Ican't wait to read Lois-Ann Yamanaka's next book. It could be called "Lois-Ann's Hanging." And it could be about how universities used to be places where free speech flourished but how they have become concentration camps of Political Correct Thought. It could be about a Hawaii writer who had the audacity to write a novel in which one of the characters of a certain ethnicity was a rapist. And how the book won a big award for being so great but then the judges wimped out under pressure by the PC Prose Police, withdrew the award, then hung the author in effigy (hence the proposed title). PC police leave
Lois-Ann hangingAs I see it, there can be no happy ending to this work because if Lois-Ann sticks to her guns -- which I believe she will -- she'll continue to be an outcast in the zany world of ethnic novel writing. But it would be worse if she capitulated and agreed that characters in her future novels will be completely generic so as not to offend the self-appointed guardians of literature.
Now, I have not read "Blu's Hanging" or "Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers," the other Yamanaka novel that caused the hot-house literary petunias to faint.
I also didn't read Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses." I didn't have to to know it was not a good thing for the Ayatollah Khomeini to hang a death sentence over Rushdie's head.
Obviously, the withdrawal of a national book award by the Asian American Studies program for Yamanaka's "Blu's Hanging" because it allegedly demeans Filipinos is not the same thing as the Rushdie death sentence. But it's close. It has the same evil roots, the same dysfunctional DNA. One is just a grub of thought in its infancy and the other is a full-grown creature.
As a professional writer, I find what's happened to Yamanaka extremely scary.
We dumped on the Soviet Union and China for decades for controlling what could be published, painted or broadcast.
There is a difference between suppressing a book and not giving it an award. But you might be surprised at how small that difference is, especially since it is in our seats of learning that censorship is budding.
Many of those who objected to Yamanaka's book are connected with universities. Some, no doubt, are writing teachers. Now, what chance does a student have of success -- or a decent grade -- if his or her work is judged on a scale of political correctness instead of literary merit? You force conformity on that level and it has to have an impact on the literary world outside of academia.
And so, instead of universities being safe havens for free thought and free speech, they become factories churning out PC Weenie Babies. (And while we're at it, let's burn those books by Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, et al, that some are finding offensive retroactively).
It is ironic that President Clinton is in China trying to show that societies flourish when speech is unchained. And yet, the message to such writers as Lois-Ann Yamanaka is that if you waver from the strict literary party line -- that no ethnic group, gender, creed, code or life-form shall be characterized in a way that may be uncomfortable to any particular reader -- you will be ostracized by your peers.
Not that being ostracized by such nitwits is a bad thing. The "Gulag Archipelago" was never on the Soviet Union's Government-Approved Writer's Collective Super Duper Summer Reading List. But its author, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, did pretty well anyway.
Of course, he was forced to hang out in prison for a while, so I guess Yamanaka got off lucky there.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
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