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NY Times, May 5 2015
Charlie Hebdo Award at PEN Gala Sparks More Debate
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Guests at your typical $1,250-a-plate Manhattan fund-raiser usually face
no quandary more urgent than “red or white?”
But when representatives of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo
step onstage Tuesday to receive an award for “freedom of expression
courage” at PEN American Center’s literary gala, the roughly 800 guests
will face a more complicated choice: standing ovation, walkout or
something in between?
During the past week, the news that six prominent writers, including
Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje and Francine Prose, had pulled out as gala
table hosts to protest what they saw as the magazine’s cultural
intolerance and Islamophobia has set off an unusually intense war of
words in the heart of the American literary establishment.
The controversy has ricocheted across social media and op-ed pages
worldwide, as partisans have traded impassioned arguments and sometimes
ad hominem insults. By the weekend, more than 200 of PEN’s roughly 4,000
members — including Junot Díaz, Joyce Carol Oates, Lorrie Moore and
Michael Cunningham — had signed a letter saying that the award crossed a
line between “staunchly supporting expression that violates the
acceptable, and enthusiastically rewarding such expression.”
The debate is emotional and complex. But the battle lines are generally
drawn between those who believe that PEN’s core mission includes
celebrating Charlie Hebdo’s courageous perseverance after the Jan. 7
attack on its office by Muslim extremists that left 12 people dead and
those who believe that the magazine’s cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad
promote bigotry and reinforce the second-class status of a Muslim
underclass in France.
There has also been debate about the debate, with some seeing an example
of fractious freedom of expression in action while others see a
spectacle that has generated more heat than light.
“With this boycott the Charlie Hebdo debate has come to embody all the
limitations, and now the futility, of the freedom of expression argument
vis-à-vis Muslims in particular and minorities in general,” Nesrine
Malik, a Sudanese-born, London-based commentator, wrote in The Guardian.
“We are trapped between people who see a knowing establishment prejudice
against Muslims (and other ethnic or racial minorities) everywhere, and
those who refuse to believe it exists,” she wrote.
The controversy revives a debate that flared up in January over whether
some of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons were racist. It is drawing in new
partisans, and may take on greater urgency after the shootings on Sunday
in Texas, where two gunmen, one of whom the F.B.I. had previously
investigated for links to Islamic terrorism, attacked a conference
organized by an anti-Islam group that included a Muhammad cartoon contest.
To some, the bigoted nature of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons is clear. “It’s
a racist publication,” Ms. Prose, a former president of PEN, told The
Nation last week. “Let’s not beat about the bush.”
The writer Luc Sante, who also signed the letter of protest, said that
while the work of Georges Wolinski, one of the cartoonists killed in the
attack, “was humane and large-spirited,” some of Charlie Hedbo’s
contributors trafficked in “sophomoric troll humor.”
“The fact alone that black and Arab people are offended by the way they
were depicted — leaving religion to the side — should have made PEN
think before celebrating Charlie Hebdo,” Mr. Sante said in an email.
Defenders of the award counter that such arguments overlook the full
scope and context of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons. They point to websites
like Understanding Charlie Hebdo Cartoons, which offers detailed
analysis of some of the magazine’s ruder images, or to a study published
in Le Monde in February stating that, contrary to the notion that the
publication focused obsessively on Islam, fewer than 2 percent of the
magazine’s covers between 2005 and 2015 primarily mocked Islam.
Adam Gopnik, a writer for The New Yorker (and a gala table host) who
wrote an essay in defense of the award, said in an interview that the
critics had elided the crucial distinction between blasphemy, which
attacks a belief system, and racism, which attacks people.
“In France, it’s well understood that Charlie Hebdo was and is
aggressively blasphemous and anti-religious,” he said. But “if you make
a minimal effort to understand Charlie Hebdo in its proper context, you
cannot conclude they are racist in any meaning of the term.”
The conversation about Charlie Hebdo in France has indeed been different
from those in the United States. There, the magazine is widely seen as a
leftist, anti-establishment irritant and champion of the underdog,
carrying on a long French tradition of scabrous satire. The former
President Nicolas Sarkozy was a particularly despised target, and the
magazine has been unsparing in its evisceration of the right-wing,
anti-immigrant National Front.
In an interview last week with the French magazine Les Inrocks, Rénald
Luzier, the cartoonist who works under the name Luz and drew the cover
image of Muhammad for the first issue after the attacks, said Charlie
Hebdo’s creed was not hatred but “a joyful atheism.”
Still, as the shock of the attacks has begun to fade, the French debate
has broadened, and some prominent intellectuals have questioned what
lies beneath the “I Am Charlie” slogan.
In an interview about his new book, “Who Is Charlie?,” to be released in
France on Thursday, the center-left historian and demographer Emmanuel
Todd described the Jan. 11 demonstrations that brought millions to the
streets of Paris and other French cities in support of the magazine as
“a sham.” The march, he argued, purported to unite all of France but in
fact brought together an urban, historically atheist elite and a rural,
Roman Catholic, traditionally anti-republican demographic, but not the
Muslim underclass.
“For the first time in my life, I wasn’t proud to be French,” Mr. Todd
said in a cover interview this week with the magazine L’Obs. “When four
million people come together to say that caricaturing the religion of
others is an absolute right — and even a duty! — and when these others
are the weakest members of society, one is perfectly free to say that
we’re fine, we’re in the right, that this is a great country. But that
is not the case.”
The real threat to France, he said, isn’t Muslims but “this crazy new
religion I call ‘radical secularism.’ ”
Some of the writers protesting the PEN award say that acknowledgment of
this aspect of the French context has been missing from the American
conversation.
The novelist Rachel Kushner, one of the six hosts who withdrew, said
that the award could be intended to honor free speech, but actually
reinforced a cultural and legal order that limits the free expression of
religious beliefs — for example, by banning head scarves in schools.
The defense of Charlie Hebdo “is always on secularist grounds,” Ms.
Kushner said in an email. “But some in France — the very same
marginalized sector of society who see themselves as targeted by some of
Hebdo’s covers — are targeted by laws that enforce secularism.”
Ms. Kushner said her opposition to the award stemmed mainly from her
belief that it did not accord with PEN’s charter, which asks that
members “pledge themselves to do their utmost to dispel race, class and
national hatred.”
Supporters of the award might point to another directive in the charter:
“that members pledge themselves to oppose any form of suppression of
freedom of expression.” But most would surely agree with Ms. Kushner on
another point.
“These issues are very complicated, and divisive, and will not be
resolved anytime soon,” she said, “and certainly not by a bunch of
people in New York City.”
Rachel Donadio contributed reporting from Paris.
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