Banned Books Week: in Asia, freedom of speech is not as simple as it seems

ARCHIVES 2013

By admin-s On Sep 26, 2013

In Malaysia, the state censorship of my youth has been replaced with a more elusive and deadening internet conservatism

Tash Aw, The Guardian

Some years ago, not long after my first novel was published, I was in one of the largest bookstores in Malaysia, admiring piles of my novel handsomely arranged on a table close to the store entrance. I marvelled at the shiny terrazzo floors and range of titles on display, pleasantly surprised at how things had changed in 20 years – the bookstores of my teenage years had been sorry affairs, meagrely stocked with yellowing copies of Penguin Classics wrapped in cellophane. Among the inevitable stacks of candy coloured chick-lit novels and John Grisham thrillers, one title caught my eye: the recently released paperback of Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker-winning The Line of Beauty. In a country where homosexuality remains illegal, the open sale of the book was surprising. Flicking through the book for signs of indelible ink blacking out offensive passages, I was pleasantly surprised to find that nothing had been censored. Perhaps the authorities hadn’t realised what “rimming” meant, I thought; but how could I explain the presence of the F-word, gleefully sprinkled through the novel, or indeed the scenes of drug-taking? Had the relevant authorities actually read the book? Or could it simply be that times had changed, and that freedom of speech – for so long the scourge of the young nation states of Asia – was flourishing unhindered?

I grew up in a country where censorship was a way of life, so much part of the individual and national psyche that every creative act seemed to be defined by its relationship to authority. Like most young boys, my awareness of the censorship of printed works began in a faintly laughable way – we got used to seeing words describing body parts deleted by permanent marker (applied by hand, it seemed), and black strips across women’s breasts, even when they seemed to be wearing bikinis. But beyond this schoolboy sniggering there was always the spectre of banned books in the background: memoirs of communist figures, political or religious novels, sexually explicit works – anything deemed to threaten the security of a young, unformed nation state, whether in a political or moral sense. Within this restrictive framework, writers were able, of course, to find ways of expressing themselves, but they did so with a constant awareness of the boundaries within which they were operating, and of the consequences of misjudging the constantly changing limits of what was acceptable. The same sentiment expressed in different political climates would meet differing outcomes: the writer’s life was a barometer for political, racial and cultural sensitivities.

But two decades of economic growth ushered in the new millennium, and money brought with it a sense of freedom. People could choose how to educate themselves, how to dress, where to live; they were free to travel abroad, where they would be exposed to new ideas; they had a stronger sense of who they were in relation to the hitherto all-protecting, all encompassing machinery of the state. And, above all, the swelling wealth of the last decade brought with it the internet, that great instrument of free speech.

The easy access to anti-establishment newspapers, blogs and self-publishing online would seem to render state censorship completely futile – even the infamous great firewall of China has trouble keeping up with the anti-government software and proxy servers that virtually every savvy urban dweller possesses. But those vague delineations of censorship seem to have worked their way seamlessly into the equally hard-to-define and forever-shifting ways of the internet, making the game of eluding censure even more complex than it was before.

Amir Muhammad, the influential Malaysian filmmaker and publisher, claims never to have had a book banned, in spite of at least two of his films being denied even a limited release. But he points to a deeper problem: the ingestion of decades of dogma and a climate of low-level fear leading to self-censorship, that precludes the need for overt state action. The largest chain of booksellers in Malaysia has refused – independently of direct government pressure, it would seem – to sell any of the Malay-language pulp fiction novels that Muhammad publishes because the presumed moral laxness of those books “might somehow lead to baby-dumping and adultery”. Similar books published in English – the language of the bourgeois urban middle-class – are deemed perfectly safe (which would explain the presence of Hollinghurst’s books, which couldn’t possibly be a corrupting force because hardly anyone would buy them).