 So, we'll start. Thank you all for braving the weather conditions in order to attend this lecture, and I'm sure you won't regret it. Well, it's my pleasure to welcome for this globalization lecture my friend, very old friend actually. Tarek Ali, we met for the first time 40 years ago, something like that. I still remember Tarek visited me in Beirut at that time, and was amazed to find the collected works of Lenin for something like 45 pounds of the time, and bought that and I still remember him at the airport with the police looking at him bizarrely with this whole collection of books. Anyway, Tarek is the kind of person about whom you would say he doesn't need to be introduced. He definitely doesn't need to be introduced, but I would say that probably many people know one facet of Tarek, and he has actually many facets. He's a really multi-talented person. Of course, he was first known as a political leader, and actually a political leader in the student movement. He was a major figure in the student movement in this country, but not only in this country. In his country of origin, in Pakistan, he was also a very popular figure in the student movement of the late 60s. He's one of the emblematic figures of 1968 and the whole upheaval that characterized that year. He remained very much prominent as a political leader, as a political fighter ever since, so one should say it never stopped even if the forms in which or through which Tarek practices political activity have evolved with time. Many people also know Tarek, of course, as a public speaker. He's a fascinating public speaker. I should say he's a really great orator. He's always been very admirative of his skills as a public speaker, and which explains also, of course, the role he played as a leader in the student movement, as a leader in the left-wing movement more generally. Tarek is, of course, also a political thinker, and you ought to be. I mean, if you are what I already mentioned, but he is also a political author, the author of many, many books of, let's say, books dealing with politics, starting from revolutionary politics to the analysis of various conditions and situations, and international relations. He started writing books about Pakistan. I mean, his first book was about Pakistan, and that was exactly 40 years ago when we first met, that this book came out, and his next book, and tells already something about Tarek, was the coming British Revolution. So, 1971, it didn't come exactly, but maybe it will come. There will be one coming anyway. And, well, I won't go into the list of his political writings, probably not probably. Certainly the one which, I mean, was a kind of bestseller, was his clash of fundamentalisms, written after September 11, but the titles of his next books are quite telling the bush in Babylon about the bush and Blair, one should say, in Babylon, about the invasion of Iraq. Beyond that, of course, there are still other facets. One of them is Tarek as a filmmaker, and Tarek as a playwright, and scriptwriter, if one could say it, put it in that way, and he most recently actually has co-written and contributed as even a figure in the film itself to Oliver Stone's latest film about Latin America, The Latin American Left, which probably many of you have already seen, South of the Border. And, of course, well, I could continue the list, including, as a good friend of Tarek, I should say, he's even an excellent cook. But beside all that, he is now today here in his capacity as a writer, a writer of novels, of fiction, and he has written several books of fiction, especially his quintet about, one could say, related to the world of Islam, which starts with the Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, which was followed by the Book of Saladin, The Stone Woman, then a Sultan in Palermo, and the last one came out this year, Night of the Golden Butterfly. And this finishes the quintet, as he liked to call it. He has written other also books of fiction. And, well, I try to get for this globalization lecture, therefore, Tarek, the writer, and to discuss this issue of globalization through his experience as a writer and his knowledge of world literature. And, as you have seen, the title of his lecture is World Literature, World Language. I'm sure this will be a very interesting talk. As usual, it will be followed by a period of Q&A. And at the end of which, you will be treated to a dance upstairs. I don't remember the name of the dance. I'm very sorry for that. And I had some problem pronouncing it, but anyhow, it should be also very interesting. You'll see that once we finish here, it will be upstairs in the room which is where this occupation is taking place. So without further delay, Tarek Ali. Thank you very much. Thanks, Gilbert, for those kind words. World Literature and World Languages is something that concerns us all. It's not something meant for specialists. It's something that affects us all. First, let's start with world literature. Is there a world literature to which the answer is obviously there is? Is there a world literature which is seen as that and that depends very much on the languages in which it's translated? Is there a world with its own national literatures? Yes, it is. Do we know all about them? We don't. And the reason we don't is because very little is actually translated from most of the cultures and languages of the world into the major languages that exist now, which are of course the dominant imperial language today is English, spoken more in different parts of the world than any other language. The second language is Spanish, which is not an imperial language but once used to be, which is why it's spoken in most of South America with the exception of Brazil and of course it's spoken in Spain itself and increasingly spoken on the west coast of the United States where there are large Hispanic populations. So the question of what literature becomes available is very dependent and constitutes a world literary space is determined really by how much of this literature is translated into the main languages of the world. And the fact is that not all that much is. What has been the effects of globalization on world literature has been a compartmentalization so that globalization has produced a much more provincial culture, while capital roams freely, the world and its different countries have become far more provincialized. There is much less understanding in my opinion today of the different cultures of different parts of the world than there was 40 years ago prior to globalization. This affects everything. It affects for instance what you read in your newspapers, what you watch on television. There was much more space given to other parts of the world 40 years ago than there has been over the last 25 years. And there are many reasons for this. One is that the sort of turbocharged capitalism has very little time for culture. And that the books increasingly published all over the world, all over the world are taken from the bestseller list of the New York Times. I know publishers in South America, in Europe, in countries which once used to be very proud of their languages. I know books they publish often without reading because they're on the bestseller list of the New York Times. So they look at the list and they say, how many of these can we afford? That's the first question. And the second question is how much money can they make for us? So what this is creating is in essence a cultural conformity and uniformity that is quite damaging to world literature taken as a whole. And it is very dependent now on languages. I mean if you look even in Europe, countries like France in particular, which was so proud of its language since from the days of the Enlightenment onwards in particular, that it used to look down on other languages because they saw the French language as the epitome of the most enlightened country in the world. And if you didn't know France, French, you were a barbarian. Now many, many French academics, writers, novelists, queue up outside English language publishing houses, pleading to be published in English, which they never used to do. And the main reason they do it is they want to be read in the imperial language and they want to be read, especially in the United States of America. So the level and the thrust of this globalization, which is a globalization based on a consensus accepted in Washington after the collapse of communism in terms of economics and politics and ideology if you like, we now see that culture is essentially following the same route. So then you have the world literature that is created by the Nobel Prize for literature. So the Nobel Prize committee decides that a beautiful novel written, let's say for the sake of argument, by an Ethiopian or Somali writer, someone points it out to them. The first question they ask, if this novel is so good, why hasn't it been translated into French? Because the Nobel Prize committee prefer to take books which are all translated into French as one of their key criteria for whether a book is good or not. If it has by some chance been translated into French, then it's considered for the Nobel and once it gets the author, he or she gets the Nobel, then that book becomes part of world literature and world literary networks. Now I want to argue that this official world literature, a literature created by prizes and recognition from a tiny, tiny group of people based ironically in Scandinavia and named after the inventor of dynamite is not a sufficient criteria for us to determine what constitutes great literature. And especially I want to talk about three or four writers to make the discussion more concrete. Of course long before the Nobel Prize was invented, centuries before, all the questions indirectly of what constitutes a world historical novel, if you like, a universal novel were raised in Spain in the 17th century with the novel produced by Cervantes called Don Quixote, which I hope all of you have heard of. Anyone here not heard of it? Admit it. How many? How many? Okay. This is a great novel written by Cervantes in Spain in the 17th century which has been debated and discussed for the last four, four and a half centuries. The way we know the novel in other parts of the world it is because it was the first real novel to be translated in lots and lots of different languages long before the world was seen as a global entity. I'm told that there was a Chinese translation published in the 18th century, Japanese. So this novel made its way. And what is interesting about the novel is that for those of us who don't speak Spanish or don't read Spanish perfectly or even imperfectly, or don't know Spanish history, it is impossible to understand what this novel is all about. And yet it is a very important novel. And one reason it's important, which is not accepted by the Western Academy, by and large, by the way. In an essay I wrote recently in my collection, Protocols of the Elders of Sodom and Other Essays, I talk about the introduction by Harold Bloom who is, as you know, a very great expert on world literature and academic in the United States. There's a beautiful new translation of this novel in English by Edith Grossman. Really stunning. I strongly recommend all of you to read it. It's a fantastic translation which gives you a feel of the rhythms of the Spanish language and Cervantes' own rhythms and his humor and his vicious satirical bits, which have not been understood by everyone from earlier translations. But this great translation is wrecked by an introduction by Harold Bloom because he doesn't tell you anything about the context in which that novel was written. He essentially says, well, this is one of the great novels of humanity. Some people liked it. You know, Standa loved it, but Nabokov didn't like it. Well, who cares a damn? What we really want to know, and it goes on like this. It's a really bad introduction. What we really want to know is why did Cervantes write this novel? What was the context of the Spain in which that novel was produced and what was this great writer trying to tell us? And he is, if you read the novel carefully, trying to tell us many things that the Spain in which he is writing is a Spain in which the three cultures that coexisted for several hundred years have been destroyed. As many of you, I hope, will know that for several hundred years, Islamic culture, Jewish culture, Christian culture coexisted, debated. Out of these debates and discussions, a synthesis grew which was called Al-Andalus and Al-Andalusian culture, Al-Andalusian poetry, Al-Andalusian philosophy, which they feared in Baghdad as being too radical and too questioning. But it was an amazing civilization in many ways. And this civilization was destroyed two key years, one 1492, which people mainly think about the discovery of America by Columbus. But the other thing that that year marked was the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. That's when they proclaimed that all the Jews had to be expelled and they were told either you convert or you get out of our country. And if you convert and we find that you're still observing your ritual religious rituals, then that means that you have betrayed your new religion and we will burn you. And in order to make sure that this happens, we have created a secret police called the Holy Brotherhood which will spy on you quite openly to see whether you're observing these rituals or not. And exactly the same was done to the Spanish Muslims. And it's now easy to forget because views and anger on Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is so great. But you have to remember that for most of that history, Jewish and Islamic civilizations co-existed both in the Arab world and in Al Andalus, Spain and Portugal and in Sicily. And the Muslims were the ruling class, but they protected the Jews. There were no pogroms in Sicily. They were protected. Very few attacks in Andalus in over 600 years, there were some. But by and large, very few. And this coexistence created a very rich culture. And when that culture was destroyed by force, by the reconquest of Spain as the Catholic Church called it and the armies it created to fight it, these two civilizations were rooted out. And what was said to the Jews in 1492 was said to the Muslims 60 years later, convert or get out. And if you convert, but you're not a proper convert, we see you having a bath three times a day, you will be killed. It's quite ironic that but bathing became a crime in Spain because Muslims had these ritual baths. All the public baths were destroyed to stop it city after city after city. So the fate of these two civilizations was together and this is the period in which Cervantes was born and was growing up. And all the evidence points to the fact that he belonged to a family of Jewish doctors, physicians from Cordoba. But they converted, his grandparents converted to save themselves and because they didn't want to leave the country. So they converted, but even in the families of converts and confersors, many of those old traditions never died, Muslim or Jew, never died. And so when Cervantes sat down to write this novel, what does he say? It's very interesting. In the early pages of the novel, he says basically that it's not a novel written by him. And you get, the reader gets a shock and he then says, one day when I was in the Alcana market in Toledo, a boy came by to sell some notebooks and old papers to a silk merchant. As I am very fond of reading even torn papers in the streets, every reference point, torn papers in the streets because lots of literature, documents written in Arabic, often when they were found were torn up and chucked in the streets. As I am very fond of reading even torn papers in the streets, I was moved by my natural inclination to pick up one of the volumes the boy was selling and I saw that it was written in characters I knew to be Arabic. And since I recognized but could not read them, I looked around to see if some Morisco, Muslim convert, who knew Castilian and could read them for me was in the vicinity. And it was not very difficult to find this kind of interpreter for even if I had sought a speaker of a better and older language, I would have found him and the better and older language for Cervantes is the language of his forebears Hebrew. So he's making two points. He's giving a hint to the reader, this is where I'm coming from and this novel actually has been written in Arabic. Now why does he say this? It's not for amusement. It's not to make us smile. It's to register a literary protest that once we had a culture in which these languages flourished and these languages are no longer there. And later on in the novel when he's talking to Sancho Panza, all this is seen as comedy by the way in most western eyes. It's very serious stuff. He's discussing, explaining to Sancho Panza what the word al-Bogez means. As in well and what if in the midst of all this music al-Bogez should resound. What are al-Bogez? said Sancho. I've never heard of them or seen them in my life. Al-Bogez responded Don Quixote are something like brass candlesticks and when you hit one with the other along the empty or hollow side it makes a sound that is not unpleasant, though it may not be very beautiful or harmonious and it goes well with the rustic nature of pipes and timbrels. This word al-Bogez is Moorish, i.e. Arabic, as are all those in our Castilian tongue that begin with al. For example, al-Mohaza, al-Morzar, al-Hambra, al-Guasil, al-Husseema, al-Masin, al-Kansia and other similar words. I have told you this in passing because it came to mind when you mentioned al-Bogez. But there is nothing in Cervantes that is just told in passing. He's covering himself here because of the inquisition. Nothing is told in passing. Everything is carefully thought about before it is put on paper. And this inquisition in Spain which destroyed an entire culture went very deep in this guy and throughout this novel, which if you read it and read it with intelligence and know the history of Spain, you will find what he is doing. I think probably alone in this, but my reading of Cervantes' novel says that the real target of the novel is the Catholic Church. And he does it in a very special way because were this to be openly admitted, he would have been killed. I mean he would have been tried for heresy, blasphemy and put to fire. That's what they used to do. So he's very careful the way he writes it. And all the books of chivalry that he attacks at the beginning of this novel, I don't believe he's talking about books of chivalry really. He's talking about useless books. And many of these useless books were religious catechisms and religious books that were being produced in Spain to justify the inquisition and justify the expulsions of Muslims and Jews from Spain. So the novel, in other words, in this case, is replete with history. And that is what makes it curiously enough a world historical novel because his readers knew exactly what he was talking about. Suddenly he and Sancho Panza are going through Spain and there's an empty village. And they say, ah, this village is empty. Ah, I wonder who lived here. They know perfectly well who lived there. Muslims who have now gone back to the Maghreb. But he mentions it. He could have ignored it after all. Everyone knew. But he wanted to say to his readers, look, this is what has happened to our country. So Cervantes' great novel, probably the first great piece of world literature as such, is in itself a synthesis of the different cultures of which Spain has been a part. And he expresses this in the novel very clearly and he wants everyone to know. And that is what makes this book so special and that is how this book really should be read and read it on your own and see. And if you read it with an understanding of what had happened in Spain, it's quite amazing. And that is the effect it had on the German Enlightenment. Schiller, for instance, when he is writing his depiction of Philip II in his famous play, which has been made into an opera, Don Carlos, but it was written as a play. Friedrich Schiller writes this amazing scene where the king is nervous that his son is plotting a rebellion. So he says, the king. My son, the king of Spain, the king. My son is meditating treason, grand inquisitor. Well, and what do you resolve? King on all or nothing, grand inquisitor, what mean you by this all? King, he must escape or die. Grand inquisitor, well sire, decide. King, and can you not establish some new creed to justify the bloody murder of one's only son? Grand inquisitor, to appease eternal justice, God's own son expired upon the cross. It's chilly. But everything and anything can be justified by inquisitors and inquisitions is what Schiller is saying. And of course, it has been justified ever since. And this debate will not go away, the debate around Cervantes, for a very simple reason that when he wrote the book, of course, it was a different type of Europe. But that expulsion created the modern European identity. It went very deep in Europe, a Catholic Christian identity. All the other cultures, religions had to be exterminated. And that created the modern European identity. And it's important to remember this, to understand even how deep this goes when we read about the wave of Islamophobia now in virtually every single European country. With the big target of attack in most of European countries are Muslim migrants. They don't just attack them as migrants, they attack them because of their origins, their religious origins, their cultural origins. And the Chancellor of Germany says openly that we can never integrate with the Turks, German Turks, many born in that country because of who they are and where they come from, they are the other. She more or less said that, Angela Merkel, a few weeks ago. And no one even bothered to comment on it. So the point I make often is that the language being used about Muslims in many parts of Europe today is very similar. Not the same, but very similar to much of what was said about Jews in the 20s and 30s and 40s. They wear funny clothes, they come from a different civilization. They are not like us, they are Jews, they killed Christ, they have Christ's blood on their hands. They have a different diet, they pray on a different day. We can never actually integrate them because in the last analysis their culture, their roots are very different to ours. Anti-Semitic currents and thought in Europe goes back many, many centuries. It didn't suddenly develop with Hitler and the Third Reich who took it to its ultimate grisly conclusion, but it had existed for a long time. And so Cervantes' novel is not unimportant for trying to understand what Europe once was. That is his plea, look at what we have lost when we lost these different cultures that also humanized us. And it's an important novel to understand. The other writer I want to talk about, it's more modern, a 20th century writer, very great Arab novelist, translated, some of his work translated into English, Rehman Munif, who wrote the great, great series, Cities of Salt, one of the most devastating, satirical and brilliant literary attacks on a particular type of Arab ruler. People say it's Saudi Arabia. It is, but it's not just Saudi Arabia. What he says about the Saudi rulers could apply it to the rulers of most of the Gulf states and in a way it could apply also to Hasnimo Barak in Egypt because he is savaging their style of living, how they rule, what they say. And now Munif, of course, is not so well known as Najib Mahfouz, and Najib Mahfouz is well known because he got the Nobel Prize, which is great. He's also a very great writer. Munif, to my mind, is more edgy, more challenging, more demanding, raises more questions, provides more answers. And for writing Cities of Salt, he was deprived of his Saudi nationality, but he carried on writing. The last thing he wrote before he died were a trilogy on Iraq, which I hope will be translated one day. I have read very small extracts from the translation, but it's a very moving history, not a modern Iraq, but of Iraq, Mesopotamia, the traditions of that country. I don't know whether it is being translated at the moment, but it should be, because unless it is, many of us will not be able to read it. But the way Munif has been written about in the Western canon is quite shocking, actually. I mean, some people obviously appreciate him. I mean, a few German critics have said he's a master. That is how they've referred to him, a master. But the late John Updike, who reviewed the book in The New Yorker, actually wrote, why does this man write? Because what I'm reading is not a novel. Well, it may not be a novel to satisfy Updike, whose own novels leave a lot to be desired, in my opinion. But it is one of the great works of modern Arab fiction, which is also world-historical because of what it represents, the creation of a new Arab ruling class following the discovery of oil, and the depictions in that novel of the symbiosis between the new oil companies coming into the Gulf and the native tribal leaders who had no idea that they were sitting on all this oil and suddenly how their everything changes with those who are now collaborating with the oil company and later they will collaborate with its government, their body language changes. They begin to have bigger ideas of who they are and finally the money swallows them up. And Nagib's message is, what will you do? His real message, which he doesn't write, but a message that permeates the book is what will you do after the oil disappears? The cities will become sand again and what will you have done for your people all this time? Building these huge skyscrapers without any meaning at all, mimicking, blindly mimicking the West with whom you collaborate, all this is going to disappear one day. Then what will you answer when you go before your creators to what have we done for our people? And it's a very strong and powerful message. And so much so that when Monif lived in exile even in Damascus he was basically not allowed too much laxity to speak in public because he had a very sharp tongue. One occasion his wife told me when I met her in Damascus a few years ago she said the one occasion he actually gave a lecture, it was not allowed to be advertised but it's spread by word of mouth all over Syria. And so many people turned up that they had no room. I mean, so people were sitting outside this room which took 200 people, there were sort of 5,000 people outside trying to just listen to what this guy was saying. And when he died and the Saudi ambassador asked permission to call on his wife to express their condolences, she really did break with tradition because no one refuses that. If someone wants to, she said, no, you attacked him when he was alive now that he's dead you want to come in condolence debt. I will not tolerate this hypocrisy and that was very much in the spirit of her husband. Now, is Monif part of world literature? Yes, he is, he is part of it because we know something of what he has written and he is accepted by literary, serious literary critics as one of the great masters of the Arab language. But how many more are there which we don't know about and how many are writing now who might never get translated? And you can take this same pattern from continent to continent. All depends on what the world, who is the proprietor of the world languages and what will be the impact of this on the culture, world culture by the end of the 21st century. The answer is we do not know. People say to me in the Arab world but Arabic is a divine language it will last forever. Well, don't be too sure. I hope it does because it's a very fine language but will it? The other divine languages disappeared. Latin after all used to be a divine language and it disappeared. It was once taught in English private schools but even there I'm told it's disappearing now so that they could, why it was important to know the language because the roots of the romance languages come from Latin. So will Arabic disappear? I don't know. It depends a lot on what happens in that world. Of course the Quran will always be read but as many of you know in many parts of the world the Quran is read without being understood anyway especially in South Asia. It is learnt by heart. Should it be the case, think that in 30 years time Arab children also know the Quran by heart but they speak in another language altogether. It depends a lot on what happens there. I'm not being alarmist. I'm just saying this is the way languages rise and fall. It is not simply linked to the beauty of the language because Latin was a very beautiful language. All the great Roman poets wrote in it. Languages can disappear. If the cultures on which they are based crack up, implode, disappear, are taken over by other cultures then that can happen. The big languages today, French and Spanish, English and Spanish will probably last for a long time to come yet. Chinese, a new rising language. Many people in the Western are learning Chinese for bad reasons mainly. They want to do business with China not because of the inherent purposes of learning but good young people are learning Chinese. Very good to expand. Very difficult language to learn but a very important language to learn and how would we have known that China has a tradition of novels and the production of novels which precedes Britain where people normally think the novel was born or spain. The novels were being written in China in the 9th and 10th centuries and they were not just any old novels. They were huge novels and some of these novels, very funny by the way and vicious and satirical, through these novels you can get a fantastic glimpse of what Chinese society was like at that time because the history books usually tell the messages of the victorious side as history often does but through literature you can sometimes get a picture that you will not find in the works of history and these Chinese classics now important because of the place of China are being translated at a rapid rate. Initially they existed usually in bad translations now the most recent ones have been taken up in a very strong way. The last point I just want to come back to is who gets the Nobel Prize for literature. Peace we know. The Nobel Prize for peace is given to people during the war. That we know. And this recent by the way just so that you know I'm on the subject of the great founder of Dynamite's Prizes. The Nobel Peace Prize recently given to a Chinese dissident. The West is being sort of going great. The Norwegian idiots, all retired politicians are saying we gave this guy the prize because we want to teach China a lesson and China has to reform itself. Well no one in Norway is going to be able to reform China. It's the Chinese people who can and I hope will transform China. It's not going to be done from a tiny country in Europe but leaving that aside. Obviously the Chinese are stupid to arrest this guy but then they can be stupid especially on these questions but who is this guy? I mean you know not to put to find a point on it the guy is a semi-fascist. I'm not kidding you. He has written several times now on how the big problem with China is that it wasn't colonized and that we need at least 300 years of colonization and civilization for China to recover. He's written that and someone asked him recently you know through various mechanisms do you agree with that still? He said very much so that's my political position. Fine it's a crazy position. He's wrote some of the most savage defense of the Iraq War which few I mean you know even the hardest defenders of the Iraq War were slightly nervous in the West. They were not this boy. Said Iraq has to be invaded to teach these Arabs a lesson. Who are they? They're a lesser civilization. Of course you can imagine what his position on Afghanistan is. You know if Iraq had to be destroyed Afghanistan has to be wiped off the map. This is the guy to whom the Nobel Peace Prize has given the latest prize. I bet you that they had no idea of what his politics were but let's just return I mustn't get sidetracked to the Nobel Prize for literature. Throughout the Cold War period the Nobel Prize for literature became an instrument of the Cold War more or less not completely that would be unfair but it became part of the Cold War. Any Soviet dissident writer got the prize. Pasternak a wonderful point in my opinion Zhivalko wasn't such a great novel. Brodsky got the prize. Okay fine he was in exile but that is the way in which the literature prizes tended to go. Okay that's their position. That is fine. It wasn't totally determined by literature. Where it was determined there's no doubt about it at all was in who they didn't give the prize to in those same years. I give you an Indonesian genius Pramodianan Tathur a great Indonesian writer, novelist poet, literary critic and communist. Locked up by the military dictatorship in Indonesia for several years kept on Buru Island tortured suffered from malnutrition they kept themselves alive those political prisoners in Indonesia by eating leaves, little animals anything they could find because the state wanted them to die but didn't quite have the guts to kill them directly. It was a slow death and in prison Tours began to tell stories to keep the morale of the prisoners high and those stories became the basis of the Buru Quartet which he wrote in prison. Once the Suharto dictatorship was removed he was released came back treated as a hero by ordinary people who had read his books many of them written in prison but why didn't he ever get the Nobel Prize if anyone deserved it he did because of the quality of his literature not his politics because you know there are some who think that literature has to be political I don't accept that I think all great literature as I've been trying to explain is usually linked to the history and the world and if you contextualize it that what it is but not at the expense of reducing the literate to the political every novel has to have form, style as well as content you can't cut one off from the other and Pramodya Anantathur the Indonesian writer certainly had that he wrote in one story she who gave up in 1952 before the dictatorship about an uprising against the Dutch in Indonesia and it's quite interesting because it applies to lots of other parts of the world as well in such times too the rage for politics roared along like a tidal wave out of control each person felt as though she he could not be truly alive without being political without debating political questions in truth it was as though they could stay alive even without rice even school teachers who had all along lived neutrally were infected by the rage for politics and so far as they were able they influenced their pupils with the politics to which they had attached themselves each struggled to claim new members for his party and schools proved to be battlefields for their struggles politics, politics no different from rice under the Japanese occupation and later he mocked the way in which when they were in prison the state used extremely reactionary religious organizations to come and forcibly convert them and he writes just look at what we were eating imagine a diet of gutter rats the moldy outgrowth on papaya trees and banana plants and leeches skewered on palm leaf ribs prior to eating even JP one of our most well educated prisoners found himself reduced to eating chichak though he always broke off the lizard's toe pads first he'd become quite an expert at catching them after amputating the lizard's toes he would squeeze the unfortunate creature between his thumb and forefinger shove it to the back of his throat and swallow it whole the man's will to defend himself against hunger was a victory in itself and into this world what did they send us I have no doubt that this year just as in previous years at the beginning of the fasting month my mates and I will be treated to a lecture by a religious official brought in from the free world on the importance of fasting and controlling one's hunger and desires imagine the humour of that you know he writes about what they were living on and one of the last things he wrote just as politics cannot be separated from life life cannot be separated from politics people who consider themselves to be non-political are no different they've already been assimilated by the dominant political culture they just don't notice it anymore and that doesn't doesn't that apply to any part of the world here Europe, United States everywhere so we only know these people and their work many of us because they have been translated and so the struggle for the right to translate is an important struggle and I always say to the European Union bureaucrats when I run into them somewhere or the other that the one thing you could do is set up a huge fund for translation have groups of experts from the countries in which these books are published and real people you know not bullshit types who will tell you what is good and what is not good and publish from each of these countries 20 books a year it's not so much you have loads of money you can do it and it will be good if they are published in other languages not necessarily your own all your own but in other parts of the world too without that we will lose touch and we live in a globalized culture today where education as we know from the events going on around us is itself under attack why should literature leave alone world literature be so important to this particular culture which puts money at the center of its life its economic life, its political life its cultural life consumerism becomes absolutely central and making money and getting rich and in this what is the point of literature or philosophy or history it's just a diversion and even to say you need to educate your citizens but why so they can think but they don't need to think and what if they stop voting who cares even if a few vote will win so this is a dangerous trend you know a number of British universities where in Brighton which used to be a fantastically good university at Sussex they don't teach pre-20th century history but how can you understand the 20th century without understanding at least some of the key events of the 18th and 17th centuries it's not easy you know you can't do it and then increasingly history being taught in globules in modules in tiny little bits so you learn tiny bits apart from the first world war which is done to death at the second world war movies, books, literature etc non-stop we get that but little else and without that even this you know one of the worst crimes the carried out by the western Europeans against the Jewish people of Europe the holocaust you can't even totally understand that as a crime it has to be contextualized it's part of western culture what happened why it was accepted not just in Germany in France in Italy in the United States otherwise they would have bombed the camps they would have allowed Jewish refugees in no it's the Palestinians who pay the price for all that for the failures of Europe so in these times where everything is under attack literature does provide a refuge away from the globalized world and that is how we have to see it glimpses out of literature which are actually literary and I will end the lecture with a small quote to you which I hope you will appreciate as much as me which I first read about in a Chinese documentary about a very very brilliant Chinese documentary about the Chinese Rust Belt and the total destruction of industry which we have here in the United States especially and this great Chinese filmmaker made a film of what had happened to the life and culture of these people and in the middle of it he caught two young boys without a future talking to each other so different voices of the different kids these are two young kids in their teens talking to each other you ask me what to do I don't know what to do so you have no dreams at all just like me then why the hell do you criticize me what's your dream I'm trying to talk to you can you get food from talking