In this saddest city, we mourn the metaphor

In this saddest city, we mourn the metaphor

This is fiction, unless it isn't. This isn't a symbolic mirror-game, unless it is: "There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue.

"In the north of the sad city stood mighty factories in which (so I'm told) sadness was actually manufactured, packaged and sent all over the world, which never seemed to get enough of it. Black smoke poured out of the chimneys of the sadness factories and hung over the city like bad news."

Sad cities abound. So does bad news, so do glumfish, so do locked-up editors, so does muted speech, so do miscarried stories, so does fear, paranoia, silent menace, invisible stranglers. But while Salman Rushdie (dear Salman, I'm supremely annoyed by your recent memoir, but that's another story) at least had the power of metaphor to tell his story, a story in disguise, a story of sugar-coated poison pills, in the above excerpt from his children's book Haroun and the Sea of Stories, written during the years facing the guillotine following the Iranian fatwa - in short, while Rushdie can substitute reality with allegories, an ancient literary device since the time of the Greeks, the saddest city that should not be named is perhaps the one in which even metaphors and analogies are at risk of being banned and its writers (or editors, appearing in court in shackles, like convicted murderers) excessively punished. Ten years, to be precise, for printing a metaphor.

If even metaphors are executed - as in the firing squad sense - what do writers have left? The end of metaphor is the end of story. The end of story means acid clouds, occult earthquakes, anti-humanism, monomania, suicidal love, witchhunts, a dark age. If freedom of expression is too much for the authorities, fine, then we should at least demand freedom of metaphor.

Soviet novelists knew the price they had to pay. Solzhenitsyn got expelled, Babel was shot. Bulgakov's satirical masterpiece about Satan in the Soviet Union was published in full only decades after he wrote it. Chinese writers know it too, and Iranian filmmakers, who've mastered the art of contraband metaphorising and yet jail terms are still not uncommon.

Rushdie may have smuggled in analogies scot-free in Haroun, but his previous epic metaphor on the Prophet Mohammed made him the subject of that infamous death sentence. There are crude and rude metaphors and there are subtle and sophisticated ones, but let the critics sort that out, not the Criminal Court, because seeing anybody thrown in jail for writing something outside the popular or official belief is a horror beyond any acrobatic symbolism.

It is said (is this a metaphor too?) that Picasso was once asked to donate to a campaign to help jailed writers. Picasso refused, explaining that writers write better in prison. Pablo, tell that to Somyot Prueksakasemsuk, among others, not because we agree with what he wrote, but because writing shouldn't be a crime.

What's sad is that we're not even talking about the Soviet Union or China. We're talking about a so-called democratic nation that prides itself on smiles and harmony. At least the Soviet regime banned or even killed writers on a strict set of revolutionary ideals and even - I kind of dig this - aesthetic or philosophical kicks. The way their thought police interpreted metaphors went way beyond the realm of literary subtext; the censors were as smart as the writers, not less, as it often is elsewhere. I entertain the belief that if written and visual metaphors are banned, then our last stronghold is music, because subversive melodies and anti-establishment chord progressions are at least harder to detect. You'd need someone like Stalin, who actually lifted the official ban on Shostakovich's symphonies, then wrote a scathing review of one of his operas before setting out to exploit the composer who was branded "anti-people". In a way that was a good match, a deadly cat-and-mouse game that rang of some sort of creativity, and not a blunt interpretation of text that only makes literal the famous Barthes' metaphor, The Death of the Author.

Yes, in this saddest city full of glumfish, metaphors are dead.


Kong Rithdee is Deputy Life Editor, Bangkok Post.

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