Pyromaniac, thy manuscript will not burn!
It
is called ‘biblioclasm’ or ‘libricide’. It is censorship in its most
brutal, visible and intimidating form. It is the practice of destroying,
often ceremoniously, books or other material in public, typically
motivated by moral, religious or political objection. Famous cases of
libricide include the torching of the Library of Alexandra and the
destruction of Mayan codices by Spanish conquistadors and Catholic
priests.
On May 10, 1933, that’s exactly 77 years ago, a horrendous act of
libricide was perpetrated by the Nazis. Books were burned in public.
More recently, there was the destruction of the Sarajevo National
Library.
It’s all about censorship. It is about faith gone mad. It is about
being paranoid and insecure about the explanatory power of logic-systems
that one adheres to. It is about defending the indefensible by
eliminating threat. It is about re-construction of historical record by
erasing event and personality from the narrative.
Sarajevo Library on fire. |
This is a censored, censor-loving, censoring world that we live in.
The easiest way to deal with opposition, i.e. people and views that
oppose us and what we believe in respectively, is to render irrelevant
by elimination rather than through the employment of superior logic.
This is the lazy and destructive path. There are various instruments of
erasure that the slothful can employ, including vilification,
name-calling, name-dropping, intimidation, assault and of course
physical removal. This is why a word like libricide was coined, and why
people are killed.
I remember a time when people argued for removing ‘history’ from the
school curriculum.
Interestingly these proposals came from and were supported by those
who were championing the idea of ‘traditional homelands of the Tamil
people’ and/or were arguing for power-devolution to ‘areas of historical
habitation’.
Even that ‘historical reference’ remained largely unsubstantiated and
more to do with myths and legends rather than facts that could be
established. Removing ‘history’ from curricula helps only those who
cannot buttress claim with reference to event and fact. That, one notes
with a certain degree of concern, was state-sponsored libricide.
Then there was the ‘libricidal’ efforts based on the indecent and
mischievous allusion to the idea that history is version. This is true.
History is someone’s version. It is interpretation.
On the other hand no version that holds that the Ruwanweliseya is a
church can be taken seriously. Neither can we take seriously the claim
that a Nestorian Cross found in Anuradhapura ‘establishes’ that the
Buddhist and Christian faiths thrived side by side in that wondrous
‘multi-ethnic, multi-religious’ character that tweaks both reality and
relevance. History is discomforting to some. It is not innocent, true,
but neither is it irrelevant. And so historiography is necessarily a
discipline that ideology-pregnant. And it is the ideologically slothful
that opts to engage in libricide of one kind or another.
There is another kind of book-burning, I realized: self-libricide. It
is the art of wishing away the uncomfortable. We call it
self-censorship. It is at the same time a refusal to engage, a disavowal
of conversation and debate, a fear of one’s frames of reference being
rendered irrelevant.
Mikhail Bulgakov had a classic line in his masterpiece, ‘Master and
Margerita’: ‘manuscripts don’t burn’. We live in the 21st century. This
is the age of electronic archiving.
The hardcopy can be destroyed, but the soft copy lives on in multiple
forms and in multiple places too numerous for the pyromaniac to
eliminate it. On the other hand, when an individual chooses to burn
manuscript, he/she burns himself in the process. We diminish ourselves
when we refuse to acknowledge the uncomfortable, the disconcerting.
I believe this is the crux of the message that Udayasiri
Wickremaratne expresses in ‘Baya una minihek oba amathai’ (A fearful man
addresses you), the third part of a soliloquy-sequence titled ‘Suddek
oba amathai’ (A white man addresses you). The fear is simple and
therefore profound: ‘I am scared that I might utter something truthful;
I am scared that I might do something right’.
That ‘truth’ and the correct action the addresser speaks of refer to
the uncomfortable, the disconcerting within us; in short that which
compromises stated/believed truth-system. Once we acknowledge this, our
universe crumbles, our truth-frame collapses and we become internally
displaced within ourselves. This is the ‘logic’ of self-censorship, the
logic of self-libricide. The problem is that self-libricide is easier
desired than accomplished.
When we rant and rave about Christian fundamentalists, we are
simultaneously ranting and raving against the fundamental tenets of
Buddhism. When we vilify Buddhism and Buddhists, we are spitting on the
core principles of the Christian faith.
Liberation requires self-examination, a slaying of personal ghosts, a
recognition that the devils that stifle the search for truth or the
union with God (as some might desire) exist not outside us, but within.
It requires us to resist self-libricide, check out ourselves in the
mirror and ask ‘who is the fairest of them all?’ It requires us to be
brave enough to tell the truth and do the right thing, regardless of
consequences.
There is an archive within us that is burning all the time. No one
set it on fire. We did. When will we begin to douse these flames? Will
be able to contain the fire to a point where we will not suffer
asphyxiation thanks to the poisonous fumes of ignorance we engendered
ourselves and even extinguish completely and save the libraries so
necessary for us to save ourselves?
At the end of the day, once the debate is done, the rhetoric ceases,
the points made and conceded, we will be confronted with a simple truth:
manuscripts do not burn. That should make us happy, but it does not.
Why?
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