Where I Stand — Glenn Schaeffer: Escaping censorship

Friday, Aug. 22, 2003 | 9:42 a.m.

Editor's note: In August the Where I Stand column is written by guest writers. Today's columnist, Glenn Schaeffer, is president of Mandalay Resort Group. He also is a graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop.

SHORTLY AFTER terrorist rebels staged a coup in Sierra Leone in 1997, they put a price on the head of poet and novelist Syl Cheney-Coker, one of Africa's most respected authors. Syl barely escaped, and like so many others fleeing persecution, he found a refuge in the United States, specifically in Las Vegas as the first writer to be hosted by City of Asylum Las Vegas, the program I helped establish in 2000 with my friend Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright, Nobel laureate and outspoken advocate for the voices of conscience. Wole himself is hardly a stranger to persecution; in the '60s, he was imprisoned and tortured in Nigeria for speaking the truth to tyranny.

If you've followed past coverage of City of Asylum Las Vegas, then you know that Syl was with us for two years, during which he completed the third volume of a historical epic about his homeland. He was recently able to return to Sierra Leone after United Nations intervention brought a semblance of stability to the country.

In May, the Chinese artist and writer, Er Tai Gao, took up residency here, along with his wife, Maya, as our second writer in refuge. Gao first ran afoul of China's communist rulers in 1957, when he wrote an essay in which he had the audacity to suggest that personal freedom was linked to the creation and full enjoyment of beauty. Here in the West, we take such humanist notions as givens, but Gao's indiscretion landed him in a labor camp in China's central desert, where many of his fellow inmates perished.

Gao survived, and upon his release three years later, he returned to his painting and writing. And he continued to annoy China's rulers (vexing of authority is a hallmark of fine literature). Across the course of the next 30 years, Gao was jailed repeatedly for expressing his thoughts on freedom and beauty. When he wasn't in prison, he was often prevented by the Communist regime from teaching or even lecturing. Finally, he and Maya, also a writer and painter, escaped from central China to Hong Kong by hiding in boats traveling down the Yangtse River.

And like so many others, they made their way to freedom in the United States.

Er Tai's story and the stories of Syl and Wole are all too familiar. Worldwide, censorship still reigns as the norm, not the exception, contrary to all our expectations that the end of the Cold War meant the complete victory of liberal democracy and the "end of history," as political scientist Francis Fukuyama put it. The terrorist attacks of 9-11 and subsequent events make it clear that we remain mired in a bitter conflict: the liberty of expression and individual spirit versus those forces opposed to any such freedoms.

City of Asylum Las Vegas received quite a bit of coverage at the outset, most of which focused on the seeming absurdity that the city could have become a safe haven for writers at all. Las Vegas?

Well, why not? Las Vegas is the city where people come to reinvent themselves, America's ultimate boomtown, a town built on imagination and risk-taking. In that, it's the perfect town for writers, who are risk-takers par excellence, especially writers in exile.

So why not a refuge for writers in Las Vegas? Besides, no one else had made a move. Since we took the lead, five other American cities have signed on as cities of asylum, with more on the way.

Missing from most of the coverage of City of Asylum Las Vegas was much discussion of conditions worldwide that have made the City of Asylum network so necessary. Missing was any discussion of the place of freedom of speech and conscience in the modern economy.

Progress takes place when daring or disruptive ideas can be advanced. Literary narrative, the "backtalk" of individual minds, is a stimulus to market economies and liberal societies as it has been pretty much since the invention of moveable type in Germany and the subsequent explosion of literacy. From this revolution sprang the core values of Enlightenment, humanism and, in particular, the case for freedom of expression as it promotes progress. Conversely, wherever you have censorship and high rates of illiteracy, you find failed economies, market corruption, political totalitarianism and backward social customs.

Well, what can we do? City of Asylum Las Vegas is a small part of a larger worldwide movement to advance the cause of freedom to write. Little by little, by the accumulation of protest, artfully rendered in stories and poems, we are affirmed in the growth of liberal society.