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  • There Is Never One English

    There Is Never One English

    Deepa Rajagopalan on creating space at the centre.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    This piece is in partnership with PEN Canada.

    ~

    Words carry weight because of the way you use them; how you place them in a sentence, how you pick one over the other, how you refuse to explain them. It gives everything away. It reveals you, the speaker. And when you have access to only one language – a language that fundamentally doesn’t recognise you, that doesn’t have words for what you are trying to say – you must have the courage to bend it like clay. 

    My parents met in college in Kerala, where they were studying to become medical imaging technologists, and soon after they graduated they got married and found jobs in Saudi Arabia. I was born and spent most of my childhood there. We lived in a small desert town that no one had heard of and where my parents worked at the main hospital. They quickly learned how to be quiet and blend in, like lizards in the desert.

    I went to the only international school that happened to teach an Indian curriculum. There were kids from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. My Grade Two class spoke nine different languages at home – none of them Arabic – so it helped that the official language of the school was English. I had a teacher who taught me how to fall in love with the English language. She taught me to pay attention to the words. I came home every afternoon with new ones on my tongue and tried them out in sentences. My parents, bewildered, bought dictionary after dictionary to satiate my curiosity. Ours was a small school, and most of our classrooms were in a portable trailer. We had a library that doubled as the computer room. I read every book in there at least twice. Wherever I went – in our close-knit Indian-Pakistani-Bangladeshi-Sri-Lankan-Filipino community – I found books to read, and people would lend them to me, no questions asked. The book I read the most was Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. The novel is set in Cornwall, England. There was nothing I had in common with the characters in this book, and yet I felt at home reading it. It was a source of comfort. It didn’t occur to me that I couldn’t see myself in that story, or any other story I had read until then.

    When I was eight, I tried to write a novel. All the characters in the novel had light skin and blue eyes. I didn’t have the imagination then to understand that I had subconsciously accepted that I was not at the centre – that I was, in my own life, at the edge, or even invisible, and was fine with it. I wrote essays and stories for my school magazine, but I wasn’t in any of them and, until years later, I didn’t think anything of it.

    ~ 

    I moved to a boarding school in Kerala when I was thirteen, and a few years after, I got my hands on this book everyone kept talking about which had won the Booker Prize in 1997. The author – this curly-haired beautiful woman – was all over the news because people outside India said that she was brilliant. She also kept getting into legal trouble in India for the words that she used. That book was The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. I had never read anything so beautiful before, and yet I was enraged by it. This book, unlike anything I had read until then, was about my people. The characters looked and sounded like us – my parents, my friends, their parents, extended family. Their concerns, their humour, their hope and hopelessness were familiar. I felt exposed, like the safety of being at the fringes had disappeared. There was nowhere to hide in three-hundred-something pages. Surely, that couldn’t be safe, right? Literature was no longer something I read from the sidelines. I was inside it. I put it away, and read Rebecca again, looking for comfort. But it didn’t feel the same anymore.

    Following the publication of The God of Small Things, an English historian told Arundhati Roy during a radio show in London that the very fact that she writes in English is a tribute to British Imperialism. He meant it as high praise, because he had loved her work. But the thing is, if you read The God of Small Things, even though it was written in English, it feels like it wasn’t. It feels like it was written in a version of Malayalam, or in something more than language. Something that captured the essence of a people so effectively that the language becomes irrelevant. The English historian probably felt the way I felt when I read Rebecca – in awe of something you cannot see yourself in – but unlike me, he was not comfortable or familiar with that feeling. It only makes sense that he felt compelled to give the credit for the brilliance of Roy to British Imperialism.

    Roy does not explain things that require explaining to the average English reader. She writes about Ayemenam like it is the centre of the world, like its people are the only people who matter. When she uses words that are specific to the place, to the people, she doesn’t explain them or apologise for them or put them in italics. She leaves them out there in the open, for everyone to judge and question and not understand. One reviewer of The God of Small Things on Goodreads gave it a scathing one-star review and said that it was just meaningless gibberish. They were so enraged at being forced to read about a community that didn’t include them, and instead of trying to understand it, they declared their hate for it. Roy is not ashamed of not being understood. She stands there, right at the centre, with a delicious, humble confidence, and says what she has to say. She uses the English language to decentralise itself. I think this is what Toni Morrison meant when she said ‘I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. I claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.’

    ~ 

    My great-grandmother lived with us for a couple of years during my late teens. She had, by then, started to succumb to old age. Her bladder had lost control, she needed support to walk, and she couldn’t hear very well. My mother had her move in with us to give her whatever dignity we could, but people treated her as something worthless. During that time, I found out that she had been a writer in her youth. A writer! I had known her all my life, and no one had ever mentioned this before. She wrote in Malayalam, which meant that, for me, her work was not accessible. I asked her to teach me the language. I could speak the language fluently, but the written word was foreign to me. The 56 letters of the alphabet – 15 vowels and 42 consonants – tortured me. The loops and circles and curves, and the subtle differences in sounds they caused remained unapproachable. Every day, I read with her for half an hour – loudly, so that she could hear. She was patient with the many mistakes I made. I got better – I could soon read billboards and destination signs on buses and, with difficulty, newspaper headlines. She died not long after, standing, holding onto a dresser. My mother said that she died peacefully, knowing that she had done something worthy in the last days of her life. 

    I lost the language soon after that. 

    I wonder what kind of a writer my great-grandmother was. I wonder if she wrote as if she, her people, our people, were at the centre of it. I wonder if she had written all the things she wanted to, without inhibition.

    When I first started writing seriously, I had already been in North America for almost a decade. Unlike my parents in Saudi Arabia, I didn’t need to camouflage myself to be safe. But I was, at first, apologetic for taking up space on the page, as if what I was writing about was too much, too little, too heavy, too silly, too trivial, too everything. But I was consumed by the desire to say exactly what I wanted to say. I turned to fiction, where I felt I could write from the centre of my life. What if I could give words to this strange, unmoored sense of belonging – of belonging nowhere and also anywhere? What if I could give the reader what they didn’t know they wanted? 

    On the page, unlike in the real world – or, worse, on social media – there is space for the nuances of who I really am. On the page, I feel safe to first present the box I was placed in, and then to shatter it, to be anywhere but in the box.

    After my short story collection, Peacocks of Instagram, came out, I got to travel to many literary festivals and talk about the book. I had dreamed of this for years. At many of those festivals, I had the indelible joy of people coming up to me to express how much they had loved my book. Some of them would go on to tell me about the one time they went to India in the 1970s or 1980s and educate me about a city or a practice or a custom they had encountered. They meant well, of course. They simply couldn’t see themselves in my stories and had to find a way to forge a connection. And instead of getting offended, I thought, maybe I got this right. Maybe I managed to create something good and specific – that I made someone who didn’t find themselves in it not only keep reading but come up to me and try to claim a part of it. Surely that should mean something?

    A reader who read a story in the book about a group of young South Indian girls learning Carnatic music at a Hindu temple in California asked me why there were no white people in the story. She seemed bewildered, offended even. I said it was because it was my story, and I wanted to place these scrawny little brown girls smack at the centre, as if no one else mattered. I said that I did it, because I wanted to do it. I said that I learned it from Arundhati Roy. I only said one of those things out loud, but I am a writer, and here, on the page, I have more courage.

    Deepa Rajagopalan is the author of the short story collection, Peacocks of Instagram, shortlisted for the 2024 Giller prize, and an Apple Books Best Books of the Year 2024. She won the 2021 PEN Canada New Voices Award for the title story of the collection. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in literary magazines and anthologies such as the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, the New Quarterly, Room, the Malahat Review, and the Notre Dame Review. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph.  

    Photo credit: Ema Suvajac

  • Missing Persons and Missed Connections

    Missing Persons and Missed Connections

    Em Dial on archives and invitations of silence.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    This piece is in partnership with PEN Canada.

    ~

    Please note the word ‘quadroon’ appears multiple times throughout this essay. This word has a violent history that is inextricable from racism, slavery, and eugenics. It is not a word for use by non-Black people.

    When I can’t sleep at night, I reach for the phone on my nightstand and type Craigslist into my browser. I am always instantly comforted by the white and soft grey background with all lower-case sans serif text, in a professionally hued deep azure blue that sings of the internet of the early 2000s. There is something reassuring about a vessel that remains the same as its content shifts, even if it is just an online classified website. My gaze drags over the options for where my midnight thought spiral could take me – I could buy a used sauna for one, I could take someone from New Mexico up on a housing swap, I could quit my job in favour of a gig at the Canadian National Exhibition. Yet, I always come back to the top of the home page. Under the first subheading, ‘community’, is what I am looking for: ‘missed connections’.

    Missed Connections is a board where people can anonymously describe an encounter with someone of interest; someone who slipped by before they could grab their contact information, or, oftentimes, even catch their name. It is an echo chamber for ships passing in the night. An archive of ephemera. If I had to craft an archetypical post, based on the hundreds that I have read over the years, it would sound something like:

    Dark, shoulder-length hair. Glasses. Red jacket.

    You passed by me in the Shoppers Drug Mart at Yonge and Dundas and asked if I knew if ibuprofen could be safely given to dogs. I said no and you laughed. I haven’t been able to get you off my mind since.

    If you see this, respond with what kind of hat I was wearing.

    My fascination with Missed Connections isn’t because I’m waiting for a response on a post about someone I passed on a sidewalk, or because I’m hoping for the flattering moment that I’ll read a post and think Wait, is that coffee shop encounter describing me? I read them because it feels like I’m bearing witness to the very human urge to try and figure out how to write into silence. How to archive a void.

    Many writers, especially writers from racialised backgrounds, work from fragmented histories, a product of the active and violent erasure, dispersal, and censoring by imperial and colonial forces of the necessary voices. In an attempt to address this wound, I have found that there can be an impulse to try and break apart this silence and rebuild the historical records that we deserve. But perhaps within Missed Connections is a lesson in how we can instead make language from silence. A language that is material.

    ~

    I’m in the middle of working on a collection about the archetype of the ‘quadroon’ – a word used to describe women of one-quarter African heritage who lived in the American South in the late 1700s and early 1800s. These women haunt the archive. By that, I mean only their outlines are present in the imprint of time, be it through history books or government records or popular culture. What fills those outlines is dependent on who is writing the journal entry, the census form, the novel. At times, the ‘quadroon’ is the meek, submissive concubine sold by her mother to be the second wife to a married white man. Other times, she is the bold seductress whose greed drives her to track down white men as if for sport. At times, she is undeniably Black. At times, so white that she is the lowest hurtle to a eugenicist’s utopia.

    I seek to write about this archetype because the sexualisation, the dehumanisation, and the tokenisation of the quadroon echo into the present day, into my life. And yet, when I try to reach back towards this echo, into the cave of history from which it reverberates, I come up empty handed. I have tried to comb through the archives for the voices of women who were categorised as ‘quadroons’, but their voices are missing, as were the voices of all Black women at this point in history, as are the voices of all who threaten the falsities of the archives by the simple fact of their living. I have tried to use the descriptions of ‘quadroon’ women that exist in the archives to deduce how these women may have lived their lives and felt in the process, which only produced a flat replication of stereotypes. I have tried to invent, assume, deduce. But the space remains, taunting me.

    But the task is as un-abandonable as it is insurmountable. I am finding with every artefact I encounter that the call of these women is only amplified by their absence. Perhaps this is what I feel compelled to capture. Not to reify their silence, but to testify to the necessity of remembering them. To witness. It is fitting that in the Christian etymology of the word, it is a translation of the Greek martys, or martyr. To witness is to place truth over self. To break apart language as a way of letting the dead in, as you lay awake, unable to sleep.

    ~ 

    Here is where, as of late, I have been turning to Missed Connections for guidance. I recently noticed something about the vast majority of posts on the classified board – here is a simultaneous refusal to let a fleeting connection go undocumented and an acceptance that it is not up to the writer of the post to bridge the gap between missing and found. It is up to the reader.

    Into the archive of Craigslist goes an outline of sorts, the few facts that we have – a red scarf, the setting of a grocery store. What comes next is internal; how did a smile from a stranger affect the speaker, how did it move them? Finally, there is an invitation, the desired person is asked to reach out from the void. There is an unstated assumption: the odds of the person who asked you about ibuprofen seeing your post on Craigslist has to be something like the odds of throwing a pea into a shot glass a hundred yards away. They are not going to see it. And yet, the impulse to invite a connection out of silence is followed.

    This is not to say that I am taking Missed Connections as a blueprint when writing into the wound of silence. I have encountered plenty of posts that have disturbed me deeply by their misogynistic and racist characterisations of the connections that have been missed. I am not moved by these posts, and in fact, find it disturbing that these posts at times so closely evoke through their racist caricatures the journal entries I have encountered in my research.

    I am most moved by the posts that are sparse – the ones that make me feel through fifteen words just how touching a half second can be. These posts are not denying the existence of the Missed in Missed Connections. They are also not letting the Connection go unspoken. They are acknowledging that the person on the other side of that shared gaze is there, in the world, and can fill out, around, between the fifteen words in the post for themselves.

    I have come to resist my urge to find or create or invent the voices of women categorised by a racist term and instead lean into the imprint that the silencing of them has left upon me. I am still refusing the historical silence that has been imposed upon them, but it is not my place to try and speak their words into existence. I am calling, inviting, conjuring them into my own corner of the archive.

    ~ 

    In an interview about her book-length poem, Zong!, M. Nourbese Philip says, ‘The silence is linked to what we can never tell, what we don’t know. That’s not something that sits well with Western approaches to knowledge capacity, where we feel that we have to find out everything we need to know.’ Leaning into the unknowing feels unnatural, especially as someone whose only language is English, who has only ever lived in the United States and Canada. The impulse to answer and complete is not easily undone. In fact, in this project of witnessing, this is a part of myself I am martyring. Laying to rest the desire to track down these missing persons, I am able to let these persons be reframed. Just because they are missing from view does not mean they lived lives as ephemera. They are full people, not outlines, and sitting with space and silence in my writing is one way to counteract the dehumanisation of the archive.

    ~ 

    As I write this, I do not know how you will fill in the spaces around my words. Perhaps we’ve crossed paths in a grocery store or breathed some of the same molecules flung across an ocean. Perhaps we’ve seen one another as spectral glimpses at the edges of a paragraph or as phantom shadows beneath letters on a page. If so, here’s my invitation.

    Em Dial (she/they) is a writer born and raised in the Bay Area of California, currently living in Toronto, Ontario. They are a Kundiman Fellow and recipient of the 2020 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award and 2019 Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award. The author of In the Key of Decay (Palimpsest Press, 2024), her work can also be found in the Literary Review of Canada, Arc Poetry Magazine, Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive (Nightboat Books, 2025), and elsewhere. 

    Photo credit: Mengwen Cao

  • Shadow Histories: Writing What You Don’t Know

    Shadow Histories: Writing What You Don’t Know

    Christine Wu on reimagining family history.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    This piece is in partnership with PEN Canada.

    ~

    Consider my parents’ first date, sharing

    what they have in common: a history of being possessed

    My parents’ first date shows up in my poem ‘Ancestry.com Has Nothing on Me’. It’s vague on the details, although I considered painting a more robust scene: a little cha chaan teng in Hong Kong where they shared milk tea and egg tarts, or perhaps a stop by a street vendor selling chai and samosas in India.

    The truth is, I don’t know what my parents did on their first date, or even what country it was in. What I do know: my father’s family spent much – or perhaps, all – of his childhood in India, my mother grew up in Hong Kong, and somehow their paths crossed before they moved overseas to start a family in Canada. Both my parents knew the taste of samosas and jalebi, of rice and lap cheong, of chilli chicken and Hakka noodles. They shared these foods with me during my childhood in Vancouver, where I grew up in-between cultures, constantly trying my best to fit in. What they didn’t share were the details that surrounded their childhoods, how they met, their migration to Canada, and the toll it took on them.

    I first came across the term ‘shadow histories’ in Jenny Banh’s essay ‘Chinese Restaurant Kids Speak about Labor, Lifeways, and Legacies’. Banh refers to a ‘shadow history’ of her family’s time in Southeast Asia that ‘would never be discussed’. Banh writes:

    here is a lot of silence and misdirection in [my mother’s] statements to me. Dare I say resistance? She withholds many things from me, and I have to guess or imagine what she means. I think my family history consists of many imaginaries within and between the generations. Maybe within me as well…

    Though this was my first time encountering the term “shadow history,” I immediately understood what Banh meant. A shadow history is an unspoken past that lurks in the background, often entangled in trauma, always actively haunting, yet never discussed or confronted head on. This was familiar to me in my lived experience with my family. Like Banh, I also had ‘a silent and evasive family,’ and I, too, learned ‘to not ask questions or talk too much.’

    As a writer, I write to understand myself, to process experiences and emotions, and to connect with others. Like many aspiring writers, I was taught the adage ‘write what you know’. It’s sound advice that often produces interesting writing from different lived realities. While writing my poetry collection Familial Hungers, however, I found myself returning to what I didn’t know – aspects of my family’s past that had grown entangled into my life. How and where, exactly, did my parents meet? What were their childhoods like? What buried memories do they carry every day? Over time, my relationships with my family origins have amassed fractures resulting in ongoing breaks in communication. As such, I found myself unable to ask about details from my family’s history.

    How, then, do you write about what you don’t know?

    As it turns out, writing what you don’t know is made up of research, speculation, and imagination. I wrestled with the incomplete – and possibly inaccurate – facts presented in my poem. Research provided context to some of my questions – Hong Kong was a British colony, then occupied by the Japanese, then a British colony again, before finally becoming a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. There was, in fact, a sizeable Chinese community in India, specifically in Kolkata. India was an official British colony from 1858–1947. The Sino-Indian war occurred in 1962. I also had bits and pieces I remembered from my childhood: my mother had a British passport, her father was a sailor who would bring home gifts, she once talked about her family needing to escape India to go back to Hong Kong; my father had a ‘difficult’ childhood. These memories allowed me to begin questioning and speculating: Did my father spend his entire childhood in India? Did his family stay during and after the Sino-Indian war? How did my mother meet my father if she was living in Hong Kong? Did my mother also spend time in India? Could I make up a fake first date for them in my poem? Was it disingenuous to do so?

    I found myself attempting to fill in the blanks of what I knew about my family history. Memory is famously unreliable, and my memories of what my mother did share with me in my childhood might be wildly inaccurate. What is the difference between truth and accuracy? How much do the details matter? My parents may never have even had a traditional first date, not the way I ask readers to imagine it in my poem. I ask the reader to imagine a whole host of probabilities whose details I myself don’t know: what it might have been like for my grandmother living through the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong and the subsequent British re-establishment; the realities of being Chinese in India during the Sino-Indian War; my parents’ emigration and their sense of unbelonging in Canada. These imaginaries float between fact and speculation, uncorroborated stories pieced together from bits and pieces that approximate and become a personal history. They’re held together with research, memory, and imagination. What I initially considered controversial – imagination – serves its purpose in revealing an emotional truth. The poem, then, is an imagined family history that may or may not be accurate, studded with interruptions from the history of British colonisation and its lasting effects.

    That said, I still worry about the accuracy of details, what my family might think when or if they read my poem, whether they might get caught up in the inaccuracy of the details, whether the emotional truth I am presenting rings true for them in the way it does for me. Whether that same truth will still resonate with me years down the line. As I worry, it occurs to me there are multiple definitions of worry: there is the commonly understood meaning of worry as related to anxiety, but there is also the way worry is used as a verb to describe repeatedly touching or disturbing something. A dog might worry at a bone, or a child might worry the edges of a blanket while falling asleep. While I write, I worry about the impacts of my imagined details while also worrying at the details – changing the location of a first date from a cha chaan teng in Hong Kong to a street vendor in India to something else entirely until the scene feels right. Maybe this worry is part and parcel of writing what I don’t know: doing my best to present an emotional truth while holding onto uncertainty, worrying the details, contemplating their fuzzy edges, and hoping what emerges rings true.

    Christine Wu is a Chinese Canadian poet who lives in and writes from Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia, Canada), the unceded and ancestral territory of the Mi’kmaq people. She was the 2023 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award winner and a finalist for the 2022 Writers’ Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Her first poetry collection, Familial Hungers was published by Brick Books in 2025.

    Photo credit: Indigo Clarke Media

  • Kurdishness: A Matter of Existence and Non-Existence

    Kurdishness: A Matter of Existence and Non-Existence

    Nurcan Baysal on Kurdish language, culture and identity. Translated by Nazım Dikbas.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    It is 2 January 2017, a new year has only just arrived, it is a cold – very cold – day, and here I am trying to enter Şırnak city centre. An eight-month curfew ended only a few days ago. A many-kilometres-long queue of vehicles is lined up at the entrance of the city. And the queue is moving very slowly because every vehicle has to pass through several checkpoints. I wait for a while, then I decide to walk into Şırnak. I ask the driver to wait for me in the car, and set off on foot towards the checkpoint.

    It resembles a border crossing rather than a regular control point. A large, semi-secluded zone has been erected from concrete blocks and barbed wire. Within this zone, there are tracks like those you encounter at border crossings. They have even labelled them: Track 1-Cabin, Track 2-Cabin, Track 3-Cabin, Track 4-Cabin. At the entrance to the zone, female and male police officers first carry out a body search. Then our identity cards are collected for a criminal and administrative record check through GBT, the General Information Gathering System. Fifteen minutes later, our identity cards are returned and we enter the zone, pass through the tracks and the concrete blocks, and finally exit. It is at this precise point that I notice a fabric banner hanging across the entrance to the city: ‘Şırnak is a Turkish province.’

    I begin to walk uphill towards the city centre. Soon, I meet up with a friend, a local. We pass through demolished neighbourhoods. Şırnak is a city I know very well, but I cannot see a single street, park or building I recognise. A while later, there is only emptiness left around me – a flat emptiness that at its very end meets the grey sky. I am walking in emptiness. Then I ask my friend, ‘What about the marketplace? Where is the marketplace?’ ‘This vacant spot, here, this is it,’ she responds. ‘This is exactly where the marketplace was.’ I am horrified. I collapse onto a rock on the ground. The tears I have managed to hold back since the morning begin to flow. ‘Gone! Gone!’ I cry. “Şırnak is gone!’

    Şırnak was only one of many Kurdish cities destroyed during the curfews and clashes of 2015 and 2016. The city has – or perhaps I should say had – twelve neighbourhoods, of which eight were completely destroyed. Şırnak, as we once knew it, was no more. The same can be said for Sur, Nusaybin, Yüksekova, Cizre and Silopi. Ancient Kurdish towns and cities, centuries, even millennia old, destroyed within the space of a few months. We were no more.

    This was not only a physical destruction. After August 2015, Kurds, as a people, were erased from many fields of social life in Turkey – from local administrations and civil society to culture and arts. The Kurdish issue suddenly became ‘an issue of terrorism.’ We, writers and human rights defenders who made known the rights violations taking place in the area, were ‘supporters of terrorism.’ Kurdish politicians and activists were ‘members of a terrorist organisation.’ We had gone back 40 years. Kurds no longer existed; instead, there were people who, when they walked on snow, made the sound ‘kart-kurt.’ There was no Kurdish issue; there was a terrorism issue. A place called Kurdistan had never existed. Not only mainstream media, but many others, from publishing houses to art galleries and theatres, began to censor Kurds and work related to the Kurdish issue. Suddenly, they acted as if a people that form a quarter of Turkey’s population – 20 million people, 20 million citizens – had disappeared. As if they had been cast into a dark well. Life went on, as if the curfews didn’t exist, as if there was no destruction and violence in the Kurdish provinces, as if fires weren’t raging across Kurdish land, as if people weren’t dying every day.

    Once upon a time, when the Kurds did exist

    Of course, this was not our first ‘disappearance.’ According to the ups and downs of the state’s Kurdish policy over the past century, we have sometimes existed, and sometimes we haven’t.

    In the late 80s and in the 90s, we did not exist. One of the first sentences we heard from our teachers at school was ‘There are no Kurds, they are all simply mountain Turks.’ And we, too, after all, wanted to be ‘Turkish and happy’ as our Oath proclaimed, mandatorily read out and repeated every single day at schools across the country before lessons started.

    Thus, Kenan Evren, the general who came to power with the 12 September 1980 military coup d’état and was President throughout my childhood years, declared from our single-channel TVs: ‘There is no such thing as a Kurd. This word is in actual fact a concept that derives from the sounds of “kart, kurt” which our people in the southeast make when they walk across the snow on the ground.’ We were children then, and we listened to the sounds we made as we walked on snow, and we tried our best not to make those ‘kart, kurt’ sounds. Tansu Çiller, a Prime Minister in the 90s, confirmed our non-existence, and often said on TV ‘There are no Kurds, there are terrorists.’

    In any case, all along, we ‘terrorists’ were being physically destroyed. Our homes and neighbourhoods were emptying rapidly. Young Kurds were taking to the mountains in large numbers, and every day our number was on the decline. Some of us died in murders committed by ‘unknown assailants.’

    After a lengthy period for us in limbo, Erdoğan, who came to power in the early 2000s, acknowledged our existence and called us his ‘Kurdish brothers and sisters.’ We were surprised: out of the blue, we existed again. The official Kurdish TV channel TRT Şeş was launched with a grand ceremony, departments of Kurdish language were opened at universities, and we regained the banned village and street names that had been changed in the 90s. Turks and Kurds together, we danced the halay, accompanied by Kurdish music. Hadn’t we been brothers and sisters for centuries, after all?

    That brotherhood and sisterhood didn’t last long. When the peace process abruptly ended in July 2015, the time of non-existence began for us once again. Erdoğan began by announcing that ‘There is no Kurdish issue,’ adding ‘It would be discrimination to use the phrase “Kurdish issue”.’ Eventually he, too, ended up declaring, ‘There is no Kurdish issue, there is a terrorism issue.’

    The war waged by kayyıms on Kurdish language and culture

    Once the state decides you do not exist, it naturally has certain implications for your life in all its aspects.

    On the morning of 11 September 2016, on the eve of a religious holiday, a new word entered our vocabulary: kayyım. Kurdish mayors were sent to prison, and the appointment of the first kayyıms – essentially unelected government officials replacing elected officials, – began. On 11 September 2016, kayyıms were appointed to two provincial municipalities and 25 district municipalities, and within a matter of a few months, kayyıms were in charge of 95 of the 102 municipalities won by representatives of the Kurdish movement in local elections.

    Once the kayyıms were appointed, they set about destroying all that belonged to the Kurds. They began by demolishing symbols and monuments of Kurdish culture and history. From Orhan Doğan to Ehmedê Xanî, from Roboski to Uğur Kaymaz, all the sculptures and monuments in the region associated with Kurdish culture, or which referred to massacres committed by the state, were demolished. Then it was time, once again, to change the names of our main streets and side streets. All Kurdish names, including those given to parks, were replaced with Turkish names. Women’s centres were closed, cultural centres were closed, all that we were proud of in our cities was destroyed in a few months. Theatres, multilingual nurseries, libraries, music academies – all institutions that sought to keep Kurdish culture alive – were shut down. At the local elections held on 31 March 2019, the Peoples’ Democratic Party HDP once again won 69 municipalities, including three metropolitan municipalities. A few months later, kayyıms were appointed in Kurdish provinces and the newly elected mayors were sent to prison. The votes of millions of Kurds were ignored. Those kayyıms are still in office today.

    This non-existence is reflected in our language, in our land, in everything about the Kurds. A piece of land, Kurdistan as a geographical territory, was made to disappear, just like the Kurds. The word Kurdistan, used in the Grand National Assembly of Turkey (TBMM) without causing any controversy during the peace process, was banned once the process was shelved. When the word was used, it was not taken down in parliamentary minutes and instead recorded as ‘X’. Members of parliament who used the word faced disciplinary investigations. Erdoğan, who in his speeches during the peace process had acknowledged the ‘existence of Kurdistan,’ now did not hold back from regularly telling Kurds who criticised him to ‘clear off to Kurdistan.’ In March 2019, in a speech he made in Gündoğan, he addressed HDP Co-chairperson Sezai Temelli with the words, ‘There is no Kurdistan here. If you are so desperate, there’s one in the north of Iraq. Clear off there.’

    The situation is no different in parliament. Right after the end of the peace process, in November 2015, Leyla Zana’s speech in parliament was X’d. Since that day, no Kurdish has been allowed into parliamentary minutes. The mother tongue of at least 20 million citizens has become a language that gets X’d in the parliament that is supposed to represent those citizens.

    From the days in the 40s, when Musa Anter was beaten up for whistling in Kurdish, we have arrived at the present day, when Dicle University students are jailed and prosecuted for precisely the same offence. From the 90s, when the great singer Ahmet Kaya was physically attacked for stating at a music awards ceremony that he planned to record a song in Kurdish, we arrive at the present day, when wedding-hall singers are detained for singing in Kurdish. In the last decade, Kurdish-language schools, Kurdish-language newspapers and magazines, Kurdish-language nurseries and Kurdish-language institutes at universities have all been closed. It is the 1940s all over again.

    The people of this ‘unknown language’ have no value in public policies and public services either, of course. Today, the Ministry of Health publishes its brochures in six languages besides Turkish to provide better services. Those languages are French, Arabic, English, Russian, German and Persian. No services are provided in the language of its Kurdish citizens that form at least a quarter of the country’s population. In a similar manner, the Women’s Emergency Support App (KADES) of the General Directorate of Security provides services in six languages but not Kurdish. This is how the directorate introduces its KADES app on their official web site: ‘In six languages, only a single click away, in support of women.’ Even in an application aimed at protecting the safety of and preventing violence against women, there is no Kurdish, the mother tongue of citizens that form around a quarter of this country’s population.

    We Kurds have not existed in the brochures of the Ministry of Health, in the announcements made on aeroplanes, in services provided at court houses. But it goes beyond that: we seem not to exist at all. Our language does not exist, our culture does not exist, our songs do not exist, our holidays do not exist, our elected officials do not exist. We Kurds don’t even exist in that single click offered by the app of the General Directorate of Security. And to be frank, it is painful to know all this.

    Now, in the last few months, a new process has begun between the state and the PKK. The state calls it the process ‘Turkey without terror,’ while we Kurds prefer to call it the ‘peace process.’ Following the PKK’s decision to lay down arms and dissolve itself, we Kurds expect the state to take steps towards democratisation and, most significantly, the recognition of our existence, language and culture, with protection provided through constitutional guarantee. To be frank, we are tired, after a century of struggle between existence and non-existence. But we wish, at least, to leave our children a future where they won’t have to struggle to prove that they exist.

    Ew Dibêjin ‘Hûn Tunene’; Em Dibêjin ‘Em Hene!’

    Despite the policies of non-existence that have continued for the past 100 years, the fact is: we do not suddenly disappear when the state claims we do not exist. When our language is banned, we try other ways to keep it alive. When our political parties are closed, we open new ones, and choose new names for them, with acronyms formed of new combinations of letters. When our songs are banned, we whistle them. When our holidays are banned, we light our traditional Newroz fires within the safety of our gardens, or a secluded corner of our neighbourhoods. When our culture is prohibited, we become dengbejs, folk singers who keep alive Kurdish stories old and new, and we transmit our culture from one generation to the next through kilams, our songs that tell our stories. When our homes are burned down, when our villages are forcibly evacuated, we stubbornly and persistently – and sometimes despite knowing that our homes may be razed to the ground over and over again – return to our villages, and rebuild. When our trees and forests are burned, we feed the roots that remain, water them, strive to make them grow again. When our towns are levelled to the ground, we weave back their texture from scratch, knot by knot. It takes years, it takes decades, sometimes even a century. But we do not give up on ourselves, our language, our culture, our roots.

    Although the Kurdish policy of the state has varied over the past century, in a sense, there has been continuity on the Kurdish side. In the face of all these policies of oppression and intimidation, Kurds continue to sing their songs, celebrate Newroz, dance the halay and speak their languages. Although there have been various challenges that have forced them to withdraw and regroup, the Kurdish people have never forsaken their identity, language and culture. The type of struggle may vary, but their demands do not. Those demands have been there for a century. The Kurdish people won’t step back from their demands, because without the fulfilment of those demands life will not be worth living.

    It doesn’t matter within which country’s borders they live. The story of the Kurds has remained unchanged for the past century. This is a story that has been kneaded with blood, persecution, pain and struggle. A century-long denial continues. Yet neither the Kurdish issue nor the Kurds disappear simply by saying ‘they don’t exist.’

    For Kurds, this is a matter of existence.

    Let me end this piece with a phrase often used by Kurds:

    Ew Dibêjin ‘Hûn Tunene’; Em Dibêjin ‘Em Hene!’

    They say ‘you don’t exist’. We say, ‘we exist!’

    This phrase is, I guess, the summary of the past century for us Kurds.

    Nurcan Baysal is a Kurdish human rights defender, journalist and writer from the city of Diyarbakir. She is one of the founders of Diyarbakır Political and Social Research Institute and the Platform to Save Women Kidnapped by ISIS. She is also one of the Middle East advisors of the Global Fund for Women and the Urgent Action Fund for Feminist Activism.

    She is the author of O Gün (That Day); Ezidiler: 73. Ferman (Ezidis: 73rd Decree); O Sesler (Those Voices); a book of short stories, Yok Zamanı (The Time of Nothingness); co-author of Kürdistan’da Sivil Toplum (Civil Society in Kurdistan); and, most recently, We Exist: Being Kurdish in Turkey. 

    She was awarded the Brave Women Journalists Award by the Italian Women Journalists Association in 2017, named 2018 Global Laureate for Human Rights Defenders at Risk by Front Line Defenders, and won the DW Freedom of Speech Award in 2020.

  • The Wolf No Longer Lives in the Dark Hallway

    The Wolf No Longer Lives in the Dark Hallway

    Magdalena Blažević on the massacre of Kiseljak.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    I learn from my sister’s face that fear is cold and has colours. While we hide with our mother beneath the stairs in the hallway, my sister’s face evolves like a bruise – purple turns to yellow, yellow to green. Up until that moment, nothing scared me more than the darkness in the hallway. There lived my nightmare. The wolf.

    From my mother’s movements, I know that fear is both panic and composure. It’s a hot summer’s day, yet she takes off her shorts and pulls on her winter velvet trousers. In the face of male assault, women fear more than just death. The threat is no longer imaginary, but clearly visible through the window. One cannot control fear. I tremble with hysterical laughter when my mother warns us that the soldiers have already entered the village, that we must stay silent when they arrive. Because of my innate boldness, she addresses me especially.

    My hands are clenched, but I don’t think about fear. Only of escape. In my child’s mind we all survive. There is no other outcome.

    Twenty-five years later, I photograph the remnants of that time. My grandmother’s house, the basement, the apple tree and wooden bench, the railway, the field, and the Bosna River. Crime scenes and escape routes. I collect photos, documents, objects. I record the testimonies of survivors. Witnesses. I am a witness myself. I read mine and my mother’s diaries, our letters – everything that will lead me back to that time, to the day I was forced to grow up.

    ~ 

    As a child, I am a believer. I think death means that the souls of the deceased are in heaven, but I don’t think about the souls of those who survived. The morning after the attack is equally horrifying for the survivors. The narrow dusty road is soaked with blood. It is a hot August day. The blood, thickened by heat, lures the flies. Someone has to wash the concrete in front of the house, to take a shovel and scrape off the top layer of bloodied soil and dump it somewhere, soil that should have been buried with the dead. I know that now.

    This task was given to our grandfather. In my child’s mind, he is the strongest man in the world, maybe even the scariest. At that time nobody knew that he was the weakest, that he would eventually fall to pieces and commit a crime himself.

    The testimonies lead me to an empty garage that, at that time, served as a morgue. I think about how someone had to lay dead bodies on plastic sheets, in several rows, close the garage doors and leave them there overnight. Someone had to take photos of the motionless faces. At the time, we believed that the photos would serve as evidence in a trial that never began, for a crime that no one was ever held accountable. It is likely that they never will be.

    The summer smells of tar-soaked railroad ties, warm blackberries, and crushed tomatoes. It is yellow and dusty. Only the forest and the birds are black. I stand on the balcony of my house and call Ivana, my fourteen-year-old cousin, to come and see how I have decorated my room. She waves at me, and says she will come later, she has other things to do right now. It is the last time I see her. She was killed in front of her home on August 16, 1993. On that narrow dusty road.

    At that time, we live in a different village across the Bosna River, but that day we return to pick fruits and vegetables from the garden. Everything is already overripe. If it rains, it will rot. We return by nightfall. Back then I didn’t know that daylight is scarier than the night.

    In the village across the Bosna River, we live in a house in front of which grows a large weeping willow. Its branches hang down to the ground, and it is dark inside the canopy. The willow tree is my tent. A hiding place. It’s where I read my first book for adults, The Prisoners by Lajos Zilahy. It is the only book that I have, rescued from someone’s home library. The love story of Peter and Miet. Children gather around me as I read aloud. There is no radio, no TV. We discover worlds through books. They listen carefully during the sex scenes; they don’t care for the rest of the story. I keep the book under my pillow in the room where I sleep. The room is small, there is only enough space for the bed and a narrow cabinet. In it I find expired cake decorations; remnants of shredded coconut, dried almond flakes, colourful sprinkles. I chew and swallow. My stomach growls. I read and think about how, one day, I will meet my own Peter, and I will cry when we say goodbye to each other.

     ~ 

    As we flee, I realise that there is a wild animal inside me. I run faster than anyone. I leap across the dusty road into dry grass in a single bound, crawling, tearing, scratching my way forward. I crash through the cornfield in front of me, the gravel from the railway scatters beneath my feet. I don’t hesitate, not even at the river. It’s deep and fast even in summer. I take off my shoes, I can’t afford to ruin them, I have no others. Beneath my bare feet moves mud and slimy river weeds. The water rises to my armpits. Just a little further, and we will be safe.

    I’ve learned that fear comes with a tightened throat and lungs gasping for air. I can hear my grandmother’s rasping breath as she lowers herself onto the concrete steps in front of the house and begins naming the dead. Liar! I think. She must have lost her mind. My mother gives her sweetened water, but grandmother’s throat is dusty like the road, it cannot be quenched by water.

    We don’t go to Ivana’s funeral. The cemetery is on a hill, exposed, visible from the woods like the palm of a hand. To me, she is not dead, just gone. The first proof of her death is a photo from the morgue. It was published by Globus, a Croatian weekly newspaper, in an article about war crimes in Central Bosnia. The entire family is at our house. There are too many people crammed into the room. I sit on the floor. We are all silent. The newspaper passes from hand to hand, wet from sweaty fingers. The children look too. There is no point in hiding anything from us anymore. When I see the photo from the morgue, the wild animal inside me howls. I’m twelve, and I’m scared that we will forget what happened to us.

    Years later, I begin writing the story about that summer of fear, death, loss, but also of love. While I’m trying to find and collect material for my novel, I go to that village across the Bosna River. I take my camera everywhere. I walk along the battered road. It’s late summer again. The weeping willow tree has been cut down, and the house renovated. It’s not the same anymore, there is no point in taking photos. An old man is tending to the front lawn. Should I go up to him, tell him that we once lived here. I walk towards the fence then change my mind. I’m not sure it would mean anything to him. I continue down the road to the house where Ivana used to live. It began decaying before it was even finished. I take photos from a distance. I still remember the smell of dust, kitchen grease, and mice. The house is a dark blot in the middle of a blooming meadow.

      ~ 

    Twenty days after the attack, I learn that a wild animal lives inside our grandfather too. He kills a man, out of rage. They occasionally let him out of prison on the weekends. His thick, unruly hair is now cut short, his glittering eyes visible. He has a rifle, for sure, and he will kill us all. I think. I run inside the house; afraid he will chase me.

    I tried to find documents from the trial, to reach more witnesses. I find almost nothing, and nobody from the village wants to talk about it. They know I’m a writer, that anything they say will end up in my book. My grandfather remains an enigma. Both, in life, and in the story.

    We returned to the village across the Bosna River in the winter of 1993. It’s safe now, but we are still afraid. We live in soot and cold. Inside, the walls are black from the flame and smoke of the oil lamps, and outside we choke on coal smoke from the chimneys. Winter is black, like a burnt forest, like birds.

    We only heat one room in the house, and life happens around the stove. I’ve learned how to make candy from melted sugar and my fingers now smell like caramel. We taste our first candy in a long time. We go to Ivana’s grave and leave some for her under the wooden cross, next to a bouquet of evergreen branches decorated with Christmas ornaments. Somebody takes a photo of us children, standing beside her grave. Small, serious faces. I can remember heavy snowflakes.

    At that time, I read even more. On my shelves there are collected works of Ivo Andrić, Marija Jurić Zagorka, and Russian classics. By the stove, I develop an addiction to escaping into fictional worlds, and all I can think about is how to leave this place. I’ll be Countess Nera. Anna Karenina. 

    My bedroom is freezing. To reach it, I have to pass the dark hallway, past the staircase under which the wolf lives. I no longer run in fear with my eyes closed. I’m no longer afraid of the dark, or the wolf. Only of the forest in broad daylight.

    Under my pillow I still hide books.

    And keep running, running…

    Magdalena Blažević, born in Žepče in 1982, is a writer from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her stories and her debut novel, In Late Summer, have been translated into several languages, and awarded numerous prizes, including the 2022/2023 Tportal Award for Best Croatian Novel. 

    Photo credit: Marijana Baskarad

  • Hip-Hop & the Apocalypse

    Hip-Hop & the Apocalypse

    Jordan Aitcheson-Labarr on viewing a turbulent world through Hip Hop

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    What is the utility of art in a world in the throes of destruction? Every day we bear witness to people across the globe made homeless by climate catastrophe, families and homes brutalised by bombs, the greed of billionaire oligarchs and tech CEOs tipping countries across the world into fascism. As multiple crises compound one another, I have found myself renegotiating what I think about art and its usefulness. It’s been hard to imagine that things will get better before they get worse. And little by little the avenues of my liberatory imagination have begun to dwindle, and art has begun to look more like a refuge for distraction or posturing.

    It feels like we’re entering an epoch of apocalypses, but so few of us have the energy left to do anything about it. How do you combat engineered moral apathy on such a scale? From which wells can we draw to ignite our collective creative energies? How can we hope to weather what comes?

    I don’t know, nor do I think the answer is simple. But as the days and weeks lap into one another, a constant that has helped dispel some of my hopelessness and remind me of art as something other than escape has been Hip-Hop. What we know today as Hip-hop was birthed from a creolised synthesis of different diasporic cultures mixing in the heart of the Bronx, conceived as an expressive tool to give voice to the creativity, love, and anger of the residents of one of New York’s most impoverished boroughs. Hip-hop emerged from the harshest of conditions to consecrate itself as a precious platform for stories of love and histories of rebellion.

    Genres analogous to Hip-hop have always been present in my life, with Reggae, Dub, Jazz, and Soul featuring as background music to memories of weekends cleaning the house or family dinners around the table. I see my love for Hip-Hop as a natural evolution from the habitus that was being built around me. The first Hip-hop album I remember hearing was College Dropout by Kanye West in 2005. My older brothers were able to sneak the CD away from my Dad when he wasn’t looking, and in our bedrooms we’d huddle around a busted CD player and listen to a young man from Chicago wax lyrical about his troubled life and hunger for ambition. I didn’t quite understand what I was hearing at the time, yet there I was, a 5-year-old walking around the house rapping “I’ve been working this grave-shift And I ain’t made shit/ I wish I could buy me a spaceship and fly”. What I knew at the time about the perils of retail labour and low wages was next to nil, but there was something both fantastical and familiar about the worlds contained within those records. It was only when I got older that I began to fully grasp the financial struggles that coloured my early years, making me feel things at the time that I couldn’t explain. Perhaps that’s why I felt an affinity to the music; it was offering words and insights to help me better situate my own experience in histories and systems so much bigger than me.

    From Blues to Gospel to Negro Spirituals, Hip-Hop follows in a long line of Black musical traditions which oppressed peoples have used  to envision alterities and fantasise better futures. The throughline between the music I grew up with and the music of my parents is that it was always more than artistic expression, it was a portal into a Black interiority that contained love, misery, and plans for escape and salvation. Hip-Hop is just one of the newer sonic iterations of what Black people across the diaspora have done since surviving their abduction from Africa and the harrowing middle passage.

    Although the Kanye of today is a gross and tragic shell of his former self, I think the essence of Hip-Hop can most aptly be captured in that one bar of his in Gorgeous:‘Is Hip-Hop just a euphemism for a new religion? / The soul music of the slaves that the youth was missing.’ For me, there is something integral in this short verse – in how it connects Hip-Hop’s ties to the past and illustrates the link between the music of people who were grappling with their own apocalypses – and the music of today. It would be remiss to ignore the context of chattel slavery that made the sonics of enslaved people so urgent and complex; there are, of course, stark differences between the liberties we find ourselves afforded in relation to those before us. But the world in which we find ourselves comes with its own challenges. So when faced with forces seemingly beyond our control, looking back to when a group of people suffered an apocalyptic event can provide perspective to look at the tools they used to help them survive. The music of our past – and by extension art – has been used to communicate and contain powerful messages, evoking ideas of hope, while also having hidden messages codified in them to aid in escape and community building. Those same mechanics were not lost in time but trickled down and manifested themselves in the melodies and rhymes of some of my favourite MCs. From Mos Def’s ‘Umi Says’ to Noname’s ‘Rainforest’, to Denzel Curry’s ‘Walkin’ – Hip-Hop’s more radical essence has somewhat endured.

    Yet, as is the case with many other counter cultural forms, over time, it has become subsumed in a capitalist model of production that has championed consumerism over struggle, making hyper-visible braggadocio and machismo in some of the genre’s biggest stars of today (think Drake pushing 40 and still rapping about how many women he’s slept with and how much money he has). Despite this, the genre is still very diverse and is more than the sum of its parts, with artists still managing to retain some essence of what made the genre so impactful to me as a child. Some of my first pieces of writing were 16 bars I’d try to frantically write out to rap over random type beats on YouTube, or to have freestyle battles with my brothers and cousins and friends. It was the first form of poetry that made sense to me, when all other forms I encountered in the Western cannon made me see myself in the third person, through the eyes of some European writer I was told I had to respect. Beyond seeing the value of Hip-Hop as an artform born from strife, I don’t have to listen to a song delivering some grandiose political treatise for me to consider it radical. Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is arm someone with a framework to regulate and understand themselves when they feel like everything else around them doesn’t make sense. For me, the Hip-Hop album that would do that was Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly.

    I was 15 when I first heard To Pimp a Butterfly and had been following Kendrick’s journey since Section 80 and good kid, m.A.A.d city, but nothing could have prepared me for the beautiful chaos this album delivered. The album wears its influences on it sleeve, with elements of Jazz and Funk all over the album, colliding to illustrate the joy, pain, and contradictions endemic in Black America (and across the diaspora). The album is aspirational in what it attempts to strive towards, namely a reclamation of the humanity Kendrick feels has been stripped away from him and other Black Americans having grown up under carceral logics that negate their self-confidence and modes of expression. The album endeavours to be a wake-up call to love yourself despite the ways the world has hurt you. It was no surprise to me then that when the uprisings of 2020 began, and the air was electrified by a chorus of shouts demanding the deconstruction of systems of oppression, songs like Kendrick Lamar’s Alright were playing at protests.

    Alright encapsulates the undulating hope one must have to imagine a world beyond the pain you might be experiencing. The track’s opening lines (also an interpolation of a speech from Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple) demand your attention by focussing on the mortal danger of life under the intersecting systems of racism and poverty, and how these systems make marginalised people combatants in games we never asked to play. As the song continues, it reaches its hook and culminates in the refrain ‘We go’n be alright’. It’s these few lines that you could hear often repeated at different protests, from the time of the songs release up until the uprisings of 2020 and today. The song borrows from the repetitive nature integral in the spirituals of the past in how its mantra-like chants engage audiences in a rhythm you can hold onto that matches your movement as you march along with it. I think songs like ‘Alright’ functionally and thematically hit that same resonance as the music from which they descend: they uplift and inspire us to resist the overbearing assaults on our daily lives and liberties. 

    Kendrick commented on the song in an interview with NPR some years ago, “Four hundred years ago, as slaves, we prayed and sung joyful songs to keep our heads level-headed with what was going on… Four hundred years later, we still need that music to heal. And I think that Alright is definitely one of those records that makes you feel good no matter what the times are.” While Hip-Hop can encode in its lyrics a belief that things can change, and that there is something better waiting for you beyond the hell you might be experiencing, it can also offer glimpses into much bleaker realities. Realities that assert that our world is beyond saving, that the damage is done, that – to borrow from one of Public Enemy’s lyrics – ‘Armageddon, it been in effect.’

    I was 17 when I first heard Kendrick’s next album, and the world was emerging into a different place for me. I was entering my last few years of secondary school and beginning to question what it was I wanted to do with my life. I was lost and perhaps yearning for that same ecstatic feeling I was used to getting when a new Kendrick album came out. So, I pressed play, and then my optimism fell apart.

    In DAMN, Kendrick takes a decidedly darker approach, with his machinations taking on dystopic tones. The world reflected in it is steeped in pain, a world Kendrick feels is out of control and out of sync with the hopes and dreams he once had. There doesn’t seem to be a way he believes we can remain like this. There is no tomorrow. These thematic threads appear in songs like FEAR,where he recounts instances of living closely with death, doubt and fear, opening the song with a monotone mantra that sluggishly spills his woes. 

    Why God, why God do I gotta suffer?
    Pain in my heart carry burdens full of struggle
    Why God, why God do I gotta bleed?
    Every stone thrown at you restin’ at my feet
    Why God, why God do I gotta suffer?
    Earth is no more, won’t you burn this muh’fucka?

    It’s easy to see where his cynicism may have sprouted from. In the year before this album’s release, Black Lives Matter, as a movement and protest, gained significant traction in the wake of the brutal executions of two black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, by police officers in Louisiana and Minnesota. In conjunction with his growing rise to rap stardom and fans’ expectations of his political responsibility and other personal demons, DAMN culminates in a striking repudiation that the world as we know it can’t be saved. 

    It’s hard to salvage belief in a world you have become acquainted with through violence, and even harder to think it can be saved. Some Hip-Hop artists recognise this and continue a tradition of earthly rejection used by their ancestors, with folk music and Negro Spirituals possessing thematic similarities in how they can dismiss our material world in search of something else. Those who have abandoned notions of the world’s salvation are not inherently negative or naïve but seek to reemerge from the social relations that bind them into something new.

    It’s been eight years since DAMN came out, yet we still find ourselves surrounded by images of death and state violence – continually enduring small daily traumas and sometimes feeling like it will not get better. Death by a thousand cuts. As artists and creatives living in an age in which we are encouraged to dismiss critical analysis as wasteful and see art as pure entertainment and escape, tracing the threads of Hip-Hop, from the past to the present, has helped me to continue seeing art as a weapon capable of arming you with a means to communicate and inspire. Hip-hop has reminded me that this latest iteration of terror only follows in a long line of others that our ancestors have fought in many forms.

    In a video on the rap artist MAVI, writer Tosin Balogun discussed hip-hop and its place in times of crisis:

    Creating art out of suffering is a haunting, if not a futile endeavour. Deep down, we must know we can’t be saved by colours on a canvas or words on a page. We must know we are chasing a sun that will never set, yet, we are unable to stop. We write and we sing, and we draw and every momentary reprieve from the gaping maw of despair, we attribute to our creativity. The truth is art can’t save the world. Art can only make the world look at itself.

    Hip-Hop itself will not save me or you. But I believe art in times of crisis to be the connective tissue that binds us and helps us understand ourselves. I still wake up every day not knowing the exact right way to help things get better. Or I feel disheartened, like I’m not doing enough. The answers to my fears are mine to wrestle with, but the important thing is that I surround myself with things that inspire me to keep going. It is not the song that’s important, but the feeling it’s left me with. It is what I choose to do after I take the headphones off. The apocalypse is here, but it has been with us for some time now, and what lies beyond capitalism is a mystery to me. But what I know for certain is that I don’t want to be dispossessed of my ability to try and imagine something different.

    Jordan Aitcheson-Labarr is a creative writer from South East London and enjoys working across a range of styles, from scriptwriting to lyrical prose. His work has been featured by Theatre Peckham, Make It in Brixton, and the queer Black collective PRIM.BLACK. He is a graduate in English and Creative Writing.

    Photo credit: Jordan Aitcheson-Labarr

  • Respectable Writers and Useful Scenery

    Respectable Writers and Useful Scenery

    Kamila Shamsie’s 2025 PEN Lecture.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    Kamila Shamsie delivered English PEN’s annual PEN Lecture in Newcastle, UK, on Thursday 19 June 2025, in partnership with New Writing North and the Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts. The Lecture was originally published in Lit Hub.

    ~

    First, an apology. I was asked by English PEN to respond to any line, phrase or word from the four articles that make up the PEN Charter – and I’m afraid I’ve taken up this offer in the manner of a guest who has been invited for tea, ends up staying the weekend , and breaks the household china before leaving.

    The household china in this case is Article 2 of the PEN Charter:

    ‘In all circumstances, and particularly in time of war, works of art, the patrimony of humanity at large, should be left untouched by national or political passion.’

    Of course, the word that particularly stands out there is ‘patrimony’ or ‘inheritance from the male line.’ How odd that a large group of writers saw no contradiction in crafting the phrase: the patrimony of humanity. And yes, PEN was founded by a woman, Catherine Amy Dawson Scott. ‘Patrimony’ stands out because we so rarely hear it anymore; I can’t imagine that there’d be much objection if the next PEN Congress suggested replacing it with ‘inheritance’, so I’m going to do no more than make note of it before turning to the rest of the article which demands a more robust critique. Without the patrimony phrase this is what we have:

    ‘In all circumstances, and particularly in time of war, works of art should be left untouched by national or political passion.’

    Let’s start with a question of definition.  There are many ways in which we now talk about politics – the politics of gender, the politics of race, the politics of class, the politics of child-raising etc. I am entirely on board with that expanded definition,  but for the purpose of this lecture I’m going to engage with Article 2 on its own terms – so, political means, as the OED would have it, ‘relating to the government or public affairs of a country’ or ‘relating to the ideas or strategies of a particular party or group in politics.’

    The PEN Charter dates back to 1948 soon after the end of World War II and at the start of the Cold War, but to understand how and when Article 2 came to be we need to go back further, to the PEN Congress in Brussels in 1927. PEN was six years old, and its guiding ethos came out of the recent experience of World War I – a war    that was fought because of imperial expansionism and military alliances and resulted in nearly 40 million casualties. After four years of a war, and four years of hate-filled propaganda on both sides, the founders of PEN wanted to work towards unity among the writers of different nations, particularly formerly warring European nations. Other parts of the world where politics got in the way of writerly unity – for instance, every nation colonised by Europe – was of much less interest.

    If unity was the goal for PEN in the 1920s, then everything that got in the way of unity had to be recognised and avoided. Politics was quickly targeted as a primary source of discord. Politics was responsible for war, for propaganda, for division.   Not everyone agreed that politics could be understood so narrowly let alone siloed off from literature and life itself. At the PEN Conference in Berlin in 1926 the German-Jewish anarchist revolutionary playwright Ernst Toller argued the point with the PEN President, John Galsworthy, telling him politics ‘is everywhere and influences everything.’ Galsworthy was in no way convinced. The following year, 1927, in Brussels at the annual congress PEN spelled out its three guiding principles, which included this:

    ‘In all circumstances, and particularly in time of war, works of art, the patrimony of humanity at large, should be left untouched by national or political passion.’

    Six years later, in 1933, the PEN Congress was held in Dubrovnik. By this time Galsworthy had died, and PEN had a quite different President: HG Wells. Also by this time the Nazi party had come to power in Germany and Ernst Toller had been exiled. When German PEN refused to answer questions about book burnings, Wells gave the floor to Toller. The German PEN delegation walked out and was subsequently expelled from PEN.  

    A few years later, in 1940, Wells was one of the many writers to sign a letter from the PEN London centre entitled ‘Appeal to the Conscience of the World’, which called on all writers, everywhere, to urge the world to join the fight against Nazism.  A moral position to be sure, but also very much a political one. Despite the letter – and PEN’s embrace of political passions – in 1948 the three guiding principles from Brussels 1927, including the one about art untouched by politics, became the first three articles of the PEN charter.  A new article, Article 4, was added in 1948. This is the article most of us probably think of when we think of PEN because it is the first to talk about free expression. It also contains this sentence: ‘[PEN] believes that the necessary advance of the world towards a more highly organised political and economic order renders a free criticism of governments, administrations and institutions imperative.’   I’m going to repeat that: a free criticism of governments, administrations and institutions is imperative.

    How did the PEN leadership imagine that this new article could co-exist with Article 2?

    A clue may come from Wells’s address to the PEN Congress in Edinburgh, in 1934. In the time between the 1933 and 1934 Congress, Germany had moved even further into Nazi totalitarianism. Against that backdrop, Wells told the PEN Congress: ‘When Politics reaches up and assaults Literature and the liberty of human thought and expression, we have to take notice of Politics. If not, what will the PEN club become? A tourist agency – an organisation for introducing respectable writers to useful scenery – a special branch of the hotel industry?’’

    Wells is doing something very careful here, it seems to me, though I’ll leave it to Wells scholars to tell me if he was doing it from conviction or to try and prevent schism within the organisation. Wells’s position is not that of Toller.  He does not take the view that politics ‘is everywhere and influences everything.’

    He argues, rather, that PEN has to take notice of politics in certain exceptional circumstances when Politics reaches up and assaults Literature and liberty. In Wells’s imagery Literature is lofty, Politics is low and violent. In unexceptional times, the two are separate. That is to say, most of the time PEN can separate Art from Politics; but every now and then, it absolutely cannot.

    I’m going to take you now to a hairdressers’ on 16 January 16 2025.  The hairdressers’ is in Gaza, the date is one day after the ceasefire was announced, two days before it was due to come into effect, the woman who is writing about it is the playwright, novelist and short story writer Nahil Mohana. Her words are translated from the Arabic by Resist Crisis Translation and Basma Ghalayini:

    ‘The occupation usually intensifies its raids just before a truce comes into effect so I’m surprised by the sight of five brides, each waiting their turn, along with fifteen other women here, to dye their hair in preparation for the truce. . . The main focus of discussion is about the things we will do once the ceasefire comes into effect. The list is long.’

    The list has 25 points. Because of time constraints, I’m going to skip the first ten and start at number 11. The whole list, and much else that’s extraordinary is in the book Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide published by Comma Press.

    11. We will smoke cigarettes and shisha again, and be spared from the cursing in our streets as a consequence.

    12. We will eat meat, chicken, shawarma, maftoul, eggs, fresh vegetables, juices and ice cream.

    13. I will kiss my husband, because I miss our moments together.

    14. Our children will return to school and to discipline.

    15. Families will reunite, the South will join the North, and we will see our loved ones.

    16. We will go back to drinking high-quality coffee, sold for 14 shekels instead of 60.

    17. We will no longer be devoured by drones, the quadcopter will be out of our lives.

    18. We will mourn the martyrs and the missing with honour and dignity.

    19. We will go back to walking in the streets without fear of shrapnel or going out and never coming back.

    20. We will eat grilled corn on the promenade.

    21. We will bathe under a shower.

    22. We will light the streets at night.

    23. We will stop following the news; in fact, one of the women offers to donate her TV.

    24. We will go back to washing machines instead of hand washing.

    25. I will bury my son who remains under the rubble of the house.

    Imagine telling any of the women in that hairdressers’ shop that art should be untouched by national and political passion, particularly in time of war.  Untouched, how? The war is happening because of politics, the ceasefire has been brokered because of politics, the ceasefire will be broken because of politics. When Article 2 posits an ideal separation between Art and national and political passions in times of war it entirely fails to recognise the reality of that hairdressers in Gaza in January 2025.  

    Nahil Mohana’s list reflects the truth of Toller’s assertion: politics is everywhere and influences everything. It doesn’t just influence whether you can bury your son or not, it also influences the price of coffee, the possibility of eating corn on the promenade, the presence of electricity, the soundscape of your neighbourhood – is it the babble of children coming home from school, or is it drones and missiles?

    But in times of war is not the root of the problem with Article 2 any more than the word patrimony is. We can whittle away and whittle away the article and it remains not just problematic but nonsensical so long as it continues to view politics as something that can, let alone should, be separate from art.

    I’d like to draw your attention more closely to Toller’s phrase ‘politics is everywhere’.  It doesn’t just mean ‘everywhere, during times of war.’  It doesn’t mean ‘everywhere, when the far right is on the rise’. It doesn’t mean ‘everywhere in Gaza.’ It means, everywhere.

    In March 2020 we were told to go into our homes, avoid contact with anyone who didn’t live with us. We were told to stay away from the bedsides of dying relatives. We were told not to embrace other mourners at funerals. 

    Those of us who had certain kinds of jobs had to stay at home; those who had other kinds of jobs, often the most dangerous kinds of jobs, were told to keep on doing them as before, for a long time without proper protective equipment. The weeks became months became a year, a second year. Our borders were closed to people entering from certain nations. Other borders were closed to us. We could not enter particular spaces unless we showed a code that confirmed we had followed certain rules laid down for us which many people didn’t want to follow.  I don’t say this as someone who is critical of rules having been imposed during a pandemic.  I say it to make that point that when all that happened we should have realised, those of us who didn’t already know it, how deeply politics touches every moment of our life. We should have realised that the liberties we took for granted were actually a consequence of the political framework in which we live. 

    It stands to reason, doesn’t it? If censorship is political so is the absence of censorship. If bombs falling on you happen because of politics then the fear of nothing more than violent than weather dropping from the sky is also because of politics. When the weather is more violent, more extreme than at any other point since records began, that also is politics.

    Homophobic laws are politics, and so are the lives that people can live as a consequence of those laws being overturned.  

    Knowing you can be stripped of citizenship in the country where you’ve lived your whole life is politics and so is knowing your continued citizenship is assured no matter what you do.

    The ability to safely have an abortion is politics; the ability to sponsor your spouse for citizenship in the country where you live, regardless of your income, is politics.

    Travel bans are politics and the ability to travel between countries is politics.

    The suspension of civil liberties is politics; being accorded human rights is politics. 

    Speaking up and taking to the streets against your government when it provides moral and military cover to a genocide is politics, and so is not doing these things.

    Taking part in a cultural boycott as an act of solidarity with an oppressed people is politics and saying no, art should be separate from politics is politics.

    School fees preventing you from going to university: politics. Leaving university mired in debt: politics. The inability to afford a mortgage despite your university degree and your job: politics. Waiting months for cancer treatment that needs to happen now: politics.  Asthma because of the bad quality of the air you breathe: politics. No libraries where once there were libraries: politics. An uptick in racism: politics. Raising or teaching or being any of the 4.5 million children living in poverty in a country with the world’s 6th largest economy: politics.

    Lighting the streets at night, bathing under a shower, eating grilled corn on the promenade, going to school, kissing your husband, burying your loved ones: politics.

    Everything I’ve listed is political for everyone, whether in war or in peace, whether it is easy to do it or impossible. There are times when politics suffocates us, there are times it allows us to breathe. It is politics either way. 

    This is what the feminists who took up the line ‘the personal is political’ understood: we live within a particular political framework which creates a specific political culture.  That political culture sets the norms, it names what is permissible and what is transgressive. It says ‘you can’ and ‘you cannot’.

    How is our Art ever to be free of political passions when everything we have to be passionate about – the people we love, the books we read, the natural world we cherish, the clean air our bodies want us to breath – is so tied up in politics. 

    For many of us who grew up in places where politics was more suffocating than not one of the main stories of the 21st century has been the vast swathe of politically progressive ground that  has been ceded so easily, in countries where the consequences to political engagement and opposition have been so comparatively low. Too many have chosen the politics of non-engagement, which is at best a hair’s breadth away from acquiescence or complicity. In the lives of writers, the frankly bizarre and incoherent idea that Politics and Art should be separate has played a key role in fermenting this non-engagement.

    And frankly that bizarre idea makes the PEN Charter incoherent too. English PEN’s website tell us that the PEN Charter has ‘guided, united and inspired its members for over 60 years.’ But how can it unite us when we have Article 2 urging Art to stand apart from politics, and Article 4 which is absolutely drenched in politics?  Wells’s attempt to hold the two in balance relied on a division between art and politics, but that division is entirely illusory. 

    The illusion has done us no good and it has done our literature no good. It is an embarrassment to English PEN and all its fine work of political engagement to continue to enshrine such an idea in its Charter. And there are practical implications: any PEN Centre or any member of a PEN Board that doesn’t want to engage with politics that need urgently to be engaged with can simply point to Article 2 in defence of its position. 

    I’d like to propose that at the next PEN Congress, Article 2 be struck off the Charter.    

    No one should have been using that piece of household china, anyway; too many cracks in its surface.

    Kamila Shamsie was born and grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. She is the author of eight previous novels including Burnt Shadows, shortlisted for the Orange Prize, A God in Every Stone, shortlisted for the Women’s Bailey’s Prize and the Walter Scott Prize, and Best of Friends, shortlisted for the Indie Book Awards. Her novel Home Fire won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018. It was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017, shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award, and won the London Hellenic Prize. In 2023, her story Churail was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She is a Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature and was named a Granta Best of Young British Novelist in 2013. She lives in London and in Doha where she is Writer in Residence at Georgetown University in Qatar.

  • Banana Scrambled Pancakes with Whole Milk on the Side on 13 June

    Banana Scrambled Pancakes with Whole Milk on the Side on 13 June

    Sana – a pseudonym – writes from Iran.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    I’ve read a lot about war. At school, history classes consisted of biased accounts of recent decades all the way back to 2,500 years ago, when the first emperor was crowned in Iran. Naturally, we then researched everything else ourselves to get the whole picture. So I always thought I knew what it would feel like.

    My parents lived through the Iran–Iraq conflict in the 80s. They’ve told me all these stories about sitting in a family gathering and the alarms going off, and going to the basement or the nearest shelter until the bombing has passed, and then hearing the radio tell them that it’s all clear then starting to recite dead people’s names.

    That wording sounds incredibly offensive now that I’m living it. Except that it isn’t the radio but social media where I go for the names of the deceased. And instead of alarms we just hear the bombs when they come, as we cross our fingers that our houses are spared.

    For the past week, since the war broke out, I have lived a hundred years. Time crawls when you hear the drumming of your heart every moment. When every hour you text your friends who are scattered across cities a quick ‘Still alive?’ message and then wait in anticipation. When you can’t talk to your mother because the internet is mostly down and your mum is stuck in another country, anxiously gazing at the news, worried that every missile might go astray and this time hit her daughter.

    They tell us not to tell anyone what’s happening. That Mossad can tail us, pinpoint us, and determine the exact locations of the strikes. So every time my mother texts me to ask if I’m okay, to ask what’s happening, I can only tell her: ‘All good. Nothing to worry about. We’re all good.’ I hesitate to put my location here, or my real name.

    ~

    But I ought to put the details of that first day. I always have my phone on silent with the vibration turned on. Because I’m usually bouncing from one class to another, and you’re not allowed to have your phone ring in class. And because I’m an anxious person, and must know if someone’s calling me.

    That morning I was lying on my mattress, my phone next to my pillow, asleep. Since I was a kid I have been good at one thing only: sleeping, whatever the situation. But now I’m not so sure. Now, I wake in the middle of the night and hold my breath as I listen for the sound of an explosion inching closer to us.

    That morning, my phone was vibrating next to my pillow, and I cursed whoever had dared wake me up at 6am. But it wasn’t the usual. My mum hadn’t forgotten that people do something as mundane as sleep and decided to call me at an ungodly hour. My friend hadn’t wanted to wake me up early so that we could catch up on studying for our cardio pathology exam. Our neighbour hadn’t found yet another problem with my lifestyle that she thought best to discuss at 6am. No, it was one of my oldest friends, calling from Tehran, to inform me that last night an attack was launched on the city and that we were now in the middle of a war with Israel.

    I wouldn’t know this for 30 minutes, because I allowed the call to go to voicemail. Still dizzy with sleep, remnants of dreams still swirling, I finally picked up the phone and opened a group chat and the first message I saw was ‘Holy shit, did you all hear that?’ It had been sent at 3am.

    The night before, we had talked on this group chat about the sixth round of negotiations with the US that Iran was due to embark on two days later. And we had crossed our fingers that, maybe, this time was the time. Maybe they would strike a deal at last. We talked about whether prices would finally go down, whether I would finally be able to buy the iPad I had been saving for, whether we would finally be able to submit our research to reputable journals without being rejected because we were Iranian.

    But those were pipedreams. Israel had attacked us, and Trump had known, and the higher-ups were dead.

    At first, I thought it was a joke. Then I turned on the television: picture after picture of the deceased, reporters scattered across Tehran, the air defences hacked. Then my aunt called. She told me to come to their house – that it didn’t make sense for a girl of my age to be all alone in her house in a situation like this. I promised her I’d come that night – that the city hadn’t been attacked yet and that, honestly, this was no big deal. I told her: ‘There’s no way this will escalate into a full-blown war. And I dohave an exam and a very heavy textbook that I can’t just take with me anywhere.’ I would go there if things escalated, I promised. Just so that they wouldn’t worry.

    She agreed. I let the TV run in the background as I made breakfast. Banana scrambled pancakes with whole milk on the side. I watched the news as I ate. I watched the news as I tried to study. I was cooking lunch – pasta – when something exploded in the distance.

    There weren’t any government officials here. Just normal people, an airport and, a couple of military bases. Why would a city miles away from the capital be the target of an attack? Why hadn’t it occurred to me that this was a possibility?

    The pan was sizzling, and I didn’t know if the smell of burning in my nose was from the explosion or the mushrooms turning to ash. My phone started ringing again. ‘Come here. Right now,’ my aunt’s voice hissed at me. I couldn’t argue, couldn’t tell her that I didn’t want to be trouble and that it was nothing. It wasn’t nothing.

    I agreed to go. I took out an old backpack and packed up my life – my essential documents, my passport, the little liquid money I had in the house, a pair of pyjamas and a loose T-shirt, some medication I had on hand (antibiotics, cold suppressants, painkillers, alcohol), and some essential hygiene equipment. I turned off the gas, put the food in the fridge, and called a taxi.

    It took 30 minutes for someone to pick me up. The city smelled like chemicals and fear. In a few hours it had transformed. It was a city I didn’t know anymore.

    The air was musty and humid, the sun burning my hand through the car window. I cursed myself for not putting on sunscreen. A trickle of sweat travelled down my spine and I wondered if it was from the heat or the fear.

    Then, a new thought: should I have taken my stethoscope? I had spent a couple of months’ worth of savings on it. Maybe I should’ve taken it with me so that it wouldn’t get damaged if my house was hit. Maybe it would be of use. Maybe I could help.

    But how would I help? I hadn’t even started officially training in the hospital. All I knew was basic CPR and how to do medical recording. I’d be helpless, forced to watch people die when all I wanted to do was save them.

    But then I was getting ahead of myself. Nothing thatbad was going to happen. It was a conflict between governments. They’d resolve this. This wouldn’t escalate into a war.

    ~

    In the five stages of grief, I was right around when denial was supposed to hit. Deep denial, slowly making its way to anger. I didn’t know who I should be angry at. Myself for being so helpless? The officials for not having anticipated this? A small country 1,000 mile away for forcing us into a war we wanted no part of?

    Then came the bargaining. This wasn’t a war. Civilians weren’t going to get hurt. It was just a show of power designed to scare the government into submission. It was bound to blow over. I kept repeating this, to anyone who would listen – my friends, my family, myself, the empty room I curled up in as I scrolled the news.

    It was hours later when I finally sobered up, when they showed the remnants of buildings in a city I’d grown up in. I don’t cry often, and never in front of people. I didn’t cry when my father died, didn’t cry when I failed to get into my first-choice university. When I do cry, I do it alone in the shower, where I can pretend that tears are just leftovers of the water running down my body.

    I lay on the hardwood floor of my uncle and aunt’s bedroom, alone, hugging my knees, staring at the headlines on my laptop, and I let the tears fall.

    I didn’t know what I was mourning. If it was the country being destroyed, or my mother whom I’d never get to say goodbye to if I did die here, or my father who had died years ago. ‘Daddy. I’m so alone.’ I kept repeating this, chanting it as if he would hear my words. As if, somehow, miraculously, he’d be resurrected. And then do what? Resolve a political crisis?

    I was objectively well-equipped to handle the situation. I was studying to be a doctor and I’d learned to handle the unbearable weight of life after my father passed away. But subjectively I was a seven-year-old girl who had come home after a crappy first day at school and simply wanted to vent when she found that her parents were still at work, and found that she couldn’t.

    ~

    I’m past all the stages. I’ve reached the point where, every night, I read the news of more destruction, more missiles, more shootings, and I nod my head and tell myself that it is what it is, then I go to sleep. Every morning, I wake and check the news and check the group chat to make sure that everyone I know and love is still breathing somewhere in the country. Every afternoon, I feel restless and want to escape but tell myself that power is in numbers, and that it makes no logical sense to go back home and stay there, alone, even if I feel like a burden to my uncle’s family and feel that my aunt is getting restless.

    Everyone around me has changed. People I don’t know intimately post on X about their ruined houses, about farewells, about pets that scream and howl and writhe into themselves as they try to flee. Those who aren’t leaving lie their heads on their pillows at night and count their blessings in the morning if they haven’t been startled awake by a bomb close by.

    I don’t remember my old routine. How could I ever get up at 6.30am and walk to university and sit through nephrology lectures and nod off in immunology classes and then go to my part-time job in the evening? And I can’t wrap my head around the grievances I had. How could I ever think that the semiology exam was difficult and myself slighted because we had one too many tests in a day or because I was overworked and burnt out?

    If we’re ever free of this, I know what I’ll do. I’ll eat pizza with my friends on a roof café. I’ll take a trip. I’ll buy that expensive dress I decided I couldn’t afford.

    ~

    Every evening, when my mum texts – or, when the internet is exceptionally good, calls – I put on my brave face, and my smile, and I tell her that it’s all good. ‘We don’t even hear the explosions, mum. I promise. All is good.’ I don’t know if she believes me or not. But both of us nod and end the connection with ‘Love you, goodbye.’

    Sana is the pseudonym of a writer writing from Iran.

  • To Which Homeland Should I Send My Letter?

    To Which Homeland Should I Send My Letter?

    Kamran Sajid on Panjabi folk music

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    There’s a marrow language for the unbelievable, for dispositions of mysterious origin, inherited postures. No one told you that integrity solidifies in the stomach. That speaking the truth in calamity has the consequences of abandonment, of marvel and respect. Look, the lonely climes of the stomach sighted, the guiding burden of consummate listeners. Heer: the wailing of the presently rascalised, and the retroactively realised. Is there victory in the singing of the song; that is, the stomach? Injustice tickles and threatens the truth with vomit. But the songs of the integritous settle the stomach. They are the aftermath of calamity, after all. For the song to travel, it must live in the bones.

    How many generations does it take for a culture to become native? For the tattoos of names and labels to set in blood, for postures to solidify in bones? By whose volition do the branches of trees become tresses: poets, and dreamers, who claim the language of the stars. The language of this poetry is often luxurious, but the poetry itself is not a luxury. In fact, to truly appreciate it, you’d have to have let every object, everything go, (at least once), as Bulleh Shah or Ghulam Farid, two Panjabi mystics, have said.

    I’m addressing the notion of an attachment to one’s native or ethnic culture. A culture itself, in spite of its perceived nativity, was also once born and invented. Is it my perceived nativity of Panjabi folk music that calls me to it? Is it something in the blood and the bones? 

    ~ 

    Summer 2023 in Manchester. I’m at my friend Ràjveer’s house, and we’re celebrating his dad’s birthday by having a mehfil. I’m standing by a laptop with my friend – Spotify open – and he tells me ‘I’ve got a song for you.’ He selects the Punjabi Mehfil Vol. 1 album, plays Ghulam Ali and Afshan’s ‘Methoon Peeche Kyoon’, which isn’t the actual name of the song. ‘These recordings are a mess’, he tells me. That song becomes my most played song of the year.

    How did this happen? Before 2023, my Spotify Wrapped would usually be a United Nations meeting of genres; dominated primarily by US rap. In 2024, four of my top five most-listened-to songs were Panjabi folk songs, and they had an average length of 17 minutes and 58 seconds.

    One of my top songs was ‘Janda Hoya Das Na Gaya…’ by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Nusrat was one of the most popular South Asian musicians, chiefly a proponent of qawwali music, but also of other religious-musical traditions in the region, as well as Panjabi folk music. In the chorus, Nusrat sings:

    Janda hoya das na gaya
    chitthi keri watan wal paava.
    (He left without telling me where he was going
    to which homeland should I send my letter?)

    Spotify was just one plot in the digital garden I was cultivating. I have a flowing saved folder on Instagram, growing fast and wide, alongside a TikTok bank and YouTube playlists for more unsung varieties. The YouTube algorithm began recommending songs to me with less than 100 views, many of which would then enter my playlists. I brought together Panjabi geets, qawwalis, shabads, bhajans, naats and filmi songs. I found live stage recordings with camera setups, as well as simple recordings of singers out in nature or in their homes. Naturally, each of these expressions have a different flavour. The stage recordings are usually more planned and grandiose, sometimes lasting for over forty minutes. The recordings from folk singers out in nature, while generally much shorter, are the most memorable for me. They have simultaneously the worst and best video quality; the smallest in pixels, but greatest in heart.

    In one of my favourite videos, Sain Bodhi Shah sings verses from one of the most popular and culturally significant poems, Heer. Heer was born in the 18th century, written by poet and mystic Waris Shah. The poem breathes Panjabi culture: the ploughed land, the brazen passion, the floaty faced jogis, the juggernaut hearts. The poem is, in an outward sense, a tragic love story between the characters Heer and Ranjha. Waris Shah, in a move atypical of his time, used the colloquial language of the people to write his story; choosing not to write in respected languages which had an existing poetic reputation such as Farsi. Shah’s story presents a female lead character who breathes with agency, who raises her voice as if it is her birthright. The story and its characters remain symbols of courage today, reinvigorating spirituality in people and reminding them of the beauty and dignity in their culture, the crimson love in their blood.  

    As a child of diaspora, it might be redundant to say I grew up dealing with the echoes of another world; sometimes harnessing them, sometimes drowning them out. Music and poetry are so integral to Panjabi culture, where lifetimes of folk songs and annals of poems are widely bestowed the honour of memorisation. Just the evocation of the first beat of a song or poem will inspire a passionate response from many a Panjabi – a turning and raising of the hand, a glowing smile and a headshake, and any combination of ‘aahaa!’, ‘wah!’, ‘Allah!’, ‘Waheguru!’ and ‘kya baat hai!’.

    There’s something in the English terms ‘folk song’ or ‘folk music’ that, to me, evoke the archaic or the unpopular. Until very recently, I would have said there’s a stark contrast in the reality of these terms and music in the Panjabi language – but with the growing popularity of musicians such as Diljit Dosanjh and AP Dhillon, you now might have to specify that you mean ‘the classics’ when you want to tell someone you’re into Panjabi folk music. The likes of Diljit Dosanjh and AP Dhillon have found an international audience which includes non-Panjabi speakers, while the audience of the folk music remains predominantly limited to Panjabi speakers.

    ~

    Panjabi poems and folk songs can perhaps be characterised by their cutting, undressing honesty – something which, in the past, caused anger to be levelled at writers and singers. Bulleh Shah wrote of delicate and beaming divine connection, yet he criticised the funnels of organised religions that were widely practiced in his time. He writes:

    Panj veylay lok, aashiq har veylay
    Lok maseethi, aashiq qadma vich.
    (Five times, for the people (referring to prayer); the aashiq, all the time.
    The people, in the mosque, the aashiq in their footsteps.)

    Bulleh Shah challenges the limitation of prayer to a place of worship, suggesting that prayer should be something embodied. The aashiq is one who embodies ishq, a divine, transcendental love, which exists beyond human divisions such as race and religion. Bulleh Shah was chastised in his time for his beliefs by those whose mono-religious edifices could not contain such multiplicity; such horizon-shattering love. His poems have been famously sung by Abida Parveen, who has breathed new life into Bulleh’s poetry in the 20th and 21st centuries. I hope to see her perform live one day.

     ~

    Whilst the mehfil in the summer of 2023 was a defining moment, an earlier, equally important moment took place in 2020. I came across a YouTube channel called The Dream Journey, which records live folk music performances across Pakistan. The most popular videos on the channel feature English subtitles – perfect for modern engagement, or for those of us in the diaspora who might not completely understand their mother tongue,I was already writing at that time and was drawn to writing through a perennial or spiritual lens – one that could, as well as satisfy my metaphysical longing, encompass the two cultures I inhabited.

    Na fanaa meri, na baqaa meri
    (I can claim neither impermanence nor infinite existence)

    These words, written by Kabir Das, were sung on the channel by Maulvi Haider Hassan Vehranwale. The video features a whole qawwal party singing together, which included both the young and the old. As a 20-year-old, the majority of my age mates weren’t interested in traditional music and metaphysical topics like that. I’d sometimes feel internally that I was too young to be thinking about all this so deeply, but seeing children in this video, who in some moments sang louder than the lead vocalists without mics, I felt affirmed.

    Still, internally, there lingered a feeling that all of this was too serious, and this was not normal early-20’s-occupation. It could be said that this notion of age and time is a Western one, and to a great degree I feel it is. But truthfully, I also faced the surprise of family and peers, who saw me getting into this music and poetry that was “before my time” and doing so “before” the time I was supposedly ready to. Societally, an association has been made between asceticism and age, as well as age with knowledge and wisdom. But I couldn’t rest with this notion.

    One of my top songs on Spotify in 2024 was 38:18 minutes long. I’m trying to think of juxtapositional equivalents to short and long songs: A speedboat ride and an excavation, A TV episode and a film. Most of these longer songs are live recordings, and they feature the additions of audience sounds and musical mistakes, which wouldn’t be found in a studio recording. In a world where commitment and an attention span are often deemed hard to come by, or worse,relics of a bygone era,there’s something radical and humbling about engaging with music in this way. More satiating.

    What we choose to dedicate our free time to are things we love and care for, right? I would be remiss not to mention that the spirituality of the music, or its appeal to my sense of diasporic dislocation, were not strong enough to take so much of my time and attention. It’s not just the song, it’s the life it is attached to; of the tears I have given to this music, most have been for love. For romantic, platonic, familial, and humanist love. Baba Farid writes:

    Kaga sab tan khaiyo, mera chun chun khaiyo maas
    do naina mat khaiyo, mohe piya milan ki aas
    (O crow, eat all of my body, chew and chew at my flesh,
    but don’t eat my two eyes, for I have hope of meeting my beloved.)

    Many Panjabi folk songs are about heartbreak and separation, and some of the resolutions in the lyrics are soothing and transcendental (I was just trying to get over my ex! I wasn’t trying to transcend my physical body!)

    Tears, also, for a vision of cultural renaissance: the wearing of colours that are seldom worn anymore, the lonely feathers of forgotten, colourful birds. How beautiful to be in their lineage, the mystics, the criminals of conscience; where it is not the equivalence of blood that joins, it’s the equivalence of something else. My friend Ràjveer challenged my idea that for the song to travel, it must live in the bones. ‘If this were true,’ he said, ‘the music would die with people.’ He instead posited the spiritual and metaphysical as a carrier of these songs and stories. If the stirring of this music is afforded only to those who are in the regional lineage of its creators, how humanist is it – how truly transcendental is its love?

    Whatever the answer, there’s something in the music that sends jolts of frenzy to my body today, with the faces of an uncanny, reassuring resonance. Jubilant colours can be, will be, worn again, and there’ll always be people of integrity in every generation.

    This music should be lived in, then lived out.
    Bone should connect to fingertip, blood to your tears.
    What will I do with my hands?

    Don’t blaspheme the words of poets with their echoes.
    Don’t regard the listeners by the words they collected.
    Analyse pisiform bones instead.
    Observe the echoes of their veins.

    Kamran Sajid is a writer from Nelson, Lancashire. He has read his poetry at Simon Armitage’s ‘Blossomise’ book launch, Manchester International Festival and Aviva Studios. He is a graduate in English and Creative Writing.

    Photo credit: Alina Akbar

  • Ancient Magic vs. Modern Magic: Raphael Cormack in Conversation with Rana Haddad

    Ancient Magic vs. Modern Magic: Raphael Cormack in Conversation with Rana Haddad

    Rana Haddad and Raphael Cormack on holy men, charlatans, and how ‘East’ and ‘West’ saw each other.

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    RANA HADDAD: How did you come up with the particular idea for your latest book, Holy Men of the Electro Magnetic Age – where you unravel the lives of two ‘Holy men/ Charlatans’ who began their journey in Istanbul and Jerusalem in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and end up enchanting audiences in Paris and Beirut by using a mixture of half-fact, illusions and dreams of what could be? How did you hear about Dr Tahra Bey and Dr Dahesh, and why did you decide to build your book around them and themes of magic, science and spectacle?

    RAPHAEL CORMACK: I have two answers to this question. The first one is the simple one. My first book, Midnight in Cairo, was a history of the 1920s and 1930s entertainment industry in Egypt’s capital. As I was doing research for that project, I reasonably frequently came across references to stage hypnotists and spiritualists who appeared on Cairo’s cabaret stages alongside some of the biggest musical stars of that era. I started to ask myself what they were doing on these bills and what audiences made of them. That soon led me towards Tahra Bey and Dr Dahesh but it also led me towards many others like them – Dr Salomon Bey the hypnotist, and other fakirs like Rahman Bey and Hamid Bey. It was a whole scene that has now been almost entirely forgotten.

    The second answer is more complicated. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we can see the 1920s and 1930s as global decades or, at the very least, write the Middle East into the standard histories of the period. That is something I was trying to do by writing about the entertainment scene in Egypt, which was globally connected. I saw an opportunity to do this with the occult too. If you read anything about the early twentieth century, it doesn’t take long before you come across some manifestation of the occult, whether it’s theosophy, spiritualism, hypnotism or another mysterious art. Not only was it very popular, it seems to me to capture something of the spirit of the age: irrationality, hope, post-traumatic anxiety, and curiosity. Again, I saw a chance here in the characters of people like Dr Dahesh to write the Middle East back into the story of the interwar period.

    Neither of them were strictly speaking doctors, in the conventional sense of the word. But they used that title with all seriousness, and used spectacle and mysterious methods to convince a large section of their public that they had superpowers. Why do you feel that, 100 years ago, as you feel now, people in fear of drastic historical changes and the arrival of a new unpredictable era wanted strong men in politics and men who claimed supra-scientific or supernatural powers in private?

    There is an uncomfortable connection between these holy men and the strongmen dictators of the period. When I started this book, I felt quite a lot of sympathy for the occult and I still do (to an extent). I was drawn to its desire to create a new world, its rejection of the corruptions of the material world, and also, to be totally honest, its fun and charismatic characters. But the more I researched the harder it was to ignore the links to various kinds of fascism. These links were rarely direct (neither Tahra Bey nor Dr Dahesh were fascists – nor were they really involved in any kind of politics at all). Still, the indirect connections were very strong. Not only were there similarities between the way that these holy men held their followers in their sway and the way that the strong men like Hitler and Mussolini inspired such devotion, but also the rejection of bourgeois rationalism and the appeal to a great new world coming were eerily alike. Something about the occult seems fundamentally non-egalitarian, despite its frequent claims to promote the equality of all humanity. As Anna Della Subin has said, talking about the same period, ‘occultism, the realm of hidden, elite mysteries, seemed to contradict the spirit of democracy.’ If one person or a small group of people can claim special access to the world beyond the veil, a hierarchy necessarily emerges. It’s only a few steps away from dictatorship.

    Tahra Bey: an Armenian pretending to be an Egyptian Fakir in Paris and the maternal cousin of Charles Aznavour. Is this how a refugee one century ago found a way to fame and success in the West?

    Tahra Bey’s Armenian-ness is clearly a key part of his story. For those who have not read the book, Tahra Bey came to Europe in the mid-1920s, claiming to be an ‘Egyptian fakir’ and performing various miraculous feats which baffled the scientific establishment. He could seemingly control his body with the power of his mind, changing his heart rate at will, piercing his flesh without feeling pain, and putting his body into a death-like state during which he would be buried alive in front of a live audience. All of these things astounded audiences, who were also were drawn by his exotic garb (flowing white robes and headdress) and his claims to be a fakir descended from a long line of fakirs. These stories, though, were all false. He was an Armenian from Istanbul, born Krikor Kalfayan.

    As I was writing this book (and partly helped by the discussion after a talk I gave on the subject at the Moon Station in Athens) it became clearer and clearer to me that Tahra Bey’s identity as an Armenian refugee was crucial to understanding his persona. In Europe at the time Armenians faced both discrimination and suspicion. I interpret his construction of the mysterious Eastern persona as an attempt to style himself as an exotic and interesting outsider, rather than a suspect refugee as many Armenians in Europe were seen. Likewise, his whole act – his imperviousness to pain, his conquest of death – could pretty easily be read as a response to the traumas of the Armenian genocide. Although Tahra Bey himself does not seem to have personally witnessed violence, he would undoubtedly have heard stories and many of his relatives would have perished in the 1910s.

    I think the period you chose is an extraordinary period of history, and I find it fascinating you chose to explore it through Dr Tahra Bey: ‘Tahra Bey born in Istanbul . . . travelled across Europe out of the ruins of the Eastern Mediterranean until he reached France as a refugee in 1925. In Paris, advertising himself as an “Egyptian fakir” from a long line of mystics, his ability to manipulate his physical body in inexplicable ways using the power of his mind made him a summer sensation. . . . Dressed in exotic Eastern robes and talking about a forgotten Eastern science of the spirit, Tahra Bey gave Europeans exactly what they wanted to hear.’

    Do you feel that there was something that the East possessed which audiences in the West craved, and which Tahra Bey delivered for them in the character of a Fakir? What was it? 

    What we learn from Tahra Bey is that people in the West were obsessed with the idea that they could be saved by Eastern philosophies but that they really only wanted a simulacrum of the East not its reality. The craze for Eastern wisdom in the 1920s was not informed by true curiosity about the long traditions of mysticism from across Asia and North Africa. In fact, many people were often confused as to whether Tahra Bey was Egyptian, Indian, or something else entirely. The embrace of the East was largely just a rejection of the West. It was based on very little knowledge and so many people were fooled by anyone who came along dressed in long robes. A few people did eventually embrace the spiritual traditions of other cultures, including Sufism, and learn about them seriously. But these people were few and far between.

    In the case of Dr Dahesh, your second subject, a Palestinian who moved to Beirut after the formation of Israel and used western science as a cloak and justification for his ‘magic’, soon becoming a celebrity in Beiruti high society, do you think that he is in a way a mirror image of Tahra Bey? Instead of dressing in Eastern robes, he wore western suits; instead of talking about Ancient powers and techniques, he claimed ‘Western Science’ as his source of extraordinary power.

    Dr Dahesh is the centrepiece of the second part of the book and his story guides that narrative. I use his story to write the Middle East back into the history of the modern occult – not as an exotic, mystical fantasy, but as a real place with real people in it.

    Dr Dahesh also fits into the narrative nicely because he first appeared on stage in 1929 doing an act that was clearly inspired by Tahra Bey and his fakirism. Dahesh would pierce his flesh without feeling pain and bury himself alive just as Tahra Bey had done in Paris. However, instead of dressing in long white robes and headdress like an exotic Rudolf Valentino-style Sheikh, he put on the garb of Western modernity. Soon he began to talk of hypnotism and spiritualism instead of fakirism, explaining that this new science could unlock many secrets. He was not the only one, either. Many hypnotist spiritualists were active at the same time, some more famous than Dr Dahesh and some less so.

    Unlike these other hypnotist-spiritualists though, Dr Dahesh went on to form his own religious movement. People who were stunned by his miraculous abilities – ranging from materialising large objects out of thin air to reading their minds – were drawn to the complex metaphysical doctrines he espoused and were inspired by his calls to unite all religions under the banner of Daheshism.

    One obvious interpretation of all of this would be the one you proposed: that in the ‘East’, ‘Western science’ was playing the same exotic role in the public imagination that Tahra Bey’s mysterious ‘Eastern’ doctrine of fakirism did in Europe; that they are mirror images of each other. There is much to be said for this interpretation, but I would add one more thing to it as well. As I show in my book, these hypnotists were really doing something extremely similar in form and content to the things that Jinn summoners were doing at the same time. In the early twentieth century, traditional practices using the power of the Jinn to access mysteries from the world beyond were still popular. However, they were considered backwards by many bourgeois modernisers in the region, because Jinn summoners were the subject of many high-profile legal cases in the 1930s, accused of charlatanry and fraud. Still, many people would go to them to find answers to their questions – who stole my money? where is my lost ring? should I travel abroad? who will I marry? and so on. Hypnotists – who put their mediums into trances and told audiences to ask them extremely similar questions – unlike Jinn summoners, claimed the power of modernity as well as its prestige.

    The Middle East in the 1920s and 1930s was not experiencing the same fears of civilisational collapse as Europe, but it was going through something equally momentous. A combination of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the increasing encroachment of European colonial powers in the region led to a period of uncertainty and instability. Many at the time looked to modern science, which seemed to be delivering all kinds of inexplicable wonders, to fashion a new almost magical existence.

    Is interest in magic and the supernatural simply a misguided cure for feelings of fear? Or do you think that people do believe that our paradigms of knowledge are too narrow, making them open to a vision of the world that transcends scientific materialism? Do you whole-heartedly believe they were both full-on charlatans? Or do you think they were also in touch with realms of knowledge to which modern science does not have access?

    This is a question that hangs heavily over this entire subject. But it is not an easy one to answer. I have a few different ways of thinking about it, and will lay out a few. Firstly, pretty much the entire history of the world makes it clear that humans are not satisfied with scientific materialism alone. Some people will always seek out the mystical, the spiritual and the sublime, no matter how irrational it may be. That seems to be a pretty ironclad fact of human nature. The question of whether the metaphysical plane is ‘real’ is harder to answer. In some ways, I like to look at mysticism and the occult as one language and scientific materialism as another. They are both ways of interpreting the world. In some cases, they will express the same thing with different words, and, in others, they will have words or phrases that don’t translate into the other language. To speak of a language as ‘true’ or ‘false’ or ‘real’ or ‘fake’ doesn’t seem right. Perhaps it is the same with the materialist and spiritual interpretations of the world.

    Things become very difficult when you write a history book about the occult. History is a materialist language. To ask, for instance, whether Dr Dahesh truly accomplished miracles is not a historical question. To ask why people were attracted to his message and what he offered people, however, is a historical question. As is the question of why some people were so opposed to him. So, these are the things I have focused on.

    In order to answer the other question, a new genre of writing is needed. I very briefly toyed with the idea of turning this book into a work of fiction but decided that it wouldn’t solve the problems. What we need is something between fiction and non-fiction that can leave the question of logical truth hanging suspended before us. I am not sure what that is.

    Before Political Islam turned into a political and militant movement, first used by the West as a weapon against leftist movements in the Middle East during the cold war, and its transformation into a target after 9/11, did Islam have more of a mystical and/or romantic image in the West? Was the idea of the East being a hot bed of terrorism and religious extremism as wide-spread then as it is now – before the establishment of the state of Israel and before the rising of the oil-rich Gulf states?

    The idea of the Arab world being a hotbed of extremism goes back to at least the late nineteenth century, though in those days they would have called it ‘fanaticism’. There is a good argument that this view of Islam and Muslims as particularly ‘fanatical’ or extremist was really solidified with the rise of colonialism in the Middle East (opponents to colonial rule were branded ‘fanatical’ or irrational). Today, ‘terrorism’ seems to be a political category rather than something rooted in objective fact – at least, I cannot think of any consistent definition of the term that seems to hold water and corresponds to how it is used.

    At the same time there has long been a simultaneous view of the ‘East’ as mystical, exotic and mysterious. The two have gone hand in hand since at least the nineteenth century. The two can make sense together if you say that the West is committed to viewing the East as irrational and illogical; sometimes this takes the form of ‘fanaticism’ or ‘extremism’, sometimes of ‘exotic Eastern mysteries’, but the basic fundamentals are the same.

    In fact, I think it’s no coincidence that at exactly the same time as Tahra Bey is becoming a star in Paris, the French colonies in North Africa are being threatened by the revolutionary president of the Republic of the Rif Abdel Krim. As I say in my book:

    When a man in ‘Arab’ robes and a headdress appeared in the Parisian press, it was most often in the role of dangerous enemy of France. But Tahra Bey, a mysterious man from the desert in long white robes and with a dark beard, had not come to take their empire; he had come to save their souls. For some, no doubt, he was a conscious or unconscious salve for their colonial anxieties.

    What are the illusions the East has about the West – what we could consider the opposite lens to Orientalism? A lens where the ‘other’ looks and sees what it wants to see? And apart from the wonders of modern scientific inventions, how do you feel the eastern view of the West has changed over the last century? 

    The question of views of the West in the Middle East through the twentieth century is an extremely complex one, over which debates have raged. There are questions of modernity, colonialism, capitalism, and religion lying behind them all. Obviously, too, Eastern views of the West cannot simply be a reverse of Orientalism because that concept is so tied into power as well as simply perception. As Edward Said notes, all cultures to some extent have stereotypical views about other cultures, but what marks Orientalism out as something different is the way that these views are turned into a discourse that implicitly justifies Western rule in the East.

    Still, I hope that the characters in my book, particularly Dr Dahesh and the other hypnotists, provide one way to look at this multifaceted question. They demonstrate the growing fascination with the West in the early twentieth-century Arab world and they show how far it spread. But, just as Tahra Bey reveals the ignorance of many in Europe about the realities of the Middle East, so these hypnotists show how people were willing to believe extremely outlandish things if they were presented as miracles of Western science.

    I love that you’ve chosen to cover popular culture and strange phenomena in the region such as charlatans and fakirs. Your first book was about women in Cairo’s 1930s nightlife scene, while this book is about two unusual men who have pursued careers as magicians, seers or charlatans. Your interest in the world of entertainment and magic is a great way to show a side of the Middle East to which western readers don’t often have access. Do you feel that you saw a gap in the narratives about the Middle East, and realised while living in Cairo that you wanted to shed a light on that?

    My aim has really always been to show the fun parts of Middle Eastern history, in particular popular culture and entertainment. To be honest, this is not primarily out of a desire to change the minds of Western readers about the Middle East, but because those are the stories that interest me. I am drawn to counter-cultures, the demi-monde and the kind of people who do not usually feature in ‘serious’ history. I like to read books about that kind of thing, and I like to write them too. If you’d asked me five years ago, when I started writing this book, I might have said that it might also change some stereotypes about the Middle East and show a different side to the Arab world than pictures in the news. Now, though, I am not sure I feel that way. After the Israeli onslaught in Gaza and the constant dehumanisation of Palestinians there, as well as the total lack of interest shown in the war in Sudan, I don’t really think my books are going to change the minds of people who don’t see Arabs fully as people. I’m not currently optimistic about the power of literature or writing to change minds. The primary audience of my books is (and probably always has been) people in the Arab world, people from the Arab world, or people who know the Arab world.

    I have, though, been thinking a lot about comparisons with my previous book, Midnight in Cairo, which focused on female performers as opposed to the holy men of this book. In a lot of ways, the way that male occult performers of the 1920s and 1930s are perceived in polite society is not too dissimilar to the way that the dancers and nightclub singers were seen. In the Middle East, as in Europe, they were often seen as a dangerous threat to society and the nation. Both hypnotise and deceive their viewers, taking their money and leaving them bereft at the end. Of course, the comparisons are not direct. But they open up interesting avenues of inquiry!

    Talk to me about the parallels you see between the era you explore – the turn of the twentieth century – and our current turn of the century: the rise of fascism, the proliferation of magical thinking and the business of delusion in the wake of the collapse of another empire and the birth of a new century. 

    I also see these parallels to our current age and find them quite difficult to interpret. One of the core arguments of my book is that the occult makes up the avant-garde of the collective psyche. If you are looking to find the anxieties, fears, hopes, or dreams of an age, then the best place to look is with the gurus, holy men, and occultists. In 1920s Europe, people were disenchanted with Western civilisation and were searching for a whole new way to see the world. In the Middle East, they were fascinated by the potentials of modernity, but were worried about its connection to imperial powers whose reach was stretching across the region. Today, in the wellness gurus and the new-age movements of the day which appear to be the analogues of the occult movements of the 1920s and 1930, we see the same thing happening. In my interpretation (though others may have different views) what these groups promise is a way to cope with the anxiety of the world that feels as if it is about to fall apart. I don’t feel we are in a world that has collapsed, but rather one that’s tottering. People are trying to hold fast to what exists, and there are all kinds of people who are trying to convince you that if you buy this product, if you do this course, if you meditate the right way, then everything will be alright. But it won’t.

    Raphael Cormack is Assistant Professor of Arabic at Durham University. He is a writer, editor, and translator from Arabic. His first book, Midnight in Cairo, was about the female stars of Egypt’s early 20th century nightclub scene. Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age is his second book.

    Rana Haddad is a novelist, writer and former BBC journalist. She moved to the UK from Syria as a teenager and now lives between London and Athens. Her first novel The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor was published in 2018 by the American University in Cairo’s Hoopoe Fiction. She’s currently writing her second novel featuring an inventor, a poet and a thief set in London before the turn of the 21st Century She’s the founder of the arts, design and writers salon Moon Station Athens.