Farrukh Dhondy | Banning of books and ‘cancelling’ of authors: Where, when will it stop?

Like ‘whatever’, ‘meh’ and ‘dumped’ and ‘blocked’

Have now returned as echoes to taunt

By day and even by night to haunt

Your conscious mind and dreams.

In answer, however unjust it seems,

Recurs your favourite resounding word

‘Absurd, absurd, absurd, absurd...’.”

From Allah Who Knows, by Bachchoo

For most of my short and happy life, the verb “to cancel” applied exclusively to events. But language moves on. Today people are “cancelled”.

This shift came about when a person whose views were deemed objectionable by a potential audience, such as activist students at a university, had a speaking event “cancelled”. The epithet then transferred to the person who was stopped from speaking.

Subsequently, the word wasn’t restricted to the “cancelled” speakers. It began to be used for various forms of banning or even dismissal.

Some months ago, I attended a talk by the writer and critic Pankaj Mishra on the works of V.S. Naipaul. Nadira, Lady Naipaul, attended as one of the chief guests. After the lecture, in the question-and-answer session, it emerged that Sir Vidia Naipaul’s Nobel Prize-winning work had been banned from several schools and colleges as some in those institutions, uncritically and stupidly, deemed his outspoken views and even insights in his writing “insulting” and what they would term “politically incorrect”. In a conversation after the event, Nadira characterised the ban on his books as Vidia being “cancelled”.

The writer J.K. Rowling, just before the July 4 general election in Britain, issued a statement saying she wouldn’t vote for the Labour Party as she profoundly disagreed with Sir Keir Starmer’s expressed views on gender issues. Starmer had in the past, after assuming the leadership of the Labour Party, somewhat clumsily, criticised a female Labour MP for saying that only women could have a cervix.

Rowling has been an avid Labour supporter in the past, donating £1 million to the party in 2008. However, she has vociferously campaigned against trans-women, men who assert that they are really women, sharing toilets, changing rooms, sporting events and jails with those who were born women.

She has never ever said that trans-people should in any way be denied their rights as citizens, but has firmly asserted that, despite the law supported by the Labour Party that recognises trans-women as “women”, one’s gender is determined by your genes, even before sperm meets ovum in the (female) womb -- or maybe in a test tube or incubator or whatever advanced medical practice uses -- so men are men with penises and women are women with vaginas, and gender is not determined by one’s assertion to the contrary.

JK has, as a consequence, suffered “cancellations”. She and other women who share her firm stance are called TERFs -- the acronym for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists.

I suppose sharing her views on this issue I could be labelled a TERM. Obvious!

Work it out!

To be fair, Keir Starmer has said he respects J.K. Rowling’s work and right to say what she does and he has, in the recent campaign which led to his winning the election, said that the Labour Party has fought hard for women’s rights and seemed to say that he is in favour of excluding trans-women from certain women-only spaces. It’s not exactly a U-turn, more an end to fumbled opinion.

I don’t think one can label JK’s reluctance to vote for a party led by Keir Starmer a “cancellation” -- though some might be in favour of extending the word to encompass even that.

Does the word apply to the murdering fatwa of Ayatollah Khomeini? Does it apply to the burning of books? (Incidentally, I am in favour of the mass burning of books as long as the arsonists and incendiaries buy hundreds -- millions, please! -- of copies to burn. Let the royalties and publicity keep coming?)

I must now, gentle reader, admit that I have never had the prominence of any thought, word or deed to merit being cancelled. The closest I came was with my first published book East End At Your Feet.

It was (is?) a book of short stories written after being commissioned by Martin Pick, a perceptive young editor at Macmillan publishing who approached me after having read my anonymously published anecdotes of teaching in a multi-ethnic school. These “stories” appeared in a radical newspaper called Freedom News, the publication of the British Black Panther Movement of which I was a member.

Martin tracked down the “author” of these pieces, saying there couldn’t be very many teachers in London called Farrukh, the name he’d been told by the person who sold him the paper. He said he was convinced that an audience for “multi-cultural” stories about young British Asians and Afro-Caribbeans existed, but the writing didn’t. Would I fill the gap? Is the Pope... (I’ve told you before… stop this nonsense --Ed)

The book was written and published and instantly adopted in several schools as a classroom text.

I’d quoted a line from a Rolling Stones’ lyric with the “f” word in it – quite innocently used by the Stones and myself. Martin called me at 7.30 one morning soon after its publication saying there was a demonstration outside a South London school demanding that the book be banned. It wasn’t. I was invited on TV to defend it. The opposite of being cancelled.