When one thinks of Sir Salman Rushdie, the words modesty and humility immediately pop up in my mind. Oops! I intended to say just the opposite of how that last sentence came out. Oh well! Some time back somebody with an undeniable mean streak wrote that Sir Salman would be quite upset if he were to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature. He would probably fulminate “Why after so many years? And why only one, not three Nobels?”
Last year when the list of those who would willingly prostrate themselves before the Queen for the honor of adding Sir to their names was announced, the not-yet-Sir Salman exclaimed that he was “humbled” by the news. A few days ago when he finally got the chance to kneel before royalty, he almost stumbled. A “case of nerves”, he explained later. Somebody who had never passed up a chance to take a swipe at the pretensions of Empire and its hangers on, was now tamed and domesticated. Privamavda Gopal, writing in The Guardian, described Sir Salman as a shadow of “his own creation Baal, the talented poet who becomes a giggling hack coralled into attacking his ruler's enemies.”
Quite a contrast to the response from the black British poet Benjamin Zapaniah who when approached with an offer from Tony Blair to receive the Order of the British Empire (OBE), refused to mince his words: “Me? I thought, OBE me? Up yours!” As he explained later, in a piece published in The Guardian, “there is a part of me that hopes that after writing this article I shall never be considered as a Poet Laureate or an OBE sucker again.” Taking a dig at some of his fellow writers who offer “pathetic excuses” such as "I did it for my mum"; "I did it for my kids"; "I did it for the school"; "I did it for the people", he recalled that “I have even heard black writers who have collected OBEs saying that it is "symbolic of how far we have come". To understand why he was so surprised by the letter from Tony Blair, he cited a poem he had published much before the offer of an OBE:
Cause every laureate gets worse
A family that you cannot fault as muse will mess your mind,
And yeah, you may fatten you
Don't take my word, go check the verser purse
And surely they will check you first when subjects need to be amused
With paid for prose and rhymes.
Zapaniah ended his piece with a final jab: “Stick it, Mr Blair - and Mrs Queen, stop going on about the empire. Let's do something else.”
When the desi writer Amitav Ghosh heard that his book_The Glass Palace_ had been short-listed for the Commonwealth Literature Prize, he swiftly wrote a letter of protest to the committee. In his letter he demanded that his book be withdrawn from the short-list and reminded the committee that “the issue of how the past is to be remembered lies at the heart of _The Glass Palace_ and I feel that I would be betraying the spirit of my book if I were to allow it to be incorporated within that particular memorialization of Empire that passes under the rubric of "the Commonwealth".
This stance will of course do nothing to stall the continuing co-optation and neutralization of colorful critics, raconteurs and assorted shit-disturbers without whom the blandness of life would be unbearable. Some like Christopher Hitchens can be tamed even without such awards! However oxymoronic it might sound and regardless of how pissed off his colleague Keith Richards and his other admirers were, Sir Mick Jagger is now a fact of life.
Last week, at about the same time when Salman Rushdie was going down on his knees, it was also announced the media’s demon of the year Robert Mugabe had been stripped of his knighthood. Apparently this was also the case with the Romanian dictator, Nicolai Causescu who was “de-knighted” barely a few days before his execution. Thus are villains either glorified or vilified, depending on the compulsions of what is called real-politics.
Maintaining one’s integrity and resisting such rewards for ensuring good behaviour is of course not an easy task. But it is not impossible. There is the example of Jean Paul-Sartre, the first individual to refuse the Nobel Prize in 1964. In his own polite version of “stick it!”, Sartre refused that ultimate dream of many by remarking: “it is not the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner. A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honorable form."
The only other person who had the courage and integrity to say “stick it!” to the Nobel Prize was the Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho (1973 Nobel Peace Prize). He was the co-winner of the Peace Prize (1973) with that renowned peacenik and anti-war monger Henry Kissinger. Needless to say, Kissinger grabbed the prize, presumably with both hands, prompting the now famous one-liner by the singer-songwriter, satirist and ex-MIT faculty member, Tom Lehrer: “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.”
