Self-censorship is not black or white

During the hustle and bustle of the Colombo International Book Fair last Saturday, two works by prominent poet Buddhadasa Galappaththi were launched. The event was highlighted by two lectures on the intricate art of writing newspaper columns in Sri Lanka.

The first lecture, delivered by Thilakaratne Kuruvitabandara, was titled ‘The art of Sri Lankan newspaper column writing.’ The invitation described him as ‘journalist’ (madhyavedi) whereas, he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of our literature, cinema, music and all art forms in general. The second lecture was by thinker, columnist, translator and political activist Gamini Viyangoda, who writes one of the best contemporary socio-political columns in Sinhala for the Ravaya newspaper. It was titled ‘The social impact of the newspaper column.’

The first lecture established the historical perspective of our newspaper columns, highlighted with quotes which could only be garnered from an archive today. The perspective covered only the Sinhala press, which was a drawback because the first Lankan national newspapers happened to be in English. But did they actually carry columns, which needed to be distinguished from editorials? This is an interesting question in comparison to columnists in Britain, and we shall have a look at that subject later in this column.

I found the second lecture more pertinent because it established the newspaper column as it existed today, in the present political and historical context. Gamini Viyangoda explained how columnists resorted to satire, subterfuge and writing between the lines in order to survive in a macro climate of fear where journalists have been murdered, disappeared or abducted and tortured.

Self-censorship was the next important point raised. It’s probably a bigger role than anything else in ensuring a columnist’s survival. The prevailing theory is that the state would use physical violence to silence journalists only when it’s unavoidable (the criteria of ‘unavoidable’ remains murky at best, but one can always create a comfort zone in the mind by defining that grey zone between life and death according to one’s fond beliefs).

The state can always counter that the vast majority of journalists in the country have never been intimidated, threatened or physically attacked ( always by ‘unknown persons’ because we have yet to establish who was actually responsible for all the mediarelated murders, assaults and kidnappings, and quite likely they would remain unknown for the rest of our lives). But this is a general condition. In other words, the state is ‘squeaky clean’ while mysterious forces continue to kidnap, intimidate and murder.

I, for example, have never received a threatening phone call (though there’s always hope) but I practice self-censorship because I feel intimidated by the general context. While ridiculing my caution and possible paranoia, you can congratulate yourself on not saying anything at all while buying your groceries, paying fuel and electricity bills or letting your children go through military drill as university entrants or when the police shoot criminals by the roadside ‘while trying to escape.’

Therefore, a columnist’s caution and fears are in direct proportion to his or her concern with human rights, dignity, and concern for freedom of expression. But all these things will be viewed and defined from polar opposites by columnists across the great divide which marks our journalism, and everything else, right now. One person’s slavery is another’s freedom, one’s fear another’s joy. It is sobering to reflect at this point that, with the exception of Lasantha Wickematunga and Prageeth Eknaligoda, almost all the prominent journalists who were targeted by ‘unknown persons’ were hardline, progovernment writers who played a major role in bringing this government into power.

Therefore, what am I scared of as a liberal, dissenting critic of this government’s policies? This is hard to explain to people who have learned to live with the system, willingly or otherwise. Independent writers are explorers of latent fears, because they must risk the unknown and wrest definitions from a confusing mass of ideas, viewpoints, slogans, stories and incidents around them. And, in a context such as ours, they may have to pay one day dearly for the ‘unpatriotic’ task of correctly defining an unruly, unholy age of socio-political and economic chaos and mayhem.

And that’s why, as a columnist, I too, resort to subterfuge, writing between the lines, and comedy -- and I’m not even a political columnist. I think my case illustrates perfectly the plight of the contemporary Sri Lankan column writer (I shall leave out reporters because, theoretically, they have nothing to fear as long as they report within the bounds of the existing parameters) because, theoretically, it’s the political columnist who is at risk, because he has to criticise the government. Why should a writer who is by and large a social commentator feel himself at risk?

That’s so because A. I’m not a hero and B. That’s the nature of our society. Not being a hero, however, does not automatically turn you into a coward. If we take a military analogy, the mass of soldiers and officers are professionally trained to win battles without risking themselves too much. If half the army is wiped out while winning the war, the country would have lost economically. But a few heroes will always emerge, and we can admire them though no one will claim that their heroism alone was the crucial factor in winning the war.

My point is that self-censorship is still a wide-enough greyblack-white zone in which you can actually say something relevant. For all the political ruthlessness, Sri Lanka isn’t yet Stalinist Russia or Myanmar. In some respects, even Stalinist Russia might be seen as better than Myanmar (or Sri Lanka, for that matter) because it still produced a number of great writers. No newspaper columnists may be in that list, but Stalin saw literature as a greater threat than newspapers, which is why many writers and poets perished in the Gulag. In that sense, the Myanmar situation might be far worse, leaving no grey zone where creativity allied to personal freedoms and political expression is possible.

Sri Lanka today is in between these two extremes. Gamini Viyangoda’s usually outspoken column is a good example of what might be achieved in an atmosphere of selfcensorship. Thisaranee Gunasekara and Kusal Perera are other examples, along with a handful of others. Some of them are bi-lingual writers (I must add that Gamini Viyangoda, along with the others mentioned, doesn’t believe in censoring himself. Even though he was recently vilified on on one of the state TVs, this was on another issue, and not on his column writing. Then again, how would the government react if he wrote in English for a national English Sundaypaper?

The point is that our writers do not, in general, probe the limits of self-censorship. They happily wallow in it. This is unfortunately because a marginal space for independent expression has been allowed by the regime. I think this is because, unlike Soviet Russia or Myanmar, we are in the privileged geographical position of a hub, centrifugal as well as centripetal. Our small size, a tradition of outspokenness, a considerable culture of flawed but continual democratic practices since 1948 (unlike Soviet Russia or Myanmar, which have known no democratic traditions in their modern political history) and an ever-increasing dependency on tourism and foreign aid (both mainly from Western sources) are the bulwarks of that little, increasingly besieged space occupied by our tiny number of independent columnists, writers and rational-thinking general public, who in fact add up to another belittled minority.

In this context, it’s useful to compare ourselves with another country (Britain, in this case). But lack of space means we have to postpone that discussion till next week.