Malinda Words: Writers’ Blocs and Dead Lines

Protestors outside the New York Times office demanded fair and accurate coverage of Israel's attacks on Palestinians.

No, not a typo. I meant “Writers’” with the apostrophe after the ’s’ and I meant ‘bloc’ and not ‘block.’ Yes, dead-lines as in ‘lines that are dead’ and not deadlines, for example the kinds imposed by editors on reporters, columnists and other contributors to newspapers. It has other applications of course, but we are talking about writers here, journalists in the main.

I enjoy exploring the origin of words and terms so I checked the etymology of ‘deadline,’ and found the following in the ‘Online Etymology Dictionary’:

‘Time limit,’ 1920, American English newspaper jargon, from dead (adj.) + line (n.). Perhaps influenced by earlier use (1864) to mean the "do-not-cross" line in Civil War prisons, which figured in the trial of Henry Wirz, commander of the notorious Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia.

The Port of the Secretary of War, October 31, 1865, titled ‘Trial of Henry Wirz’ contains the following chilling passage:

‘And he, the said Wirz, still wickedly pursuing his evil purpose, did establish and cause to be designated within the prison enclosure containing said prisoners a "dead line," being a line around the inner face of the stockade or wall enclosing said prison and about twenty feet distant from and within said stockade; and so established said dead line, which was in many places an imaginary line, in many other places marked by insecure and shifting strips of [boards nailed] upon the tops of small and insecure stakes or posts, he, the said Wirz, instructed the prison guard stationed around the top of said stockade to fire upon and kill any of the prisoners aforesaid who might touch, fall upon, pass over or under [or] across the said "dead line.”’

The key observation is that the deadline was ‘in many places an imaginary line.’ The arbitrariness of it all, was what crossed my mind. If you meet an editor’s deadline, you won’t be shot. Chided, probably, and if it is a habit you could be in serious trouble. Goes for all deliverables. You won’t die though. In other situations, you will. Even today, as I write.

In Sri Lanka, back in the late eighties, as far as the security forces and police were concerned the deadline was derived from date of birth: if you were born in the sixties or early seventies, you were fair game for arbitrary arrests, torture and summary execution. For much of the early decades during the war against terrorism, ‘deadline,’ so to speak, had nothing to do with date of birth or deliverables: being Tamil was enough. For the LTTE, rival militant groups, politicians, professionals and civilians in crowded places were all considered to be in a zone beyond the dead-line. ‘Our way or death,’ was the gist of how the JVP understood dead-lines. The eighties, it must be said, is a decade that has been passed over, strangely, perhaps because the ‘right people’ were in power.

The eighties, it must be said, is a decade that has. been passed over, strangely, perhaps because the ‘right people’ were in power.

So there are dead-lines, boundaries that can be transgressed only at the risk of being killed. Some of them are clearly defined and in these days of digitisation they are not hard to figure out, although it must be said that where there are no walls, fences, trenches, rivers and other markers it is a tricky business staying in the live-zone. It is obviously more difficult in situations of war.

BUT NOTHING COMPARES WITH PALESTINE. Period.

Don’t believe me, just watch clips from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s civil and military leadership. The genocidal intent is clear, as William Dalrymple, the Delhi-based Scottish historian and art historian, as well as a curator, photographer, broadcaster and critic, has stated. He describes them as ‘clear and unembarrased calls for slaughter, erasure, nuclear holocaust and the levelling of Gaza, all on record, all on camera, from their own mouths.’

The perimeter walls of every house is a dead-line. If there are floor tiles, the lines demarcating each square is a dead-line. The corridors separating one row of beds from another in hospitals, yes, dead-lines. Pick two spots randomly and connect them with a line. It need not be straight. Dead-lines, all.

Palestine is a criss-crossed map of imaginary dead-lines. The Israel Government, right now, is making Henry Wirz look like an angel.

Writer’s blocks and writers’ blocs. These too warrant comment. One day, some student interested in the political economy of the communication industry will write a doctoral dissertation on the ways in which mainstream media in North America and Europe have reported events in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank since the horrific attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Such a dissertation no doubt would delve into the long history of the region including the unprecedented sequestering of Palestinians which fertilised militancy.

For now, it suffices to acknowledge that journalists in the mainstream media are suffering from a chronic version of writer’s block. Ironically, a group calling itself ‘Writers Bloc’ has joined many others in calling out such journalists, especially those working for the New York Times.

Writers, friends, can be blocked. They can be deemed to have ventured beyond arbitrary and undefined dead-lines and for this ‘crime,’ killed. Dozens in Gaza, as I write. Writers can block-themselves, as those working in mainstream media outfits have.

There’s however a writers’ bloc, formal and informal. They will not be stopped. They don’t observe dead-lines. And they don’t stop after meeting deadlines. They simply cannot.

This, then, is a tribute to such heroes of my tribe. They are the Merchants of Light, a term coined by Francis Bacon in his posthumously published novel, The New Atlantis (1627), a collective that, as my late friend and benefactor Errol Alphonso once told me, ‘traverses the world for intellectual treasures and to bring them back to share, and to create repositories of knowledge and learning.’

They do not fear dead-lines. All power to them.

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 267th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

14 November 2023

Writers’ Blocs and Dead Lines

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