[LINK] "Banned in Dubai! Not quite"

[rfmcdonald]

Martin Knelman in the Toronto Star has the full story about the Atwood/Dubai incident. Misunderstandings, it seems, are to blame, not bigotry.

Scene one: New festival in the Gulf invites internationally celebrated writer from Canada to help launch. Famous author accepts.

Scene two: Outraged British author Geraldine Bedell tells U.K. press that after she and her publisher, Penguin U.K., were invited to launch her book The Gulf Between Us at the festival, the invitation was withdrawn, she was persona non grata, and her book was banned. All, apparently, because one of the characters was a gay sheikh.

Scene three: Atwood sends a letter to festival director Isobel Abulhoul regretfully bowing out of her highly anticipated appearance for an onstage interview, explaining that as vice-president of International Pen, an organization that fights censorship, she cannot be part of this event in the light of what has happened.

But then events took a bizarre turn. It became apparent to Atwood that the situation was not at all what it appeared. First of all, this allegedly banned book had not even been published yet. Second, there was no evidence Bedell or her book had ever been invited in the first place, so the invitation could hardly have been cancelled.

Atwood was confused and troubled. Had she been spun? Having spent years fighting literary censorship, had she hastily leapt onto the wrong side – defending an alleged victim who had no case, while helping to sabotage a festival that deserved support?

Others might have been tempted to look the other way, or just wait for this controversy to go away. Not Atwood. Instead she cast herself as detective, determined to find out what really happened and why. This involved day after day of endless emails and phone calls, and writing an article for The Guardian (London) satirizing herself as "Anti-Censor Woman."

Well, what really happened, she found, was that the festival did what festivals often do. It decided not to invite the author and her book, as in "Thanks, dear, and good luck, but this is not for us."

So this incident hardly ranked with those notorious cases in which Nazis burned books, religious fanatics issued death threats, heretics were put on the rack, and tyrants tortured and jailed writers whose opinions didn't suit them.