When I use the term "limited idealism" in my title I am referring to myself. One must face one's own shortcomings and continue to grow and not simply reject the source of those limits for they are the simultaneously the primary source of growth.
Last week I sent an email to a number of friends and acquaintances announcing that my favorite week of the year was coming up: The PEN World Voices Festival. In the email I listed the events I was planning on attending, suggested friends purchase their own tickets and commented on the fact that there were no queer events, however, I am not as up on my queer writer names as I ought to be so I cannot say there is not representation. But I knew well enough that of course there was a gay writer in the lot and perhaps there was only one.
I have never been able to attend every single PEN festival event. Sometimes they are at the same time sometimes I have to work. But I do recall always having to make that hard choice. Some events I remember being amazing were just two years ago. There was a panel that I showed up quite late for that was about the prison systems in the United States and Ireland and other places (I was late). Michelle Alexander was there. Another event that year included a small panel in a small room in an independent music school on a small street on the imperial crackdown on Hungarian arts funding. There was the opening event at the 92nd Street Y with writers reading in their mother tongues and Patti Smith sang a ballad to the empty chair who represented those unable to attend because they were in prison or because they were not allowed to enter the US.
The first PEN World Voices Festival event I ever went to was a tribute to the poet Czeslaw Milosz. Ryszard Kapuscinski was there reading a Milosz poem in Polish. It was at Hunter College.
Now events are being held at Cooper Union and Joe's Pub. NYU and the New School. I am not upset about the idea of going to a literary event turned cabaret of translated Japanese texts while sipping a fine cocktail in the casual glamorous atmosphere of the Public Theater's fancy bar. However, who can afford the ticket price and Joe's minimum food/drink purchase? Not everyone. Not a whole lot of people.
I remember two years ago I was thinking critically about PEN and accessibility in regards to a panel about the gentrification of New York and the weird little stipulation of purchasing tickets online only - not at the door in cash. That was weird. Who are they trying to keep out? So, I suppose, my thoughts tonight are thoughts that have been happening.
But I've always trusted PEN.
Something changed in January. They brought in a new Executive Director, Suzanne Nossel. When I received the member email announcing her appointment I did my research and I was horribly confused. She is an imperialist. It's weird because she was coming from Amnesty International - how did she get in there? But there was a lot of controversy surrounding her appointment at Amnesty - none at PEN. Yet even more confusing.
How can an organization state a mission based on Freedom of Expression and be led by a pro-NATO interventionist? It's flabbergasting. And then I kind of just blocked it all out - because I guess that's kind of what everyone else was doing.
And then I got the PEN World Voices Festival calendar of events in the mail. On Bravery. Yet. The panels are more consumer-friendly than political or critical as they had been in the past. There is a panel on gender that is completely exclusionary of transgender. There is a panel about publishing headlining the most conservative looking man I have ever seen at a literary event -- Ah, and here we have our gay man: The rich, married, Ivy Leaguer with a dog. The closing ceremony on Freedom is to be given by Sonia Sotomayor. Two years ago it was Wole Soyinka at the New York Public Library. It was amazing.
Something has gone awry.
Tonight a lone man was protesting Nossel. A PEN member. A paying attendee of the event. The only voice challenging these changes. An older white man, of course. Still in the 60s THANK GOD.
PEN leadership refused to respond to him at the beginning of the event. His concerns are legitimate and should have been addressed to appease everyone in the audience. Rushdie simply cursed him out. Right on, Salmon, your charm is commendable.
Bravery is the theme of this year's PEN literary festival and it is a farce.
Where are the transgender voices? Where are the queers and the lesbians? Why isn't PEN taking advantage of their clout to speak out against the US government? How can Salmon Rushdie get up and stand in front of us and say that we are living in a different America than we were 9 years ago when the festival started?
Today we are still in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today Guantanamo is still open and over 100 prisoners are on hunger strike and the US is force-feeding a number of them.
And what about this immediate city? What about stop-and-frisk? The prison system is only getting worse. What about the homeless people and the offensive city-wide subway campaigns that are astoundingly offensive to young mothers? Why is PEN silencing the controversial topics by not giving them platform?
If I noted any shortcomings in this organization I have idolized since I first heard of it nine years ago then I was naive not to know what I could see coming.
And I'm not saying there aren't powerful, thought provoking events this year with amazing writers and important minds but I am saying there's an obvious conservatization that is forcefully happening under the guise of freedom of expression.
I'm saying, I'm confronting my own limited idealism and I choose not to be on the side of exclusionary politics that maintain the status quo of power politics. I stand in solidarity with the most radical and dissident voices in the name of peace and freedom for all humans.
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