Our Culture of Intimidation

By Richard Cumyn

I recently reviewed The Tinsmith, Tim Bowling’s new novel set in Maryland during the American Civil War and in British Columbia twenty years later. The book is getting well deserved critical attention, but I fear it will be challenged or even suppressed, in part because it uses the word “nigger” liberally throughout. Bowling has endeavoured to produce a work of literature faithful to the style of the times he is writing about, the mid- to late-1800s, when such ugly expressions were common, and he has every right to do that. Nevertheless, he may be in for a rocky ride from some in this country and abroad. Last June, for example, a group in the Netherlands, that supposed bastion of free speech, publicly burned the covers of Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes and demanded he change the title, which they deemed offensive to blacks. The offended group was called Foundation Honor and Restore Victims of Slavery in Surinam.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the pervasive culture of intimidation in our society and the effect of this chill on writing, reading, the arts, creativity, and artistic expression in general. From the political tactics of robocalls misleading voters in the last federal election to the tacitly sanctioned violence of professional hockey, intimidation appears to be prevalent and increasingly accepted in Canada. Graft this onto the entertainment value of Schadenfreude-laced reality TV, and a more insidious shift towards surveillance in the name of national security, and the result is an atmosphere as conducive to artistic freedom as, say, that of the dystopian society depicted in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. We may not be the bleakly hopeless totalitarian nation of Oceania, but elements eerily reminiscent of that story are revealing themselves here.

PEN Canada lists a number of obstacles to freedom of expression, including assault and general harassment of individuals, threats, murder and outright state-imposed censorship. Harder to define and fight against is self-censorship. Writers and journalists, for example, may “deliberately refrain from voicing their opinions or reporting freely on sensitive issues that are likely to incur the wrath of the government.” As media concentration condenses to fewer and fewer controlling interests worldwide, the corporations that own newspapers, electronic networks and publishing houses are exerting more and more influence over what gets reported, what gets written in book form and ultimately what we end up reading.

Self-censorship can happen in subtle ways. In 2009, the young-adult novel, Boy Toy by American author Barry Lyga, was published to rave reviews despite and perhaps due to its controversial subject matter: “a 12-year-old who has sex with a beautiful teacher twice his age.” As School Library Journal reported the story, Ryga expected his book to be pulled from school-library shelves and pilloried in the press by outraged parents. None of this happened, however, because the book didn’t make it into children’s hands. Bookstores shelved the title amid adult books or failed to order it at all. School and public librarians who loved the book for its honest depiction of a difficult but plausible situation, refused to recommend or carry the book, for fear of the public backlash. The novel, only one among many similar titles, didn’t get read as widely as it should, because it hit an invisible wall of nervous self-censorship.

Just recently the Governor General’s Award-winning playwright Michael Healey (The Drawer Boy) ended a long association with Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre. He is on record as saying that he left because the company’s artistic director, Richard Rose, refused to program Healey’s latest play, called Proud. Rose was apparently concerned that Proud could be deemed libelous of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The work was at the first-draft stage and one of the characters, though identified only as “Prime Minister,” is clearly based on Mr. Harper. Regardless of the play’s genesis and resemblance to real figures in Ottawa, it is a fictitious work, one that was cleared for take-off by Tarragon’s lawyer. This sort of pre-emptive self-censorship is akin to cutting off your hand because you think one day you might make a fist and hurt somebody.

Small theatre companies such as Tarragon, Theatre Passe Muraille, SummerWorks Theatre Festival and others, in this province (Ontario) and across Canada, depend upon government grants for their continuation. There are simply not enough of us filling seats to make these playhouses self-sufficient. At the same time, important new work emerges from these creative hot-houses ever year. In 2011, as you may recall, SummerWorks lost its funding from Canadian Heritage, most probably because in 2010 they staged a play called Homegrown, which portrayed the relationship between characters based on playwright Catherine Frid and Shareef Abdelhaleem, one of the so-called Toronto 18, a group of misguided youths charged with plotting terror. A spokesman from the Prime Minister’s Office, Andrew MacDougall, was quoted as saying that the PMO was “extremely disappointed that public money is being used to fund plays that glorify terrorism,” this despite the play’s primary focus, the naiveté of the female lead. The money SummerWorks was counting on from Canadian Heritage amounted to almost a quarter of its operating budget. Whether or not theatres or dance companies or art galleries or small-press publishers should depend upon the public purse for existence is a matter for another debate. My point is that governments exert a powerful influence over what does and does not get made, by the simple and intimidating act of granting or withholding money. When it becomes clear that art is being suppressed by way of this instrument of control, we should all worry.

My final case is also a couple of years old but is another clear example of intimidation affecting public consumption of information. In January 2010 Talonbooks Ltd. announced and scheduled publication of an English translation of a book they were titling Imperial Canada Inc.: Legal Haven of Choice for the World’s Mining Industries. The book was due to hit the bookstores in May of that year. On February 12, 2010, Talonbooks received a fax marked, in bold uppercase letters, “WITH PREJUDICE” from the law firm representing Barrick Gold Corporation. The fax demanded, under threat of legal action, that Talon “provide the undersigned with a copy of any portion of the manuscript of text of Imperial Canada Inc. that makes direct or indirect reference to Barrick, Sutton Resources Ltd., or to any of their past or present subsidiaries, affiliates, directors or offices no later than 5 p.m. on February 19, 2010.” In other words, in one week’s time and less than three months before publication.

This tactic is known as a SLAPP or strategic lawsuit against public participation, an action “intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition” (Wikipedia). Though Talonbooks didn’t respond to the threatening fax, they did mark the May 2010 publication of Imperial Canada Inc. as “cancelled” on their website. Later they posted a text describing the conflict, saying in part, “What have become known as SLAPP suits work especially well in Canada, and we, of course, like most Canadians, can’t afford one.” Talonbooks went on to list the book in its fall 2010 catalogue and eventually to publish it, a good-news ending. Nevertheless, the tactic did its work, delaying publication and heightening the anxiety that surrounds this culture of intimidation. Authors end up second-guessing themselves, editors become gatekeepers fearful of what their corporate masters might say should a controversial book escape, and in the end we are all impoverished.

SLAPP lawsuits, thankfully, are being challenged and dismissed in provincial legislatures and the higher courts. If we’re lucky they will disappear altogether. Meanwhile we need, all of us, to take on some of the crusading gumption of the late Barney Rosset, who died in February 2012. As the owner of Grove Press, Barney stood up to legal challenges, and to government and private intimidation, to be the first to publish American editions of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, as well as the groundbreaking Evergreen Review. A bully is successful only until his victims stand up to him. As readers, theatre and gallery goers, and informed citizens, we have to continually remind ourselves of this crucial fact.

(from a talk given February 28, 2012 at Queen’s University, Kingston, during Freedom to Read Week)