(Salman Rushdie & Toni Morrison)
How to teach the essays?
These two short essays have been prescribed for the first year students of the undergraduate programmes of certain universities. Here is an attempt to plan for the face-to-face teaching of the lesson for three hours in three days and another two hours for homework, in a week.
There are four objectives to be attained through learning of the lesson;
1. Objectives
a) Students debate on the need for censorship on literature.
b) They formulate a critical analysis of the danger of censorship on creativity as pointed out by the authors.
c) They compare the views of Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison on censorship.
d) They reach a decision on accepting the warning of the authors on the censorship.
2. Materials required
a) Computer
b) LCD projector, screen
c) Print or soft copy of the short essays
d) Whiteboard to write on
e) Marker pens
3. Full text of the essays
On Censorship (Salman Rushdie)
No writer ever really wants to talk about censorship. Writers want to talk about creation, and censorship is anti-creation, negative energy, uncreation, the bringing into being of non-being, or, to use Tom Stoppard’s description of death, “the absence of presence.” Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it. And writers want to talk about how much they get paid, and they want to gossip about other writers and how much they get paid, and they want to complain about critics and publishers, and gripe about politicians and they want to talk about what they love, the writers they love, the stories and even sentences that have meant something to them, and, finally, they want to talk about their own ideas and their own stories. Their things. The British humorist Paul Jennings, in his brilliant essay on Resistentialism, a spoof of Existentialism, proposed that the world was divided into two categories, “Thing” and “No-Thing,” and suggested that between these two is waged a never-ending war. If writing is Thing, then censorship is No-Thing, and, as King Lear told Cordelia, “Nothing will come of nothing,” or, as Mr. Jennings would have revised Shakespeare, “No-Thing will come of No-Thing. Think again.”
Consider, if you will, the air. Here it is, all around us, plentiful, freely available, and broadly breathable. And yes, I know, it’s not perfectly clean or perfectly pure, but here it nevertheless is, plenty of it, enough for all of us and lots to spare. When breathable air is available so freely and in such quantity, it would be redundant to demand that breathable air be freely provided to all, in sufficient quantity for the needs of all. What you have, you can easily take for granted, and ignore. There’s just no need to make a fuss about it. You breathe the freely available, broadly breathable air, and you get on with your day. The air is not a subject. It is not something that most of us want to discuss.
Imagine, now, that somewhere up there you might find a giant set of faucets, and that the air we breathe flows from those faucets, hot air and cold air and tepid air from some celestial mixer-unit. And imagine that an entity up there, not known to us, or perhaps even known to us, begins on a certain day to turn off the faucets one by one so that slowly we begin to notice that the available air, still breathable, still free, is thinning. The time comes when we find that we are breathing more heavily, perhaps even gasping for air. By this time, many of us would have begun to protest, to condemn the reduction in the air supply, and to argue loudly for the right to freely available, broadly breathable air. Scarcity, you could say, creates demand.
Liberty is the air we breathe, and we live in a part of the world where imperfect as the supply is, it is, nevertheless, freely available, at least to those of us who aren’t black youngsters wearing hoodies in Miami, and broadly breathable, unless, of course, we’re women in red states trying to make free choices about our own bodies. Imperfectly free, imperfectly breathable, but when it is breathable and free we don’t need to make a song and dance about it. We take it for granted and get on with our day. And at night, as we fall asleep, we assume we will be free tomorrow because we were free today.
The creative act requires not only freedom but also this assumption of freedom. If the creative artist worries if he will still be free tomorrow, then he will not be free today. If he is afraid of the consequences of his choice of subject or of his manner of treatment of it, then his choices will not be determined by his talent, but by fear. If we are not confident of our freedom, then we are not free.
And, even worse than that, when censorship intrudes on art, it becomes the subject; the art becomes “censored art,” and that is how the world sees and understands it. The censor labels the work immoral, or blasphemous, or pornographic, or controversial, and those words are forever hung like albatrosses around the necks of those cursed mariners, the censored works. The attack on the work does more than defining the work; in a sense, for the general public, it becomes the work. For every reader of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” or “Tropic of Capricorn,” every viewer of “Last Tango in Paris” or “A Clockwork Orange,” there will be ten, a hundred, a thousand people who “know” those works as excessively filthy, or excessively violent, or both.
The assumption of guilt replaces the assumption of innocence. Why did that Indian Muslim artist have to paint that Hindu goddess in the nude? Couldn’t he have respected her modesty? Why did that Russian writer have his hero fall in love with a nymphet? Couldn’t he have chosen a legally acceptable age? Why did that British playwright depict a sexual assault in a Sikh temple, a gurdwara? Couldn’t the same assault have been removed from the holy ground? Why are artists so troublesome? Can’t they just offer us beauty, morality, and a damn good story? Why do artists think, if they behave in this way, that we should be on their side? “And the people all said sit down, sit down you’re rocking the boat / And the devil will drag you under, with a soul so heavy you’ll never float / Sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down / You’re rocking the boat.”
At its most effective, the censor’s lie actually succeeds in replacing the artist’s truth. That which is censored is thought to have deserved censorship. Boat-rocking is deplored.
Nor is this only so in the world of art. The Ministry of Truth in present-day China has successfully persuaded a very large part of the Chinese public that the heroes of Tiananmen Square were actually villains bent on the destruction of the nation. This is the final victory of the censor: When people, even people who know they are routinely lied to, cease to be able to imagine what the case is really.
Sometimes great, banned works defy the censor’s description and impose themselves on the world—“Ulysses,” “Lolita,” the “Arabian Nights.” Sometimes great and brave artists defy the censors to create marvelous literature underground, as in the case of the samizdat literature of the Soviet Union, or to make subtle films that dodge the edge of the censor’s knife, as in the case of much contemporary Iranian and some Chinese cinema. You will even find people who will give you the argument that censorship is good for artists because it challenges their imagination. This is like arguing that if you cut a man’s arms off you can praise him for learning to write with a pen held between his teeth. Censorship is not good for art, and it is even worse for artists themselves. The work of Ai Weiwei survives; the artist himself has an increasingly difficult life. The poet Ovid was banished to the Black Sea by a displeased Augustus Caesar and spent the rest of his life in a little hellhole called Tomis, but the poetry of Ovid has outlived the Roman Empire. The poet Mandelstam died in one of Stalin’s labor camps, but the poetry of Mandelstam has outlived the Soviet Union. The poet Lorca was murdered in Spain, by Generalissimo Franco’s goons, but the poetry of Lorca has outlived the fascistic Falange. So perhaps we can argue that art is stronger than the censor, and perhaps it often is. Artists, however, are vulnerable.
In England last week, English pen protested that the London Book Fair had invited only a bunch of “official,” State-approved writers from China while the voices of at least thirty-five writers jailed by the regime, including Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo and the political dissident and poet Zhu Yufu, remained silent and ignored. In the United States, every year, religious zealots try to ban writers as disparate as Kurt Vonnegut and J. K. Rowling, an obvious advocate of sorcery and the black arts; to say nothing of poor, God-bothered Charles Darwin, against whom the advocates of intelligent design continue to march. I once wrote, and it still feels true, that the attacks on the theory of evolution in parts of the United States themselves go some way to disproving the theory, demonstrating that natural selection doesn’t always work, or at least not in the Kansas area and that human beings are capable of evolving backward, too, towards the Missing Link.
Even more serious is the growing acceptance of the don’t-rock-the-boat response to those artists who do rock it, the growing agreement that censorship can be justified when certain interest groups, or genders, or faiths declare themselves affronted by a piece of work. Great art, or, let’s just say, more modestly, original art is never created in the safe middle ground, but always at the edge. Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes, disrespects sacred cows or other such entities. It can be shocking, or ugly, or, to use the catch-all term so beloved of the tabloid press, controversial. And if we believe in liberty, if we want the air we breathe to remain plentiful and breathable, this is the art whose right to exist we must not only defend but celebrate. Art is not entertainment. At its very best, it’s a revolution.
(Credited to) https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/on-censorship
Peril (Tony Morrison)
Authoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always, fools. But none is foolish enough to give perceptive, dissident writers free range to publish their judgments or follow their creative instincts. They know they do so at their own peril. They are not stupid enough to abandon control (overt or insidious) over media. Their methods include surveillance, censorship, arrest, even slaughter of those writers informing and disturbing the public. Writers who are unsettling, calling into question, taking another, deeper look. Writers -- journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights -- can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace, and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.
That is their peril.
Ours is of another sort.
How bleak, unlivable, insufferable existence becomes when we are deprived of artwork. That the life and work of writers facing peril must be protected is urgent, but along with that urgency, we should remind ourselves that their absence, the choking off of a writer's work, its cruel amputation, is of equal peril to us. The rescue we extend to them is a generosity to ourselves.
We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writing is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world's resources. The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow. The history of persecuted writers is as long as the history of literature itself And the efforts to censor, starve, regulate, and annihilate us are clear signs that something important has taken place. Cultural and political forces can sweep clean all but the "safe," all but state-approved art.
I have been told that there are two human responses to the perception of chaos: naming and violence. When the chaos is simply the unknown, the naming can be accomplished effortlessly -- a new species, star, formula, equation, prognosis. There is also mapping, charting, or devising proper nouns for unnamed or stripped-of-names geography, landscape, or population. When chaos resists, either by reforming itself or by rebelling against imposed order, violence is understood to be the most frequent response and the most rational when confronting the unknown, the catastrophic, the wild, wanton, or incorrigible. Rational responses may be censure, incarceration in holding camps, prisons, or death, singly or in war. There is, however, a third response to chaos, which I have not heard about, which is stillness. Such stillness can be passivity and dumbfoundedness; it can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art. Those writers plying their craft near to or far from the throne of raw power, of military power, of empire building and counting houses, writers who construct meaning in the face of chaos must be nurtured, protected. And it is right that such protection be initiated by other writers. And it is imperative not only to save the besieged writers but to save ourselves. The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages nourishing underground, essayists' questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films -- that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.
Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.
A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.
(Credited to) http://yougottareadguest.blogspot.in/2009/07/excerpt-peril-by-toni-morrison.html
4. Day 1 (one hour)
Poem, story or a novel are the creations of writers.
They are like sculptures to sculptors.
Poems or stories are like a new garden created by a gardener.
Likewise, a film is a creation of the director.
The creators take much labour and pain for their creations.
But when the creations come out there is hue and cry against creations.
There arise protest from different corners.
Sometimes, even before the release of a film or a book, the ban comes.
There is cutting off certain pages or scenes of the creations.
This censorship makes the creators and the related disappointed.
Sometimes, freedom of expression might be at risk.
A heavy loss to the name, fame, and money happens through censorship.
Is censoring necessary for literary creations?
Teacher writes the question on the board.
‘Is censoring necessary for literary creations?’
If you think yes, write YES in your notebook.
If you are no, write NO.
They write YES or NO according to their options.
Why are you YES?
Why are you NO?
Scribble your arguments for YES or NO.
They scribble maximum arguments to substantiate their YES or NO.
Teacher asks an enthusiastic student:
Are you YES or NO for censoring literary creations.
Yes, you are YES/NO for censoring.
What is your argument? Say one.
The student says her argument.
Teacher megaphones her argument.
The student explains the argument with an example.
This is what Ms. X says.
Do you agree with her?
The teacher invites a student who may counter Ms. X.
Teacher megaphones the argument of that student.
Thus the class glides into a debate.
Teacher provokes the arguers to raise maximum arguments.
(Teacher maintains a neutral role to get a heated debate)
When the debate saturates at a point, teacher asks: (20 mts)
You got more arguments from others.
Write those arguments also in your notebook.
They complete their writing of arguments. (10 mts)
Pointing to any one’s arguments teacher says:
Look these are your arguments on censorship.
Here are two short essays written on the same issue of censorship.
They are well-known writers of the current time.
The first one is Salman Rushdie and the other one is Toni Morrison.
Shall we read Salman Rushdie first?
(The essay has several new words and usages, these barriers should be overcome)
The essay has several new words and new usages.
Take your pencil, you are underlining the new words and terms that require explanation.
They read ‘glossary’ for the explanation of the new words.
They may refer on-line dictionary.
If both of the above sources are unavailable, let them get the help of the co-learners.
If teacher’s explanation is necessary, teacher intervenes.
Now you overcome the barriers of the new words.
They reread the essay. (20 mts)
While they complete reading, teacher shows the following blank table on the screen
|
A. Salman Rushdie
|
B. Tony Morrison
|
||
|
1.
|
|
1.
|
|
|
2.
|
|
2.
|
|
|
3.
|
|
3.
|
|
|
4.
|
|
4.
|
|
You read Rushdie’s arguments against censorship.
He opposes censorship tooth and nail.
Try to write Rushdie’s arguments under section A.
For example, quoting Tom Stoppard, Rushdie says censorship stops what writers want to talk, thus they talk less important issues.
Shall I write that on the table?
Teacher megaphones and writes the following words in the first box.
Censorship stops writers to talk.
This is one argument that we get from the first paragraph.
Take your time to complete reading of the remaining paragraphs.
Write other arguments also in the columns.
Do it as a homework.
Also, read the short essay by Toni Morrison.
And write the arguments of Toni Morrison under section B of the table. (10 mts)
5. Day 2 (one hour)
Take out the homework done.
Two or three students present the arguments of Salman Rushdie. (10 mts)
Good, you have made an attempt to present the arguments of Rushdie.
I have also done the same attempt.
Look at the screen.
(Each point comes as a flash at a time)
|
A. Salman Rushdie
|
B. Tony Morrison
|
||
|
1.
|
Censorship stops writers to talk.
|
1.
|
|
|
2.
|
Censorship is No-Thing
|
2.
|
|
|
3.
|
Censorship is like providing breathable air only
|
3.
|
|
|
4.
|
Censorship is like weakening the remaining air
|
4.
|
|
|
5.
|
When the air of liberty is provided we are not in a position to utilize that freedom
|
5.
|
|
|
6.
|
Fear produced by censorship takes away the confidence of the writers.
|
6.
|
|
|
7.
|
Censorship labels the art filthy and violent
|
7.
|
|
Teacher asks the meaning of NO-Thing. (20 mts)
Following questions are triggered to open discussions.
What is the meaning of the comparison of censorship with breathable air and weakening the remaining air?
In censorship how is one unable to enjoy freedom?
How does censorship become a threat to confidence?
How censorship brands art filthy and violent? (20 mts)
The teacher points out the blank columns of section B of the table.
The same way shall we write the arguments of Tony Morrison?
They read the short essay of Tony Morrison to write her arguments against censorship.
They make an attempt to fill in the columns under section B.
|
A. Salman Rushdie
|
B. Tony Morrison
|
||
|
1.
|
Censorship stops writers to talk.
|
1.
|
|
|
2.
|
Censorship is No-Thing
|
2.
|
|
|
3.
|
Censorship is like providing breathable air only
|
3.
|
|
|
4.
|
Censorship is like weakening the remaining air
|
4.
|
|
|
5.
|
When the air of liberty is provided we are not in a position to utilize that freedom
|
5.
|
|
|
6.
|
Fear produced by censorship takes away the confidence of the writers.
|
6.
|
|
|
7.
|
Censorship labels the art filthy and violent
|
7.
|
|
Two or three students present their list of arguments.
After their presentation teacher shows the following chart.
|
|
B. Tony Morrison
|
||
|
|
|
1.
|
Disagreeing writers can’t follow their creative interest
|
|
|
|
2.
|
They face two types of peril.
a) Their own peril
b) Reader’s peril
|
|
|
|
3.
|
Our existence becomes bleak if arts are deprived
|
|
|
|
4.
|
Absence of writers in the society is like amputation
|
|
|
|
5.
|
Regimes are fearful of unmonitored writing. They compel writers to flee.
|
|
|
|
6.
|
If unpoliced writers are threatening the regime there is suppression of writers.
|
|
|
|
7.
|
When chaos are resisted, violence may come up. Stillness may arise from the suppression of chaos.
|
|
|
|
8.
|
Writers who construct meaning in chaos should be protected
|
|
|
|
9.
|
Unstaged plays, canceled films are like nightmare
|
|
|
|
10
|
The trauma of censorship is very difficult to remove
|
They compare the list of theirs with that of the teacher.
Teacher asks the following questions one-by-one to the class to generate discussion;
a) Why does Toni Morrison say that disagreeing writers can’t be creative?
b) How does censorship fasten writer’s own peril as well as reader’s peril?
c) How does the existence of the society become bleak without art?
d) Negating the presence of the writers is equal to amputation. How?
e) Why the rulers threaten the writers to flee out?
f) Why the presence of writers is necessary in chaos?
g) How do the unstaged plays and canceled films become a nightmare?
Now we complete reading of the short essays.
Write the summary of these two short essays in three paragraphs.
In the first paragraph, you are writing the key arguments of Salman Rushdie.
In the second paragraph, you are writing the key points of Toni Morrison.
In the third paragraph, you are writing your own findings based on the arguments of Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison.
A general reader may feel their arguments are quite alien and loaded.
So when you write, write in a clear, simple style to be comprehended by readers who have only limited number of vocabulary.
Do this as a homework.
There is one more homework.
Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison share their dissatisfaction over censorship on literature and art.
Were they victims of any censorship?
Is it from that dissatisfaction they are criticising censorship?
Read online to collect maximum about the background of their dissatisfaction. (20 mts)
6. Day 3 (one hour)
Yesterday I gave you a homework.
Writing the summary of the short essays was the homework.
They interchange the homework with others and read.
Two or three present the summary in the whole class.
There was one more homework.
Finding out the background against which the two authors penned the essays, was the second homework. (10 mts)
Any two describe the background against which Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison wrote the essays on censorship.
Teacher reads and explains the following extract about Salman Rushdie.
Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses’ was banned in many countries with large Muslim communities (13 in total: Iran, India, Bangladesh, Sudan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, Singapore, Venezuela, and Pakistan).
He held that the novel is not "an anti-religious novel. It is, however, an attempt to write about migration, its stresses, and transformations."
On 14 February 1989—Valentine's Day, and also the day of his close friend Bruce Chatwin's funeral—a fatwā ordering Rushdie's execution was proclaimed on Radio Tehran by Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran at the time, calling the book "blasphemous against Islam".
Teacher reads and explains the following paragraph about Tony Morrison:
Although her novels typically concentrate on black women, Morrison does not identify her works as feminist. When asked in a 1998 interview "Why distance oneself from feminism?" she replied: "In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book – leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity."[ She went on to state that she thought it "off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I'm involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don't subscribe to patriarchy, and I don't think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it's a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things. (10 mts)
(Credited to) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison
Both the essays, especially the essay of Salman Rushdie, have certain historical or fictional references.
The essayists use this strategy to substantiate their arguments.
Can you make a list of such fictional references of both the writers?
|
Historical/fictional references by Salman Rushdie
|
Historical/fictional reference by Toni Morrison
|
|
King Lear
|
Miami
|
|
Albatross
|
Albatross
|
|
|
|
How relevant are these references to the theme of the essays?
Students read the essays once again in order to find out the relevance of each reference. (20 mts)
The last sentence of the full text of Rushdie’s essay is;
Art is not entertainment. At its very best, it’s a revolution.
And the last sentence of the full text of Toni Morrison’s essay is;
A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.
Rushdie and Toni Morrison have not been discussed each other before writing such a meaningful conclusion to their essays.
But a coincidence of words in the vicinity.
Are the themes of the sentences divergent or convergent?
Can you interpret the themes of the sentences in your own way?
I repeat the question, what was the sense in the minds of the essayists?
Art is not entertainment. At its very best, it’s a revolution.
A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.
They try to write their own interpretation.
They may agree/disagree with the sense of the sentences.
Two or three students present their views with the help of what they have scribbled.
Teacher adds her views; (20 mts)
a) How does art become triggers for social change?
b) Writer’s life and work are not at the mercy of others in the society.
c) Art and literature are the necessity of the society.
d) Protecting art and literature with its originality is the need of the society.
