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Dear Khalid,
Thanks for your communications. I feel honored and
privileged that you feel such a great connection with me. I agree with
you that friendships are supposed to bring out the best of everyone
involved. I also feel that any friendship is doomed for failure if
honesty is missing from it’s foundation so I’ll be honest. When you say
that I am going to play a significant part in the new phase of your
creative life, you are asking me to carry a certain amount of
responsibility that I don’t think I’m worthy of but I will try my best.
I appreciate and commend that you expressed your
only concern in the very first letter when you wrote that you don’t want
to get into a debate with me. You wrote that you see a dialog
differently from a debate where there is no pressure to convert or
convince. I totally agree with you that debates, with the urge of
converting the other person, are counter-productive most of the times.
However, I would like to ask you whether the concept of dialog in your
mind allows for disagreements or not? I am certain that we agree on most
of the issues but I am also certain that there are places where we will
disagree. I can promise to overlook frivolous disagreements and where I
cannot overlook, I will disagree with you without being disagreeable.
Your intentions of winning hearts instead of
arguments are commendable. You posses the ability to use the mediums
(poetry, short stories etc.) that are best suited for the job. Let me
share with you my thoughts about arguments. Some arguments are carried
out in the spirit of one upmanship. Such arguments, for the most part,
are non-productive. There is another type though; arguments to
understand each other’s perspective better. Let me make use of the tired
and old metaphor of the same knife being in the hand of murderer and
being in the hands of a surgeon performs tasks that are diametrically
opposite. I feel arguments are also such things. One can bleed others
with the arguments but one can also win hearts thru arguments. It would
be childish of me to claim that I have won many hearts thru my arguments
but I know that many people in my life whom I am proud to call my
friends met me because of such arguments; you should know because you
are one of them.
In your second letter you wrote that you were
surprised that when you asked me to be part of the translation team to
translate Nobel Peace Prize lectures, I did not choose to translate the
Nobel lecture of a leader and instead chose Amnesty International. You
wrote that you were curious what objections did I have to all receivers
of Nobel Peace Prize. I don’t have objections to ALL recipients of Nobel
Peace Prize. The objection I have is against the Nobel Peace Prize
itself and that objection is that it’s a politically motivated prize. I
am yet to discover what are the contributions of Henry Kissinger (1973
Nobel Peace Prize), Mother Teresa (1979) and Dalai Lama (1989) towards
world peace. I am also yet to discover what were Pope John Paul’s
contributions for getting nominated for the award in 2003. I know
certain of his “achievements” that could have landed him in the jail if
he weren’t the Pope but I’m sure those were overlooked by the nominating
committees. As I’m sure you know, Jean-Paul Sartre rejected the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1964 saying that he didn’t want to align himself
with an institution. That exactly is my point. When Rev. Desmond Tutu
accepted the award, he endorsed the institution that had given the same
honor to Henry Kissinger before him. Had Sarter delivered a "rejection
lecture", that would have been my first choice for translation.
Peace is a necessary outcome of justice and justice
alone can guarantee peace. The contributions of Amnesty International in
the field of justice and human rights are greater than the sum of the
contributions of most of the people on the Nobel Peace Laureates list. I
didn’t want to become the showstopper for the translation project and
yet I also didn’t want to translate the lecture of some individual whose
contributions to the world peace were vague or unknown to me. That was
the reason I chose to translate Amnesty International’s lecture of which
I have been a part of and know about its contributions first hand. I
hope that eases your curiosity.
Regards,
Rafi Aamer
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