The recent spate of open letters and protests from Canadian writers about the Giller Prize and its sponsorship by Scotiabank pushes us to ask a sad and pathetic question: who the hell cares what Canadian novelists say anymore?
It’s sad because not long ago many saw novelists as sources of wisdom — as purveyors of insight into the human condition. That’s why it’s pathetic to read these letters and discover that a large group of Canadian novelists are not much more than political sloganeers with no more perceptiveness than your average Toronto school kid forced to attend a political protest disguised as a school trip.
If you’ve somehow missed this controversy, the Coles notes version is that a number of Canadian writers are furious that the Giller prize is sponsored by Scotiabank which is itself a large shareholder in the Israeli-based arms manufacturer, Elbit Systems. It probably doesn’t help (though no writers seem to be saying this openly) that the Giller Prize was founded by Jewish Canadian Jack Rabinovich. The current executive director is his daughter Elena Rabinovich. This certainly seems relevant given that there are other Canadian literary prizes whose funders are also connected to arms dealers who aren’t receiving the same scrutiny.
Last year, protesters crashed the awards ceremony and caused a scene, raising a placard with the slogan “Scotiabank funded genocide” beside the poor host Rick Mercer. When police later charged the protesters, as many as two thousand authors reacted with indignation, alleging that Giller officials had been ‘complicit’ in cooperating with the police, as if helping police to arrest criminals is itself some kind of moral crime.
This year, a number of authors publicly demanded that their books not be considered for the prize to avoid the Giller taint. Two of the book prize judges also resigned in protest. Most recently, several past Giller winners, including well-known names like Michael Ondaatje, penned yet another open letter demanding that the Giller prize use its influence to have Scotiabank completely divest itself from Elbit Systems and all arms manufacturers.
Despite the illustrious credentials of its authors, the Giller winners’ protest letter displays all the intellectual sophistication and moral complexity of a hack political manifesto. All of the required slogans are there. The writers talk about the recent ‘killing sprees’ against Palestinians and a ‘campaign of slaughter’ in Gaza, as if the Israeli army is just randomly going on killing missions without any pretext. No mention is made of the October 7 attack on Israel or the evils of Hamas.
The authors talk about a ‘genocide’ in Gaza, seemingly oblivious to the fact that their misuse of the term is just the latest in a plethora of cases where activists are cheapening what the word was intended to mean. Pretty soon we are going to have to treat genocide allegations as we do comparisons to Hitler — as a sign that someone is slightly bonkers and has lost their sense of perspective.
The writers call on the Giller official to do the ‘right thing’ as if the right thing is completely obvious, as if the intractable quagmire of middle eastern politics was just waiting for eight Canadian writers to come along with the solution — and that solution is the politically slanted defunding? of a Canadian literary prize.
The open letter talks of how there is a choice to either do the ethical thing or continue to have Scotiabank invest in Elbit systems, as if this is a binary choice. They haven’t seemed to consider that there could be morally robust reasons to back Israel’s right to self-defence.
The moral simplicity of this claim is as dumbfounding as it is predictable.
Over the last number of years, the literary world has been taken over by morally self-righteous groupthink. This has, until recently, been evidenced in the DEI-ification of awards. The list of winners, finalists, and juries for almost all of the major prizes — from the Giller’s to the Governor General’s Awards to those given out by the Writers’ Trust – have begun acting as if deciding what counts as great literature is determined by the sex, race, and political beliefs of the writers. The field also now uses ‘sensitivity readers’ to avoid terms and scripts that might cause ‘harm’ — meaning things like white writers creating a black character. That this has ended up creating a cadre of writers and literary figures fixated on their own version of political correctness is to be expected.
This hyper-politicized scene robs literature of the wisdom it ought to provide. It does though lead to a dearth of wisdom and actual literature. The writers protesting the Giller are turning their backs on everything that makes literature meaningful — most importantly, the willingness to explore the multi-faceted nature of good and evil. Can we really trust these writers to offer sympathetic accounts of the inner lives of people with whom they may not agree? Can writers with this simplistic of an idea of human nature and history — who seem to believe ethics is owned by one political group — really tell us anything that matters?
These writers also seem oblivious to the kinds of allies they have in this cause — from the religious theocrats in Iran to their proxies Hezbollah to the hostage-taking murderers of people at a music festivals in members of Hamas. Does it not occur to any of these writers to at least wonder if the situation might not be a bit more complex if these people are your allies?
Then there is the odd assumption that war is intrinsically evil — not tragic, but evil. They don’t want to be tainted by links to those who make weapons. It’s a bizarre claim to be made by writers who live in a country whose very freedoms were created by wars — against fascism and a cold war against communism.
Do these writers really think humanity has gone beyond war itself? Were it only so. Do they honestly look around at the world — at the tyrannical regime in Iran, at the rise of China and its systems of citizen thought control, at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and think, now is a good time to rid ourselves of any links to arms manufacturers? If only we disarm ourselves, and disassociate ourselves from those bad gun-makers, everything will be alright?
Unintentionally, they are making the case not only for Scotiabank to remove its funding from the Giller prize, but for the full defunding the Canada Council and all other taxpayer-supported literary initiatives — the programs that allow these apparatchiks of the laptop class to live a life of smug self-righteousness.
For all of our sponsorship of literature, Canadians deserve discernment and wisdom from our writers, not this kind of hashtag activism.
National Post