( Yuki Iwamura / AP Photo )
As PEN America celebrates its 100th year, Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, the human rights and free expression organization, and Ayad Akhtar, president of PEN America, playwright and novelist and the author of Homeland Elegies: A Novel (Little, Brown and Company, 2020), talk about today's gathering of renowned writers from around the world to talk about drawing on the organization's history to fight threats to free expression going forward.
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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Today, at the New York Historical Society, PEN America, an organization dedicated to defending free expression, if you don't know them, is celebrating their 100-year anniversary with a special event called Words on Fire: Writing, Freedom, and the Future, which is being described as an afternoon of urgent public conversation on the issues that drive the world's leading free expression advocacy organization in this dire moment. Words on Fire is taking place from 4:00 PM until 7:00 PM today, featuring renowned writers, Margaret Atwood, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Dave Eggers, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie among others.
The New York Historical Society is also currently hosting the special installation, PEN America at 100, a century of defending the written word, featuring artifacts, photos, and letters from PEN America's decades in defense of free speech. With me now are Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, and Ayad Akhtar, President of PEN America. Maybe you know him, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, novelist, author of the recent Homeland Elegies, a novel, which came out in 2020.
They are both leading today's event and are going to talk more about it, as well as about the person who is missing from today's event, who was supposed to be one of those featured at it, Salman Rushdie who, of course, was attacked on the stage last month. I'm told that Ayad Akhtar is a friend of his. Ayad, welcome to WNYC. Suzanne, always a pleasure, welcome back.
Suzanne Nossel: Thank you.
Ayad Akhtar: Thanks, Brian. It's an honor to be here. I've been listening to your voice for so many years. It's quite a mind trip to be talking to it.
Brian Lehrer: I'm really honored and blown away to be hearing that from you. Suzanne, talk about Words on Fire and talk about the absence of Salman Rushdie.
Suzanne Nossel: Sure. Look, this is the 100th birthday of PEN America, so it's a momentous occasion. We've assembled a group of writers who we think of its prophets in a sense, Margaret Atwood, Dave Eggers, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, all who have written so bracingly about alternative futures, a characterizing phenomenon that we could not even imagine that we now see manifest in our own society here in the United States. We're looking forward to what they will bring us as a steer for our next 100 years as we launch off into our second century as an organization.
Probably the first person that we had in mind when we thought of who to bring together for this occasion was Salman Rushdie because he's been such an iconic part of our organization for so long. PEN, all over the world, mobilized on his behalf during the fatwa back in 1989 and for years thereafter, while he was in hiding, making sure that his words and books stayed alive and in circulation pushing back against the impulse to reject them out of fear. Then Salman, when he came out of hiding, became president of PEN America in 2004, founded our PEN World Voices Festival, and has been almost in daily contact, I would say, with me and with our organization ever since. We had that plan.
He was part of our lineup. He was going to be in dialogue with Ayad. Then, of course, we got the horrifying news in the middle of August, and that is no longer possible. Certainly, he is an inspiration, and he's helped crystallize our sense of mission for this event.
Brian Lehrer: For people who don't know the history that Suzanne was referring to, Salman Rushdie's book, The Satanic Verses, a novel that he wrote way back in 1988, was banned in multiple countries. Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini ordered a fatwa mandating his murder, forcing Salman Rushdie to go into hiding for nearly a decade.
Suzanne was talking about how, at some point, he decided to come out. He had to live life, and nothing like this happened until just August 12th at the Chautauqua Institution in Upstate New York, where he was preparing to give a talk about exiled writers seeking safety in America, ironically. Then he wasn't safe at that moment. Ayad, are you close to Salman Rushdie? I'm told you're friends. What are you thinking and feeling about this at this moment?
Ayad Akhtar: Well, it hit me hard. Salman, he has been a role model for me, for my entire writing career. I encountered Satanic Verses when I was a teenager, and it really was a pivotal moment in my development. I grew up in a Muslim family, in a Muslim community, and the book was universally reviled and disgusted amongst those that I loved. When I read the book in college, right after graduating high school, it changed my life. It really opened-- I often say that my childhood faith was crashing upon the shores of my intellectual development when I encountered it.
It was really the linchpin that made me see the stories that I had been taught to take for true were actually potentially constructions and stories to be told and retold and reshaped. Salman has stood at the center of what it is for me to be a writer writing the truth to a community that doesn't necessarily always want to hear it for much of my life. Hearing what happened to Salman at Chautauqua actually happened was devastating. Thankfully, he wasn't killed by it.
The goal was not fulfilled, but it is a reminder for many who don't know about this episode what a pivotal place freedom of expression really plays in our societies, in our democracy, self-governance, in advance, in knowledge, the free exchange of ideas. Salman himself has said that what is the freedom of expression if I don't have the freedom to offend you? There is no freedom. I think that there is this debate that we increasingly maybe begin to lose sight of the centrality of freedom over the concerns that some of us increasingly have about the harms that speech maybe causing to certain communities.
Brian Lehrer: Can you talk about where that line is for you? I'll just repeat that Rushdie quote that you just cited. "If I don't have the freedom to offend you, then it isn't really freedom of speech," but where is the line if you think there even is a line between criticizing those in power, like the government or politicians, and saying hateful things about a certain demographic group, for example?
Ayad Akhtar: It's a good question, Brian, and I think it's a question that I can't answer simply. What I certainly can say is that the freedom to speak has to be primary and has to be paramount over the concern around harm. I think the extent to which those two become competing [unintelligible 00:07:39] I think we are misguided fundamentally in how we are thinking about freedom of expression.
Brian Lehrer: When you look, Suzanne, at the 100 years of PEN America, how have the debates changed in these last 100 years, because now, we could go on and we've done segments with you and with other guests on this, on what we were just talking about, Ayad and me, on where is that line between celebrating freedom of speech and celebrating restraint at not saying hateful things that might cause real harm to people? Is that what PEN America was talking about 100 years ago when the organization was founded or really very different kinds of questions?
Suzanne Nossel: Well, it's interesting because what the exhibition and our delve into our history shows is that there are certain throughlines. For example, in the PEN Charter, which was adopted back in 1948, there is the concept of free speech encompassing voluntary restraint, the notion that you don't say everything that comes to mind, that we all have to exercise a certain discretion.
That is not a novel concept, and they recognize that that was elemental to the defense of free speech, that it was only if most people, most of the time, exercised that discretion that you could really leave things open so that when it was necessary to offend or when conveying a certain idea would cause inevitable offense, that there was space to do that and that you didn't give impetus to the effort to shut down and narrow the breadth of permissible discourse. That's an old idea.
I think what is new to some degree is just the degree to which the weight of our debates has to some degree shifted or expanded from focusing exclusively or primarily on infringements, on free speech by government to all kinds of other constraints on open expression, whether that's the moderation of content online, or to cancel culture where it's speech versus speech.
People feel silence because speech can be stigmatizing because there can be online harassment or other repercussions that are delivered informally from speech without the hand of government, but nonetheless, having a silencing effect, forms of self-censorship that take hold as we try to navigate the minefield of sensitivities that govern today's society in a pluralistic diverse country and polity. I think they're both elements of continuity in PEN.
I think the fundamental mission, the defense of free speech, the idea that writers have a duty one unto the other to stand with those who pay the highest price for exercising their voice for voicing their opinions, telling their stories that others need to rally around people like Salman Rushdie when they step out courageously to do that. That really has been extraordinarily powerful through line. I could read back some of these letters from many, many decades ago and feel as if I could have written them myself.
Ayad Akhtar: Brian, can I--
Brian Lehrer: Yes, go ahead. Sure.
Ayad Akhtar: I think The Rushdie Affair is a good example, we here in New York City can't imagine that any of the claims of harm that the Muslim community may have felt so many of the Muslim community may have felt upon the publication of that book would justify any kind of response that it had amongst that community, but the fact is I grew up in a community that did feel harmed by it. The harm to the reputation of the prophet to the Muslim community, which itself was felt aggrieved and rightly so by a couple of centuries of exploitation at the hands of the great game for resources and positioning on the map and feeling maligned by the west and living in these countries, there was a larger context in which you could justify at least the claim that there had been significant harm and in a way coming from that community and recognizing that many, I loved felt aggrieved by what had happened.
It is a similar context. It's one that we can't necessarily identify with because we don't share those beliefs, but we share other beliefs. When those beliefs that we feel more attached to are attacked, then we understand a little bit better what it means for that sense of harm to be significant to us, but I still believe that someone is right and that in writing that book, he did more for us as Muslims. In my community, then he would've been not doing so. I think it's an important reminder and it's hard to remember it when the values are not our values.
Brian Lehrer: 212-433- WNYC, with Ayad Akhtar and Suzanne Nossel on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of PEN America, the free speech organization. Leslie in Somerset, you're on WNYC. Hi, Leslie.
Leslie: Hi. Hello, Brian. I'm so glad. This is my first time I've been been a listener forever.
Brian Lehrer: I'm so glad you're on. [crosstalk] Thank you. Go ahead.
Leslie: Okay. I only just turned on the radio when I heard your guest. I'm not even the man. I'm not even sure who anybody is. When I heard him saying, "We must have the free speech no matter what harm," he didn't say no matter what harm but the harm can be caused by it, whatever. All to say was when I heard that immediately, I called up my first time and I said, "Yes, you can offend people, but you cannot lie about consequences around them and you cannot tell lies. You have--"
Brian Lehrer: It's a great addition because we were talking about opinions or interpretations that offend people. Leslie, I'm going to leave it there for a time, but thank you for making your first call to the show, please call us again. Suzanne, one of the other contemporary debates around speech having to do with social media is pressure from one side, not to "sensor" if sensor is even the right word, and pressure from another side to monitor the main social media sites for disinformation, lies, as the caller says, untruths, that can be harmful to the public whether it's medical disinformation or anything else and calling on the social media companies to monitor and remove things that are deemed to be disinformation. From PEN America's free speech advocacy standpoint, where are you on that complicated question?
Suzanne Nossel: Look, we definitely recognize that disinformation while overwhelmingly protected by the first amendment [inaudible 00:15:09]
Brian Lehrer: Whoops. I think the tech gods must not have liked that question because we seem to have lost the connection to Suzanne. Let's try that again. Are you there? Did you just fade out for a second? I don't know what happened but--
Ayad Akhtar: Let me respond [unintelligible 00:15:30]
Brian Lehrer: Hey, Ayad, why don't you? Yes.
Ayad Akhtar: I think it's important to disaggregate a couple of issues here. One of them is that what we see with social media is that we see the monetization of speech. The problem isn't that people have the freedom to lie on social media. It's that the particular kinds of lies that get promulgated are actually very, very lucrative to Twitter or to Facebook or to any number. Hello?
Brian Lehrer: Yes.
Ayad Akhtar: What we're talking about really is the freedom of a business model. It's not freedom of expression per se, it's freedom of reach, it's freedom of Facebook or Twitter or any number of social media companies to be able to promulgate and push that content out virally across their platforms using their technology and to increase its reach far greater reach than it would have otherwise.
I think that sometimes when we're talking about disinformation in online ecosystems, we're putting it into a rubric of freedom of expression which it really isn't. As Suzanne said earlier, a lot of that speech is protected. It's really a matter of whether we want these monopolistic organizations to be able to have such a sway over what it is that we see and to benefit monetarily from it.
Brian Lehrer: As we run out of time, I want to remind people again that the reason we're having this conversation today is because PEN America is celebrating its 100th-year anniversary. It's actual Centennial at the New York Historical Society today with an event called words on fire writing freedom and the future, featuring renowned writers, such as Margaret Atwood, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Dave Eggers, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and the president of PEN, Ayad Akhtar, author most recently of Homeland Elegies, a novel. You want to just tell people in our last 30 seconds or so Ayad, what's going to take place at the event and if there are any others around town acknowledging the Centennial?
Ayad Akhtar: We have the exhibit at the New York Historical Society. Then today, Chimamanda is going to be addressing us with a speech, and that that'll be followed by Margaret Atwood and Dave Eggers in conversation about envisioning the future which is something that both of them have done quite a bit. We'll have a tribute to Salman. I'll be giving some remarks on the occasion of the 100th-year anniversary around freedom of expression and the harms and some of the issues that we've discussed today. Then we're going to have an open Q&A with everybody that was involved at the end. It's about a three-hour affair symposium is what we're calling it, from four to seven at the New York Historical Society.
Brian Lehrer: Great. I'll reinforce that it. It isn't just that event as you were just referencing. The Historical Society is hosting an installation, PEN America at 100. That will go on for a while. Ayad, thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you very, very much.
Ayad Akhtar: My pleasure, Brian. Thank you.
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