There is a crimson thread that binds the starry heights of the American literary world to a shepherd's world in India's Kashmir valley.
It is more grave than the 'crimson thread of kinship' that Sir Henry Parkes said bound the Australian colonies in 1890 to the exclusion of Indigenous First Nations communities and other non Anglo-Celtic workers. It has stretched over the centuries and across the world, and it is killing our girls and our women. It is the crimson thread of male entitlement.
Merely days ago, the American author Junot Diaz left the Sydney Writers Festival (SWF) amid allegations of sexual abuse from another American guest of the festival, Zinzi Clemmons. Other writers soon began to share their experiences of Diaz's predatory and abusive behaviour.
All this occurred while the literary world had just learned that the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature would be delayed as a consequence of one of its associates being accused of sexual assault. This groundswell of rage, and calls for a price to be paid, galvanised by the #MeToo moment, hold to account writers like Diaz, and institutions like the Swedish Academy that administers the Nobel Prize.
They are part of a complex configuration of literary prestige: the upholding of a minority writer in Diaz, who scaled the walls of the literary establishment and unlocked the gates to others like him; and who recently published an essay where he revealed that he too was a victim of sexual violence as a child. Now the victim, upon whom the literary world has bestowed prestige, imbuing him with power, has turned perpetrator.
At another SWF event, one about the #MeToo movement, the Australian writer, sociologist and activist Eva Cox observed to the panellists: 'It's not "How do we stop that man from doing that to us?", but '"How do we stop men feeling like they're entitled to?"' Therein, she pointed to the crux of the matter: male entitlement.
There is another, more sinister and tragic manifestation of that bloodied crimson thread, woven with the use of rape as a weapon of war. Most recently and horrifically, it can be found in the events that transpired in a forest at the foothills of the Himalayas.
"This crime is marked by a complex configuration of colonisation, religious tension, disputes about land ownership ... But at the heart of it is that eight men felt they could rape and murder an eight year old girl with impunity."
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