaginative openness to “the minds of everyone else, not just the cultural other.”
“We need to make it harder to speak so confidently about what’s wrong, about what’s wrong with the people we think are behind what’s wrong, and we need to develop some humility and self-doubt,” he said.
While there was no direct debate (let alone Khrushchev’s shoes being slammed), there was a clear disagreement. In his comments, Cameroon-American novelist Patrice Nganang noted that more than 50 countries in Africa had so far refused to impose sanctions on Russia and support Ukraine. But African writers, he said, should not be ashamed of their country’s lack of enthusiasm for a “unipolar world.”
“The African people are realizing very quickly that it is the same countries that have chained the African continent and the black population for so long that are crying out for freedom at Ukraine’s borders,” he said.
Kurkov, who spoke last, offered a response. It’s normal, he said, to feel one’s own “toothache” most acutely. But “I myself feel a toothache for Sri Lanka, for Africa, for Palestine.”
“Always remember that there is no competition of tragedies,” he said. “If we can help, we should help.”
At the end, there was an informal (and unanimous) vote on one preliminary proposal: that PEN initiate an oral history project on the present moment, similar to the one undertaken by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.
If the Congress itself felt like a very rough first part, so be it.
“These are writers,” Nossel said after the group posed for a portrait. “You can’t script them.”