The Power of Writing

By Joel L. Swerdlow

Chinese state security officers arrested Wei Jingsheng, an electrician, on March 29, 1979. Among his major crimes: writing essays arguing for democracy. Wei, who would spend 18 years in jail and become a prominent symbol of the power of the written word, was placed in the Beijing detention center.

Chinese authorities feared Wei, recognizing that writing has an almost magical power: Words on paper, created by ordinary citizens, have overthrown governments and changed the course of history. So powerful is writing that the beginnings of civilization and history are most often defined as the moment cultures develop it. Anthropologists can only paint outlines of ancient societies that had no writing; a written record provides the human details—history, belief, names and dates, thought, and emotion.

No other invention—perhaps only the wheel comes close—has had a longer and greater impact. Writing helped preserve the three major monotheistic religions, whose believers the Koran refers to as “the People of the Book.” The transformation of language into written words has immortalized passion, genius, art, and science—the letters of St. Paul, the poems of Li Po, the humor of Aristophanes, the treatises of Maimonides.

Much of writing’s power comes from its flexibility. Ever since the Sumerians began keeping records by impressing cuneiform signs on clay tablets 5,000 years ago, humans have searched for the ideal tools to portray words. They have chiseled symbols in stone and bone and have written on leaves, bark, silk, papyrus, parchment, paper, and electronic screens. This skill, once known only to a few professional scribes, grew into mass literacy: Some five billion people can read and write today, about 85 percent of the world’s population.

From its beginning as recordkeeper to its transformation into one of humanity’s most potent forms of artistic and political expression, writing reveals the power of innovation.

But the story of Wei proclaims writing’s greatest power—its ability to move hearts and minds.

His cell measured four and a half feet by nine feet [1.2 x 2.8 meters]. Authorities kept the light on at all times. No one, not even his guards, was allowed to speak to Wei, and he was not permitted to read or write. His requests for paper and pencil were ignored.

To understand how writing evolved, I visit Sarabit el Khadim, a flat-topped, wind-eroded mountain of reddish sandstone in the southwestern Sinai Peninsula of Egypt. Here, in a turquoise mine dug by Egyptians almost 3,500 years ago, is one of the earliest examples of a phonetic alphabet. Avner Goren, an Israeli archaeologist who supervised excavations in the Sinai for 15 years, is leading me up a steep trail, with narrow ledges and a drop-off to rocks far below. Near the top, we stoop to enter a dark hole.

“What do you think?” Goren asks, pointing to a wall about six feet [two meters] in front of us. Carved into the stone are crude sketches of a fish, ox head, and square, remarkably different from the Egyptian hieroglyphs found elsewhere at the site.

The simplicity of these marks belies their significance. I move closer, as if proximity will reveal their magic. The people who made these signs were among the first to use characters each of which represented one sound—an alphabet. These alphabetic symbols had acrophonic values, with each representing the initial sound of the object depicted. The picture of the square—a house—thus stood for the b sound because the word for house was beit.

If these ancient writers were not Egyptians, who were they? After British archaeologists explored Sarabit el Khadim in 1905, some scholars argued that they were Israelites fleeing from Egypt with Moses about 1250 B.C. But similar writing as old or older was discovered in present-day Israel in the 1930s, so most researchers now believe that this alphabet was invented in Canaan, a region between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Most likely, Canaanites who were brought in to work the mines left these messages.

Egyptian scribes had to master hundreds of symbols. I tell Goren that alphabetic writing must have seemed much more attractive to those scribes. “Probably not,” he says. “About 30 of the symbols in Egyptian hieroglyphs represent single sounds, just like the alphabet. They knew about using symbols to represent sounds. To the Egyptians the Semitic writing may have looked too primitive to be significant.”

That night, as we lie in sleeping bags at the base of the mountains, Goren warns against seeing an alphabet as “superior” to pictographic writing. “If you came from outer space and wrote a report, you’d give the alphabet high marks,” he says. “It’s flexible and easy to learn. But what actual effect did that have? There was no mass literacy until after the development of the printing press in the mid-15th century.”

But alphabets, it seems to me, changed the way people thought. Theoretical science, formal logic, and the concept of time as a straight line moving from past into future came from societies with alphabets.

From a small patch in the Middle East the notion of one symbol per sound spread around the world, taking root first among the Greeks, who modified some characters into written vowels. The Latin alphabet of the Romans evolved from the Greek around the sixth century B.C. By the ninth century A.D., Japan had developed strong phonetic components in its written language; Korea by the 15th. Indeed, of the several hundred written languages in the world today, only Chinese still relies on a writing system in which individual characters represent individual words. These characters often mean one thing when used alone, but something else when combined. The Chinese character for “sincerity,” for example, shows the character for “man” alongside the one for “word,” literally a man standing by his word.

Wei drew characters in his head, taking pride in this mental calligraphy. One morning, more than two years after he was placed in solitary confinement, his food tray included a ballpoint pen—another prisoner or a sympathetic guard had smuggled it to him.

Wei began to write letters to his family on the rough sheets he had for toilet paper. Guards found these letters and demanded to know where he had hidden the pen. Wei refused to say. After guards failed to find the ballpoint, which Wei had tied to a string and lowered inside the hollow metal rods of his bed, the warden ordered him to another cell. Wei sneaked the pen with him.

Since writing’s invention, people have used it to combat loneliness and establish a sense of self. In the fourth century B.C., Aristotle saw writing as a way to express “affections of the soul.” Recent studies have documented that writing about feelings can alleviate depression, boost the immune system, and lower blood pressure.

How, then, do people in societies without writing express themselves? Of the more than 10,000 languages ever spoken, most had no written form. “We talk to each other, listen, visit, and trust the spoken word,” says Guujaaw, a leader of the Haida Nation. “Expressing yourself without writing is natural.”

The Haida have lived on the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia for more than 10,000 years. Guujaaw and I are walking on Sgan Gwaii, a small island in the south that has some of the world’s last temperate rain forest. Mosses and ferns cushion our steps. In the ocean, sea lions and puffins dive for fish.

“Like most other cultures in the Western Hemisphere, you never developed writing until outsiders brought it in,” I say. “Do you think that’s because you had no need for writing?”

“Are you suggesting that writing is better than speaking?” Guujaaw asks in response to my question.

The answer seems obvious, I say. Things get distorted when people repeat them to one another, especially over long periods of time.

“Things get distorted in writing as well,” he says. “Oral histories from our people go back thousands of years. They are a living history. They provide a link between storyteller and listeners that written stories cannot. In fact, human intimacy and community can best come through oral communication.”

Guujaaw leans on a rock. “I’ll tell you a Haida story,” he says. “Don’t write it down. Listen. If you are busy writing, you will miss half the story. A story includes the telling and the listening.”

Hearing his story about how animals warn humans not to spoil the water stimulates my senses. Guujaaw’s voice, the breeze, the ocean, and the trees around us all flow through me. If I were reading the story, I would be alone in another world—and much less aware of my surroundings.

Plato would have said, “I told you so.” Living at a time when writing began to challenge Greece’s oral-based culture, he warned that writing would make people “trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. . . . They will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing.”

But Plato lived in the fifth century B.C., when reading was physically difficult. Books were papyrus scrolls often more than 60 feet [18 meters] long; the idea of pages, sparked in large part by the availability of parchment, emerged in Europe in the second century A.D. Space between words did not become standard in Western society until the seventh century. Long after Plato’s time, writing served mostly as an aid to memory, something to stimulate the spoken word. People read aloud, a practice that died slowly.

St. Augustine, one of the world’s leading scholars in the fourth century A.D., was shocked to come upon his mentor St. Ambrose reading silently. This transition from the spoken to the written word occurred because writing meets certain needs so much more effectively. Writing permits analysis, precision, and communication with future generations in a way not possible via the spoken word. The only way I know about St. Augustine’s experience is that he mentions it in a book.

Still, Plato was right—people in an oral culture need strong memories. I have forgotten most of Guujaaw’s story by the time we enter Ninstints, an old Haida village.

Ninstints was home to hundreds of Haida families in the mid-19th century, before white people landed. Now all that remains are the foundations of a few houses and some rotting totem poles. Today there are only about 4,000 Haida compared with 40,000 in the 19th century.

Despite such decline, Guujaaw insists that the Haida have not been defeated by people with writing. “We’ve been here on this land for thousands of years, and we’re still here,” he says. “Writing is not essential to living. People with writing are a brief chapter in our history.”

But Native American oral culture worked best when people went on long hunting or fishing trips and gathered around campfires every evening. Now modern devices like television discourage the sharing of oral traditions.

Days later I share this thought with Pansy Collison, a Haida who teaches high school in Prince Rupert, British Columbia. “Don’t forget that oral history is an essential part of our students’ identity,” she says.

Collison uses storytelling in the classroom to help her students learn their history and build pride in who they are. As part of this, her students write out the oral traditions of their family or clan—she relies on writing to preserve oral history.

As Collison shows me how these written lessons help invigorate oral traditions, I realize I am seeing another example of writing’s extraordinary flexibility. Most Native Americans lost ground to outsiders who had weapons and machinery that developed only in societies with writing. But now writing is vital to the Haida’s rejuvenation.

In the winter of 1981, after holding Wei in solitary confinement for more than two years, authorities realized they could not keep him from writing. They gave him a new ballpoint pen and better paper and authorized one monthly letter to his two sisters and brother.

In these letters Wei discussed art and offered advice on romance. He was forbidden to write about being beaten or deprived of sleep. He also could not mention his malnutrition, headaches, heart pain, diarrhea, and rotting teeth.

Wei never knew if his letters were delivered. He told his fiancée to find someone else, not knowing that she had already married.

Authorities also told Wei to write to government officials explaining his crime: trying to break up China. He did write to officials but told them they threatened national cohesion by suppressing freedom.

Maintaining national cohesion has always been a prime concern for China’s rulers, who learned thousands of years ago that sharing the same written language can unite people. In the third century B.C. Chinese people spoke at least eight languages and countless dialects, but with establishment of a unified empire and a standard system of writing around 200 B.C. everyone could read the same characters.

Joseph Stalin, who ruled the Soviet Union from 1928 to 1953, was a master of using writing to control people. Russia and Persia had divided Azerbaijan in the early 1800s. Shortly after taking power, Stalin feared the Azerbaijanis’ loyalty to their countrymen in neighboring Iran, formerly Persia. Hoping to divide the two groups, he encouraged the Soviet Azerbaijanis to emulate nearby Turkey and switch from the Arabic alphabet to the Latin alphabet.

By the 1930s Stalin, concerned about growing ties between Turkey and Azerbaijan, forced the Azerbaijanis to adopt Cyrillic, a script used for writing Russian and other Slavic languages. It had evolved from a script created by missionaries of the Orthodox Church in the ninth century A.D.

This alphabetic clash seems alive as I walk through Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital. Newspapers are in Cyrillic, labels on canned food are in the Western Latin alphabet or in the Turkish-style Latin with its umlauts and cedillas, and street signs are in freshly painted Azerbaijani Latin, which has “x,” “,” and “Q,” letters not found in the Turkish alphabet. There is no sign of Arabic letters.

“We chose Latin letters largely because they will help us be modern and will link us to the rest of the world,” Oruj Musayev, professor of English at the Azerbaijan State Institute of Languages, tells me. Musayev has just finished compiling the first Azerbaijani-English dictionary using Latin letters. “Our alphabet choice reflects geopolitics. Dropping Cyrillic meant moving away from Russia. Although we’re Muslim, we’re nonsectarian, so we didn’t want to use the Arabic alphabet, which would link us to the mullahs in Iran.”

The stakes are high. Azerbaijan has promising oil reserves and is courting Western buyers.

That the West relies on the Latin alphabet is a remnant of the Roman Empire. Latin letters have endured because they serve Western languages well—and using Latin letters has become associated with being “modern.”

The Latin alphabet’s ability to link Azerbaijan to the outside world becomes evident the next day when I drive to Lahic, a village isolated in the Caucasus Mountains. In addition to Azerbaijani, people in Lahic speak a dialect of Persian found nowhere else, which has no written form.

Aga Ismailov, a farmer at the edge of town, invites me for a special lunch. As Ismailov barbecues a lamb he slaughtered the day before, his children prepare plates of tomatoes, cucumbers, watermelon, cheese, and freshly baked olive bread.

“My youngest son is learning French and English in school,” Ismailov says, speaking in Azerbaijani. “He is the only one in the family who knows the Latin alphabet.”

He asks his son, nine-year-old Bakhish, to join us. “Good afternoon, how are you?” Bakhish says in English. He then shows me how he writes his lessons.

As Bakhish writes, I’m struck by the frequency of the upside-down e that I’d noticed all over Azerbaijan. Why select the Latin alphabet because it is used in most international trade and computer transactions and then give yourself a letter no one else has?

“It’s the sound somewhere between a and e, like ‘hat’ and ‘cat,’ and is the most common sound in our language,” Anar Rzayev, one of Azerbaijan’s leading writers and a member of parliament, explains the next day in Baku. “What you call the upside-down e dates back to early in our history. We kept it even when we had the Cyrillic alphabet. Maybe it’s stubbornness, but it’s a symbol of Azerbaijan.” Shortly after independence, he says, Azerbaijan’s parliament debated eliminating the but decided to keep it. Azerbaijan is a newly independent country with tremendous problems. Development of oil resources is still a dream, and the country’s annual per capita income is about [U.S.] $500, making it one of the world’s poorest nations. To have its own alphabet seems a strange indulgence.

“There’s nothing new about what’s happening in Azerbaijan,” Anar says. “An alphabet is a symbol of a country just like a flag. Why do you think different alphabets have appeared in the first place?”

Pride in his nation’s writing system helped give Wei his Chinese identity. That most Chinese written characters have remained essentially unchanged for more than 2,000 years provides an emotional and a practical tie to the past.

Many of his letters were to China’s leaders, whom he criticized. As punishment, authorities sometimes took away the pen they had given him, but other prisoners took apart pens, often stolen from guards, and smuggled them to Wei.

“Why write?” the guards asked. “No one will ever see your letters.”

In late 1993 authorities told Wei he would be released. They were trying to win international support for acting as host of the year 2000 Olympic Games. Wei, who had been in jail for nearly 14 years, refused to leave his cell without copies of his letters. “They’ve been lost,” he was told.

“You can find them,” he replied. Twelve hours later, the warden returned with his letters.

Six months later, after the Olympic Committee rejected China, Wei was re-arrested. State security seized his papers but failed to find the computer disks onto which his letters had been transcribed.

Tong Yi, the young woman who transcribed Wei’s letters onto computer disks, had extraordinary courage. She also had to master the Latin-alphabet keyboard, which requires up to five keystrokes for one Chinese character.

The extra work needed to enter Chinese into a computer raises an important issue. China may become the wealthiest country in the world; it already is a major factor in the international economy. As this economy relies more on computers, does the Chinese writing system put it at a disadvantage?

Usama Fayyad, a senior researcher at Microsoft Corporation, whose job is to think about the long-term future of computers and data storage, says technology will eventually offer efficient and economical ways to bypass keyboards. Voice and handwriting recognition, he tells me, could make it irrelevant which writing system is used. We’re in an office on Microsoft’s 260-acre [105-hectare] campus near Seattle. A painting of clouds floating through a blue sky covers one wall.

Fayyad also says that the distinction between an alphabet and Chinese characters does not matter in terms of how a computer operates. He explains that when you hit a letter on the keyboard, the computer enters that action into its memory as a number. Each letter is a different number, and a sentence inside the computer is a string of numbers. It’s up to the computer program to interpret the string of numbers as instructions.

Fayyad warns me not to get too romantic about computers.

“They’re great at bookkeeping,” he says, “but not yet great at recording impromptu ideas, thoughts, feelings. For that, paper is still far superior. You can hold it, fold it, put it in your pocket, look at it again later when it’s convenient.”

Fayyad’s praise of paper leads me to Joseph Jacobson, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He helped found a company, E-Ink, whose technology is trying to transform ink from a permanent medium to something that can change electronically.

“Paper is fantastic,” Jacobson tells me as we tour E-Ink offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “If books or newspapers on paper had not already been invented, if we lived in a world only with computer screens, then paper would be a breathtaking breakthrough. But the way we use paper is incredibly wasteful.”

Jacobson shows me the E-Ink technology he hopes will someday supplement ink on paper. It prints electronic letters on squares of plastic that can be erased and reused.

I ask Jacobson why he uses plastic. “Paper tears too easily,” he replies. “We’re working on a plastic substance that looks and feels like paper. You could photocopy it, even underline on it with a special pen.”

“Isn’t that a lot of trouble to solve a problem that doesn’t exist?” “A problem does exist,” Jacobson says. “Paper needs to be taken into the digital age. We need writing that changes on paper. Think about all the information people download from the Internet. They don’t want to read it on a computer screen, so they print it on paper. The demand for paper is soaring. Think of all the savings in cost and the pollution prevented if you needed less paper.”

As I watch the E-Ink letters blink, I feel as if I’m back in the cave at Sarabit el Khadim—looking at a piece of the future.

After Wei’s re-arrest in 1994 he was placed back in solitary confinement. Two walls of his new cell were glass, so constant monitoring could ensure he did not write. For more than six months not even his family knew whether he was dead or alive. In 1997 a book of Wei’s letters, The Courage to Stand Alone, was published in the United States. Tong Yi, who transcribed his letters, had been sentenced to two and a half years in a labor camp. After serving this time, during which she was sometimes beaten, she was allowed to leave China.

In the summer of 1997 I read The Courage to Stand Alone and follow news accounts of Wei’s treatment. He is frequently beaten and denied adequate health care. I fear he will die soon.

Then in November 1997 the Chinese government releases Wei, largely in response to international pressure, and puts him on an airplane to the United States. A few weeks later I meet him at his office in the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University.

I am startled by Wei’s smile and how well he looks. He explains that he can eat only soft food until his teeth are fixed, and sips tea as we talk.

“Writing,” he says, “kept me alive. I sometimes thought about a letter for a week before writing anything. It’s something that you must do even if you do not have the leisure of being in prison. To write, you must work methodically, forming your thoughts and prompting other people to think as they read. Writing requires work at both ends. That’s what makes it special.”

Wei plans to write a book about the experiences, feelings, and ideas he could not put in his letters, which he knew would be read by prison officials.

“I wish I could read it in Chinese,” I say.

Wei laughs. “You can learn,” he says, writing .

“It means ‘friendship,’” Wei says.

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