Last week I spent a few days searching for something in the commentaries, opinion pieces and essays I have written and which were published over the past couple of years. I rarely read anything I write after it is published. I enjoy the act of writing, and that’s where the pleasure stops.

I looked at the published work to see whether I had been repetitive or contradictory; not that I am overly concerned about either. I console myself with the idea that when it comes to being repetitive, at least I’m being consistent. Also, it simply means that I am looking at the same phenomena over and again…

As for contradictions, well I could defer to Walt Whitman, but that would be an easy way out. I prefer to see my individual writing as a body of work that should be read intertextually.

The one thing I did notice is that there have been times when I have self-censored, either by complete omission, (re)framing or casting opinions in allusions. The omission part is not as disingenuous as it may seem. There are times when trust trumps parading “inside” knowledge.

In other words, there are things we are told in confidence, or shared among friends and acquaintances that you keep to yourself. It does not help that South Africa is a terribly fractious society, and this notwithstanding, it can be predictable.

Some people’s responses are programmed – like those of replicants. Mention Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Julius Malema, Cyril Ramaphosa, Pravin Gordhan, or Donald Trump and Elon Musk for that matter, and you can almost predict what responses would follow. You can often also tell who would say what…

We live, moreover, in an era where people, notably in Twitterjaya, will go to war over breakfast cereal, or soap powder. This is also the era of minimising social offence. Amid all this we censor ourselves, and state and society does its share of censorship.

Reflections of self-censorship

Censorship is both deleterious for society and a reflection of that society. Historically, the freedom to say (and write) what you wish is the privilege of the citizen, with the exile, outsider or slave having had it as only a limited privilege. The slave, back in time, was forced as it were, to limit even from expressing what s/he thinks.

In liberal democracies, too, the exile or outsider knows to keep a low profile because there are invariably rights that are enjoyed only by the citizen. And so, in this sense, freedom of speech is a reflection of society.

All told, in the contemporary period, some people around the world enjoy greater freedom of speech (and the freedom to say what you actually think) than others. Then there are those who enjoy the privilege of having their ideas spread to a large audience (to say what they think) though they remain heavily constrained by cultural conventions or political regimes.

Whether you’re in Iran or Israel, the United States or Australia, there are some statements that are either forbidden (outright), and others that are presented behind a veil. This is when self-censorship or invisible censorship enters the writing process.

As the late great sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote: “Consciously or unconsciously, people censor themselves, they don’t need to be called into line.”

As for this conscious self-censorship, the example I often turn to is the way that (as Arthur Koestler described in his two-volume autobiography — I don’t remember exactly in which of the two books) during the Nazi era in Germany, newspaper publishers knew what editorial positions to take if they wanted to remain in business, and did not need a state official or member of the Gestapo peering over their shoulders all day.

This is part of Bourdieu’s “political censorship” and “economic censorship” and “self-censorship”. In other words, don’t offend the Nazis (political), if you want to stay in business (economic), so watch what you publish (self-censor).

This self-censorship has become more pervasive and is especially pronounced in the contemporary period where there has been an increasingly acute awareness of social offence.

One most recent example is when the pop musician Beyonce Knowles used an “ableist” expression in one of her songs and she was asked to change it — which she swiftly did. We can probably go back 60 or 70 years, and find offence in almost every pop, rock, rhythm and blues or hip-hop song published — or in film.

James Bond has since the 1960s been a terribly sexist and probably abusive character. Let me not get started on blaxploitation. Even one of my favourite films, Blade Runner (1982) has come under critical scrutiny for presenting a “demographic dystopia” in which whiteness is overwhelmed by non-whiteness — and black people are, for the most part, absent in the future… Anyway, we can either accept that for what it was, or we can go back and rewrite or sanitise every piece of music and or film script to minimise offence, or we can simply be careful what we write in the future.

Writing and self-censorship

When I look at the instances where I have exercised self-censorship there are two areas in which I am guilty. In the first, I am simply afraid of being misrepresented or misinterpreted. Being critical of the cruelty of the Taliban, Iss or Boko Haram (especially the burning of books, banning young women from getting education and public flogging or decapitation) can readily, and conveniently be associated with Islamophobia. Or, as someone once told me, “you speak like those people who hate Islam.”

Being critical of the state of Israel has become associated with anti-semitism. Opposition to the US’s wars is turned into “hating America”. Getting around it is easy if you never mention the Taliban, Israel or the US, and stay with criticism of decapitation, public flogging, restricting young girls from getting education or women appearing in public, the horrors of warfare and cruelty presented as self-defence, and notions of exceptionalism and eternal innocence. The problem is that you are often forced to write in very vague or general terms.

This is the most powerful (and unfortunate) self-censorship. It really gets you nowhere. You are forced to bury opinions in allusions. This is what I have learned from going through some of what I have written over the past couple of years, while searching for a particular passage.

Self-censorship is always driven from outside, by accident or design in societies that are “free” or “unfree,” democratic or undemocratic.

The passage I was looking for was never published. It was this: “The United States’ efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons smacks of double standards. All nuclear weapons are bad and should be dismantled. As for the United States, it has actually used nuclear weapons (on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki): would you give a known murderer a loaded weapon under conditions of uncertainty and recurrent crises.”

I cut it, along with comments about Amartya Sen’s eloquent condemnation of India’s nuclear programme. My question to Sen was: “Point me to evidence where or when you condemned the US for their nuclear weapons.”

I guess that was all too strident. Because of self-censorship, all those probing questions and statements of fact, and so much more, are lost like tears in rain. DM