If I am moved to give my mind and my energies to revealing the hidden details behind a story about a storyteller, beset by the political winds and deprived of her basic human intimacies, a reporter, a poet, a seer of deep patterns, it must be because we all have a fundamental human dignity that we wish would reach across the void to others, and if we are honest, we see when it is threatened.

I want to know what the shape and texture of the human voice, as a whole, really is, to know where beauties have been silenced, where serious thought is being diverted into pools of circular self-proclamation made by dictators and miscreants. I want to know how limited is my humanity by the limiting of someone else’s.

Can this be called literature? It is the tracing of the borders where literature tries to be and ceases to be and is struggling to be born, even where it is nothing but information seeping out into language by the brave work of a single determined observer. A witness. Literature, I think, is witness, and when we understand what pushes impassioned reporters into the darkness of prohibition, we understand a little about what else we might not know.

It is any reporter’s job to match to our perceptions and our consciousness the information we ourselves had not yet come across. Sometimes, this entails political realities, and sometimes interpretation. The criminalization of the press, of reporting of fact and of the analysis and critique of ideas, is spreading to places that had enjoyed at least relative press liberty.

Where they are censored, jailed, silenced or disappeared, or even outright murdered, the literature of the entire human experienced is impoverished. That basic service of acting as witness, as a voice for the unvoiced, a medium, is part of the human fabric, and we are, as a species, less whole and less organically sovereign and independent, when those voices are diminished or erased.