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Last year, a film called The Legend of Maula Jatt, based on a 1979 cult classic, became the most successful Pakistani film in history. The opening scene depicts the grisly murder of the Jatt family; young Maula survives, and vows to exact revenge against the perpetrators, namely Noori Natt. The two men spend the rest of the movie hacking up each others associates. When the film first came out in the U.K., some of the gore had to be edited out; the British Board of Film Classification warned potential viewers of frequent scenes of strong bloody violence, noting that, in one, a woman decapitates a man and holds up his bloody severed head.... In another scene a man buries a baby alive. Nonetheless, the uncut film cleared censorship boards in Pakistan. It attracted hordes of moviegoers, some of whom presumably couldnt even understand the Punjabi dialogue. Everyone who spoke to me about the film deemed it too much fun to resist.

Also last year, an indie film about a middle-class Punjabi family sent Pakistan into a moral panic. Joyland, a film directed by Saim Sadiq that won awards at Cannes and the Film Independent Spirit Awards, and which Pakistan submitted to the 2023 Oscars, had to be cleared by the countrys three censor boards in order to be screened in Pakistan. After a series of edits, the censor boards certified the film. Then, just before its release, it was banned. After lobbying by supporters of the film, Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif assembled a review committee, which recommended more changes. The carefully edited film was screened in the province of Sindh, but remained banned in Punjab, Pakistans most populated province and the films primary setting.

What was it about Joyland that made the arbiters of our social order so fearful? In the film, Haider (Ali Junejo), a young man, lives in his family home with his wife, Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq), who works in a beauty parlor. Like millions of Pakistanis, surely, Haider is confused about his sexuality. Also like millions of Pakistanis, he is unemployed. His father (Salmaan Peerzada) is a garden-variety patriarch who wants his son to get a job and give him a grandson. When Haider finally finds a job at an erotic-dance theatre, he tells his family that he is the theatre manager; in fact, hes learning to be a backup dancer for an ambitious trans performer named Biba (Alina Khan). In time, Haider falls in love with Biba. (When I watched the film in London, the audience fell in love with her, too.)

Maybe Joyland was banned because it depicts a queer love story, but I dont think so. I think the ban was a misguided attempt to defend families, because, at the films heart, that is what Joyland is about: a family that is struggling, a family in which love and abuse intertwine so tightly that its difficult to tell them apart, a family much like any other in the world. The members of this family are constantly judging one another. But the film itself does not judge the lovers, and it does not judge the family.

About three-quarters of the way through the film, Haider and Biba share a subtle and intimate scene that was censored in Pakistan. When I talked to people who had seen the film, whether edited or unedited, they all seemed to ask the same question: Who was trying to fuck whom? The question seemed to come from a kind of voyeurism about queer and trans love. Maybe they missed the answer thats underlined in many places in the film: its your own family that fucks you, with its preconceived gender roles. As Philip Larkin wrote:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.They may not mean to, but they do.They fill you with the faults they hadAnd add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn...

Joyland manages to feel as familiar as our families are to usloving, ugly, full of secrets and laughter and false promises. When Haiders father spends an evening with a widow who lives in the neighborhood, he is vilified and seems as hapless as his son. When Haider helps with the chores and lives off his wifes earnings, his father and brother look down on him. Whereas the fantasy families of Maula Jatt hack each other to pieces, this family feels real. It suffers a thousand invisible cuts. These characters are normal, and we cant stand to watch.

We never meet the family that Biba was born intoonly the family of trans women that she chooses for herself. And, in this family, murder is on everyones mind. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province alone, at least seventy transgender people have reportedly been killed in the past five years. Biba seems to know this. She knows that she could be shot, because she has seen it.

Westerners are sometimes surprised to learn that many Pakistanis are openly trans. In 2017, Pakistan issued its first passport that recognized a third gender, X, and the following year the government passed a mildly progressive transgender-rights law. In 2022, Sindh required the hiring of trans employees for one in every two hundred public-sector jobs in the province. But transgender Pakistanis are also some of the most oppressed in our society. Trans entertainers often perform at private parties, such as weddings and baby showers, but their families may refuse to accept them; they may be groped on roadsides or refused jobs as domestic workers, let alone in offices and shops. No legislation has been able to stop the kind of violence depicted in Joyland.

A few years ago, one of the producers of Joyland, Sarmad Sultan Khoosat, directed a sublime film, Zindagi Tamasha (Circus of Life). It, too, tells a family story. Rahat (Arif Hassan) is a bearded man who tends to household chores and cares for his bedridden wife. In one scene, this good-enough Muslim shakes his bum at a wedding ceremony, and the video goes viral. Some Pakistani mullahs who watched the trailer, however, concluded that the film was an assault on their image. They claimed that it maligned religious scholars and hence our religion. Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, a far-right party whose members are known for chanting Death to blasphemers, accused Khoosat of blasphemy.

Making an independent film in Pakistan means choosing your family. Khoosat is a national icon, having produced some of the nations most popular mainstream TV shows. For Zindagi Tamasha, however, he hired a first-time screenwriter and editor, a relatively unknown group of musicians, and no bankable stars. He didnt seek out any outside finance and instead sold a plot of land, his life savings, to fund the movie. It cleared the censors three times; the films release was halted after the blasphemy accusations; the government referred the film to the Council of Islamic Ideology, a constitutional body tasked with weeding the impurities out of public life. Khoosats producer and father, Irfan, went on live TV, practically begging that his sons life be spared. Then a senate committee watched the film and cleared it for release. (There is still a ban in Punjab.) But, to this day, cinema owners in Pakistan are too scared to show Zindagi Tamasha.

This month, Americans will be able to watch the unedited version of Joyland in theatres. Maybe they will see the film for what it is: a sympathetic, even forgiving, depiction of family. Families are often anchored by people who go about their business quietly. In one scene, Mumtaz looks out a window at a neighbor who is touching himself, and she starts to pleasure herself, too. She is quiet enough that, at first, nobody in her household notices. She is a sexually frustrated woman satisfying herself in the most discreet way possible. What could be more family-friendly?

One place where Joyland finds joy is in self-reliant communities that serve as surrogates for family. When the power goes out during one of Mumtazs makeup jobs, her colleagues put their mobile phones on flashlight mode. The moment she finishes the job, they burst into applause. Later, in a beautiful theatre scene, a blackout interrupts one of Bibas dances. The theatre manager wants to cancel the performance. Instead, Haider gets the audience to light up the stage with their phones, and the show goes on.

Three years ago, I learned from my publishers in Karachi that their office had been raided by people who claimed to work for Pakistani intelligence. They seized the Urdu translation of my novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes. The novel had been in circulation for a decade and there had been no official objections to its contents. Although an official from Pakistans best-known intelligence organization, the I.S.I., denied my publishers account to the Associated Press, I attended a meeting with one of the agencys junior generals, during which he tried to clear the air. He said some vaguely nice things about the book and told me that he was only carrying out his orders. It was obvious that he had not read it in any language.

There is that scene in your book in which a Saudi prince is buggering our President, the junior general told me. This struck me as odd, given that the novel is about the alleged assassination of a President who, at least in the book, does not have any kind of sex. (In one scene, he has his rear end checked for worms by a Saudi doctor.) In English, it was funny, the junior general told me. In Urdu, it sounds very disturbing. I didnt have the heart to tell him that no Saudi prince buggers our President in my novel. The protectors of our family values, it seemed to me, had more filth in their heads than any writer or director could come up with.

Read more:
The Folly of Censoring Joyland, a Sublime Film About Family - The New Yorker

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Photo by Meg Strobel.

The controversy over the planned destruction of a literary art installation at the downtown Wisconsin Center, first reported by Urban Milwaukee, continues to generate news. A story by the Green Bay Press-Gazette today has a headline declaring that Indigenous writers decry apparent planned destruction of literary exhibit and offers criticism of the decision by Dr. Kimberly Blaeser, a former Wisconsin Poet Laureate and a citizen of the White Earth Nation Ojibwe in Minnesota, who has work featured in the exhibit installed in 1998.

The installation was a public project, overseen by the Milwaukee Arts Board and public officials, featuring texts from the works of 48 Wisconsin writers through four centuries, including many prominent Indigenous artists and people of color. The texts are wide-ranging in their voices and concerns, but as Blaeser noted, some of the works by Indigenous writers remind visitors of the colonial history of Wisconsin and how Indigenous people and the atrocities committed against them had been forgotten.

I dont understand why our leaders would be afraid of history, she said. Its such a tragedy that there would be this erasure.

Opponents of the removal argue the ongoing, $456 million expansion of the convention center does not require the removal of the exhibit. A group of Wisconsin writers issued a press release blasting the decision and questioning whether the removal is part of an effort to prepare for hosting the Republican National Convention next year and part of a rising national trend of censorship by conservative activists.

Censorship of school curriculum. Banned books. It would be hard not to see this action in Wisconsin as a part of those larger efforts, said Blaeser, in a statement. The literature on the walls of the Wisconsin Center includes Indigenous voices, the writing of early ecologists, working-class voices, African-American voices, Latino voices, Asian voices, etc. We worked hard to make it representative of all Wisconsinites. All Wisconsinites should be outraged by the plans to demolish this literary archive.

Besides Blaeser, the writers featured in the exhibit include Folami Abiade, Antler, Martha Bergland, Black Sparrow Hawk, Mountain Wolf Woman, the Ojibwe tribe, the Potowatomi tribe, Frances Brock Starms, B. J. Buhrow, Daisy Cubias, Susan Engberg, Edna Ferber, Zona Gale, Horace Gregory, James Hazard, Peggy Hong, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Ellen Kort, Margery Latimer, Aldo Leopold, Joel Lipman, Ben Logan, Charles McClain, Juliette Magill Kinzie, Anja Malesa, Tom Montag, Lorrie Moore, Kyoko Mori, John Muir, Lorine Niedecker, Louise Phelps Kellogg, Carl Rakosi, R. M. Ryan, Carl Sandburg, Guadalupe Solis, Denise Sweet, Bruce Taylor, Larry Watson, Glenway Wescott, J. D. Whitney, and Karl Young.

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This is a one-of-a-kind piece and likely the worlds largest poetry and text-based public artwork, to my knowledge, said Jen Benka, a national literary leader who served for a decade as president and executive director of the American Academy of Poets. The notion that these diverse voices will be thoughtlessly erased and that this significant artwork will be thrown in a dumpster for no reason is unconscionable.

Because the work was permanently installed, it cannot be removed in any way that will preserve it. The work will be destroyed in the process of removing it.

Wisconsin Center media presentative Sarah Maio told Urban Milwaukee the process of taking down the literary artworks would begin on April 10, which was yesterday. She also confirmed that the decision to remove the work was made by Wisconsin Center District CEO Marty Brooks and that he never consulted the centers17-member board of directors, most of them elected officials, including three Milwaukee Common Council members (Bob Bauman, Milele Coggs and council president Jos G. Prez), two legislators from Milwaukee (Sen LaTonya Johnson and Rep. Kalan Haywood), the city and county comptrollers (Aycha Sawa and Scott Manske) Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieuand Wauwatosa Mayor Dennis McBride. The private board members include Greg Marcus, whose father Steve Marcus created the Sculpture Milwaukee exhibition and whose company, the Marcus Corp., runs St. Kate The Arts Hotel.

The decision to remove the work wasnt reported to the board or debated or voted on, as Milwaukee Alderman Bob Bauman, who serves on the board, told Urban Milwaukee. Bauman sent an email to Brooks asking that he delay taking down the work and give board members a chance to consider the matter, and received no response.

Brooks has steadfastly avoided media question: he did not respond to request for comments from Urban Milwaukee or the Press-Gazette.

Opponents of his decision have charged that a tax-supported government entity overseen by publicly elected officials should have had a public process for removing a publicly-funded work of literary art.

The Wisconsin Center District Board would seem to have an obligation to due process, such as a public hearing, Blaeser wrote in a letter the Wisconsin Centers board members. The citizens who supported the creation of this one-of-a-kind nationally recognized installation deserve a chance to express their concern about its future. I ask that you show leadership and raise your voice to stop the wanton destruction. Wisconsin and the larger arts community will be watching what happens in Milwaukee.

Martha Bergland, whose four published books include co-authoring a biography of Increase Lapham, noted the history behind the installations creation: Nearly 30 years ago, many artists, poets, and writers began working to put on the walls of Milwaukees new convention center words written in and about their state. Words written over the past 400 years. Words from towns and farms and cities, forests and fields of the state. No one in any other state has done this. Hundreds of the people of this place worked together in the making of this audacious work Thousands of people have stood silent and stepped back, looked up and read the writing on the wall. People have been surprised by, moved by, informed by the words of their ancestors, their neighbors, in a graceful weave of interconnection.

Now one man prefers silence and whiteness to the richness of these words. One man has enlisted demolition crews to take hammer and chisel to these words, to our treasures.

Supporters of the exhibit have organized an online petition to stop the demolition.

More:
Back in the News: Wisconsin Center Accused of Censorship - Urban Milwaukee

The amendments to Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, notified by the government last week, will have a chilling effect on freedom of expression and media freedom.

The notification provides for identification of fake or false or misleading online content related to the government by a fact-checking unit appointed by it. Social media companies or net service providers will have to take down such content on notification by the government or lose their safe harbour protections.

Read |TV news channels creating divisions in society: SC

The protections allow them to avoid liabilities for what third parties post on their websites. The governments move is wrong and goes against accepted principles of natural justice, existing rules and past judgements of courts, and violates constitutional rights. The amendments are a violation of the procedure prescribed in the IT Act, 2000, and the guidelines prescribed by the Shreya Singhal vs Union of India, 2015, on the takedown of online content.

With the notification the government has arrogated to itself the power to decide what is right and wrong and assumed the role of a super editor. It will be the judge, jury and executioner on issues that concern it without allowing the right of appeal for the aggrieved party at any forum, including the courts. This is unfair and unjust and amounts toassumption of absolute powers in an area involving fundamental rights. The government has said that online intermediaries have the responsibility to exercise due diligence. While this is true, the government has no right to exercise undue diligence over the media. There is no clear definition of fake news, false news or misleading news. Without this, and without a laid down procedure to arrive at decisions and without the right to appeal, the governments decisions will tend to be arbitrary and lack transparency. The power is bound to be misused.

The Editors Guild of India has said that the governments move is akin to censorship and cited that there was no consultation on the matter. The government had a few weeks ago put out a set of amendments which had given similar sweeping powers to the Press Information Bureau (PIB). While the PIB does not figure in the present scheme, the effect is the same. Media organisations use social media platforms for dissemination of news and so the curbs on online content of these platforms will hit the media as well. It will be censorship done by other means, without calling it by that name. There are a number of recent judgements from courts underlining the importance of media freedom, but the notification disregards them. The governments assurance that its powers will not be misused cannot be trusted. The notification should be withdrawn.

See more here:
Censorship by other means - Deccan Herald

According to the American Library Association, 2022 saw the highest number of demands for censoring library books since the group began tracking such things, more than two decades ago. That will come as no surprise to anyone watching the faux hysteria unfold in district after district when a certain faction launches an attack.

Among recent examples is a 2018 graphic novel adaptation of Anne Franks diary that has been pulled from a HIGH SCHOOL library in Vero Beach, Fla.

Most readers will recall their own exposure to Anne Franks The Diary of a Young Girl, and the degree to which it helped humanize the horrors of the Holocaust. We learned through the experience of a girl younger than many of us were when we first read the book.

But a vicious group calling itself Moms for Liberty is bent on making sure young people dont receive that lesson in a format designed to appeal to modern readers. The group is employing a trick used by many who seek to keep our children from learning about the full range of human history and experience. It is pretending it is concerned the graphic novel minimized the Holocaust. There is also concern about a panel in which Anne walks past nude female statues. (Again, this is a high school library.)

Remember, these people disguise a hateful and racist piece of legislation by calling it anti-racism, and pretend they are protecting our kids when they intend to do them intellectual and emotional harm.

These are the same kinds of people who have asked libraries not to put biographies of Roberto Clemente, Hank Aaron, Jackie Robinson and Jim Thorpe on the shelves. Theyve asked a school district to stop showing a film about Ruby Bridges.

Understand the pattern yet?

Anne Franks diary was published in 1947. Millions upon millions of people learned something about the Holocaust and humanity by reading it. Graphic novels have become a more popular way for young people to read some of the classics with which many of us grew up. An important lesson in that format might reach more young minds, and for the Moms for Liberty especially in Florida, it seems that just wont do.

Rational and responsible parents, teachers and elected officials must speak up and put a stop to this insanity. Its agenda is clear, and cannot be allowed to succeed.

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Read more from the original source:
Censorship | News, Sports, Jobs - The Inter-Mountain

(Andy Barron | Reno Gazette-Journal via AP) A man holds up a sign against critical race theory during a protest outside a Washoe County School District board meeting on May 25, 2021, in Reno, Nev.

By Clayton Parr | Special to The Tribune

| April 13, 2023, 3:00 p.m.

A highlight of todays phase of U.S. history arises from highly publicized exclusionary actions taken by various state legislatures and others in the public sphere regarding race and sexual subject matter.

Some of these actions focus on the elimination of certain information from primary and secondary education courses and reference materials.

One topic is what is called critical race theory. Neither I, nor most of those who consider it to be a threat, really know what it means. Technically, it has been described as an academic and legal framework denoting that systemic racism is part of American society.

Why academic focus on the subject leads to dire consequences is even more unclear. Adding to the murky foundation for the attack is that courses addressing the subject exist rarely and almost exclusively at the college level.

Then there is the movement, exemplified in Florida, to sanitize the education of the countrys youth by forbidding any classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity. Any discussion of such topics is left up to parents who in reality may do so ineptly or not at all.

These legislative actions are accompanied by concerted efforts by individuals, guided by advocacy groups, to ban books in school libraries that discuss sexual identity conflicts, sexual conduct and practices and accounts of racial suppression, including indigenous people.

A troubling aspect of these movements to establish rigid classroom subject-matter boundaries is that they disregard the expertise and judgment of teachers and supervising school boards in determining how best to meet the education needs of students in their charge.

These censorship actions are rationalized as being necessary to protect school children from objectionable subject matter that may have negative psychological or behavioral impacts. The result can be cast as indoctrination, akin to development of group think, the kind of thing we condemn China for.

Another area relates to gender-based health care. Legislation enacted in many states focuses on the small number of transgender individuals in their communities. Those in Utah have been affected by a law enacted in 2022 after override of a veto by Gov. Spencer Cox barring transgender athletes from participating in girls sports. It was followed in 2023 with a law banning gender-affirming health care for individuals under 18 years of age.

What is especially disturbing is the commonality of these actions. They all seem to stem from nationwide agendas related to campaigns against what is called wokeism. The term has been defined as the behavior and attitudes of people who are sensitive to social and political injustice, seemingly a humane attitude that should be admired rather than scorned. The term, however, has been weaponized by the right-leaning political constituency as constituting excessive challenges by far-left liberals to community norms.

Evaluations as to whether some of those challenges go too far, even in the minds of socially conscious citizens, are certainly appropriate. But such discomfort falls far short of the vitriol by those who sarcastically fling the term woke at virtually any proposal by those on the other side of the political divide attempting to overcome prejudices that affect particular minority groups.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the referenced laws has been the minimization of sympathy for the Individuals who are adversely affected either directly or by implication by the proscriptions ostensibly imposed for the public good. There is little concern, sometimes outright disdain, for those within those vulnerable groups. They include transgender children and their parents, gay, lesbian or bisexual individuals and their families and African Americans and other racial minorities

Thus, although many of the issues involved are validly debatable, what appears to be behind the described actions are lineups of Republican controlled state legislatures, including Utahs, to adopt laws consistent with agendas promoted by far-right conservative leadership. Part of the motivation is to put in their place the wokes who advocate for improvements in the treatment of particular vulnerable groups.

That the agendas are part of a nationwide movement was illustrated by the vicious excoriation of Gov. Cox by Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson after the governors compassion-motivated veto of the transgender athletic exclusion bill.

These attitudes cause the laws and other suppressive actions to be lacking in humanity and loaded with prejudice.

Clayton Parr, Draper, is a retired natural resources attorney who, after growing up in a small Wyoming coal-mining town continues to be deeply disturbed by the swirls of intolerance in the world outside of that of his youth.

Continued here:
Political movement is based on censorship and exclusion. - Salt Lake Tribune