PAPERWALLAH. Bloody farce

Being a writer I am inordinately fond of pens. Either metaphorical, the ‘pen’ with which I type-write, or literal, the fountain pen I carry with me to book signings. “You’re the only person I know who still uses an ink pen,” said someone at a recent launch. Lately, pens have been on my mind. Rather, ever since the offices of Charlie Hebdo were attacked, leaving 12 people dead. The BBC carried a picture from a public rally. A hand holding a pen, raised high in the air, clenched and defiant. It’s seductive, of course — the pen as sword, as weapon, a Subtle Knife that slices away injustice, hypocrisy, and untruth. Images like these have been flooding newspapers across the world, as well as our newsfeeds and timelines. Pen-warfare, let’s call them. Doing the rounds are cartoons of broken pencils re-sharpened to fight another day, drawing tools placed in the shape of a gun, quills raining down as bombs on armed ‘Arab’ terrorists, pens strapped like bombs around a man’s torso, towering pencils about to be attacked by an airplane, and the tip of the Eiffel tower transformed into a giant nib impaling a hook-nosed turbaned ‘Muslim’ waving a scimitar. Also, a pencil eraser erasing an armed extremist with (just in case you miss the point) “terror” printed above his head, and “ideas are bulletproof”. The message couldn’t be clearer. In the face of a backward medieval ideology that only understands the language of the gun, the West — the brave, heroic, peace-loving, Enlightenment-inspired West — responds by reaffirming its commitment to resist barbarism with the weapons of ideas and freedom of expression.

It is, as Corey Oakley says in ‘Charlie Hebdo and the Hypocrisy of Pencils’ in the Red Flag , well past time to call the bullshit.

Each of these cartoons invokes the notion that the West will fight Islamic extremism (or should we simply call it fascism, without consolidating associations to a particular cultural tradition?) with a battle of ideas, an armament of cartoons, literature, graphic novels — sans bloodshed and violence, sans drones and bombers. Each image carries the dangerously misleading suggestion of a sanitised, intellectual pursuit of conflict resolution. In reality it has been anything but. For almost two decades the US, backed in varying degrees by a clutch of Western governments, has rained destruction — of the non-pencil kind — on the ‘Arab and Muslim world’, ferociously, repeatedly. To echo Oakley, “it was not pencils and pens — let alone ideas — that left Iraq, Gaza and Afghanistan shattered and hundreds of thousands dead.” Not 12. Hundreds of thousands. With lives, with families. With stories that will now remain unwritten.

The cartoons are cruel hypocrisy to lives lost when the West wielded not the pen, but the sword. Time and time again. Not just recently, but also in the past. After all, it wasn’t the barrel-trigger of ideas that put Western colonial policies in place to systematically consign their colonies, including those in the Arab world, into poverty and hopelessness. Lest we forget, France’s rule of Algeria was brutal, the imperialists complicit in murdering hundreds of thousands of colonial subjects to preserve the remnants of empire.

What would be heartening is a turnout of a million people taking to Parisian streets to put an end to the ongoing poverty, ghettoisation and persecution endured by the Muslim population of France, mostly of Algerian origin. The history of the West’s relationship with the ‘Muslim world’ involves colonialism and imperialism, occupation, subjugation and war, and raising the pen, clenched and defiant, erases that, upholding instead the sweetly quaint notion that ‘Western values’ (whatever these might be) entail a rejection and disregard of violence and terror as political tools.

The pen too does not lie blameless. It has wreaked havoc, but not in the way these pen-warfare cartoonists like to portray. The pen has signed endless Patriot acts and anti-terror laws tightening state surveillance, passed bills curtailing civil rights and entrenching police harassment. The editorial pen has launched prolonged and oftentimes indiscriminate anti-Muslim, anti-migrant attacks, with little thought for the people it so casually labels and decries. Many of those in power were quick to rally behind Charlie Hebdo while not seeing the irony in their continued practices of censorship (from the witch-hunt against Wikileaks, and the Snowden scandal, down to the many writers and bloggers warning against the seemingly friendly embrace of surveillance and thought-crime apparatuses worldwide).

We commit a crime of ahistorical philistinism if we ignore the context — recent and longstanding — to the reaction embodied in slogans like #jesuischarlie that risk casting racism, xenophobia and colonial heritage under a carpet of victimhood. The farce happily continues. World leaders link arms for freedom of thought while imprisoning dissidents and surveying their citizenry’s every move. Ordinary Muslims are expected to rigorously denounce terrorist attacks they have nothing to do with. The right accuses the left of being sympathetic to ‘Islamic terrorism’. Meanwhile, Muslims in the West live in fear of inevitable violent reprisals; I’m certain they won’t be dodging ink–filled pens, feathery quills, and sharpened pencils.

( Janice Pariat is the author of Seahorse )

Follow Janice on Twitter @janicepariat