A culture of accountability is a precondition for both literature and politics to flourish

In the film, THE THIRD MAN, the character of Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, shares an observation with his interlocutor. “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”

The novelist Graham Greene, who co-wrote the script, describes this as the best line of the film and says that Welles wrote it.

The line has of course come to stand for the proposition that art emerges from conditions of suffering and social strife.

I must confess that I have quoted the passage in that vein. In an interview in the New York Times shortly after Britain’s referendum decision to leave the European Union, five writers and artists, including Philip Pullman and Elif Shafak, were asked what impact Brexit would have on the arts. All the artists but one took the view that Brexit would have an adverse effect on their respective disciplines.

Quoting THE THIRD MAN, I offered the view that the ardors of Brexit awaiting us might potentially usher in a golden age of English literature, pushing writers out of the complacency and complicity that has marked much of 21st century British literature.

But I was wrong. Literary art requires certain positive conditions to flourish. The conditions of a healthy literary culture are precisely the conditions of a healthy political culture. Of course, we can find examples of artists who wrote in adverse circumstances, but these are the exceptions and not the rule. They do not upset the overall picture, which is that literature requires an atmosphere of imaginative freedom, even when the limits of that freedom are not tested by a given work. I want to explore those political conditions here, because, to be clear, the political conditions of literature are the political conditions of a free society.

I should tell you, by the way, in case you haven’t spotted the errors already, that Orson Welles—or rather his character Harry Lime--was wrong, factually wrong. The cuckoo clock was not invented in Switzerland but in Bavaria, in what is now Germany. Moreover, Switzerland was in no way an island of tranquility amid the turmoil that has marked almost all of European history over the five hundred years referenced. Still, those sentences make for excellent dialogue, especially in the hands of Orson Welles' acting talent.

I recently had an open-air speaking engagement in Dhaka, when the arrival of rain forced the gathering indoors to continue the Q&A session, in a much more intimate setting, with everyone crowded in. The Q&As had evolved into something closer to a conversation with the audience. At one point, I posed a question. I observed that Bangladesh had deposed a tyrant and brought in an interim government staffed largely by Dhaka liberal NGO types. But I asked the audience if they now felt they could speak freely and air their views. Of course not.

Heads nodded and, in the intimacy of the setting, the voices concurred. They could not speak freely.

When the term “freedom of expression” is invoked, very often what is under discussion is the exercise of state powers. Obviously, for more than a decade, an authoritarian government put the focus on such powers. Quite explicitly and unashamedly, Hasina’s regime severely curtailed the rights of people to speak freely, both through draconian legislation and through the deployment of thugs and a subservient police.

In 2014, I delivered a lecture to an overcrowded auditorium at Dhaka University. The title of the talk was “Bangladesh--the Land of Dead Ideas.” I criticized the Awami government, generally, and its rigged courts, specifically. But the bulk of my talk focused on what I perceived to be a tangled knot of political and social constraints on freedom of expression, a knot that throttled the development of ideas at birth. Hence, as I indicated then, the title.

At dawn, on the morning after the talk, I returned to the UK, and two days later my father passed away. For the next ten days, I was quite unaware of the furor that followed my lecture. Two weeks later, I received the video of the talk recorded by Dhaka University. The university had still not published the material, material which would have shown the outcry to be utterly unfounded. As I discovered, the talk had been grossly misrepresented in the press—a point that can easily be verified by watching the video, which is available on my Facebook page. This was a press that was already hopping in and out of bed with the regime. By then it was too late. Still, it’s important to note that not a single person who attended my talk or who has since seen the video—not one person has expressed disagreement, let alone provided a reasoned rebuttal of any of the points I made. Quite the opposite.

The fact that the Awami regime has been replaced by a largely impotent and ineffectual interim government has revealed that the limitations on free expression in Bangladesh run much, much deeper than state repression, and, in fact, those social and socio-political constraints on expression and on imagination have today been laid bare.

One might argue that it takes time for people to adjust to the new dispensation. And there are no doubt some who are so accustomed to ineffectual government that they see no purpose in ventilating their views on what is, after all, a temporary arrangement.

But why can’t we say publicly that “Ali Riaz has been a disaster.” Or that “Professor Yunus has proven to be huge disappointment.” After all, these are not elected politicians and their tenure is coming to an end. Ali Riaz, some say, has already packed up shop and left Bangladesh. I don’t know. Moreover, such views are widespread among the elite and professional classes and are routinely shared in the privacy of homes. For heaven’s sake, I have heard these views expressed by senior members of the IG! The key point is that everyone who says this, does so AS IF THESE VIEWS ARE WIDELY held, even affirming that these are dominant views. Yet the Bangladeshi press and news media has failed to hold the IG accountable in any meaningful way.

In August of last year, in the first few days after the tyrant fled, I said to a friend that we should pay attention to how this interim government resources and staffs the press office in the first few days. Explaining my view, I said that given the suspension of Parliament and the retreat of party-political activities, the government will face no daily source of accountability other than the press.

Lo and behold, the press offices of the various Advisers and the IG took woefully long to staff and never adequately. Moreover, it quickly became apparent that the Chief Adviser was unwilling to stand before the press and take questions.

In October of last year, shortly after the Chief Adviser’s shambolic interview with Voice of America, resulting in uproar in Bangladesh, I authored a full-page op-ed published in the Daily Star, under the heading “The Government Must Make Itself Available to Questions from the Press.” This required a full page because I made a detailed critique of the government’s press function.

I explained the need for the IG to get off the merry-go-round of pointless roundtables, where important government announcements were being made at gatherings of the elite, and for such announcements to be made directly to the people, in press conferences, taking questions frequently and directly from the press on every important matter. I withheld criticism of the Chief Adviser directly and levelled my ire at the press office, first for failing to provide the Chief Adviser with the required guidance and training for handling himself in interviews, such as the one he gave to the Voice of America.

In so many ways, the Chief Adviser could have set standards through his own conduct this year. He could have laid down new norms so that deviations from such norms by the next ELECTED prime minister would be both clearly visible and, moreover, could provide a basis for criticism by the public and press. A fundamental new norm could have been a leader’s practice of taking questions from the press.

Instead, a risibly low standard was set by a Chief Adviser who gave only four or five interviews to Bangladeshi media in all this time and never gave a proper press conference, one in which he took extensive questions from the press. This was the exact opposite of what we should expect of government.

But the Chief Advisor has given interviews, I must acknowledge. Travel, as the expression goes, broadens the mind. If so, Professor Yunus arguably has the broadest mind in Bangladesh. As he traveled the world, seemingly stopping off in Bangladesh from time to time, he courted foreign media, expecting and receiving low-ball questions from interviewers for whom Bangladesh is a side-show. Even then, however, when faced with the mildest challenge from Voice of America, the Chief Adviser buckled.

Then, again, recently, he gave a disastrous interview to a typically well-prepared Mehdi Hasan, an interview that was excruciatingly painful to watch. That interview, by the way, caused scarcely a ripple in Bangladesh’s enfeebled news media. Perhaps such a performance is what everyone had come to expect of him.

This is important because accountability is intimately linked to free expression. To understand this, let’s turn to the West, where accountability has been under siege in recent years.

On July 7, 2020, Harper’s Magazine published an open letter in defence of freedom of expression. Its 150 signatories formed a broad political spectrum and included the likes of Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky, Salman Rushdie, Steven Pinker, JK Rowling, and Gloria Steinem. Because I was approached and because I was in broad agreement with the thrust of the letter, I found myself numbered among the signatories.

The letter was, I think it is fair to say, directed at what was described in those days as “cancel culture,” a term and an idea that seem so quaint now, of course. But its principal target was a culture, seen in college campuses, the media, and, most predominantly, on social media, that sought to punish the expression of certain views, mainly certain politically conservative views. Prominent figures had been prevented from speaking on college campuses and others had been fired from positions in academia or liberal media organs.

These were not instances of the government limiting freedom of expression but they were, in my view, and that of some other progressives like me, such as Noam Chomsky, limitations by unaccountable parties on the free expression of ideas.

But such limitations have subsequently been eclipsed by what has been starkly obvious since October 7, 2023. People in media and in other quarters in the West have lost their jobs or have been sidelined and students arrested or deported after expressing views sympathetic to Palestinians. We know this not from mainstream or legacy media but from the new force on the political stage, the internet and social media.

This abridgement of free expression has now been augmented by efforts from government institutions but it began and continues with curtailment from outside the machinery of state, principally from corporations. Again, these are institutions that are not accountable to the public, which, as polling shows, now largely supports the Palestinian people, but are accountable only to the parties that hold the purse-strings.

The reluctance of people to speak freely in Bangladesh, even with Hasina’s departure, evidences the extent of the social and corporate constraints on society, and this government has done little to weaken those constraints. In some respects, it has made things worse.

When the signing of the July Charter was announced with much fanfare, an obligatory photograph of the signatories was published. What was striking about it was that of the forty-seven or so people in the frame, only one was a women. Just one.

Earlier in the year, when Shireen Huq, the head of the Women’s Commission came under attack in public, did the Chief Adviser leap to a full-throated defense of the woman appointed by his government? Not in the least. Instead, Professor Yunus stayed silent and, in fact, from the beginning, the Consensus Commission did not even consider the recommendations of the Women’s Commission.

Did Ali Riaz even give damn about the Women’s Commission, or its recommendations? Does he give a damn about women? They say a picture is worth a thousand words. When I reflect on the picture of 47 signatories with just one woman, I think of three words: sexism and misogyny.

By staying silent, the Chief Adviser encourages Bangladeshi society to remain silent. He and his administration have been complicit in continuing and cultivating the culture of silence. He did indeed lead by example. It just wasn’t a very good example.

Of course, there are political and other limitations on the press, limitations that come from beyond government. There is the prospect of violence.
Scanning the front pages of newspapers every day yields this observation: A journalist by the curious name of “Staff Correspondent” seems to do an awful lot of work.

The byline ordinarily bearing a real name is coveted by journalists. After all, a journalist’s career advances as she makes a name for herself. So why would she give up the byline for this anonymous staff correspondent? Safety is of course the primary reason. On most days, half of the front-page stories, especially those relating to the announcements of political leaders, are attributed to the staff correspondent.

This is the climate in which the Chief Adviser declined to assume the moral high ground, a man who needn’t fear a Molotov cocktail being thrown through the window of his home or office. Making himself accountable would have sent a resounding signal to other leaders that facing difficult questions from the press is the right norm for the country.

Yes, yes—you may say—Professor Yunus should have defended Shireen Huq but—you might add—he simply doesn’t have the talent to take press conferences. And perhaps you are right. After all, so much of the past year has been a ceremony of the politically blind leading the politically talentless, culminating in the farce that has been the Consensus Commission.

We might talk about freedom of expression as a necessary condition for literature or art but it is accountability that delivers that freedom. When those forces that would seek to limit such freedom are properly accountable, be they state or non-state actors, then freedom has the upper hand. Accountability is what a thriving literary culture has in common with a thriving political culture, both of which sit in a broader culture of accountability.

Mediocrity thrives wherever accountability is absent. Accountability is not merely the means by which we punish political or economic failures; accountability in the public space is also the very same mechanism by which we identify talent, the good, or the values that we want to advance in our society.

Equally, no literary culture can flourish without a flourishing and sophisticated culture of literary criticism. Already, in the West, we see the decline of literary culture alongside the decline of literary criticism. All the newspapers in the US and UK have in the past ten years culled their staffing of their literary sections, some even shutting them down altogether, at the same as sales of literary fiction have been crashing. Long pieces of criticism have been replaced by bite-size book reviews. This is not criticism; this is not accountability.

I had occasion to consider this not so long ago. Here, as I draw towards a close, I will relate a story that contains a little self-promotion, for which I hope you will forgive me. Frederic Jameson is a name known to every self-respecting academic in literary studies. An academic and literary theorist and critic, he passed away last year. Shortly before he died, he penned a list of those who were, in his opinion, the greatest novelists of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The list was published earlier this year and laid out on the screen in a way that clearly sought to reflect the layout on the paper on which Jameson had, presumably, written it. It was a rather short list given its scope, I think. When I saw my name on the list, I was moved to tears. I was surprised, too, of course. I’m hardly a novelist since I’ve published only one novel. But Jameson headed off my thought that he might be mistaking me for someone else by writing the title of my one novel in brackets beside my name.

Why should this move me as much as it did? After all, a decade has passed since the novel was published, and the novel earned accolades and praise back then. My life has moved on, with other non-writing ventures, though, lately, I contracted to write two books, both works of non-fiction.

I was moved because it mattered to me to hear this from someone whose judgement I so respected. Writers and artists almost universally respond to this very simple thing. It is the obverse side of accountability. The word “criticism” has negative connotations, the threat of a sting, even perhaps in the phrase “literary criticism”. But criticism, even with the suggestion of such sting, also carries the possibility of separating what is good from what is mediocre.

Without political accountability, good governance doesn’t stand a chance. Without literary criticism, literature will wither. And both emerge from a broader culture of accountability. Freedom to speak means freedom for others to criticize what you say. Unless both flourish, neither does.

* Zia Haider is a Bangladeshi-origin British novelist.

* The views expressed here are the writer's own