The literary controversy by author Elizabeth Gilbert, of the popular book Eat pray love, seems to have passed unnoticed on South Africa’s literary scene. Gilbert’s new book was due to be published by Riverhead, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House this month. She delayed its publication indefinitely after receiving flak from Ukraine supporters and citizens. This is what the author says on her Twitter account:
Last week, I announced the upcoming publication of my most recent novel, called The snow forest, which is set in the middle of Siberia in the middle of the last century, and is the story of a group of individuals who made a decision to remove themselves from society to resist the Soviet government and to try to defend nature against industrialisation. But over the course of this weekend, I have received an enormous, massive outpouring of reactions and responses from my Ukrainian readers, expressing anger, sorrow, disappointment and pain about the fact that I would choose to release a book into the world right now – any book, no matter what the subject of it is – that is set in Russia. And I want to say that I have heard these messages and read these messages and I respect them, and as a result I am making a course correction and I’m removing the book from its publication schedule. It is not the time for this book to be published, and I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced, and who are all continuing to experience, grievous and extreme harm. So, that is the choice that I have made, and I’ve got other book projects that I’m working on, and I’ve made a decision to turn my attention to working on those now, so I just wanted to let everybody know that. And thank you very much.
It is, of course, understandable for an author, in our age of vigorous cancel culture, to succumb to such group pressures. I don’t know whether I myself would have taken that easy way out, as she did, instead of facing up to the backlash that would follow my refusal to buckle under the pressure. Even with the knowledge of a predictable opposite pressure, this route is probably the less strenuous thing to do. But her actions, the withdrawal of the book from its imminent publication schedule, sets a dangerous precedent that is not acceptable to me as a writer. I share the sentiments of Pen America, who said: “Gilbert’s decision in the face of online outcry from her Ukrainian readers is well intended. But the idea that, in wartime, creativity and artistic expression should be preemptively shut down to avoid somehow compounding harms caused by military aggression is wrongheaded.”
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Mphuthumi Ntabeni is a South African author living in Cape Town. His debut novel The Broken River Tent won the University of Johannesburg Debut Novel Prize in 2019. He worked with the drama department of Rhodes University on two plays he wrote for the South African National Arts Festival about Maqoma and his half-brother Sandile, both of whom had been Xhosa chiefs. He has a passionate interest in South Africa’s frontier history and the wars of land dispossession. His most recent novel The Wanderers was published in 2021.
