The Role of the Committed Writer in an Unfree World ANDRÉ DAO
We live in an unfree world. The committed writer is one who writes to make the world more, rather than less, free.
So far, so simple. But how – how does a writer make the world more free?
This part is harder. Myths abound. Take the myth that the committed writer writes to persuade the reader. In this myth, society is made up of a mass of more or less persuadable individuals. Unfreedom occurs when too many of these individuals are persuaded to exploit and oppress the others. The central image of this myth is the marketplace of ideas. The name of this myth is liberalism.
Nearly eighty years ago, the Vietnamese philosopher Trần Đức Thảo explained the falsity of this myth. He wrote that the anticolonial struggle between the Vietnamese and their French colonisers could not be resolved through rational conversation. Presented with the same facts – facts about Vietnamese suffering – the two communities took away diametrically opposed meanings. That is because, as Thảo put it, the two communities make meaning within their own, distinct, cultural horizons. We do not experience the world of facts directly and objectively: we all filter so-called ‘reality’ through the stories and the ways of living of the communities to which we belong. For each of us, this communal horizon helps to determine the line between what is understood to be possible in the abstract – utopias and daydreams – and what is effectively possible: that which might actually be achieved through action.
In the context of colonial Vietnam, this meant that a French person would typically assimilate information about Vietnamese poverty, or lack of education, or even physical degradation at the hands of French colonists, to their colonial
horizon: each of these facts would be understood within a worldview in which Vietnam was and always would be a French colony. In other words, facts about Vietnamese suffering, within a colonial horizon, only authorised more rather than less French intervention: more French aid, more French education, more French laws – in short, a more perfect, and therefore more controlling, colonisation. In contrast, the Vietnamese understood the same facts within a horizon that included a free, independent Vietnam – a Vietnam that had never been colonised – not merely as an abstract idea, but, in Thảo’s words, as ‘a project effectively experienced, the very project of their existence, that which defines their existence’.
Faced with such incommensurable horizons, the task of the committed writer is not to persuade the coloniser to give up their privileges and power. It is, instead, to bear witness to the effective possibilities of those without power and privilege. Think of it this way: one of the ways we are all made less free is through the radical constriction of what is deemed to be possible. We are all shorter of breath for this narrowing of potential futures. But some – many – can barely breathe at all: the dominant ‘reality’ and its seemingly inevitable future have no place for their continued existence, let alone for possibilities that would see them flourish. The committed writer writes for freedom by resisting this constriction, this choking - by insisting that other worlds have been, and still are, possible.
Today, the effective possibilities of the Australian nation are vanishingly narrow. But there are communities living here whose existence attests to the possibility of a continent that was not and is not colonised, of a state that does not lock up people seeking safety and that does
not use borders to separate families, of a nation that does not support genocides elsewhere and does not commit genocide at home, of ways of organising work and housing and learning and our relationship to nature that can be mutually supportive, joyful and sustainable.
One of the more insidious ways of smothering these possibilities is the appeal to ‘social cohesion’. This is all too obvious when certain voices are selectively policed as ‘divisive’, as when the board of Creative Australia rescinded its commission of Khaled Sabsabi for the Venice Biennale (the commission has since been reinstated), or when the Bendigo Writers Festival responded to a letter from the Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism denouncing the invitation of Randa AbdelFattah by instituting a code of conduct instructing speakers ‘to avoid language or topics that could be considered inflammatory, divisive, or disrespectful’. The introduction of the code led to a mass withdrawal of writers from the event.
In these cases it is clear that social cohesion serves as cover for anti-
to promote respectful dialogue and understanding.’
Is social cohesion the requirement to be in dialogue even with those who wish to purge Australia of people who look like me? Is literature to be in service of a cohesive social body, rather than freedom and justice?
The committed writer rejects social cohesion and rejects the social contract, where that contract is oppressive, where it is obtained under duress. If bearing witness to other, less cohesive horizons, is divisive, then the committed writer commits to being divisive.
You might say, as Christos Tsiolkas did in his recent Ray Mathew Lecture on the virtues of ‘fence-sitting’, that such a writer is too certain. The fencesitter, according to Tsiolkas, is the only one who doubts. But in fact the committed writer in an unfree world is riven with doubt. Psychiatrist and anticolonial writer Frantz Fanon, who was nothing if not committed, ended his book Black Skin White Masks with a plea: ‘O my body, make of me always
The very concept of social cohesion reveals a totalitarian drive – the desire for a single, continent-spanning horizon. “ “
Arab and anti-Palestinian racism. But at a more fundamental level, the very concept of social cohesion reveals a totalitarian drive – the desire for a single, continent-spanning horizon. A major – and still virulent – strain of this drive towards totality is the project of a White Australia. A minor version showed itself in the Victorian Government’s recent announcement that multicultural organisations will have to sign a social cohesion ‘pledge’ if they want to receive government funding. According to the government’s expert report (which actually recommended against such pledges, a recommendation the government ignored), ‘Our commitment to social cohesion is a social contract…. It means we share a responsibility
a man who questions!’ Fanon, in his ceaseless and restless way, warned always of the dangers of dogma: of allowing one’s principles to congeal into ideology, of turning one’s rage into a static monument. Always, Fanon was interested in disalienation – the process by which a person ceases to be a foreigner in their environment. Which meant, always, striving to understand oneself and one’s place in the world. Which meant questioning, which meant doubting.
But which did not mean being uncommitted. After all, the posture of non-commitment – of objectivity, of watching from the sidelines – is itself always a commitment, usually to the status quo. The claim to be
But disavowing our complicity with violence does not, in the end, make our complicity, or the violence, go away. “ “
uncommitted is a fantasy – a response, understandable in its own way, to feelings of being alienated from a world full of violent struggle. The uncommitted writer wants to disavow any complicity with such violence: they want to say that they are simply on the side of the innocent; that they simply want the war – all wars – to end. But disavowing our complicity with violence does not, in the end, make our complicity, or the violence, go away. Siding with the innocent does not make you innocent.
In the end the one who is too certain is not the one who commits to resisting unfreedom, but the one who is so certain that they are, in fact, uncommitted – the one who believes that there is a fence on which to sit, an objective vantage point from which to observe the violence of others.
Against doubt as fence-sitting – against a doubt that settles, that invites the doubter to become settled, against settling – I want to suggest a doubt that is always on the move, a doubt that moves along the path towards disalienation, through (painful) self-knowledge, through understanding all the ways in which we are entangled with violence, and commits to freedom anyway.
But let’s be clear. This is not a lonely path,
a path consisting only of solitary choices. Here is another myth: that of the writer, committed or otherwise, as a tortured, individual genius, capable of sizing up every political struggle, every political structure, and sitting in judgement over which are struggles for freedom and which are structures of unfreedom.
No, the committed writer is a movement writer. I mean that the committed writer knows that they know very little, and that the way to remedy that ignorance is through solidarity with people in struggle. To the extent that I know anything about the indefinite detention of asylum seekers, or the ongoing colonisation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, or Australia’s ideological and material support for Israel’s apartheid regime and genocidal violence against Palestinians, I know this only by being in community with people struggling to end these injustices.
A final myth to be debunked: that to think and feel with others is groupthink or virtue signalling. The committed writer rejects this for the miserable cant that it is.
The committed writer affirms the joy of being committed, above all, to others: of being in the streets with them, of reading and listening to their words, of remembering, with them, that another Australia has both always existed, and is still to come.
