HUMAN RIGHTS | Defending human dignity
20 November 2008
Dissident Writers Fight for Justice by Speaking Truth to Power
Literary works can be used as weapons against tyranny, corruption
Washington — As many dictators can attest, literary artists are among the fiercest critics of human rights abuses worldwide.
In the 1960s, the works of dissident novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) of Russia exposed the Soviet labor-camp system. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, but his fame did not protect him from persecution, and he was forced into exile in 1974. He eventually settled in the United States, living as a virtual recluse before finally returning to Russia in 1994.
Solzhenitsyn’s fight against authoritarian rule mirrors similar battles joined by many authors, including Czech writer/playwright/politician Vaclav Havel.
As a prominent dissenter against Soviet control of his homeland, Havel used the theater as a platform to attack totalitarian regimes. Although his political activism earned him several prison stays and near-constant harassment, Havel triumphed during the 1989 “Velvet Revolution” that propelled him into the presidency of Czechoslovakia (later the Czech Republic).
As president, Havel led his country’s transition to multiparty democracy, and he remains a deeply admired figure internationally. Havel’s views have been compared to those of Britain’s George Orwell (1903-1950), whose celebrated novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four paint a chilling picture of government repression, a theme echoed by dissident artists around the globe.
Russian poet and civil rights activist Natalya Gorbanevskaya was one of eight protesters to demonstrate in Moscow’s Red Square on August 25, 1968, against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Having recently given birth, she was not tried in court with the other demonstrators, but she wrote an account of the trial (titled Noon) that was published abroad as Red Square at Noon.
Gorbanevskaya was arrested in December 1969 and imprisoned in a Soviet psychiatric facility until February 1972. She emigrated in December 1975 and now lives in Paris.
Novelist, essayist and poet Julia Alvarez, a native of the Dominican Republic whose family fled to the United States when she was 10, won acclaim with her 1995 novel In the Time of the Butterflies, inspired by the true story of three sisters who were murdered by agents of the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship that once ruled the author’s homeland.
Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, a writer, poet and playwright, has been an outspoken critic of many Nigerian administrations and of political tyrannies worldwide. Much of his writing has focused on what he calls “the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the color of the foot that wears it.”
Soyinka’s activism came at great personal cost. He was arrested in 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War, and placed in solitary confinement for his attempts at brokering a peace between the warring factions. Released 22 months later, after international attention was drawn to his imprisonment, he left Nigeria in voluntary exile.
Widely considered Africa’s most distinguished playwright, Soyinka received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986, the first sub-Saharan African to be so honored.
Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), regarded as one of Poland’s greatest poets and prose writers, fought censorship by his nation’s Communist government during the Cold War years of the 1950s and1960s. His 1953 book The Captive Mind, which explains how Stalinist regimes pressured writers and scholars to conform in postwar Eastern Europe, has been described as one of the finest studies of the behavior of intellectuals under a repressive system.
Milosz, who emigrated to the United States in 1960 and became a U.S. citizen in 1970, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980.
The career of Russian poet Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) followed a similar trajectory. Brodsky, an essayist as well as a poet, was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972, essentially for refusing to subordinate his writings to the ideological needs of the Communist Party. He moved to the United States and became a citizen in 1977, winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987. In 1991, Brodsky became poet laureate of the United States.
One of the most impassioned voices on the literary scene belongs to Filipina author Ninotchka Rosca. Now a resident of New York, Rosca had been a political prisoner in the Philippines under the dictatorial regime of the late Ferdinand Marcos.
Rosca — whose short stories, novels and nonfiction works have won her the nickname “the First Lady of Philippines Literature” — is particularly concerned with women’s oppression and gender exploitation. She often speaks on such issues as sex tourism, trafficking, the mail-order bride industry and violence against women.
These writers, and countless others, have demonstrated that literary art can be a potent weapon against tyranny, corruption and injustice. By shining a spotlight on the world’s ills — and the regimes that perpetuate them — writers of conscience are doing their part to address urgent problems and hold authorities accountable.
