Wards of Awards

Words such as modesty and humility are not usually associated with the writer Sir Salman Rushdie. Quite some time ago, someone in possession of more than a mere mean streak suggested that a Nobel Prize would actually make Salman Rushdie quite angry. He might exclaim: “Why after so many years? And why just one, not three Nobels?”

When the list of those who would willingly prostrate themselves before the Queen for the honor of adding Sir to their names was announced, the not-yet-Sir Salman exclaimed that he was “humbled” by the news. A few days ago when he finally got the chance to kneel before royalty, he almost stumbled. A “case of nerves”, he explained later. Somebody who had never passed up a chance to take a swipe at the pretensions of Empire and its hangers on was now tamed and domesticated. Privamavda Gopal, writing in The Guardian, described Sir Salman as a shadow of “his own creation Baal, the talented poet who becomes a giggling hack coralled into attacking his ruler's enemies.”

Quite in contrast was the response from the black British poet Benjamin Zapaniah who when approached with an offer from Tony Blair to receive the Order of the British Empire (OBE), refused to mince his words: “Me? I thought, OBE me? Up yours!” As he explained later, in a piece published in The Guardian, “there is a part of me that hopes that after writing this article I shall never be considered as a Poet Laureate or an OBE sucker again.” He ranted against those rant against "the establishment" until they are offered some award or the other. Then of course they offer “pathetic excuses” such as "I did it for my mum"; "I did it for my kids"; "I did it for the school"; "I did it for the people" etc. He recalled that “I have even heard black writers who have collected OBEs saying that it is "symbolic of how far we have come". His response to the letter from Tony Blair offering him an OBE was conveyed by the poem:

Cause every laureate gets worse
A family that you cannot fault as muse will mess your mind,
And yeah, you may fatten you
Don't take my word, go check the verser purse
And surely they will check you first when subjects need to be amused
With paid for prose and rhymes.

Zapaniah ended his piece with a final jab: “Stick it, Mr Blair - and Mrs Queen, stop going on about the empire. Let's do something else.”

Along the same lines, when the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh found out that his book_The Glass Palace_ had been short-listed for the Commonwealth Literature Prize, he swiftly wrote a letter of protest to the committee. In his letter he demanded that his book be withdrawn from the short-list and reminded the committee that “the issue of how the past is to be remembered lies at the heart of _The Glass Palace_ and I feel that I would be betraying the spirit of my book if I were to allow it to be incorporated within that particular memorialization of Empire that passes under the rubric of "the Commonwealth".

The co-optation and neutralization of colorful critics, raconteurs and assorted shit-disturbers without whom the blandness of life would be unbearable will of course continue. Some like Christopher Hitchens can be tamed even without such awards. However oxymoronic it might sound and regardless of how pissed off his colleague Keith Richards and his other admirers were, Sir Mick Jagger is now a fact of life.

At about the same time when Salman Rushdie was going down on his knees, it was also announced that the media’s demon of the year Robert Mugabe had been stripped of his knighthood. Apparently this was also the case with the Romanian dictator, Nicolai Causescu who was “de-knighted” barely a few days before his execution. Thus are villains either glorified or vilified, depending on the ever-changing realities of real-politics.

Maintaining one’s integrity and resisting such rewards for ensuring good behaviour is of course easier said than done. However it has been done. When awarded the Nobel Prize in 1964, Jean Paul-Sartre issued a polite version of “stick it.” He pointed out that “it is not the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner. A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honorable form."

The only other person who has refused the award is the Vietnamese Le Duc Tho, who shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize with the famous peacenik, Henry Kissinger. The fact that the latter actually received the Peace prompted the now famous one-liner from the singer-songwriter, satirist and ex-MIT faculty member, Tom Lehrer: “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.”