WHY WRITE WITH THE ARCHIPELAGO ON FIRE?

How could we still be writing as the world is burning? How could we still be congregating as writers, illustrators, translators, literary agents or publishers as cities turn to dust and ash? We should be madly, starvingly, hysterically dragging ourselves through the national highway demanding an end to a reign of greed (here in our lost, lost woods), the triumph of fascism and xenophobia (Yes Men Create Authoritarianism), and the zealousness of the war pigs crawling (everywhere where bombs start dropping).

- IGAN D'BAYAN

The not-so simple, almost rage-baiting answer is, write we must. To chart the entire gradient between love and death, hope and despair, peace and the state-sponsored monstrous, gnashing teeth of what is not peace. The marchers and protesters will disagree, as they should. But writers, not just soldiers, have taken down empires and colonizers before.

After all, writing is more than just professing the inexpressible.

These thoughts were stirred up by a speech - what commentators cited as "polarizing" - during the opening press conference of the 2025 Frankfurter Buchmesse (FBM) by German novelist Nora Haddada, who complained that very few in the media and literary community spoke against the horrors of the last few years and missing the "absolute dullness" of times before. But, waxing a bit optimistic after unleashing verbal hellfire, she points out that literature is a weapon. Literary history, she stressed, gives us the means to mask criticism. Haddada's words may have lost none of their sharpness in translation: "(Literature) is the slower type of art which is consumed in seclusion, a great antidote against the flood of information." Counteracting the hectic hysteric thinking of social media, the zombifying pull of TikTok trends, the screeching capitulation of mainstream media, and (to steal a line from Allen Ginsberg) the "obscene odes on the windows of the skulls" of bloggers and influencers.