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Literature is “in peril” because of “social censure”, according to author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Delivering the first of the BBC Reith Lectures, exploring freedom of speech, on Wednesday 30th November, Adichie criticised publishers’ use of sensitivity readers and revealed one of her own novels may soon be banned in some American schools.
Adichie is known for her novels Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Americanah and Purple Hibiscus (all Fourth Estate).
She argued “literature is increasingly viewed through ideological rather than artistic lenses” and said Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel The Satanic Verses (Vintage) would “probably not” be published today, and “possibly not” even written. She claimed writers such as Rushdie “who want to write novels about sensitive subjects” are “held back by the spectre of social censure” and that “publishers are wary of committing secular blasphemy”.
"Nothing demonstrates this better than the recent phenomenon of ‘sensitivity readers’ in the world of publishing, people whose job it is to cleanse unpublished manuscripts of potentially offensive words,” she said. “This in my mind negates the very idea of literature. We cannot tell stories that are only light when life itself is light and darkness. Literature is about how we are great and flawed.”
She added: “Literature deeply matters and I believe literature is in peril because of social censure.”
She went on to discuss her fears around American high school boards who are “engaged in a frenzy of book banning” and whose “process seems arbitrary”, revealing “I understand that one of my novels is in this august group.” She encouraged groups not to ban books but “to answer them”. “My practical reason, we could also call it my selfish reason, is that I fear the weapon I advocate to be used against someone else might one day be used against me. What today is considered benign could very well become offensive tomorrow, because the suppression of speech is not so much about the speech itself, as it is the person who censors," she said.
Adichie’s lecture honed in on the “epidemic of self-censorship" and its implications. “We now live in broad settled ideological tribes,” she claimed. “We no longer need to have real discussions because our positions are already assumed, based on our tribal affiliation.”
She continued: “We are all familiar with stories of people who have said or written something and then faced a terrible online backlash. There is a difference between valid criticism, which should be part of free expression, and this kind of backlash: ugly personal insults, putting addresses of homes and children’s schools online, trying to make people lose their jobs.” She said “this new social censure demands consensus while being wilfully blind to its own tyranny” which she thinks “portends the death of curiosity, the death of learning and the death of creativity”.
The Reith Lectures begin on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds on Wednesday 30th November at 9 a.m.