People defy fear to visit Literature Festival

LAHORE

The city of Lahore exhibited its resilient character yet again as thousands of people turned up at the Lahore Literature Festival (LLF) 2017, refusing to be confined by fear, while the festival paid back their commitment with brilliant sessions.

From being a blossoming bouquet of a three day event held annually the Alhamra Halls to being contortioned into a single day festival, there was doubt and suspicion surrounding the event being held at all. However, the persistence and hard work of the organisers of LLF did not surrender to the seemingly unfavorable circumstances surrounding this year’s LLF and were committed to holding it no matter what.

While the organisers refused to share the reason for a second shift of the venue for the event hours before the commencement of the first session, it didn’t really matter by the end of it all.

It was most aptly framed in a beautiful sentence by Molly Crabapple when she said “Our enemy wants to lock us up in a box and I'd be damned if I'd make his wish come true”.

The session ‘Art In The Age of Fascism’ with the Yale Poynter Fellow, and ‘Front Page Award’ winner  for her art of rebel-held Aleppo Molly CrabApple was maybe the most in tune with the socio-political realities surrounding the event. “People keep telling me that its so brave of me to show up here in Lahore, for this event, and it isn’t true, the real brave people are the people of Lahore, of Pakistan for holding such events and showing up in numbers”, said Molly right a the start of her talk.

"I believe that for a very long time, art has been confined to the rich collector’s world, I believe it bringing it out in the open and using the beauty and power of art to inspire the lives of everyone especially those worst hit by the rugged times our world is going through," she said.

Commenting on the mood worldwide, she said that the sudden rise of the racist war machinery is not a reality that  suddenly emerged, the global romance for fascism had been building up for a long time, looking for strongmen to reinforce their worldview and individuals like trump made that possible.

An award winning artist, a journalist and an activist, Molly has nine books to her credit while she has worked in conflict zones like Gaza, Palestine and Syria. ‘The first feeling that one gets in Gaza is that claustrophobia’, she said. There is so much of this population squeezed onto this small area.

In art and in life we must write better stories. Artists shouldn’t paint magnificent portraits of dictators that history will make them regret later, she said.

Challenging the concept of unity that erodes diversity calling for oneness, she said that that’s exactly what Hitler said, one emperor, one people.  “This purity fetish is something that is counterproductive, our cultures are mixed our races our blood, there is no pure past no separate other, and  with art we can create these inclusive paradises where this fetishism is defeated” said Molly.

In a session titled Far-Right Far-Out: Writing, Nationalism and the Brave New World” with novel writers Daniyal Moeenuddin, Eka Kurniawan, Gillian Slovo and Teju Cole and moderated by Dwigt Garner, the panelists talked about the new challenges faced by writers in the transforming socio-political realities of the world.

They shared the psychological turmoil writers  have gone through due to the recent world events including the Trump Presidency, the Middle Eastern Crises and the mass refugee plight across the world. “All this makes it so hard to concentrate and disconnect oneself from all this and delve into the characters of one’s novel”, said Teju Cole who was maybe the most expressive of how our current times influence a writer.

Daniyal Moeenuddin, although was of the view that his characters and stories are very rarely the socio-political commentary of the world around him, yet he too couldn’t deny that it seeps into the writing even if in its most subtle expressions. “I’ve not been able to read any novel for the past two years as I've now been forced by these circumstances surrounding us to read books that explain what exactly is causing this global turmoil where hatred and crisis is affecting so many people” , said Gillian Slovo.

Commenting on what a writer can do in the times of the rise of Far-Right sentiment in the form of the rise of UK UKIP, Donald Trump and religious extremism, Teju Cole, maybe summed it up best by saying, “As a writer I can  lit up a candle in the dark but I’m not responsible for vanquishing the darkness ,I am, however, responsible for my candle though”.