Alaa al Aswani: 'Literature doesn't change politics, it changes people'

On this day, 18 December, ten years ago, the Arab Spring began. The death of Tunisian street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi a day earlier, on 17 December 2010, fanned the flames, and people all over the region began to turn against the political regime. What has changed since then?

Four years ago at the Winternachten Festival in The Hague, we spoke about it with Egyptian writer Alaa al Aswani, who was disarmingly upbeat despite the fact that he can barely publish in his own country. On lack of freedom of expression and fiction in times of fake, this year's theme, Al Aswani could have a word. 'Freedom of expression is even worse now than under dictator Mubarak.'

Bribery

'The classic game at the time of President Mubarak's regime was to bribe writers. If you were well-known, you were offered a membership of three or four committees, for which you got a lot of money every month. You even got that money delivered to your home. I am sorry to say that it happened regularly that writers took it up, and am proud to say that I am among those who refused. I was never paid by the government. This practice, of course, had its consequences. On a petition for something abroad, almost all writers signed, but on a big petition against Mubarak, there were important names who hesitated or were excused because they had ties to the dictator.'

Censorship

'About 10 years ago, three other writers and I criticised the president and wrote that he should resign. People thought we had some kind of deal with him, they just couldn't believe we were openly criticising him and hadn't been jailed. You were allowed to criticise the government, but not the president himself or the regime. Already since the 1970s, we had no official censorship of newspapers and books, but self-censorship existed. To give an example, newspapers are owned by businessmen. When I was asked to write an article and in it I criticised the president, the next day that businessman's factory was closed "for security reasons". And the bank suddenly reconsidered the loan request. That happened twice. So businessmen prefer not to provoke the regime.

I have not been officially banned, but I am banned from Egyptian television and for a year and a half my articles have appeared in The New York Times and The Financial Times; In my own country, I cannot get an article published. In the media, I am horribly attacked and accused of being an agent for the CIA, the Mossad, for the Turkish secret service as well as for Iran. So on Twitter I then wrote that if they were telling lies, at least they shouldn't be so stupid as to make mistakes in that - nobody can work for both the Israeli and Iranian secret services.'

Freedom of expression

'Freedom of expression is even worse now than under Mubarak. When the revolution was just going on, there was real openness, but it has disappeared. The regime is effectively still the same and the security service is still run by the same people. They believe that the revolution could have come about because Mubarak was too soft on his opponents. At the time of Mubarak, although there was no freedom to express ourselves - after all, that is a path to change - we had freedom to say things. He used it to disguise his dictatorship: by showing that criticism of him was allowed, he showed his foreign guests how "democratic" he was. People in the regime now realise that this was a mistake, that they underestimated the influence of intellectuals, artists and writers at the time. Their starting point is therefore: never again. Hence the situation is even worse than before.'

The power of literature

'My compilation of newspaper articles keeps getting delayed and postponed, so there is pressure on my publisher not to publish it. Meanwhile, I am working on a new novel. The regime worries about television and newspapers, but does not care about novels and poems - apparently they assume no one reads them anymore. Literature is not a political tool and does not directly intervene in the political situation. But it does change something much more important: it changes people, readers. When you read a good book, you are not the same person afterwards. It opens your field of vision and brings more insight into people's behaviour, their reactions, their suffering.

Literature makes us better people because it makes you more understanding and open-minded, less judgmental. Take a novel about a woman who cheats on her husband. Even in the West, people are more forgiving when it comes to a man cheating than when it comes to a woman. But read Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert or Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoi: in both novels, the writer highlights the side of women. That is what literature can offer: the opportunity to put yourself in the shoes of the person who is condemned by everyone. As a result, you become more human and realise that things are not black and white. In Notes from the dead house Dostoevsky described the horrors he experienced in the labour camps in Siberia. Until 1861, the year the novel was published, corporal punishment was common in Russia. But after the novel's publication, people rebelled against that practice and physical punishments were abolished. That's how much influence a novel can have. I use literature to change people.'

Facebook and Twitter

'Since I can no longer publish my articles in Egypt, I write on Twitter. There I have two million followers. The regime is furious about it, but it's something they cannot exert any power over. Besides, my work is translated into 65 languages and with 40 publishers. So even if they also started banning my novels in Egypt now, they cannot stop my publication worldwide. On television, they asked me why I talked about Egypt as a dictatorship in my Tweets, "with all that democracy in our country". Within a dictatorship, everything that seems real is false. The only truth is the dictator himself.

I see it as my job and duty as a writer to defend human rights and human values and dignity. In today's world, we should not leave decision-making exclusively to politicians, because they often do not have such a broad, human view of things. And when wrong decisions are made, everyone pays a price.'