Write when they put a price on your head

The attack in New York last Friday on the British writer of Indian origin Salman Rushdie, 33 years after the Iranian regime issued an edict putting a price on his head, is a chilling reminder of the pressures and threats that authors around the world face. .

In the last 2021 report of the PEN organization, founded a century ago in defense of literature and freedom of expression, more than 200 cases of persecuted writers and journalists are listed, a list that is made public each year on November 15 and in which they also include some cartoonists and artists who suffer severe threats, harassment, house arrest or imprisonment.

Along with the assassination in February of last year of the Lebanese editor Lokman Slim, a critic of Hezbollah, or the disappearance of the Rwandan poet Innocent Bahati,

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Fame and international recognition do not exempt the perpetrators from suffering harassment, as evidenced by the case, mentioned in the report, of the Belarusian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, who has lived in Berlin for two years, after she was charged by the Government and his books were withdrawn from the country's school curriculum.

The Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, also winner of the highest literary prize awarded by the Swedish Academy, also had problems in 2021: after the publication of his latest book,

, was accused of insulting the Turkish flag and the historic leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in those pages.

But perhaps the case that refers most directly to what happened with Rushdie is the stabbing of Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfuz in 1994 by Islamic extremists, in which he lost an eye and the mobility of an arm, although he managed to continue writing.

Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfuz.BERNARDO PÉREZ

The prohibition of certain books and the harassment of their authors could be said to be something as old as the printing press —just think of Luther or Fray Luis de León, imprisoned and tried for

.

But the persecution of Salman Rushdie and

it presents certain specificities that make it an extremely particular case.

On the one hand, the persecution of writers usually occurs within the borders of their country of origin or residence, and the threats usually come from the State, from mafia groups, as has been the case of the Mexican Lydia Cacho or the Italian Roberto Saviano. , or from terrorist gangs such as ETA in Spain, whose threats targeted intellectuals and journalists such as Fernando Savater or José María Calleja.

None of this was fulfilled in the case of the British: Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa from Iran in 1989 against the novelist, who lived in London and was born in Bombay, for which he was sentenced to death and offered three million dollars to Who would finish him off?

Hostility towards Rushdie's novel, in which he fabled about the life of the Prophet Muhammad and his contact with the Archangel Gabriel, had shown since its publication in the fall of 1988 that this issue was transnational.

Before Khomeini's edict there had been book pyres, riots in the streets of the UK and attacks on shops in various countries;

India, Pakistan, Egypt and South Africa had banned it, dozens of people died in street riots.

Two years after the edict and with Rushdie hidden and protected by the UK authorities, the Japanese translator of

, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death at the university where he taught in Tokyo, a crime that was never solved.

The Italian translator was also attacked at that time in his apartment in Milan by an Iranian and, in 1993, the book's Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, was shot several times and seriously injured.

The writer Roberto Saviano with the head of his police escort, in 2009 at the restaurant on Calle de Toledo in Naples.JOAO PINA

What other novel in the 20th century has aroused such a furious reaction?

"None," explains Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya over the phone, who after the publication of his book

decided to seek refuge outside of Central America.

It first came to Berlin in a program born on the initiative of Salman Rushdie himself, who promoted in 1993, while living in hiding, the creation of the now-defunct International Parliament of Writers, in response to the increase in attacks on writers and murders In Argelia.

Through this organization, several European cities, such as Barcelona, ​​agreed to welcome and support writers whose lives were in danger for one or two years.

In 1997, American businessman Henry Reese and his wife Diane Samuels heard Salman Rushdie speak about this network of refuge cities that tried to protect not only freedom of expression but also the physical safety of writers and decided to set up the same program in Pittsburgh, his city ​​in the United States.

Thus was born City of Asylum, whose task Rushdie and Reese were scheduled to discuss last Friday when the attack occurred.

Castellanos Moya was the second writer who participated in that program.

"It is a tragic paradox that Henry Reese was on stage, since he set up that program in Pittsburgh inspired by the Rushdie case," he reflects on the phone, and mentions other authors such as the Venezuelan Israel Centeno, who have been part of this same residence.

Demonstration in Paris in rejection of the attacks against the satirical weekly 'Charlie Hebdo' in January 2015. GETTY IMAGES

The author of

has been threatened by religious power, but his stabbing does not seem to have had the structure of the attack in Paris with rifles and firearms by the Kouachi brothers on the editorial office of the satirical magazine

in 2015, in in which 11 people were injured and 12 died, including director Stéphane Charbonnier,

, who had been identified by Al Qaeda in 2010 as a perpetrator to be exterminated.

About the feminist Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, a Dutch woman of Somali origin who was in politics and has written several books, she also weighs a fatwa and has been living in the United States for a few years.

Castellanos Moya points out a distinction between authors who are harassed for what they have written and those who suffer threats for their commitment to civil society as activists.

He also points to a shift in Latin America: “Writers are not threatened as much as journalists, who are now being killed and persecuted.

Perhaps because they are no longer afraid of fiction but of the truth, and of those who uncover shady deals.

The most ideological part was perhaps in the last century when they marked you as an apostate because with fiction you transgressed beliefs or evidenced the corruption of governments in a novel.

The eternal game of mirrors between reality and fiction established by novels from Miguel de Cervantes and

, that work that Rushdie admires so much, leads to tragic mistakes when what is invented is treated as truth.

“Fiction is then read as truth because there is no room to fantasize, and they think that you are making a manifesto”, concludes Castellanos Moya.

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