Assignment #30: Literature as the cataylst For the Departments of English & Media Studies by Prof Dr Sohail Ansari

دعوت و تحریک

ادب کی قوت اور اسلامی تحریک

ڈاکٹر شاہ رشاد عثمانی

ادب کی طاقت کو دنیا کی تمام تحریکات نے تسلیم کیا ہے اور اپنے نظریات کی اشاعت کے لیے اسے بطوروسیلہ استعمال کیا ہے ۔ ایک ایسی انقلابی تحریک جو زندگی کے ہر پہلو اور ہرادارے کی اصلاح چاہتی ہے،جو تعلیم ،سیاست اور معاشرت کو بدلنا چاہتی ہے ،وہ ادب کے شعبے کو کیسے نظر انداز کرسکتی ہے۔ سیّد اسعد گیلانی [م: ۳؍اپریل ۱۹۹۲ء]نے ایک جگہ بڑی عمدہ بات لکھی ہے۔ وہ لکھتے ہیں کہ:
کوئی تحریک بھی ادب کا تعاون حاصل کئے بغیر جڑ نہیں پکڑسکتی اور کسی تحریک کاکوئی پروگرام بھی بروے کار نہیں لایا جاسکتا،جب تک ادب اس پروگرام کو اپنی آغوش میں لے کر دل ودماغ میں اسے بٹھا نہ دے۔یہ دونوں چیزیں لازم وملزوم سی ہیں۔ ایک مسافر ہے تو دوسرا زادِراہ، ایک سپاہی ہے تو دوسرا اس کا اسلحہ، ایک قافلہ ہے تو دوسرا اس کا پیش رو۔
ہر تحریک اپنے دامن میں ایک انقلاب کا تصور رکھتی ہے۔ ہر انقلاب قلب و نظر کے زاویوں سے لے کر زندگی کے تمام مادی و اخلاقی پہلوؤں پر ہمہ گیر اثرات ڈالتا ہے۔ یہ اثرات ادب کے ذریعے غیر محسوس طریقے پر دل کی ایک لرزش سے جسد انسانی میں سرایت کرتے رہتے ہیں۔ دراصل دل ودماغ اور قلب ونظر کی تبدیلی اور تعمیر جدید میں ادب کسی بھی تحریک کا سب سے بڑا ایجنٹ ہوتا ہے، جو چپکے چپکے آنکھوں کے راستے دلوں میں اترتا ہے یا کانوں کے راستے قلوب میں گھر بناتا ہے۔ اس طرح آنے والے انقلاب کے لیے جذبات اور احساسات کے مورچہ بناتا ہے۔یہ ادب ہی ہے جو براہِ راست حملہ کرکے شکار کو پھڑکاتا نہیں، بلکہ اس کے گرد تصورات وتخیلات کی سوندھی سوندھی فضا پیدا کرتا ہے، کہ شکار خود بخود اس خوشبو کو اپنے دل میں جذب کرنے کے لیے اپنے جسم کے تمام بند ڈھیلے چھوڑدیتا ہے ۔ادب کی اسی طاقت کا تذکرہ کرتے ہوئے نعیم صدیقی [م:۲۵ستمبر ۲۰۰۲ء] نے لکھا :
ادب خیال انگیز اور خیالات افروز قوت ہے۔ وہ معاشرے کی کھیتی میں خیالات کے بیج ڈالتا ہے اور پھر ان کی آبیاری کرتا ہے۔ وہ خیال کے جمود کو توڑتا ہے اور حرکت پیدا کرتا ہے۔ وحی الٰہی کے بعد اگر کوئی دوسرا ذریعہ انسانیت کو خیالات سے مالا مال رکھنے کا ہے تو وہ ادب ہے۔ ادب خیالات کو اُبھارتا ہے!
واقعہ یہ ہے کہ ادب انسانی خیالات ،جذبات اور اقدار کو زندہ رکھنے یا بنانے اور بگاڑنے والی عظیم طاقت ہے۔ دنیا کی تمام تحریکات نے اس طاقت کا خوب خوب ادراک بھی کیا ہے اور بہتر سے بہتر استعمال بھی۔ فرانس کا عوامی انقلاب والٹیر [م:۱۷۷۸ء] اور روسو [م:۱۷۷۸ء]کی تحریروں کونہیں بھول سکتا۔ ان کے قلموں کی روشنائی اس انقلاب کا موج زن خون ہے۔ روس کا اشتراکی انقلاب: مارکس [م:۱۸۸۳ء]، گورکی [م:۱۹۳۶ء]،ٹراٹسکی [م:۱۹۴۰ء]اور دوسرے اہل قلم حضرات کے قلموں کی جنبش پر چلتا ہو ا نظر آتا ہے۔ جرمنی کا نازی انقلاب، اُس تصور سے اُبھرا ہے ، جو نٹشے [م:۱۹۰۰ء]نے اپنی تحریروں میں چھوڑا تھا۔

The Novel as Agent for Social Change

Books are powerful mediums for social change. They have been burned and banned over the years for a reason: Whether it is Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking or Anne Frank's diary, books feed cultural change and social dialogue.

Exercise:

Books mentioned above have been burned and banned over the years for a reason. Find out reasons and tell you justified you find those reasons.

There are also many new novels that, like To Kill a Mockingbird, illuminate social issues not by writing through the broad strokes of history but by developing powerful characters who battle events over which they have little or no control.

Boulevard, by Bill Guttentag, is one such book.

Exercise:

Explain what ‘writing through the broad strokes of history’ means and why a writer developed characters instead?

The murder mystery at the core of this novel is engaging, but Guttentag also sheds light on the harrowing lives of teenage runaways living on the streets of Hollywood. Most of the kids don't care about becoming movie stars--they've run away from nightmarish homes (abuse, molestation, drugs) and fall from the pot into the fire when they hit L.A. In the book, girls and boys alike are preyed upon by pimps and subjected to things like rape and AIDS, but they fear going to the police because they don't want to be sent home. The kids often end up forming squatter families in order protect each other as best they can.

After reading Boulevard, I will never look at teens on the street the same way again. I also have new-found respect for the cops and social workers who help teens off the street. (It's certainly a timely issue--the New York Times ran an article about runaways last year.)

Exercise:

Why a writer never look at teens on the same way again

Another illustrative novel is Chris Cleave's Little Bee. Little Bee is a Nigerian woman who escaped to England after mercenaries decimate her village at the behest of an oil company.

Cleave has said he used his novel to expose dark realities, and he did a masterful job without being preachy or sensationalist. He created a fine novel to boot.

Exercise:

How Cleave created a fine novel?

This duo is by no means exhaustive--they're simply two I have read recently, and they display an aspect of contemporary fiction I had not acknowledged.

Exercise:

What novels have inspired similar feelings for you?

Caribbean culture and its productions continue to be critical instruments for imaginatively addressing the on-going imperative for social change and self-fashioning.

Exercise:

What imaginatively addressing means?

George Lamming contends that the work of the Artist is to “return the society to itself”  “to its past” and to the “visions of the future” on which the present is constituted.

Exercise:

What return the society to itself means?

Although such a function was originally directed to a confrontation with colonialism’s systemic erasure or misrepresentation of its others, an engagement that is never quite exhausted, Caribbean nation states must now call themselves to account for the outcomes of their Independence projects. 

Exercise:

What systemic ‘erasure or misrepresentation of its others’ means?

The region must engage new questions about the quality of life now available to its citizens. It must confront with urgency the many challenges arising from all spheres of life, from its political culture, economic circumstances, gender politics and family life, marginalised groups, youth culture and entertainment industries, foreign media infiltration, crime and violence. No longer is it acceptable to point the finger at the past or to an external “other” as a source of blame. Nation states must engage the new sites and agents of oppression or negative social conditioning generated from within and beyond its borders in order to ask ourselves more responsibly: what are the requirements of the future?

Exercise:

How a nation can know the requirements of the future?

Equally important to this process is recognising the unique contributions the region’s literature and cultural life have to offer. Caribbean writers have long been engaged in theorizing identity and culture beyond monolithic paradigms that are mired in race and ethnic prejudices and so are a rich resource for ideological and social change that has relevance to the world.

Exercise:

How identity can be theorized beyond monolithic paradigms?

These offer fertile methodologies for (re) reading cultures and literatures that have historically read the region as for instance Barbara Lalla has demonstrated in her Caribbean readings of medieval literature.

Indeed debates about the function of literature, from which the practice of criticism can hardly be excluded, are as old as the medium itself. Issues have ranged from literature’s necessary independence from politics of activism and its role in the work of social protest and change. The inescapable politics of textuality remains as pertinent an issue as the concern with the reduction of literature to politics.  

Exercise:

Explain: The inescapable politics of textuality

The reduction of literature to politics.  

For the developing world the stakes are even higher and in a Caribbean where the “culture of reading” remains the practice of the few, Lamming’s longstanding concern with finding more innovative ways to mediate the world of text to larger sections of the population is yet to be effectively addressed.

The value of reading Literature - how it can spark social change and imagination

I had never paid much attention to the roles literature could play in the public sphere until I realized that it has the potential to challenge the status quo. Is it not this subversive potential why many literary works have been banned?

Some examples of literary works that were banned for this reason:

1.    Brave New World was banned for its comments against religion and traditional family in Ireland.

2.    Animal Farm was banned in the USSR, and is still banned in Cuba and North Korea, for its satire of the communist brutalities. It is also banned in Kenya for its criticism of corruption and in the United Arabic Emirates for its depiction of talking pigs, which is considered contra-Islamic values.

3.    Alice in Wonderland was banned in China for portraying animals as if they were human beings.

4.    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had been originally banned for showing too great a friendship between a white boy and a slave in the United States.

The banning of literary works is no feature of our modern age. Plato had for example already banned poets in his Republic.

Banning poetry in Plato’s ideal state
In Plato’s Republic, poets were dismissed for arousing thoughtless emotions that cloud the citizens’ judgments. According to Plato, poets did merely interpret and represent things of this world and not the Forms (or ideas) that make up the most fundamental or essential kind of reality. In Plato’s eyes, the world exists of an ‘eternal world’ and a ‘material world’. The ‘eternal world’ is the realm of ideals and perfect forms. It possesses all objects of knowledge and is more real than the material world. The ‘material world’, on the other hand, is a reflection of the eternal world. They are the shadows in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”.

In short, Plato believed that poets did not represent reality and with their words and phrases they could corrupt the youth and incite passions instead of the faculties of reason. Hence they should not be permitted into the polis (city) as they could not speak philosophically.

Exercise:

Is Plato right in this regard, and should we ban poets if they do not represent reality or truths as it is?

Or you think:

Exercise:

Plato is unjustly dismissing the social value of poetry (and other literary works).

Literature incites public imagination
A feature of literary works is that they have a great capacity to give pleasure while being morally critical. They can portray social agents and their emotional and practical relations to the problems of their world better than non-fiction. They give color to reason and portray human beings within lively human settings – something that cold science cannot do. The most important attribute of literature is that it allows fictional characters that resemble us to approach social choices with imagination.

Literature is therefore subversive
Reading into fictional lives will lead us to wonder. It sparks our imagination of political possibilities, and it could eventually disrupt the status quo and improve the human condition.

Exercise:

How literature is subversive?

I believe it is this subversive potential why many literary works have been banned.

People ban influences they don't like, like how Christian parents did with metal, rock and roll, etc. Literature has always fallen in the same traps, don't read Camus or Sartre because they're communist, you can't read Machiavelli because he's a pragmatist and that's evil, you can't read Nietzsche because it's just the raving of a man with syphilis, don't you dare read Ovid because he is a lecherous traitor to our glorious Augustus and defiles the sanctity of love, and so forth until most great authors are on the list.

Exercise:

Donot you think influences are banned for the right reasons?

Censorship is what everyone in power wants. It has something to do with the subversive power of literature, but also if a work doesn't fall in line with the contemporary thinking, even in terms of something as straight forward as Sidereus Nuncius, those on top will try their hardest to eradicate and suppress it, but rarely with lasting success. Great books are humanity's property, and can never really be withheld from us. They will find their way to our eyes.

 ‘When I was seven (1978) our teacher gave a puff of smoke and quit, we didn't have another until I was in tenth grade. Over that time I read more than two thousand books. I'd go to the library every two weeks and check out my limit of eight and usually be looking for something else to read by middle of the second week.
I blame that period for my never adopting hero worship, or being a pop culture maven. I like what I like, because it speaks to me, I think literature taught me that’.

Exercise:

Hero worship is not adopted as there is no hero; but we mulisms have Holy Prophet (P.B.U.H); therefore we can adopt hero worship.

Explain the highlighted lines or words below:

‘Have you noticed that if you actually turn off the TV and the internet, you go away and read literature or books more often? Sparking the imagination of the future political possibilities is absolutely necessary to be able to incite love for other human beings.

From my understanding, the political layer is a construct that is reactionary to the underlying moral, philosophical, emotional and actual base layers of any human society. If the base layers are messed up, with less free thought, less critical thinking, then naturally the political layers themselves evolve to become more violent, centralized, authoritarian and volatile...If you read some of the works by Nassim Taleb and his ideas of anti-fragile, these are important for humans to start building the base for the next evolutions of civilization. There is actually a battle raging, and it is very deep to find it. That is centralization vs. decentralization. More poets, literature writers and critics could explore this battle. It has taken me 4 years of research nearly everyday to uncover a lot of this. The battle isn't even a physical battle anymore, it is a battle to occupy the thoughts of the human mind so that people start to believe in their conscious levels that their free will is actually influenced and controled to a certain extent. Only with the decentralized internet and uncensored comments do we start to realize this.

 Allegory of the cave is actually very important, because Plato understood that he couldn't explain everything, and 2000 years later we still can't but at least he could express it in the context of the material world being a sub-set reflection of the perfect external world.

Exercise:

Do you think in order to incite love for our fellow human beings we need imagination?

What centralization vs. decentralization battle mean?

 

Literature, Revolution and Social Change: AVoyage around History and Cultures

Abstract

The place of literature in the formation of social change is unquestionable to anyone who is familiar with history. Virtually every major revolution has been inspired, energized or spearheaded by a book or works of literature. This essay goes deep into history to engage and detail the role of literature in most of the major revolutions that have shaped the world.

A study of civilizations and cultures establishes the inescapable fact of the correlation between

literacy and development or between the “logic of writing and the organization of society.”

 The possession of writing or written literature marks the major difference between primitive and developed societies and, conversely, marks the process of transition from one to the other. Literature also serves as a gauge of the level of development of a culture, people-groups and religious and political identities. It is through the implications of writing through which the modes of transition in the history of human society can be observed.

 You can tell where a culture or society is and where it is going by the state of its art, especially literature. The literature of an age reflects thevalues of an age

Words on Fire: The Power of Literature

Literature both in its various forms, traditions and modes embodies enormous power and potentials.

As an instrument of change and mobilisation for social causes and progressive actions it has no equal. The entire range of human civilisation and history bears this out.

Literature wields great power over the minds of men for several reasons. We shall mention a few of them.

First, literature helps us to unravel, penetrate and even get into a culture, any culture where there is a written form. It is only through literature and by literature this can happen. Forinstance there is only one way to understand what the societies of Victorian Britain, France during the Revolution of 1789 and Germany during the Reformation were like. It is by examining their art forms- especially their literature which embodies the values, culture and worldviews of that particular point in time. Just as it can carry us into a distant culture so it can penetrate and influencea culture from within with its values and worldviews. Thus the way to affect and powerfully influence a culture so radically and profoundly is by literature. It is this very power that makes literature a supportive ally in the making of revolutions and creation of social forces.

Exercise:

How literature is a supportive ally?

Two, literature offers enjoyment and entertainment through its various forms- fiction, poetry,allegory, non-fiction, satire, etc., as such it has power over the emotion and imagination of men.Most people go into literature for enjoyment- intellectual, emotional, imaginative and spiritual; and this gives literature its enormous power.

As Ryken notes:

“There has never been a civilized culture that did not feel the need of producing and enjoying literature. Such universality indicates that literature springs from a basic human impulse and fulfils a basic need.”

Whatever affects the emotion of men and women can become an instrument of enormous power, a tremendous force forthe creation of social change.

Three, literature also serves as a mirror for an individual, a society or collectivity to see itself, its social and economic conditions, spiritual realities and religious formations. This capacity to foster self-understanding and self-awareness and show the present state of a society both in its positive and progressive developments and in its declining forms, debauchery and decay; is one of the great possibilities and one of the chief aims of literature. Because it is a mirror it enables people to see clearly, it increases perception, sense of observation to notice what before has never been seen.

Charles Dickens’s novel, Oliver Twist helped nineteenth- century Londoners to see the evils of workhouses for under-aged children and to do something about them.

They saw poor children every day swarming through the streets, but most never gave them a second thought.When they read Charles Dickens’s

Oliver Twist, however, they noticed those children and they were moved to compassion and to action.” (Edward Veith, 1990:

Exercise:

Why most never gave them a second thought?

English models but “more than anything else it was a statement of the views of Rousseau as expressed in

The Social Contract  Napoleon B onaparte acknowledged the role of print in the Revolution: “The old nobility wouldhave survived if it had known enough to become master of printing materials… The advent ofcannon killed the feudal system; ink will kill the modern system.”

Exercise:

How ink will kill the modern system?

Art also came to its own during the period. The Revolution unfettered it from the many shackles which religion had placed on it. It is no wonder that even during the Terror nearly all the thirty theatres in Revolutionary Paris were filled night after night by crowds.

 Literature also played a major role in mobilizing the bourgeoisie who would become the principal instigators of the Revolution.

It was they who filled the theatres and applauded Beaumarchers’ satires of the aristocracy. It was they, even more than the nobility who joined the Freemason lodges to work for freedom of life and thought: they who read Voltaire and relished his erosive wit, and agreed with Gibbon that all religious are equally false for the philosopher and equally useful for the statesmen.

( Durant 1975:6)

Exercise:

Explain: ‘All religious are equally false for the philosopher and equally useful for the statesmen’

Literature and Social Change:

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

 ,

 It was this blindness that Harriet Beecher Stowe sought to cure with his novel

Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The gripping power of Uncle Tom Cabin was in its literary merit, its exceptional quality, its avoidance of religious clichés, self-righteous condemnatory tone so emblematic of much of Abolitionist polemics of the era, its usage of fine and sensitive characters; and its adaption to the stage which gave it its dramatic appeal.

“ No earlier white American writer had looked at slaves as people. Countless readers asked themselves as they put the book down: is slavery just?

 All literary historians and writers are agreed that the book with its tremendous effect on the citizens especially in the North brought about the Civil War and, consequently, the Abolition of Slavery in America. As one reviewer of the book noted:

“No literary work of any character or merit, whether of poetry or prose, or imagination or observation, fancy or fact, truth or fiction, that has ever been written since there have been writers or readers, has ever commanded so great a popular success.”

Between 1852 when the book was released and 1860 it was reprinted in 22 languages and in the USduring the last half of the nineteenth century it was outsold only by the Bible.

 With that enormous success it helped push abolitionism from the margins to the mainstream, and thus moved the nation close to Civil War. It is not surprising that when Stowe visited Lincoln in the White House in 1862 to lend her voice and urge the president to make the Emancipation Proclamation the president rep

ortedly greeted her: “So this is the little lady who made this big war.”

  

After the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day 1863, a group of whites gathered in Boston at the Music Hall where on receiving the news the crowd shouted for Mrs Stowe and she

took a bow and wept for joy.”

Her mission has been accomplished, the abolitionist crusade vindicated and the purpose of Uncle Tom’s Cabin

achieved.

Words as Weapons: Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy and the Arab Spring

“It is easy to read. The work has been translated into more than 30 languages. Borders have not been able to hold the book neither has the secret service been able to stop its entry into countries… is setting the Arab world with the highest number of dictator -rulers on fire, and causing other sit- tight rulers wondering what is coming.” 

That was how  Agency Reports introduce Gene Sharp’s book From Dictatorship to Democracy 

 Which has been more effective in sweeping away more dictatorships than any other weapon in recent memory. Written by Gene Sharp, now a professor emeritus at University of Massachusetts, the booklisted

 “non-violent weapons” ranging from the use of colours and symbols to mock funerals andboycotts. Sharp whose 1968 Oxford University Doctor of Philosophy dissertation

The Politics of Nonviolent Action set the tone and course of his life and belief in non-violent methods as effective weapons.

Sharp’s book has been credited with sweeping away several dictatorial governments in South America, Asia and, lately, in the Arab world.It was responsible for the fall of Milosevic in Serbia in 2000. It was responsible for the Green uprising in Iran in 2009, and “many of the protesters were accused at their trials of using more than100 of Sharp’s 198 methods.” The Iranians became so worried they broadcast an animated

propaganda film on state television- of Gene Sharp plotting the overthrow of Iran from the White

House.”

From then on the book caught fire and like a prairie fire swept everything on its trail.

The book caught fire figuratively and literally. From Burma word of mouth spread through Thailand to Indonesiawhere it was used against the military dictatorship there.

But by far, Gene Sharp’s ideas have been most effective in Arab nations where it has swept away old regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Yemen and where it is creating an awareness of future political re- engineering. Protesters in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution admitted that Sharp’s work has influenced them in non-violent tactics. During the Tunisian uprising which ultimately led to the fall of the president“protesters stayed behind tanks in the dark to read Sharp’s book with torch light.”

Exercise:

Do you not think that what you just read was the exaggerated truth?

What makes Sharp’s book so compelling and endearing to protesters and revolutionaries?

Andwhat makes it so dangerous and frightening to dictatorships?

(In Venezuela President Hugo Chavezused his weekly television address to warn the country that Sharp was a threat to the national security of Venezuela and in Russia the intelligence services raided the print shop and the shopsselling it mysteriously burned to the ground.

The central thesis is that “the power of dictatorships

comes from the willing obedience of the people they govern- and that if the people can develop techniques of with holding their consent, a regime will crumble.”

Gene Sharp has shown that ideas indeed rule the world and that the printed page is a far more effective weapon than AK 4.

Social and Ideological Purposes of Literature

“My task... is, by the power of the written work 

 , to make you hear, to make you feel- it is, before all,

to make you see.’ 

’

- Joseph Conrad

The writer must be the ear, eye, mouth and even the conscience of his/her society if he must be trueto his calling and vocation. Regardless to whatever caucuses or company his fancies may drive him he must first see his mission to the larger company- the collectivity- as of far greater importance than any other consideration. Until he sees himself within this platform he is false to his vocationand to his calling.Speaking on behalf of his own generation of writers, Osofisan tried to conceptualize that missionwithin the historical framework of Nigerian literary evolution:

..The writers all accepted their vocation as a mission to speak on behalf of society, to be the voice not only of their own personal anguish or felicity, but also of the communal experience, whether of chaos or fulfilment. They would therefore, in other words, not create art for art’s sake but be the spokesmen of their generation.

Their mission... thus became defined, either overtly or covertly, consciously or unconsciously, as the need to recover our authentic Self, and retrieve our true identity from the wounding falsehoods hitherto propagated by the whiteman. This would lead to, not just a reclamation of the past, but if necessary, to its complete re-invention.

 (Osofisan 2007: 42)

It is this mission that will determine which form, mode or tradition of literature he may employ at a particular time to embody his creativity. It is this mission that will determine the language of expression and even the style.The writer as the ear of the society must hear what the people among whom he dwells cannot hearby virtue of their intellectual and other disabilities. He must see and, using literature as a mirror, help the people to see what they have been ignoring for long. These are the real purposes, the social and ideological dimensions of literature. He must conceptualize this with appropriate expressions and language that the people can understand. For instance, how many Nigerians know that many of their children and grand children will grow grey hairs even in their prime just because of the fabulous salaries and allowances that our politicians, in both the executive and legislative arms, are drawing today?

It is the role of a writer to analyse society to bring out the facts and express it with evocativeand descriptive imageries that will react on the imagination of people. It is then that there will be action.In this process the writer needs a lot of research and accurate data as a guide of society. This wayhe can speak with authority. There are several issues that Nigerians need to know and which theservices of a writer is required. These are some of them for example:i.

 Conclusion

 It is a fact that all the major literary works that sparked revolutionary movements in history were based on the dominant issues of the period. Indulgences, slavery, economic dispossession, injustices etc., these were some of the major issues of the past which the literature sought to bring to the front burner of popular discourse of their days.