‘Art is about freedom of expression, and should not be molded to fit any propaganda or lofty ideal.’
         – Joyce Carol Oates
 

The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s classic parable of mass hysteria, draws a chilling parallel between the Salem witch trials of 1692-93 – described by Miller as ‘one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history’ – and the American anti-communist purges led by FBI Director J Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. The story of how the small community of Salem is stirred into madness by superstition, paranoia, and malice, culminating in a violent climax, is a savage attack on the evils of mindless persecution and the terrifying power of false accusations. Through its allegorical resonance, it is also an indictment of restrictions on freedoms of expression and association. In these ways, it remains particularly relevant in the present day.

 

‘Freedom’ by American rock band Rage Against the Machine was released as the fourth and final single from their self-titled debut studio album in 1994. The song paints a grim picture of how the government, big businesses, and the media manipulate us into believing we’re free while they control the narrative. The true realities remain hidden, leaving us trapped in this illusion of freedom. Where there is no freedom of consciousness, there can never be freedom of expression. Listen and watch the music video here.

 

Free Speech, a book by Danish lawyer and human rights advocate Jacob Mchangama, traces the riveting legal, political, and cultural history of the idea of free speech. Through a series of captivating stories about free speech’s many defenders, Mchangama reveals how the free exchange of ideas underlies all intellectual achievement, enabling the advancement of both freedom and equality worldwide. Yet the desire to restrict speech, too, is a constant, and he explores how even free speech champions can be led down this path when the rise of new and contrarian voices challenge power and privilege. Free Speech demonstrates how much we have gained and how much we stand to lose without it. The book can be purchased here. 

Image: AFP – Getty Images

Featured Artist: Narges Mohammadi

 

My fellow inmates and I were gathered in the women’s ward of Evin prison in Tehran one evening when we saw a television report of Mahsa Amini’s death. Just over a year ago, she died in the custody of Iran’s morality police for allegedly failing to wear a proper hijab. Her death set off an immediate and widespread uprising – led by women – that rocked the country.

In the women’s ward, we were filled with grief – and rage. We used our short phone calls to collect information. At night, we held meetings to exchange the news we’d heard. We were stuck inside, but we did what we could to raise our voices against the regime. Anger reached its peak a few weeks later, when a fire swept through part of Evin on October 15. We chanted ‘Death to the Islamic Republic’ amid the gunfire from security forces, explosions, and flames. At least eight people were killed.

Thousands of people protesting Ms Amini’s death were arrested in the months afterward. As the anniversary of her death approached, Iran’s leaders worked hard to suppress dissent. I have been imprisoned in Evin three times since 2012 for my work as a defender of human rights, but I have never seen as many new admissions to the women’s ward there as in the last five months.

Other women’s wards also filled up. Through friends in Qarchak prison southeast of Tehran, I learned of about 1,400 new detainees being held there. Other women have been sent to high-security wards, including Evin’s Section 209, run by the Ministry of Intelligence. A detainee who was transferred to Evin from Adelabad prison in Shiraz told us of hundreds of new female detainees in Adelabad.

What the government may not understand is that the more of us they lock up, the stronger we become.

The morale among the new prisoners is high. Some spoke with strange ease about writing their wills before heading onto the streets to call for change. All of them, no matter how they were arrested, had one demand: overthrow the Islamic Republic regime.

During recent months, I met many female prisoners who had been beaten and bruised, their bones broken, and who had been sexually assaulted. I have tried my best to document and share that information.

Still, we continue to raise our voices. We have issued statements and held general meetings and sit-ins following the news of mass demonstrations, street killings, and executions. The security and judicial institutions have tried to intimidate and silence us by cutting off our phone calls and weekly meetings with family, or by filing new court cases against us. In the past seven months, they have opened six new criminal cases over my human rights activities in prison and added two years and three months to my sentence, which is now 10 years and nine months.

I started campaigning in Iran 32 years ago, as a student. My goal back then was to fight religious tyranny, which along with tradition and social customs has led to the deep repression of women in this country. That’s still my goal. Now, seeing the groundbreaking efforts of young women and girls during this revolutionary movement, I feel my feminist dreams and goals are closer to realisation.

Women emerged as the vanguard of this uprising, demonstrating immense courage and resistance, even in the face of heightened animosity and aggression from the religious authoritarian regime.

In the past, before Ms Amini’s death, I had heard some accounts of sexual assaults against women within the women’s prisons, but I had never personally witnessed so many life-threatening beatings and injuries, nor had I encountered tales of sexual assault and harassment of this magnitude.

The regime seems to be purposefully propagating a culture of violence against women. However, it will not be able to intimidate or restrain them. Women will not give up.

We are fuelled by a will to survive, whether we are inside prison or outside. The government’s violent and brutal repression may sometimes keep people from the streets, but our struggle will continue until the day when light takes over darkness and the sun of freedom embraces the Iranian people.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times on 16 September, 2023.
 

In Chrissie Dervin’s striking watercolour Into my Arms, the child at the centre is the flower of contemporary Ireland, born of the first generation that does not fear the coffin ship, the laundry, or the boat to England. In the background, the karst is littered with emblems of this cultural heritage. Both universal and uniquely Irish, they are the thumbprint of our sense of self and location: shame, the death of innocence, the pernicious regulation of sexuality, the tattered matriarch of the Church.

This piece serves as a contemplative exploration of the intersection between historical injustices and contemporary challenges to fundamental human rights. Here, a young, innocent girl becomes the symbolic focal point within a dreamlike landscape, drawing parallels between the legacy of oppression in Ireland and the ongoing struggles for privacy and freedom of expression in other countries worldwide. The work bridges a temporal gap and draws attention to the enduring consequences of systemic violations, challenging viewers to confront uncomfortable truths and reflect on the broader implications for human rights.

Chrissie Dervin, based in Macroom, County Cork, is a visual artist best known for intricate work rendered through the traditional processes of pencil drawing and etching. Her work has come to encompass her visual reflections on the body, its frailty, and our transcendence of this frailty. Visit her Instagram profile here.
 

In the present day, free speech has become a buzzword of the political right – especially the far right, rebranded as ‘the alt-right’ – who often use it as a defence for opinions rooted in prejudice. Western society is currently witnessing a rise of right-wing ‘intellectuals’, their substantial following composed overwhelmingly of men, particularly those who are marginalised in one way or another, be that through socioeconomic status or age. Their main hunting ground is the internet, their preferred medium videos. And the key weapon in their armoury is fluency (or rhetoric, depending on how generous we’re feeling) and an aptitude for debate. They tap into latent prejudices in their audience, offering legitimation to ideas previously considered taboo. Misogyny is validated by evolutionary psychology; racist bias hides behind apparently definitive statistical findings. Chauvinism is given a do-over, while bigotry masquerades as respectable intellectual discourse.

The question is this: if one expresses in a well-articulated speech the same sentiment as someone hurling a slur word on a street corner, what makes the former’s actions any more valid? Why should the former be legal, the latter not? Hate speech – abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice on the basis of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or similar grounds – is inarguably wrong, and the argument for its criminalisation is strong. Language is powerful, so powerful it has the potential to make tolerable the worst forms of intolerance. Yet how does one legislate against hatred when it is dressed up in elegant diction? And even if we could, is this really a power we want to confer on our governments? Are debate and discussion not favourable to censorship?

As far as this author is concerned, hate speech is not free speech. When one’s speech threatens the rights of others to go about their lives free of harassment, abuse, or claims that an aspect of their identity predisposes them to malice, ignorance, or any other imagined fault, then one’s freedom of speech is afforded at the expense of its target’s freedom from discrimination and right to equality.

And yet there is a naivety and an insularity to the West’s preoccupation with what words we should and should not be allowed to say. A report by global risk analysis company Verisk Maplecroft has found that about 3.38 billion people, or roughly 46% of the global population, live in countries deemed to be at ‘extreme risk’ in relation to the right to privacy and freedom of expression. Out of 198 countries, 58 were categorised as ‘extreme risk’ when it came to the report’s freedom of opinion and expression index. Indeed, such prominent countries as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates each hold a score of less than 0.2 in a scale of 0 to 1 in The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project’s Freedom of Expression Index 2022, which measures the extent to which people can voice their views and the media present different political perspectives. Freedom of expression is also on the wane worldwide: 80% of the world’s population lives with less freedom of expression than they had a decade ago, according to last year’s Global Expression Report.

So, as we in the West thrash out what we should and should not be allowed to say legally, let’s keep in mind that the fact we can have this debate in the first place is, by comparison with many other countries, more like a privilege than a right, sadly.

Féilim James is a writer from Dublin, Ireland, whose work has been funded by the Arts Council of Ireland and Dublin City Arts Office. He has appeared in New Irish Writing (upcoming), Acumen, The High Window, Icarus, and elsewhere, and has had four plays and two short films produced. Visit his website here.
 

Gillian Wright’s painting Cop On is from a body of work created to express the trauma of bereavement by suicide. The artist’s intention was for the painting to be confrontational, with the direct gaze connecting the viewer to the raw emotion of the subject. Wright volunteers with Healing Untold Grief Groups (HUGG), through which she has found that by providing people bereaved by suicide a safe space in which to express their emotions, a degree of hope and healing can be achieved. Suicide is an epidemic in our country – and yet it remains taboo, ensuring the bereaved a lonely and silent grief, laden with stigma and shame. Societal taboos subtly dissuade people from talking about issues like suicide, thereby curbing their freedom of speech in an indirect and complex way.

Gillian Wright is a muti-media artist living in Donegal. In October 2023, her work was featured in the inaugural issue of the journal Profiles. Click here for her website, and here for her Instagram profile.
 

Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) was a Jewish-American author of poetry, prose, and translations, best known for her sonnet ‘The New Colossus’, which was inspired by the Statue of Liberty and appears inscribed on a bronze plaque on the statue’s pedestal. She was involved in helping refugees in New York who had fled antisemitic pogroms in eastern Europe, seeing the Statue of Liberty as a way to express her empathy for them.
 

In order to contextualise his painting Naser, Palestinian artist Khaled Hourani simply cited the lyrics of Emel Mathlouthi’s ‘Holm’ (‘A Dream’) – an Arabic remake of the Iranian song ‘Soltane Ghalbhaa’ – translated to English below (listen to Mathlouthi’s moving version here):

If I could close my eyes and the dreams take me by the hand, I would rise and fly in a new sky and I will forget my sorrows

If I could travel in my imagination, I would build palaces and nights where love and my hopes can grow and we will erase the pain…

A world in which you see people whose features
Are clouded by oppression, misery and suffering
From a bitter reality that destroys everything we build

A world where you see rising walls of tyranny that crushes in us dreams and dreams
And reign darkness and greed in all hearts

Khaled Hourani is a prominent Palestinian artist, curator, and writer, who was the Artistic Director of the International Academy of Art Palestine from 2007-2010, and its General Director from 2010-2013. In 2013, he was awarded Creative Time’s Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change in New York City; the many local and international exhibitions he has participated in include Catastrophe and the Power of Art at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2017, and Picasso and the Exodus at Les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse, France, 2019. Visit his Instagram profile here.
 

Smashing Times Company Manager Freda Manweiler and William Caughey are in Lagos, Nigeria from 27 November to 1 December for the second and final learning/training activity as part of the EXCELLENCE BOOST! project. Freda presented on Smashing Times’ Acting For the Future project and ran elements of the project’s workshops with the educators present. The EXCELLENCE BOOST! project aims to provide teachers and trainers with opportunities to develop and maintain their technical, pedagogical, and transversal (e.g. digital, intercultural communication) skills at the highest level, as well as the chance to network and exchange experiences with other professionals from different parts of the world (in this case Europe and Africa). Freda and William were in Port Elizabeth, South Africa back in August/September for the first learning/training activity. Read more about the EU-funded EXCELLENCE BOOST! project here.
 

We are recruiting a part-time employee to work with Smashing Times International Centre for the Arts and Equality. Smashing Times operates as an arts space and digital hub for artists, communities, and the general public across Ireland and internationally, providing a resource service and networking agency with guidance, advice, information, support, and advocacy in relation to using high quality creative processes and collaborative, socially engaged arts practice to promote human rights and gender equality.

The successful candidate should have

The successful candidate will be offered a fixed-term contract of employment and will be expected to work a minimum of 16 hours per week.

How to Apply:

Email your CV and cover letter to info@smashingtimes.ie Closing date for receipt of applications is 12pm on 4 December, 2023. Applications received after this deadline will not be accepted.

The position begins 9 January, 2024 but applicants should be available for two days the week of 11 December, 2023 for handover. Smashing Times is committed to a policy of Equality of Opportunity in its employment practices.
 

Smashing Times presented a number of performances this month as part of Acting for the Future, a project that uses creative processes to promote positive mental health and suicide prevention. ‘A Day Out’, written by Paul Kennedy and performed by Ben Waddell, was presented in a selection of schools, followed by a post-show discussion with Ben, psychologist Eimear Burke, and facilitator Ciara Hayes. First, it was brought to Scoil Mhuire Carrick-on-Suir and Comeragh College, Carrick-on-Suir, on 14 November. Then the show was performed in St Mary’s Secondary School, New Ross and Good Counsel College, New Ross, on 21 November. ‘A Day Out’ tells the story of two friends in their twenties and their last day together. For more on Acting for the Future, please click here.
 

During a recent event we held as part of the Dublin Arts and Human Rights Festival 2023, we paid tribute to Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina. Victoria Amelina (1986-2023) was a Ukrainian novelist, essayist, and human rights activist based in Kyiv. She was a winner of the Joseph Conrad Literature Prize for her prose works, including the novels Dom’s Dream Kingdom and Fall Syndrome, and a finalist of the European Union Prize for Literature. Victoria was working on a book of non-fiction entitled War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War, which is expected to be published shortly and follows the paths of journalists, human rights defenders, lawyers, and volunteers who document war crimes in Ukraine while the war is still ongoing. The book is also a personal war journal that observes the author’s transformation into a war crimes researcher and back into a book author.

Smashing Times’ recent event, entitled ‘Voices from Ukraine: War, Film, and Human Rights’, was held on 17 October in The Pumphouse, Dublin Port. Victoria, who sadly passed away earlier this year as a result of a Russian missile strike in Ukraine, was the key speaker at the 2022 event ‘Nothing Bad has ever Happened – Stories from Ukraine’ (the title taken from an essay by Victoria) in Smock Alley Theatre, hosted by Pen Ireland with Smashing Times and Front Line Defenders for the 2022 Dublin Arts and Human Rights Festival. She spoke about the situation for writers and artists in Ukraine and bringing the war in Ukraine to a close. At the 2023 event, Smashing Times Artistic Director and artist Mary Moynihan spoke about Victoria’s inspiring work before a minute’s silence was observed and a pre-recorded reading of her work was played, performed by Halyna Budilova.

Victoria was a fierce advocate for human rights and the rights of artists, including free expression. As a pioneering writer and activist, she will be remembered dearly for her courage in facing and documenting the terrible reality of the Russian invasion.
 

From 15-26 November, Smashing Times took part in a hybrid residency as part of the Theatre in Palm project. The residency combined online and in-person activity, the latter taking place in The Carmelite Centre, The Teachers Club, and the Carmichael Centre. Smashing Times’ contribution to the residency was led by Smashing Times Artist/Facilitator-in-Residence Michael McCabe, and featured artists from the European Theatre and Film Institute, Belgium, and Centro Teatrale MaMiMò, Italy.

The overall hybrid residency sees 130 emerging theatre and performing arts artists from 12 European countries create live performances together, which were broadcast live on Friday, 17 November 2023. Click here to read more on this project.
 

Five creative arts workshops took place throughout November as part of Smashing Times’ Creative Connections project. The first, facilitated by Dr Stephen Herron, was held in Old Warren Community Association, Resurgam Community Development Trust, Lisburn on 7 November. The second was facilitated by Maura Johnston and took place on 13 November in The HubBT80, Cookstown, County Tyrone. The final three workshops, all conducted by Fiona Bawn-Thompson, occurred on 15, 22, and 29 November in Clanrye Group, Killeavy, Newry.

Creative Connections is a cultural, arts-based project using creative processes of theatre, film, and new digital technologies in areas designated as disadvantaged, both in Northern Ireland and south of the border. A key aim is to use creativity and the arts to identify collective, shared solutions for bringing the groups together and creating a genuinely integrated society. The project is funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Rural Engagement Arts Programme.
 

Smashing Times Artistic Director and artist Mary Moynihan presented an innovative, creative arts workshop with members of the All-Island Women’s Forum at a residential gathering organised by the National Women’s Council on 1 November at the Gateway Hotel, Dundalk. Prior to the workshop, Mary presented on her work as an artist with Smashing Times, using the arts to promote peace-building and reconciliation in Ireland and across Europe. Mary’s ensuing workshop used arts-based processes of games and exercises to explore themes of solidarity and ‘creative connections now and into the future’. The workshop facilitated an exploration of connections and partnerships in a fun and creative environment.

The All-Island Women’s Forum is a gathering of women who have been integral to peacebuilding and community building across the island of Ireland; the forum believes that solidarity amongst women is integral to achieving equality and prosperity.
 

Often hailed as the first freedom, free speech is the bedrock of democracy. But it is a challenging principle, subject to erosion in times of upheaval. Today, in authoritarian states, and even in democracies around the world, it is on the decline. For this month’s 10 We Admire, we have chosen to focus on ten moments in history – protests, campaigns, boycotts – which were seminal in the fight for freedom of expression, women’s suffrage, civil rights, human rights, and equality.
 

 

The United Procession of Women, or Mud March as it became known, was a peaceful demonstration in London on 9 February, 1907, organised by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), in which more than 3,000 women marched from Hyde Park Corner to the Strand in support of women’s suffrage. It acquired the name ‘Mud March’ from the day’s weather, since incessant heavy rain left the marchers drenched and splattered in mud. The Mud March was the largest ever public demonstration until then in support of woman’s suffrage. Although it brought little by way of immediate progress on the parliamentary front, its significance in the general suffrage campaign was considerable. Read more about the Mud March here.
 

One of the most iconic protests of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in America was conducted by a group called the Silent Sentinels, organised by Alice Paul, a Quaker women’s rights activist with a commitment to non-violence and women’s suffrage. The Silent Sentinels protested in front of the White House during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, from January 1917 to June 1919. The protesters wore sashes, held banners, and carried flags with messages on them in support of women’s right to vote. They used silence, instead of loud demonstrations, as a form of protest, which was a new strategy within the national suffrage movement. Although silent, their presence and messaging amplified the inequality that existed at home while the United States was fighting World War I abroad to protect democracy around the world. These protests became one of the most effective in American history and helped spur the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified on August 18, 1920, which granted women the constitutional right to vote. Read more here.
 

Sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks on 1 December, 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott was a 13-month mass protest that ended with the US Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional. The boycott began in December 1955 and lasted until December 1956. Considered a foundational moment in the history of the American Civil Rights Movement, the boycott began after Parks, a black woman, was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person in segregated Montgomery, Alabama. The boycott drastically reduced the profitability of the busing system, garnering national attention and pressuring the Supreme Court to declare Montgomery’s policy of segregated busing unconstitutional. You can read more here.
 

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom remains one of the most famous and important events in all of American history. Perhaps no other event better exemplifies the soul of the First Amendment – which guarantees freedoms concerning religion, expression, assembly, and the right to petition – than the March on Washington. The march was organised by A Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, prominent civil rights leaders who built a diverse coalition of activists for the march under the banner of jobs and freedom. On the 28 August, 1963, around 250,000 activists marched in Washington DC. The speeches culminated in the Dr Martin Luther King, Jr issuing his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. The march is credited with helping to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a landmark bill in civil rights history. Read more here.
 

During the 1950s, heightened tensions with the Soviet Union ushered in a wave of hysteria regarding fears over the spread of communism in the US. In response, universities in California enacted numerous regulations limiting students’ political activities. By the mid-1960s, however, encouraged by the Civil Rights Movement, students at the University of California, Berkeley, began testing the limits of their collegiate free speech. In October of 1964, former graduate student Jack Weinberg refused to show his identification to the campus police and was arrested. Thousands of students gathered in response and surrounded the police car Weinberg was detained in for the following 32 hours, all while Weinberg was inside it. The car was used as a speaker’s podium until the charges against Weinberg were dropped. Then, on December 2, thousands of students occupied a campus building to force the school administration to relinquish restrictions on political speech and action on campus. By January of 1965, the new acting chancellor, Martin Meyerson, established provisional rules that allowed political activity on the Berkeley campus. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement not only essentially dismantled free speech restrictions on college campuses in California, but also helped catalyse the anti-war movement amongst young people who could now use their voices safely and legally. Read more here.
 

The Stonewall riots, also known as the Stonewall uprising, Stonewall rebellion, or simply Stonewall, were a series of protests by members of the gay community in response to a police raid that began in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighbourhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Patrons of the Stonewall, other Village lesbian and gay bars, and neighbourhood street people fought back when the police became violent. The riots are widely considered the watershed event that transformed the gay liberation movement and the twentieth-century fight for LGBTQI+ rights in the United States and beyond. Read more on Stonewall here.