Abstract
Canadian author Margaret Atwood
CREDIT: Liam Sharp
“These people give their all and then somebody kills them and then we all forget about them,” Atwood told Index over the phone from her office in Toronto.
Who would be on Atwood’s list? Potentially William Tyndale, a writer and translator of the Bible, who was executed in the 15th century. “Go back a bit; go back in history. You could go back to Socrates.” she said.
It’s hardly a surprise that Atwood would want some form of commemoration for persecuted writers; the Booker winner is an ardent supporter of free speech. Atwood, who is a long-standing patron of Index on Censorship, received the English PEN Pinter prize in recognition of her work defending writers’ rights in 2016. As part of winning the award, she nominated Ahmedur Rashid Chowdhury for the international component, a Bangladeshi publisher who survived a machete and gun attack by Islamic extremists.
Atwood has always been concerned about writers, but right now she is particularly worried about journalists. “I think the most important issues swirl around journalism,” she said.
“Take fake news, that’s very much an issue. Mainstream media, however much you deride them, they’re at least accountable.”
A scene from the recent TV adaptation of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, currently airing in the UK on Channel 4
CREDIT: Channel 4
Talking about journalists broadly segues into talking about science journalists specifically. The environment is a recurrent theme in Atwood’s work. Pollution contributes to the fertility decline that is the undoing of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale, while her MaddAddam trilogy imagines a world where the planet’s resources are severely depleted.
Atwood is keen to discuss the destruction of the planet past and present. What is perhaps as worrying as the earth’s escalating degradation is the recent trend to dismiss research carried out by scientists, particularly environmental scientists, she argued. Atwood mentions Trump’s attempts to dismantle the US Environmental Protection Agency.
“We went through that with the [Stephen] Harper government here in this country for about eight or 10 years. He was shutting down and destroying records… He was not interested in having that information out there,” she said.
“Even though we were paying for them with public money, they weren’t allowed to talk with us. It’s pretty frightening.”
Frightening indeed as part of the solution lies in the ready flow of information.
“That’s why it’s important not to shut down science communication because that’s where a lot of the solutions are going to come from. Censoring D H Lawrence is one thing, and we couldn’t get Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Canada until I was an undergrad, but censoring science communication is really important not to do.”
Born in Ottawa, Canada, in 1939, Atwood’s father, Carl Atwood, was an entomologist, and she spent a lot of her childhood in Canada’s wilderness, stationed near insect research centres. She taught herself how to read so that she could consume “the funny papers” as she called them, comics that came with colour supplements in the newspapers in the 1940s and 1950s. “Nobody would read the funny papers to me,” she explained.
An avid reader, Atwood started to write and around the age of seven produced her first novel. “It was about an ant. Not an advisable narrative as ants don’t do much until the last quarter of their life,” she said.
At high school she committed herself to writing more seriously and published her first book of poetry while at the University of Toronto in 1961. Today Atwood’s collection of works could probably fill a small library and she is no stranger to different forms and genres. It is the issues, though, of human rights and the environment that have cemented her reputation. At 77 does she believe people get more intolerant with age?
“If you’re inclined that way. Some of your tendencies might become more pronounced and you might lose some inhibitions about saying things. I think that people who have been generous when they are 30 are going to be generous when they are 70.”
Atwood describes the current climate as “very worrisome”. Yet she is remarkably upbeat. In the past she has gone on the record saying all writers are optimists (you’ve got to be to think your book will sell, she said) and when we speak a sense of positivity shines through. She has a dry chuckle, which is peppered throughout the interview, and for every negative point she has a counter, good one. Take youth, for example. She’s concerned about universities, the rise of safe spaces and other trends that might be hindering free speech on campus. She also believes students have lost the art of debate.
“I think it’s less well understood. People have kind of forgotten what a debate is; an argued, respectful, well-presented pointof-view instead of name calling,” she said. For Atwood social media shoulders a large chunk of the blame for this. “There’s a lot of shouting… It fosters knee-jerk reactions without consequences.”
But of youth more broadly Atwood feels encouraged. “We were getting a line that young people were apathetic and weren’t into politics, and that turns out not to be true. I think the point when they weren’t into politics was when it was same old, same old and they didn’t see any chance of making a difference and the same old, same old wasn’t doing anything that directly riled them up. But quite a few young people seem to be, as they say, ‘woken’ at the moment.”
Fear is part of this waking up moment, as is a ramped-up effort “to stem the flow, as it were”. For Atwood, a heartening recent initiative is the appearance of handmaids – female protesters wearing the iconic white bonnets and long, red cloaks – who turned up at the Texas Senate to protest several abortion-related bills.
“That’s a spontaneous movement. It’s not television organising it, and it’s not me organising it.” Atwood calls this movement “pretty clever”. “Nobody can accuse them of causing a disturbance and they’re very modestly dressed and they’re silent and everybody knows as soon as they see them exactly what they mean.”
That the youth have “woken up” is very reassuring. With a president in the White House who has framed a bullseye around women’s reproductive rights and the free press, the world of Gilead is suddenly feeling all too close. And yet, as Atwood explains, the writing was already on the wall when the book was published in 1985.
“I put nothing into it that people had not done at some point or that people weren’t already doing. People in the United States at that time on the religious right were already talking about what they would like to do if they had the chance. And that’s the reason why it’s so relevant today. People have the chance and they’re doing those things,” At-wood explained.
Hindsight is, of course, a wonderful thing. When The Handmaid’s Tale was published, few were concerned that this future dystopia could become reality, at least not in the USA. In 1990 the novel was turned into a film and Atwood went to Berlin for showings. East Berliners watched it intently and commented on its relevance to their life behind the wall.
“They didn’t mean the theology or the outfits; they meant not knowing who you could trust,” said Atwood. West Berliners, on the other hand, didn’t take the plot seriously. For them, said Atwood, “America was still seen as the great and good and home of liberal democracy and they didn’t think they would do such a thing”.
That assumption not only involved a misunderstanding of the USA, it involved a misunderstanding of humanity and of history.
“As William Gibson says the future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed,” Atwood remarked, before adding:
“And so is democracy”.