Mainstream WeeklyAs news of Noam Chomsky’s failing health makes the rounds, a journalist and peace activist from Pakistan shares some of her learnings from interactions with a trailblazing public intellectual whose moral compass has impacted the world
By Beena Sarwar
I once asked Noam Chomsky how he manages to remember so many facts and figures and hold audience attention. He replied that he didn’t convey any new information, that his talks are based on materials already in the public domain, and that he simply joins the dots - providing context - and repeats the information consistently and in different ways.
His response was typical of his humility as well as his courtesy towards a much younger person to whom he owed nothing.
Chomsky teaches us that it is not necessary to be loud and sensationalist in order to be heard. This, together with the clear and courageous moral compass he has provided over decades, is a most valuable lesson.
Noam Chomsky was already a legend when I first met him over two decades ago in December 2001 when he visited Pakistan for the inaugural Eqbal Ahmad Memorial lecture series.
Dr Eqbal Ahmad had been an anti-Vietnam War activist in the USA in the 1960s. He later taught at Hampshire College and was among Chomsky’s circle of friends, which included other intellectual giants and legendary figures like Howard Zinn and Edward Said.
He had returned to Pakistan after the death of Gen. Ziaul Haq in 1988 and was prominent in the peace and anti-nuclear weapons movements in the region. He passed away in May 1999, on the first anniversary of India’s nuclear test, that Pakistan had followed.
Confronting empire
In November 2001, Chomsky did a lecture series in India. Another fellow-traveller, the well-known physics professor and activist Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy, piggy-backed on that to invite Chomsky to Pakistan for the Eqbal Ahmad Memorial lecture series. These events were organised months earlier, and Pervez was initially worried about whether there would be an audience.
Then the 11 September 2001 attacks in the USA took place. Chomsky cut through America’s outrage to point out that these attacks were historic not for their scale but because of where they took place, mainland America, which had not been attacked before.
Also, this was not the first, but "the second 9/11". The earlier, "far more serious" 9/11 was the one in 1973, the violent coup against the elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile.
Many in America were uncomfortable with his thoughts but in progressive circles here and around the world, his popularity soared.
I had just returned to Pakistan from London after doing an MA in TV Documentary and wanted to document Chomsky’s visit to Pakistan for an international audience. Pervez agreed to let me record the series, and my Dutch friend Babette Niemel, then at VPRO Television in Holland, fought to get it approved for their ’Seven Days’ video diary series.
Needing some B-roll, casual footage for the documentary, I had asked the organisers if I could follow Chomsky. They agreed to let me tag along to his room at the Avari Hotel in Lahore with cameraperson Mariam Pasha to escort him to the talk.
Noam Chomsky and his wife Carol had arrived in Pakistan to a celebrity welcome that discomfited them. Now, Chomsky politely conveyed that we were welcome to film his public events but that he and Carol were uncomfortable being followed by the camera.
We put our equipment away until he entered the venue where he was speaking. He walked through the packed hall to a standing ovation. A few days later, he addressed a larger audience at another packed venue, an indoor stadium in Islamabad.
In both places, people listened in pin drop silence as he spoke, lowkey and without histrionics, understatedly drawing linkages between history and politics. This has been the case whenever I’ve heard Chomsky speak.
There was a shameful exception, when he spoke at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University when I was an international Fellow there, 2005-2006. In that intimate setting, another international fellow and her husband, both from Israel, kept interrupting Chomsky, despite being admonished by the moderator and other fellows.
Chomsky didn’t lose his cool, but I heard later that he vowed never to come back to Lippman House. I was glad to hear that the Nieman Fellows prevailed upon him to return in 2017 and that it went smoothly.
I was privileged to share the stage with him on a couple of occasions. In September 2006, John "Jack" Trumpbour, a Research Director at the Center for Labor and a Just Economy (CLJE) at Harvard Law School invited Chomsky as a featured speaker for the launch of a collection of essays, ’The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad’ (Columbia University Press), September 2006. It is to Jack’s credit that he pulled off this event in a space that has tended to keep Chomsky out.
I was a speaker, along with Margaret Cerullo, Eqbal’s colleague from Hampshire College and one of the book’s editors. Stuart Schaar, Eqbal’s “college buddy