Our Writers' Failure

On 1 June, the Guardian published a long essay by Martin Amis, entitled Thevoice of the lonely crowd. It was about 11 September and the role of writers. What did Amis think about onthe momentous day? He thought he was "like Josephine, the opera-singing mouse in the Kafka story: Sing?'She can't even squeak.'"

By that he meant, I guess, that he had nothing to say about "the conflicts we now face or fear",as he put it. Why not? Where was the spirit of Orwell and Greene? Where was a modest acknowledgement ofhistory: a passing reflection on the impact of rapacious great power on vulnerable societies, which are theroots of the current "terrorism"? Amis referred rightly to the "pitiable babble" ofwriters following 11 September.

Most of the famous names were heard, their contributions ranging from morose me-ism to an aggressivedefence of America and its "modernity". Not a single English writer commanding the celebrity thatprovides an extraordinary public platform has written anything incisive and worthy of our memory about themeaning and exploitation of 11 September - with the exception, as ever, of Harold Pinter. Compare their"babble", and their silence, with the work of the celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, thesubject of a fine Guardian profile on 8 June by Maya Jaggi.

Darwish is the Arab world's bestselling poet; people's poet may sound trite, but he draws thousands to hisreadings, thrilling his audiences with a lyricism that touches their lives and makes sense of power, injusticeand tragedy. In his latest poem, "State of Siege", a "martyr" says:

I love life On earth, among the pines and the fig trees But I can't reach it, so I took aim With the lastthing that belonged to me.

Darwish's manuscripts were trampled under foot by Israeli soldiers at the cultural centre in Ramallah wherehe often works. I was in this building last month, not long after the Israelis had left. They had defecated onthe floors, and smeared shit on the photocopiers, and pissed on books and up the walls, and systematicallydestroyed manuscripts of plays and novels and hard disks. As they left, they threw paint on a wall ofchildren's drawings. "They wanted to give us a message that nobody's immune - including in culturallife," says Darwish. "Palestinian people are in love with life. If we give them hope - a politicalsolution - they'll stop killing themselves."

Perhaps it is unfair to compare a Darwish with an Amis. One is speaking for the crimes against his people,after all. But Amis represents a wider problem: that some of the most acclaimed and privileged writers writingin the English language fail to engage with the most urgent issues of our time. Who among the collectors ofBooker and Whitbread Prizes speaks against the crimes described by Darwish - the product of the longestmilitary occupation in the modern era? Who, since 11 September, has defended our language, illuminating itsabuse in the service of great power's goals and hypocrisy? Who has shown that our humane responses to 11September have been appropriated by the masters of terror themselves? - by Ariel Sharon and his "goodfriend" George W Bush, who bombed to death at least 5,000 civilians in Afghanistan.

Consider Amis's unexplained reference to the conflicts we must now "face or fear". ThePalestinians have been facing and fearing an occupation for more than 35 years: an atrocious stalematesponsored by every American administration since that of Lyndon Johnson and reaffirmed this month by Bushhimself. Since 11 September, those who have been allowed to grind English into a series of clichéspropagating their "war on terrorism" have also supplied the Israeli regime with 50 F-16fighter-bombers, 102 Gatling guns, 228 joint direct attack munitions (JDAMs) and 24 Blackhawk helicopters. Abatch of state-of-the art Apache helicopters is on the way.

You may have seen the Apache on the news, firing missiles at civilian apartment blocks in occupiedPalestine. The other day, I spoke to a group of children in Gaza. They smiled, but it was clear that theirdreams, indeed their childhood, had been despatched by Israel's attacks on a people who, for the most part,have defended themselves with slingshots. Among these children, almost certainly, are those who willsacrifice, as Darwish wrote, "the last thing that belonged to me". Who is his equivalent in thewest, setting that wisdom against our government's part in the making of this terror?

In the 1980s, Martin Amis published a valuable collection of essays on the threat of nuclear war. Today,India and Pakistan seriously threaten nuclear war, which is not surprising, in a world dominated by threatssince 11 September: a world of either-you-are-with-us-or-against-us, of bomb now and talk later. What doesAmis or any English writer have to say about the great warrior against terrorism in the White House, who saysthat "first strike" is now the superpower's policy and that America "must be ready to strike ata moment's notice in any dark corner of the world"? This includes the nuclear option, Martin Amis, shouldyou still be interested.

"After 11 September," wrote Amis in the Guardian, "writers faced quantitative change, butnot qualitative change . . . They stood in eternal opposition to the voice of the lonely crowd, which, withits yearning for both power and effacement, is the most desolate sound you will ever hear." Those whopublish and promote such empty words, holding the robes of English literature's current emperors, have anurgent responsibility to hand the space to others. Our language should be reclaimed, its Orwellian vocabularyreversed, its noble words such as "democracy" and "freedom" protected, and its powerredeployed against all fundamentalisms, especially our own. We need to find and publish our own MahmoudDarwish, our own Arundhati Roy, our own Ahdaf Soueif, our own Eduardo Galeano, and quickly.

(John Pilger's latest book, The New Rulers of the World, is published by Verso. This appears herecourtesy Znet)