What do you think?
Rate this book
An Embarrassment of Tyrannies: Twenty-Five Years of Index on Censorship
The writings, many by such renowned authors as Nadine Gordimer, Arthur Miller, and Julio Cortazar, cover the issues with careful even-handedness. Ariel Dorfman writes from the experience of the Chilean dictatorship and imagines a training course for salesmen of torture equipment; Alexander Solzhenitsyn has a fragment of poetry recalling his own period in a labor camp in Kazakhstan; Wale Soginka writes powerfully in defense of Salman Rushie—a truly disturbing piece.
A great tribute to Index's achievements, this collection celebrates without being self-congratulatory. Its contributors provide elegant testimony to the human spirit's capacity for survival and its continuing struggle for freedom.
A great tribute to Index's achievements, this collection celebrates without being self-congratulatory. Its contributors provide elegant testimony to the human spirit's capacity for survival and its continuing struggle for freedom.
346 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 1998
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 8, 2020
“Sometime in 1941, Jorge Luis Borges noted that in a riddle whose subject is chess, the only word that cannot be mentioned is precisely the word ‘chess.’ ‘To ALWAYS omit a word, to make use of inept metaphors and self-evident paraphrases,’ writes Borges, ‘is perhaps the most emphatic way of pointing it out.’ The paradoxical ability of censorship is that, in its efforts to suppress, it highlights that which it wishes to condemn: it draws attention to clearings of silence in the tangles of our language and our literatures. Spanish has an idiom, ‘it shines through its absence,’ that precisely describes censorship’s innermost failure.”
I haven’t seen one yet, but there appears to be a magazine called “Index on Censorship” where some of the best writers have contributed pieces devoted to topics like, well, censorship, free press, right to free expression, tyranny, dictatorship, those freedom fighters and martyrs of freedom and similar kindred subjects. Writers like Eduardo Galeano, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nadine Gordimer, Arthur Miller, Vaclav Havel, Wole Soyinka, Julio Cortazar, Juan Goytisolo, Noam Chomsky and others. This book is a compilation of some of these best writings and the above quote was from that by Alberto Manguel, author of the novel “News from a Foreign Country Came” and “A History of Reading.”
There’s not only prose here. There’s prose-poetry also, like the one by the ward-winning American journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, a part of which reads:
“Once upon a time, politicians promised jobs and benefits to constituents, like ‘a chicken in every pot’ to get elected.
It was a sure-fire vote-getter.
No longer.
Today the lowest-level politico up to the president use another sure-fire gimmick to guarantee victory.
Death.
Promise death and the election is yours.
Guaranteed.
Vraiment.
A ‘Vote for Hell’ in the ‘Land of Liberty’, with its over one million prisoners, is the ticket to victory.”
And then there’s also pure poetry, like this poem by Herberto Padilla (an erstwhile supporter of the Cuban Revolution) entitled “Instructions on How to Enter a New Society”:
“One be an optimist.
Two: be discreet, correct, obedient.
(Do well at sports—all of them.)
And, most of all, move
like all other members:
one step forward, and
one (or two) steps back:
but never stop cheering.”
Such sceptical tone of his poetry got him in trouble with Fidel Castro’s government that he landed in jail in 1970.
In Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer’s article “A Writer’s Freedom” she quotes a poem by playwright Berholt Brecht:
“When the Regime ordered that books with dangerous teachings
Should be publicly burnt and everywhere
Oxen were forced to draw carts full of books
To the funeral pyre,
An exiled poet,
One of the best,
Discovered with fury when he studied the list
Of the burned, that his books
Had been forgotten. He rushed to his writing table
On wings of anger and wrote a letter to those in power.
Burn me, he wrote with hurrying pen, burn me!
Do not treat me in this fashion. Don’t leave me out.
Have I not
Always spoken the truth in my books? And now
You treat me like a liar! I order you:
Burn me!”
There are plenty more pages which I have dog-eared for their memorable passages but I just leave them to others (hopefully) to be rediscovered and shared since this copy is now going to the city library where I donate all the books I’ve finished reading. They may not be read for a long time, in my country ruled by ignorance and apathy, with this copy gathering dust for months or years, but one day, a true reader will stumble upon it and relive the enjoyment I had reading this from cover to cover. When that happens it’ll be something like the rain in Eduardo Galeano’s “Cemetery of Words” where he had written:
“Extermination plan: strip the land of grass, root up the last living plant, cover the earth with salt. After that, erase the memory of grass. To colonize consciousness, suppress it; to suppress it, empty it of past.
Wipe out any sign that there was anything in this land other than silence, prisons and graves.
Remembering is prohibited.
There are customs regulations for words, incinerators for words, cemeteries for words.
Squads of prisoners are sent out at night to cover with white paint the words of protest which in other times covered the walls of the city.
The rain’s persistent washing begins to dissolve the white paint. And there appear, gradually, the stubborn words.”
I haven’t seen one yet, but there appears to be a magazine called “Index on Censorship” where some of the best writers have contributed pieces devoted to topics like, well, censorship, free press, right to free expression, tyranny, dictatorship, those freedom fighters and martyrs of freedom and similar kindred subjects. Writers like Eduardo Galeano, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nadine Gordimer, Arthur Miller, Vaclav Havel, Wole Soyinka, Julio Cortazar, Juan Goytisolo, Noam Chomsky and others. This book is a compilation of some of these best writings and the above quote was from that by Alberto Manguel, author of the novel “News from a Foreign Country Came” and “A History of Reading.”
There’s not only prose here. There’s prose-poetry also, like the one by the ward-winning American journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, a part of which reads:
“Once upon a time, politicians promised jobs and benefits to constituents, like ‘a chicken in every pot’ to get elected.
It was a sure-fire vote-getter.
No longer.
Today the lowest-level politico up to the president use another sure-fire gimmick to guarantee victory.
Death.
Promise death and the election is yours.
Guaranteed.
Vraiment.
A ‘Vote for Hell’ in the ‘Land of Liberty’, with its over one million prisoners, is the ticket to victory.”
And then there’s also pure poetry, like this poem by Herberto Padilla (an erstwhile supporter of the Cuban Revolution) entitled “Instructions on How to Enter a New Society”:
“One be an optimist.
Two: be discreet, correct, obedient.
(Do well at sports—all of them.)
And, most of all, move
like all other members:
one step forward, and
one (or two) steps back:
but never stop cheering.”
Such sceptical tone of his poetry got him in trouble with Fidel Castro’s government that he landed in jail in 1970.
In Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer’s article “A Writer’s Freedom” she quotes a poem by playwright Berholt Brecht:
“When the Regime ordered that books with dangerous teachings
Should be publicly burnt and everywhere
Oxen were forced to draw carts full of books
To the funeral pyre,
An exiled poet,
One of the best,
Discovered with fury when he studied the list
Of the burned, that his books
Had been forgotten. He rushed to his writing table
On wings of anger and wrote a letter to those in power.
Burn me, he wrote with hurrying pen, burn me!
Do not treat me in this fashion. Don’t leave me out.
Have I not
Always spoken the truth in my books? And now
You treat me like a liar! I order you:
Burn me!”
There are plenty more pages which I have dog-eared for their memorable passages but I just leave them to others (hopefully) to be rediscovered and shared since this copy is now going to the city library where I donate all the books I’ve finished reading. They may not be read for a long time, in my country ruled by ignorance and apathy, with this copy gathering dust for months or years, but one day, a true reader will stumble upon it and relive the enjoyment I had reading this from cover to cover. When that happens it’ll be something like the rain in Eduardo Galeano’s “Cemetery of Words” where he had written:
“Extermination plan: strip the land of grass, root up the last living plant, cover the earth with salt. After that, erase the memory of grass. To colonize consciousness, suppress it; to suppress it, empty it of past.
Wipe out any sign that there was anything in this land other than silence, prisons and graves.
Remembering is prohibited.
There are customs regulations for words, incinerators for words, cemeteries for words.
Squads of prisoners are sent out at night to cover with white paint the words of protest which in other times covered the walls of the city.
The rain’s persistent washing begins to dissolve the white paint. And there appear, gradually, the stubborn words.”
Displaying 1 of 1 review