The word in Rushdie's eye

2023-02-17T10:36:30.774Z

To give in to the radicals is to renounce what one is, to die while alive. But in this case not only the writer dies, the entire society dies

Accustomed as we are to the trivialization of the written word, so used to contribute nothing or to feed us with junk content that seeks to quickly capture attention or entertain us with stupid frivolities, perhaps we have forgotten its true value.

We no longer remember that we have not always had print within reach and that for millennia reading and writing was the exclusive preserve of the privileged classes.

Perhaps this is the form that the gradual annihilation of literature has taken in the West: making the whole world literate and then emptying the content of what the majority of the population ends up reading, thus neutralizing it from any possibility of political contestation.

Salman Rushdie, from his physical recovery loaded with dignity, gives us a lesson in integrity and makes more alive the truth that not a few of us have known first hand: that the free word continues to be threatened.

In many countries explicitly with imprisonment, threats, harassment and harassment of all kinds to writers, poets and journalists.

In other cases there is no public news of the punishments inflicted on those who dare to break the law of what cannot be said, let alone published, but the perpetrators, many of them women, may well account for family exiles, exile, and violence.

In this sense, the honest words of the British writer in the interview that Eduardo Lago did with him breathe a breath of life into all those who cannot avoid risking it to tell, to say,

to write what their consciences and their creativity dictate to them.

The question that has haunted me since the Rushdie stabbing is: can we prevent it?

Can we avoid writing what we want to write?

Can we attend to the risks that this job still entails today?

When free speech is threatened as radically as fanatics do, there isn't much choice, really.

They are the ones who put us at a crossroads with two possible paths: either pay attention to them and keep quiet or continue writing.

The consequences of the second option are well known: that they attack your person in one way or another, even ending your life.

The derivatives of the first are not so obvious, but in the short and long term, giving in to the radicals is giving up what one is, dying while alive.