In Comforting Myths (Univ. of Virginia, Oct.), Lebanese American novelist Rabih Alameddine argues that all art is political.
What do you make of book-banning efforts in the U.S.?
In America, we tend to see everything “wrong” as happening outside the country, but censorship is constant here. In Florida, librarians are forced to take books off shelves until a committee reviews it, and they can take years to do so. If that’s not censorship, I don’t know what is.
Do you see censorship manifested in other ways?
Censorship here has many different forms. Some are pure censorship, but primarily, it’s about not being able to find a publisher. Concerns about “sales” are how we censor here. Most publishers will tell you “this will not sell,” and that is, in many ways, censorship. Now, there are different levels of censorship. During the heyday of dictatorships in Eastern Europe, you could get shot by the government for publishing something. We haven’t gotten there yet, but we’ve censored for as long as this country has existed.
So the freedom to read is contingent on the freedom to write, and to get published?
Yes. I’m one of the lucky ones because I’ve found publishers for most of my writings, but I’ve had many short stories rejected for being too sexual or too political. If you write anything that puts the U.S. in a bad light or depicts something we consider evil as not that evil, you’ll find difficulty publishing it. I had one story get rejected by many places when I sent it out for
the first time in 2006, but maybe 10 years later the same story was accepted by the Paris Review and received a lot of acclaim. It didn’t get published originally because it wasn’t politically acceptable at that moment.
Would more diversity in publishing improve matters?
Usually when we talk about diversity here, we talk about diversity of race, which is obviously important. What we don’t talk about is diversity of belief, and I’m not talking religion necessarily. Diversity should be about having different points of view and writers from different parts of the world who can give American literature an enema, something so different it shocks the system. I can’t do that because I’m an American and see literature the way most people in this country do. And yet, in this country I’m considered the outsider, but there are other writers who are outsiders much more than me, and they never see the light of day here. The writers outside the dominant culture who get accepted are those that make people in the dominant culture feel, “Oh, they’re just like us.” The trouble is that most of the world is not like us.
