October 21, 2011
Tear Gas and Petrol Bombs: Protests In Literature
by Melville House
Richard Wright once said, “All literature is protest,” but James Baldwin’s retort was that “All literature might be protest but all protest was not literature.”
Scores of Greeks have been taking to the streets to protest the austerity proposals during a 48-hour general strike, so we thought it as good a time as any to recall some key books that might fall under the label, “protest literature.” Such as …
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh
Little Scarlet by Walter Mosley
Lots of stuff by Nadine Gordimer
Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
Last year, the Guardian wrote about “Ten of the best riots in literature.”
What books would you add to the list?
Hail & Farewell: Chinua Achebe 
You are not on the list of the hundred most important writers in New York 
Rowling and a religious controversy 
Brooklyn Book Festival by the numbers 
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Eliot’s Felix Holt?
Ibrahim Aslan’s The Heron, trans. Elliott CollaThe Heron takes place at the beginning of the 1977 “bread riots.” The novel is written in Aslan’s beautiful, simple style, and is well-rendered in English by Elliott Colla.Tahrir also held a central place in the 1977 uprising. The narrator describes a scene in the square: “And Qasim who purchased five yards of white cloth and a bottle of blue ink and how he told you not to give a copy of the declaration of solidarity to every single person because there weren’t enough copies to go around and that instead you were to give one copy to each group, and you telling him that you wanted to go with one of them and Qasim telling you everybody would go in pairs and you taking your share of the fliers and going with them to Tahrir Square where you saw the students who’d taken it over, and the foreigners who stood in front of the Izavitch Cafe and the cameras and movie advertisements on the huge billboards and the words that had been added to the marquees to change their meanings and scraps of paper everywhere and the ripped up cobblestones blocking the roads and you walking on with Fathi while he distributed his fliers and exchanged funny remarks with the crowds and you distributing your fliers but feeling embarrassed and out of place.”
Germinal by Emile Zola about a long miners strike.
Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
Mailer’s Why are We in Vietnam?
Catch-22!
Slaughterhouse Five!