Artists fight institutional silence on Gaza

One of Kagiso Lesego Molope's visceral memories from her South African childhood is of the dread that gripped her when her father, an anti-apartheid activist, was missing She remembers her family searching for hours until they found him dumped in a garbage heap by the police and left for dead after being tortured.

- SHREE PARADKAR

Award-winning author Kagiso Lesego Molope was booed, heckled and later escorted out of an Ottawa literary fundraiser after she spoke about death rates and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

She grew up hearing stories of the activists and political prisoners on the run, such as the legendary Steve Biko, who would come to their house late at night seeking a safe place to hide and leave at daybreak.

All this to say it is not surprising that the Ottawa-based novelist and playwright is sympathetic to Palestinians. As a Black Indigenous woman who is an apartheid survivor, Molope said, what is happening to Palestinians "is very familiar to us." Several human rights agencies have concluded that Israeli policies against Palestinians constitute apartheid.

Nor was it unusual for Molope, the first Black novelist to win the Ottawa Book Prize, to publicly correct a conspicuous institutional silence on Gaza where Israel is unleashing unbearable horrors by quite literally speaking truth to power. "Speaking on Palestine is a matter of conscience," she said.

What is remarkable, however, is that while artists around the country like Molope are pushing back against the silence of the very institutions on whom they depend for their precarious livelihoods, the institutions themselves insist on silencing the conscientious objectors.

"What we're seeing is very troubling," said author Thea Lim who was shortlisted for the Giller Prize in 2018. Literary spaces that are meant to be bastions of free speech and discourse are going against the mandate that they were created for, she said. They're creating a situation for artists where "you either have to be quiet about slaughter, atrocity, genocide. Or you risk your career."