Index on Censorship’s ArtFreedomWales launched on Friday with the first online conversation about artistic freedom of expression in Wales with playwright Tim Price, singer, actor, writer Lisa Jen, poet and writer Kathryn Gray and visual artist Leah Crossley – though unfortunately we lost Crossley’s connection early on.
The live-broadcast, hosted by Julia Farrington (Associate Arts Producer Index) opened on the question: “How free do you feel to express yourself as an artist in Wales?”.
Price kicked off by talking about the constraints posed by the Welsh language. “We are a bilingual nation, but we [artists] are not all bilingual…There is a whole element of Welsh experience that isn’t available to me because I don’t speak Welsh.
Gray agreed, “language barrier blocks expression and collective understanding of our differences and similarities. This is disabling for the arts in Wales.”
Jen, whose first language is Welsh, moves comfortably between the two – singing in Welsh, writing plays in English – as this seems the most natural way to express herself. But there are massive problems “when you try and do things bilingually like run a workshop in Welsh, and bilingualise it – then it’s impossible. English always oppresses the Welsh”.
Our next broadcast in Welsh in August 1st, will look specifically at the opportunities for and obstacles to expression for artists working in Welsh.
Price also stressed that for most people access to opportunities to express themselves through the arts is the greatest obstacle of all. The panellists all agreed that this was as much to do with a “collective low self-esteem across the country” or as Jen put it: “Whether you are a Welsh language speaker or not, we are a flipping insecure nation.” Price said that the most common problem he finds when he runs writing workshops “is that many people believe that no one can possibly be interested in what we have to say.” The legacy of being England’s oldest colony and Westminster’s failure to invest in infrastructure, were cited as contributory causes.
Other obstacles discussed included self-censorship – how cultural institutions and the subsidy culture influence what is sayable, the imbalance between the considerable support for poets and the lack of support for playwrights who want to make the big step into the professional arena. Gray also pointed to the Welsh media’s lack of critical engagement on an artistic or political level that “would help people to understand the regime we are living under”.
There were strong positives too – the support for emerging artists, a great DIY culture amongst fellow artists at grassroots level, new cultural infrastructure – and the acknowledgement that Wales was an exciting place to be an artist now. Jen: “We have freedom to do whatever we want but few playwrights are making big, political work with a big massive voice.” She went on to say that there is no shortage of issues for Welsh artists to make work about but “we are playing safe. I am sick of seeing safe work that doesn’t tell me anything. I want to feel scared, feel danger.” Gary agreed, “Art should be about smashing things up. May things come from the ruins.”
But is there an appetite for more courageous, challenging work amongst the audience? The panellists agreed that the audience in Wales is innately conservative – the fact that Radio Cymru said that Jen’s music was not suitable for daytime listening is evidence of this – has to be taken into account. As Price said “We are a nation under siege from England, so culture remains about preserving and sustaining what we have.”
Three Al Jazeera journalists were among those sentenced to prison on terrorism charges.
In 1997, British journalist Robert Fisk interviewed Bin Laden. Fisk was not accused of being a terrorist, he was only doing his job. For decades, journalists have been interviewing terrorists, criminals and drug lords, because this is their job; to give a voice to everybody, whether they agree with them or not.
Last month, Egypt sentenced three Al Jazeera journalists to seven years in prison under the country’s anti-terrorism laws; they were accused of spreading false information, as well as supporting the now banned Muslim Brotherhood. In an extremely polarised political climate, giving a voice to the Muslim Brotherhood was deemed inciteful and inflammatory.
Art has been a means of stretching the boundaries, but can art sometimes be a public safety risk?
A series of cartoons, some of which depicted Prophet Mohammed, published by a Danish newspaper in 2005 sparked angry and violent protests across the Arab world. The same happened again when a 13 minute trailer of a movie called Innocence of Muslims appeared on Youtube two years ago. Earlier this year, French comic and political activist Dieudonné M’bala M’bala was banned from performing after his shows were found to incite racial hatred and anti-semitic sentiment by French courts. The comedian was also banned from entering the United Kingdom.
These cases raise a very important question: When does giving a platform to extremist views through art or journalism become an act of terrorism? Should artists or journalists be exempt from terrorism laws or should inflammatory works be banned?
A still from the trailer of big-budget Egyptian film Yacoubian Building (Image: Strand Releasing/YouTube)
When mass protests broke out in Egypt on January 25 2011, the uprising took many people around the world, including Egyptians, by surprise. But some believe the stage was in fact already being set for revolution years earlier — and that popular culture played a part.
On 17 December 2010, Mohamed Bou Azizi, a Tunisian street vendor had set himself on fire in protest of the confiscation of his wares and the humiliation inflicted on him by a municipal official. His act sparked mass street protests in Tunisia which 28 days later, led to the overthrow of the authoritarian regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
When Ben Ali fell, analysts questioned whether the uprising in Tunisia would inspire similar revolts in other North African countries with despotic regimes, including Egypt which they pointed out, also suffered enormous socio-economic inequalities, widespread youth unemployment and political marginalisation of the masses.
The thought of a mass uprising in Egypt was however, quickly dismissed by Egyptian officials as “outrageous”.
“Egypt is not Tunisia”, scoffed veteran diplomat Amr Moussa when I asked him if Egypt would be next. I met Moussa on January 19, 2011 at a Sharm El Sheikh conference on Arab Economic Integration — a gathering that was overshadowed by the dramatic events unfolding in Tunisia. The veteran diplomat who had served as foreign minister under Hosni Mubarak, confidently told me that Egypt was “a much bigger country and vastly different in terms of demography”. Moussa’s argument convinced me. Indeed, Tunisia is a homogeneous society with a relatively well-educated population unlike Egypt — a more diverse society with in excess of 16 million illiterate people, according to a 2012 study released by the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics.
Besides, there was widespread political apathy in Egypt. For decades, the Egyptian people had silently tolerated rights abuses at the hands of the corrupt regime. So patient were the Egyptians with their repressive government that analyst Khaled Diab joked about their political apathy in an op-ed published in the Guardian in June 2009, saying that: “The people of Egypt possessed some sort of a cultural gene against rebellion and risk taking.”
It was not surprising that the Egyptians had shown remarkable immunity to the Tehran protest virus, he wrote, explaining that “the Egyptian people had for decades, been ruled by a long succession of foreigners who cared little for their well being. They considered their native rulers just as alien.”
The widely-anticipated political pandemic had hitherto, failed to materialise… Until Tunisians revolted.
But contrary to popular belief, the eighteen-day uprising that overthrew Mubarak was not an “overnight eruption”. In fact, it had taken several years of ground-laying and a series of events helped pave the way for the revolt that was to come.
Some analysts believe the stage was being set for the 2011 mass protests from as early as 2004, not long after the fall of Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein.
This was the year Egyptian intellectuals, artists and activists founded the Kefayya (Enough) Movement that would oppose the Mubarak regime and call for fundamental constitutional and economic reforms. Although the overarching ideology of the movement is largely secular, many members of the then-outlawed but tolerated Muslim Brotherhood joined forces with the leftists and secularists.
Moreover, there were the workers’ unions, which in the years leading up to the uprising had organised a series of labour strikes, protesting low wages and rising food costs. The 2008 labour protests which began as an initiative of workers in the textile industry in Mehalla El Kobra and other Egyptian cities, inspired mass momentum and were the first spark that ignited the street protests that followed two years later.
Egypt’s pro-democracy youth activists were also active and widely credited for using social media networks to fuel the anger against the brutal regime. The April 6 Youth Movement and “We are All Khaled Said” Facebook group mobilised Egyptians for the protests by posting videos of police brutality and calling for civil disobedience.
Again, contrary to popular belief, the January 2011 uprising was not merely a “people’s movement”, as it has often been described. Some analysts think the uprising may have been driven by the security state much like the revolt that ousted Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president, two years later. Breakaway members of Tamarod, the movement that last summer gathered signatures for a petition calling on the Islamist president to step down, later revealed that “state security agents had guided and influenced our campaign”.
Some members of the group went as far as admitting that “some of the movement’s founders had been planted by state security” according to a Reuters article published online on February 20, 2014. Similarly, the January 25 uprising may have also been guided, albeit more subtly by the deep state — a term used to refer to the country’s combined security apparatus: the intelligence services, the police and National Security. It was no secret that Mubarak had been grooming his son Gamal to succeed him — a move that was rejected by senior-ranking generals in the army. The generals had expected the succession bid to cause popular unrest and decided to be prepared to step in.
“General Abdel Fattah El Sisi, who was head of military intelligence in 2010, had already been picked by his bosses as the country’s next defence minister and was asked to prepare a study of Egypt’s political future. He proposed that the army should be prepared to move in to ensure stability and preserve its central role in the state in the likely event of civic unrest breaking out,” journalist Richard Spencer wrote in an opinion piece published in the Telegraph in June 2014. Political analyst Hassan Nafaa was quoted as telling Spencer that: “When the revolution of 2011 exploded, the army had already made plans to deploy.”
“They chose to sacrifice Mubarak rather than the regime itself,” Nafaa added.
Egypt’s powerful military firmly believes it is entitled to remain in power, having fought two wars with Israel. Besides, at stake — should the country be ruled by a civilian president — is the military’s vast business empire estimated to be as much as 40 percent of the country’s GDP.
So how did the deep state in Egypt prepare unsuspecting Egyptians for the uprising that was to come?
Culture and the arts served as the catalysts for the movement for change that was being shaped as early as four or five years before the actual “revolution” erupted. From 2006 onwards many artistic works, including locally-produced films screened in Egyptian theatres, helped fuel the people’s anger and frustration, inciting protests against the inept government. While some may dismiss this theory as absurd, in reality, there is strong evidence to support it.
Take the big-budget film “Yacoubian Building”, based on the novel of the same name by author Alaa Aswany, a member of the opposition Kefayya Movement. The three hour epic, screened in Egypt in 2006, shed the spotlight on a host of societal ills including the rampant corruption, sexual repression and religious fundamentalism plaguing contemporary Egyptian society. It also reflected the hopes of young Egyptians for a just society based on rule of law and respect for civil liberties. Like Egypt itself, the building in which the film’s lead characters reside had crumbled “from a once-elegant edifice of Art-Deco splendour now slowly decaying in the smog and bustle of downtown Cairo”, Nana Asfour, who works as a cultural editor for the New Yorker, wrote in a 2007 review of the book.
The book brings to life “a seedy and despicable Cairo where only the corrupted and corruptible can fare well” she wrote, adding that “in this scathing critique of contemporary Egyptian society, one is hard put to find a redeemable character”.
From Abdou and Busayna, who by necessity acquiesce to selling their bodies to feed their families, to Talal, who seeks solace in religion and later resorts to “martyrdom” — they all are victims of their merciless society. The film also portrays the fake religiosity widespread in today’s Egypt where many conceal their greed behind deceiving pious behaviour and appearances — like prominent lawyer Kamal El Fouli who rigs the parliamentary vote in favour of Hag Azzam, justifying the action as “implementation of God’s will”.
“Our Lord created the Egyptians to accept authority,” El Fouli tells Azzam in the film.
Shocking as it was to an audience previously unaccustomed to having the realities of their everyday lives mirrored so brazenly, the Yacoubian Building was a wake-up call to many Egyptians who were able to identify with the film’s characters. It was also the first in a series of films produced between 2005 and 2010 that were fiercely critical of society and which spurred Egyptians to rebel against the flagrant injustices within it.
Heya Fawda (“It’s Chaos”), an Egyptian-French 2007 co-production and the last film by internationally-acclaimed Egyptian director Youssef Shahin, meanwhile brought international attention to Egypt’s longstanding problem of police corruption and brutality when it was screened at that year’s Venice Film Festival. Police brutality was one of the main causes that triggered the 2011 uprising which aptly coincided with the country’s National Police Day. Set in Cairo’s populous district of Shoubra, the film shockingly depicts the brutal actions of a shady police officer, feared and loathed by the residents in his neighbourhood. So shocking was his brutality that it prompted some film critics to question whether the film was “serious or a lampoon”.
Khaled Youssef, who co-directed the film with Shahin, was later credited with having had the vision to foresee the coming political changes and for “stirring the still waters” with his films. The filmmaker and scriptwriter, who joined the pro-democracy activists in Tahrir Square during the 2011 uprising, would later reveal himself as a fierce opponent of the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood regime, aligning himself closely with the military-backed authorities that replaced the ousted Morsi. His close links with the military have raised questions over whether his films were actually the outcome of his foresight or a premeditated and carefully calculated plan by the country’s security apparatus to topple Mubarak.
Youssef’s follow-up to Heya Fawda was another shocking revelation of the flagrant social injustice prevalent in modern-day Egyptian society. Set in a Cairo slum area, it depicts the daily struggles of the inhabitants of this deprived neighbourhood, including sexual violence against women and the plight of street children. The film ends with the residents of the slum rising up in arms to protest their conditions — which some observers viewed as a possible beckoning call on needy Egyptians to rise in similar fashion.
Last but not least, was the 90 minute comedy “The President’s Chef” released in 2010. In the film, a simple cook tries to convey to a president out of touch with his people, the hardships faced by average Egyptians in their daily lives. Film critics drew similarities between the film’s lead character and the real president who during the last ten years of his rule, had often been criticized for isolating himself in his own ivory tower, oblivious to the needs of his people.
In a country with a long tradition of strict censorship rules, one cannot help but wonder if the censors’ decision to pass those films was a coincidental loosening up of their tight restrictions in a bid to give a semblance of democracy and free speech. Or was it instead, a deliberate and tactical scheme to pave the way for Mubarak’s ouster?
Looking back at the events of the last three years that have ended with the return of the old regime minus Mubarak, it appears clear that nothing in Egypt happens by sheer coincidence.
Patrick Hamilton, the English author and playwright, has now reached the curious position within the literary world of being best known for being overlooked. Hamilton wrote sad, cruel and intensely funny novels of what I’ve taken to calling the Oh-God-The-War-Is-Coming (OGTWIC) genre — a genre of rented rooms, gin and lonely, quietly failing people, usually based in London and the South East, striving grimly, dimly aware that something is going drastically wrong on the continent and their inconsequential existence is unsustainable in its current form (see also Nigel Collins, Julian McClaren-Ross, and George Orwell, to an extent).
Put simply, there are Nazis, and sooner or later there will be a war. In Hamilton’s Hangover Square, George Harvey Bone’s drinking cronies display fascist sympathies, the bullying Peter having actual served time in jail for Blackshirt streetfighting. Orwell’s George Bowling, in 1939’s Coming Up For Air, bemoans the machine world in the perfect line: “Everything’s streamlined now, even the bullet Hitler’s saving for you.”
Perhaps alone among the OGTWIC novelists, Hamilton found fame in Britain before Hitler. His thrilling play Rope debuted on the West End in April 1929, shortly after his 25th birthday, and was an immediate sensation. Rope, later filmed by Alfred Hitchcock, concerned a pair of students who decide to kill a friend, just for the hell of it. But, after the murder, as suspicion grows, their nerve dissolves.
The play was apparently based on the 1924 “Leopold and Loeb” case, in which two wealthy Chicago students, convinced by Nietzsche’s idea of the the Übermensch who live beyond humanity’s moral codes, decide to murder a young friend, Bobby Franks. In the lead up to the murder, Nathan Leopold had written to Richard Loeb that: “A superman … is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from the ordinary laws which govern men He is not liable for anything he may do.”
The courts felt differently: Leopold and Loeb did kill poor young Franks, but far from committing the perfect crime, they made several clumsy mistakes and were easily caught and convicted. Only the brilliance of their defence lawyer, the famed Clarence Darrow, helped them avoid execution.
Hamilton was almost embarrassed by Rope’s success, perhaps irritated that his fame had come from a popular West End thriller rather than his novels. But, according to Hamilton biographer Nigel Jones, others gave it more credit. An article in the Times Literary Supplement after the war credited Hamilton with picking up on the Zeitgeist of 1920s and 1930s masculinity, specifically the “young men with the highest social pretensions and an almost mystical pursuit of violence” who would fill the ranks of Europe’s fascist movements. The TLS went on to praise the Rope writer, saying “[W]hether the author was conscious of it or not, his social sensitiveness had invested the thriller form with more than its usual significance. And he has shown himself at least concerned for human values and able to feel passionate indignation at their denial.”
Rope roared on to Broadway and round the world, providing Hamilton with a steady income for the rest of his too-short, drink-sodden life.
But, given its prescience, it encountered a particularly ironic moral panic when it was scheduled for broadcast by the BBC in January 1932.
The radio had been commissioned by BBC HEad of Productions Val Gielgud — brother of Sir John and of an equally theatrical leaning. Eagerly hyping his commission, Gielgud put himself forward to issue a statement on air, warning that the play was shocking indeed and that BBC listeners should “send the children to bed and lock granny in her room” before settling down to listen to the thriller.
Gielgud’s music-hall instincts worked a dream, and the newspapers and defenders of the nation flew into a fury. The Morning Post quoted a concerned correspondent who allegedly wrote: “The play had a successful run — there is, of course, a section of the British public which enjoys the degenerate; no one wishes to interfere with their pleasure. It is, however, quite another thing to broadcast this stuff into millions of homes.”
The aggrieved Morning Post reader went on to bemoan the “outrages and murders of little girls” that filled the pages of the newspapers, and suggested that the broadcast of Rope would only encourage “the morbid tendency which leads to these crimes. I submit that the BBC is making a gross misuse of its powers.”
The British Empire Union, a xenophobic, ultra-conservative organisation, picked up on the “morbid tendency” theme, protesting to the BBC that: “While not questioning the ‘cleverness’ of the play, or the undoubted dramatic ability of the author, we consider the broadcasting of a play of this description cannot but encourage in unbalanced and degenerate minds that morbid tendency which leads to the crimes depicted.”
Gielgud, by this point trolling the entire country, told the Evening Standard: “There is nothing disgusting or gruesome about this play, [but] it would have been unfair to broadcast it without letting people know in advance what they were going to hear. For example it might not be the most suitable thing to hear in a hospital.”
The broadcast was, of course, a roaring success, with millions listening in and critics (the Morning Post and the Daily Mail aside) wooed utterly.
The mechanisms of so many public outrages are tied up neatly in Rope: the tease of the promoter; the wilful misunderstanding of a work which explores a controversial issue rather than condoning it; the head in the sand refusal to look at the context of the work; the censorious impulse of those who, while not themselves affected by such things, fear for those lesser beings who may be; the intervention of the Daily Mail; and, ultimately, the fleeting, soon-forgotten nature of the controversy. Over 80 years later, in the age of the iPhone and the Twitter mob, how little we have changed.
