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  • Writing to never forget

    Writer and former child refugee Yovanka Paquete Perdigao retraces her own journey from Guinea-Bissau to London via Dakar and Lisbon, finding solace and empowerment throughout in her love of literature.

    Part of the PEN Atlas #RefugeesWelcome series.

    It all began one day after my first week of school. I ran into the kitchen with a notebook scribbled with a newfound knowledge. I remember the wide smiles my grandparents gave me; my grandfather held my notebook high and my grandma clapped with joy. I was six and I knew how to write. I could write beautifully, they said, prompting me to declare ‘I am going to be a writer!’ – followed by more beaming smiles of pride. It was just that, a simple moment in a kitchen of black and white tiles overcrowded with old appliances in 1998 Lisbon.

    War came knocking on our doors that summer. No one told me what it was but I knew it drove adults to behave like children. They would hammer pillows into the windows and hide underneath beds and inside closets when big bang sounds came from outside. Its loud noise drove vicious dogs to act like mice, crying and scurrying away as they felt it coming closer. After it hit, somehow, someone, somewhere did not live to see another day. We were trapped until the day I was handed a white flag and we walked with all of our belongings to the port. The way to the airport was a no-man zone so the only escape was through the sea. As we queued up in a long line to a military boat meant to rescue us, showers of bombs fell upon us. I remember vividly the terror that engulfed everyone as the boat was forced to move to avoid the bombing. Eventually we managed to get on board: the beginning of a long trip from Bissau to Dakar then finally to Lisbon.

    Four years later I turned ten and, for the first time in years, I was living under the same roof as my two parents and sister in Ivory Coast. We lived in a huge house with a garden soon joined by a labrador. Both me and my sister were chauffeured to one of the best French schools in West Africa with sparkling white and blue uniforms. Gone were the days of hand me downs, the used toys, the long walks to get to school, the bullying, the missing tuition fees. It seemed like we had been given a second chance at life. But that was only a peaceful mirage. That same year I saw war for a second time, and was once again uprooted to Portugal.

    In Lisbon as the only black child in my school, I was shunned for being different. The constant mockeries and insults drove me to the library. It was the beginning of one of my life’s biggest passions: reading. Every break was religiously spent reading books; it didn’t matter the author, the title, or content. I disappeared into the pages of my books until the closing school bell. Away from books, I had to face the reality that war had left a gaping hole in me, separated again from my parents and yearning for a place to call home.

    It was Latin American literature that helped me cope through my own childhood traumas and growing pains. Somehow I found myself in the writers; Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, and the Chilean Isabel Allende. Their stories, infused with magical surrealism, dysfunctional families, and historical turbulences, became my story. In Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, I saw the passion and magic of the Buendia family reflected in the endurance and strength of my own family. As such, I became Márquez’s Melquíades chronicling the adventures, the magic, the insanity, and beauty of my kin. In Allende’s The House of Spirits, I was the aloof Clara silenced by my own fears until I found my voice through writing.

    It would then take another move from Senegal to London for university, where, during my first year, unfamiliar with bonfire night, I was awakened in the middle of the night by the haunting explosion of fireworks, and forced to hide in my closet from the memories of the war. Assaulted by early memories, I would find in Mozambican writer Mia Couto’s Sleepwalking Land the reassurance that, indeed, war was of a perverse and bizarre nature, but possible to exorcise through writing.

    Today, I still remember the lives that could have been but instead ended with the sharp arrival of dancing guns. Those that did not succumb to the violence of war disappeared in its fumes. I am still searching for them, trying to re-invent and redraw lives, and to create new endings to our stories, so that they will never be forgotten.

    Read Yovanka’s poem ‘The Icebreaker‘ on Brittle Paper.

    #RefugeesWelcome: this piece is part one of five in a PEN Atlas series responding to the refugee crisis. Read the other pieces in the series.

    Good Chance, a theatre dome established in the Calais ‘Jungle’ from October 2015 to March 2016, has erected a solidarity dome at London’s Southbank Centre, with events and workshops running throughout this week. Find out more here.

    Illustration © Roberto Sitta/CreativeConnection, 2016.

  • Telling Europe’s stories

    On the morning of Friday 24 June 2016, the UK awoke to the news that it had collectively decided to leave the European Union. In London, where campaigns to form a breakaway republic would soon appear on social media walls, people found themselves muttering This Was Not Supposed To Happen, to no one in particular.

    One of the only emails to come in that day was from Mark Banting, Waterstones’ one-man-events-band champion of translated literature. His message was a rallying cry ‘to celebrate Europe’s past, present and future’. Later, in the downstairs Piccadilly bar, dark humour and wine flowed freely. But as variations on the same question – ‘what are we going to do now?’ – issued back and forth, a quiet determination began to form in response. This is an opportunity, people started to say. We need to redouble our efforts, said others.

    So: we need to do something to tell Europe’s stories, to change ‘Brand Europe’. But what role can a festival play in doing that?

    When I joined last autumn it was known as European Literature Night (ELN), one of some 50-plus simultaneous ‘nights’ scattered across Europe and concentrated especially in the Czech Republic, where the initiative first began. Most participating cities put on a few local writers, together with some speakers from other parts of the world. What happens in London is a far more involved affair. A judging process invites submissions from UK publishers in partnership with the 33 European cultural institutes and embassies which make up EUNIC London. The submitted authors have to fulfil some unusual criteria: they must be recently published and in excellent translation; they need to speak good English and be engaging speakers and performers; and the final selection should represent a range of European countries, genres and ideas. The six selected writers appear at a showcase event at the British Library, which is the centrepiece of ELN London.

    Following ELN’s expansion over the years from a single night into two nights, then three, the idea of re-launching it in 2016 as a fully-fledged festival was a no-brainer. And there’s a lot to cheer about what was achieved. This year ‘ELN’ received 62 entries from 23 countries, an increase of nearly 30% from 2015. According to Rosie Goldsmith, long-time chair of the judges and director of the UK-based European Literature Network, this year’s entries were of the highest standard to date. The final six (four men, two women) were Burhan Sönmez (Turkey), Dorthe Nors (Denmark), Gabriela Babnik (Slovenia), Peter Verhelst (Belgium), Jaap Robben (Netherlands) and Alek Popov (Bulgaria). As well as showcasing them at the British Library, we took them to workshops and school events across London. We branched out into other cities too, with some modest but well-received events in Birmingham, Newcastle and Chichester.

    The new festival format gave us freer rein to add in more elements around ELN, and in a blink of an eye we had a six-week ‘season’ of literature from the continent, with more than 60 writers and poets (from 30 cultures) taking part. Some of the highlights included a Don Quixote ‘translation joust’; a poetry night where 20 poets sparked off against each other as part of the ingeniously conceived ‘Enemies Project’; and a packed-to-the-rafters conversation between journalist Misha Glenny and Italian writer Roberto Saviano, who in 90 minutes lifted the crooked lid on London’s complicit role in international crime.

    The Translation Pitch, back for a second year in association with English PEN, illustrated why translators aren’t just good for quality writing but can be a book’s best advocate for acquiring editors. The Pitch offered a fast-paced tour of stories and poetry from Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Turkey and France, all not yet available in English. Translator James Womack received a special commendation for his entertaining presentation of Antonio Orejudo’s campus novel A Brief Respite (Spain), but Karen Leeder won the day with her exquisite rendering of Ulrike Almut Sandig’s poetry collection Thick of It (Germany).

    Our major translation project this year was the Poetry Periscope – or the ‘poetry jukebox’, as it translates from its Czech origins – a bright yellow, two-metre-high sound installation, which first appeared on the Piazza of the British Library in April. It contains recordings of poems from 30 European cultures, each available in their original language and in English translation. Judith Palmer of the Poetry Society helped us to put together this wide-ranging selection, which was designed to represent the ‘voices of Europe’ in all their diversity across age, race and gender. The Periscope is now touring to other venues around the UK, in partnership with regional writing agencies.

    If we are fortunate enough to develop the European Literature Festival further and stage it again next year, there is so much more we can do – other forms of storytelling we can bring in, different and unusual spaces we can stage our events. One big idea which is gathering momentum is a European Literature retail promotion, timed to coincide with a fresh edition of the Festival: discounted table displays in bookshops, promotional offers online, supported by a dedicated magazine (handed out at Underground stations, distributed at bookshops and libraries). We need to start with new readers first and then go as far as our resources and energies allow us to travel.

    Would all these ideas together help start a different kind of conversation about Europe? The European Literature Festival and any initiatives that spring from it are just a tiny part of the effort, but we all have a role to play. The stories and voices of Europe are needed more than ever to help us make sense of these extraordinary times. In the words of Rosie Goldsmith: ‘In the wonderful world of literature we can be both British, and European.’

    Jon Slack author photo by Laura BeduzJon Slack is the creative producer for the European Literature Festival, a EUNIC London project co-ordinated with the support of Czech Centre London and the European Commission Representation in the UK. If you would like to be involved in the festival initiatives please get in touch with Jon directly via jonslack.uk@gmail.com, or on Twitter @jonslack.

    Photo by Laura Beduz.

    Find out more about the European Literature Festival 2016, which took place 27 April – 9 June 2016. Watch highlights from across this year’s Festival here.

    Photo by PeWu.

  • In praise of longhand

    Meet A: Italian, fiercely bright and talkative in fluent English – it’s hard to believe he only arrived nine months ago. There’s R, shy about his Portuguese even though he used to help his mother with her translation work. B and G bicker jovially in Spanish all the time, but they both turn in honest, thoughtful writing about the difficulties of settling in the UK. Y writes in Spanish too, about being of Moroccan descent and being called „moro”.

    They are all teenagers, students at a school in south London whom I met for a few weeks to do some creative writing and translation, in my capacity as the Free Word Centre’s Translator in Residence. They all went through the wrench of migration when they were very young; compared to them I had it easy when I moved from Poland to the UK in my late 20s. They will all grow up in a country going through a gigantic wrench of its own.

    It’s impossible to predict the long-term consequences of the referendum. If these young people choose to stay in the UK, will their identities be subject to increased scrutiny, their multilingualism and difficult-to-pronounce surnames a cause for suspicion? If they stay and naturalise (are they not natural enough?), will they need a visa to attend a university in their birth country? How much more difficult will they find it to be in touch with all parts of who they are? If they chat with a friend in Portuguese on the bus, will someone tell them they were voted out of the country and should leave? Nobody knows, but this much is certain: people like them – people like me – were used in the lead-up to June 23rd
    as shorthand for everything that is wrong with the status quo.

    The aftermath of the referendum was quite an emotional rollercoaster for me. I was angry that it called into question principles I valued in this country. I was angry that it would throw the UK into economic and political disarray. I was furious at the inevitable deepening of social divisions and the limitation of opportunities for science and culture. I felt a bit sorry for myself, for the years I spent learning and teaching English, immersing myself in British literature, culture and habits, translating English novels into Polish. In fact, I translate and interpret both ways – into and out of Polish – and have mediated between these two languages in more ways than I could have imagined when I first began an MA course taught entirely in English (although it was based in the good old Polish city of Sosnowiec).

    Somewhere in Poland there’s a tape recording of a three-year-old me singing ‘Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?’ in a reedy little voice. I have my opinions about the right way to eat a scone (cream first, jam second) and the funniest sentence in Withnail and I (we can discuss it over a quadruple whisky). All this sticks in my craw slightly: now it seems like the UK doesn’t return the feelings.

    More than for myself, I felt sorry for the people who felt so out of place in their own country that they were compelled to vote ‘Leave’, and immensely sorry for the immigrants who have been quietly (maybe illegally, probably precariously) working night shifts in hospitals, at Tube stations and for construction companies to keep things going. To say this was a slap in the face for them is an enormous understatement.

    I felt grimly gleeful about the whole sorry spectacle and morbidly interested in how the UK intended to deal with this unprecedented situation. You want ‘Keep calm and carry on’ to feel like a real challenge again, not just a slogan on a tea towel? Here you have it.

    I am aware that some people voted ‘Leave’ for reasons unrelated to the issue of immigration. However, what it means for those millions of us who live in the UK and are more than one thing, have more than one home (or none), more than one language, more than one passport (or none), is that suddenly another layer of decisions about us will be made without us. We’ll be present in this country only as shorthand, if at all. One would think that the UK – of all places – would have already processed both the idea that you might go abroad to improve your economic situation and the idea that it is possible and even desirable to integrate people from elsewhere into your society. But it seems there is some way to go on this.

    Like immigrants, translators are more than one thing; we reach beyond, we mediate, provide hospitality, carry across (choose your favourite metaphor). We have found other cultures which fascinate us and which we feel have something valuable to say about being human. We’ve travelled, eaten surprising food, listened to music with unexpected rhythms, got lost in alien streets – and we’ve considered ourselves richer for all that, and wanted to share it.

    Maybe we feel so frustrated by this new reality that we want to act.

    My plea to translators is: go for longhand. Go against the tendency to simplify or eliminate. Put in the effort, in whatever way suits you best, to emphasise nuance. Remind people (readers, students, pupils, friends, users of local libraries, reading groups, festival audiences, community groups, prison writing groups, courts, cultural organisations, policy makers, neighbours, everyone else) of the worth of abundance and openness. If you can, go beyond the page and into volunteering, lobbying, creating opportunities. Other languages and cultures have sustained us – there’s no better time to return the favour.

    Discover PEN-supported European writers on the World Bookshelf.

    Tickets are on sale for International Translation Day 2016, the biggest annual UK gathering of literary translators – taking place in London on Friday 30 September.

    Find out about London mayor Sadiq Khan’s post-Brexit #LondonIsOpen campaign.

    Read about English PEN’s work with multilingual young people in London: Brave New Voices.

  • PEN Atlas Q&A: Anjan Sundaram

    Journalist Anjan Sundaram talks to English PEN’s Robert Sharp about his latest book, Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship, which describes the erosion of press freedoms in Rwanda, and how the absence of free speech leads to oppression and the ‘transmission of trauma’.

    You can listen to this exclusive English PEN podcast via the embedded audio player below. An edited transcript of part of the discussion is presented here.

    [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/250744312″ params=”color=00aabb&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=false&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

    The Rwanda you describe in your book is very Orwellian: the government seems able to do things that no-one believes have actually happened.

    This book was in many ways an education for myself. To understand what becomes possible in a country when people and society are silenced.  It is terrifying, the extent to which people will go, out of fear of disobeying the government.

    A Rwandan journalist told me that the government was conducting some sort of programme that was doing harm to people, and it wasn’t being reported. We went together to the countryside, far away from urban centres, and it was like walking through a war zone.

    We walked through villages where the thatched roofs were down on the ground. The circular mud huts were open to the sky. It was the rainy season, so the mud walls were disintegrating. The people outside were sick with malaria and pneumonia; some of them were dying. In the few concrete houses people were crammed into rooms with goats and pigs. The surreal thing was that the grass roofs could have been put back up on the houses! I was shocked to see hundreds of people in this situation.

    I asked them, ‘Who did this to you? Was it the army? Was it the police? Who tore down your roofs?’ And they said, ‘We did.’

    What had happened was that the President [Paul Kagame] had said called these grass roofs ‘primitive’. And the local representatives in government were so terrified of the President that they went out to the villages and told the people, ‘The President has said these roofs are primitive, they need to come down.’

    The people were so afraid – who were they going to speak up to? There were no journalists, there was no way to get the word out. So they had no choice but to comply. They went up onto their houses and they tore down their roofs. When they came down, the officials said: ‘We will let you know when the replacement houses are built.’ And so until then these people had to live in the open.

    Here was a case of people doing harm to themselves on government orders, because there was no voice in society saying, ‘This is wrong, don’t tear down your own roofs until the government has built a replacement house, it’s common sense.’ There was a pastor in the East who did speak up, and he was promptly arrested for ‘threatening national security’.

    This was when I realised the extent to which the government could control society. The echoes, the parallels with the genocide in Rwanda were impossible to ignore. In 1994, Rwandan society went out en masse to kill Tutsis and about 800,000 people were killed in three months. Society was doing itself harm on government instructions, because any voices that spoke up against the genocide, or spoke up against the tearing down of grass roofs, were silenced. People felt the only option for them was to comply.

    Speaking of the genocide, there is another passage in the book where you meet some genocidaires. They come across as the most content people in the book!

    These are people described in Rwanda as the incarnation of evil. During the genocide they killed many people in extremely gruesome ways. They had been in prison and now they were performing community service as punishment for what they had done.

    When you actually go and speak to them, they come across as really having thought through what they have done. I think they are among the few people in Rwandan society who have had a chance to reflect and understand what made them kill.

    I asked them what should have been done in Rwanda to prevent the genocide and they said, ‘We should have been taught human rights.’

    And I thought that this was too practised an answer, so I ignored it. Then later one of the genocidaires came back to me and said, ‘You did not understand what I meant by “human rights”. What I mean is that we don’t understand where we begin as people and where the state ends.’ He put his hand over his head to show how the state came over them and consumed them. ‘If I don’t understand where I begin, if I don’t understand that I have rights, how am I supposed to understand that someone else has rights? If the state orders me to kill them I will kill them, because I don’t see them as whole people, and I don’t see myself as a person.’

    Then you begin to realise the power of the state. You don’t find many people in Rwanda who have had a chance to think through their actions in this way, and to understand that they are people, and they have rights! You really have to begin with people understanding that they too have rights, and then they will naturally protect the rights of others. It is this dynamic that we have in free countries, where people understand that defending other people’s rights is part of defending their own rights.

    And these genocidaires had come to this conclusion on their own, in prison. It was remarkable to talk to them!

    You describe in the book how the President uses the genocide for political ends. How does he do that?

    The genocide was an incredibly traumatic event that is still alive in Rwanda today.

    To people in power that trauma can be useful. It becomes an easy way to control people. At some of the genocide memorial events, I would find children present, who hadn’t been born during the genocide.  They were crying, wailing, bawling, as though they felt the pain of the genocide. I met school teachers who complained that during the week of the genocide memorial the children become uncontrollable, because the government shows so many images of killing. Why would they do that?

    At the national stadium, once a year, the President shows images of the genocide, and works people up into an emotionally vulnerable state. Then he walks into the stadium and he reminds everyone that he is their saviour, and that they are safe because of him. It is a very emotional and powerful way of controlling people.

    Nothing is sacred when you are trying to hold onto and consolidate power. If an opportunity presents itself where people are vulnerable, power will use it. The Rwandan government does it with the genocide. They use that trauma to control people. The genocide memorials become centres where trauma can be transmitted.

    anjan-sundaram-48427Anjan Sundaram is an award-winning journalist who has reported from Africa for the New York Times and the Associated Press. His writing on various countries in the continent has also appeared in Granta, the Observer, Foreign Policy, Politico, Fortune and the Washington Post. He graduated from Yale and received a Reuters journalism award in 2006 for his reporting on Pygmy tribes in Congo’s rain forest. His first book, Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo, was published to great critical acclaim in 2014. In 2015 he won a Frontline Club Award for print journalism for his piece ‘A Place on Earth: Scenes from a War’.

    anjansundaram.com | @anjansun

    Robert Sharp is English PEN’s Communications Manager.

    robertsharp.co.uk | @robertsharp59

    Banner photo by Graham Holliday.

  • Literatura animal

    Translated from the Spanish by John Rutherford.

    It was always cold in church. Even in summer. Dampness creeping up your body from the flags spread a sensation of moss and lichen over your skin, and turned your insides to stone. Only the occasional furtive cough, a mouth excavating the air, broke the monotony. In this part of the world the people of God lived in an amphibious land. Perhaps this is why they came to life and the church grew as animated as a cinema whenever the parish priest read out the part of Genesis that tells the story of the universal flood and Noah’s ark.

    The priest’s cavernous voice placed a hydrographic emphasis on the catastrophe, which sounded very familiar to the parishioners because here, too, from time to time, ‘the fountains of the great deep’ broke up and ‘the windows of heaven’ were opened. Then the priest would open his arms and proclaim: ‘And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights’.

    People glanced at each other out of the corners of their eyes, knowingly.

    ‘That’s nothing! A shower!’ my mother commented as she left church. In this part of the world it could rain from the fifteenth of September until the fifteenth of May. No problem.

    My mother was very religious, but in her own way. One day she told us a story from her childhood, about a lad called André. He was what in rural Galicia people called a toliZo, a loony. He had a nickname: O Inocente. Most people treated him kindly, doors were opened to him, and he was given food and a glass of wine. André was a cheerful lad. Even when some bully hit him, he laughed. The more they hit him the more he laughed.

    One day in church the priest explained the mystery of the Holy Trinity. ‘The central mystery of faith, those were his words,’ my mother said, with a sad echo in her voice. Three different persons and only one true God. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And when the priest came to the third person, the Holy Spirit, André jumped to his feet and waved his arms as if they were wings:

    ‘That’s me! That’s me!’

    There were murmurs and a few laughs that were soon suppressed when the priest’s voice thundered down from the pulpit:

    ‘Silence! No, André, you are not the Holy Spirit! Sit down, keep quiet and keep still.’

    The following Sunday, the priest resumed the interrupted business of the Holy Trinity. Father, Son and Holy Spirit…

    ‘That’s me! That’s me!’

    André was flapping his arms, with elevation in mind. People were watching him, with hopes that he might take off. The priest called the sexton and ordered him to eject the mad boy.

    ‘And he never returned,’ said my mother. ‘Whenever the priest mentioned the Holy Spirit, all looks would be directed towards the empty space where O Inocente once sat.’

    I still shudder when I remember another story that my mother used to tell us when we were children. The event that the story recounts disturbs and astonishes me to this day. I listen to it in my memory as a kind of early training, a secret lesson, to release us from the rack that is the history of Spain.

    The parish priest lived in a parsonage with a large garden and some arable land. A niece of his called DoZa Isabel lived there, too. A beautiful unmarried woman who rejected all suitors. One of them, a rich ship-owner whose business was based in the port of Corunna, gave her an eye-catching parrot, with blue-green wings and a long purple tail, and educated in Latin. It would repeat: ‘Ora pro nobis, ora pro nobis.’ This was during the Republic, which had toppled the Spanish monarchy in 1931; and DoZa Isabel, a die-hard conservative, decided to call the parrot Pius IX. It was summer, and the parrot took possession of the parsonage’s great balcony. From it the voices of people on the road could be heard. One morning a group of lads from Altamira passed by. They were going to the hills to collect firewood and pine cones for kindling, which they sold in town. They stopped to listen to the parrot. They said funny things to it, and it always replied: ‘Ora pro nobis.’ The next day they came back. And the day after that. Until one morning one of the lads yelled:

    ‘Long live the Republic!’

    There was an intense silence. Then the parrot said: ‘Long live the Republic!’

    My mother said: ‘We never saw Pius IX again.’

    To return to the history of the Flood, the priest explained that Noah first freed a raven and then a dove, to see if the waters had abated. The dove returned with some information, like a good journalist: an olive branch. And the raven? The priest said nothing about the raven. What had happened to it?

    It was up there, in the turbulent sky, when they left church. It hadn’t gone back to the ark. Flying, in tatters, like a wandering poet, towards the unknown.

    Find out more about Manuel Rivas here.

    Read more about Manuel Rivas’s PEN-supported titles, The Low Voices and All Is Silence, on the World Bookshelf.

  • PEN Atlas Q&A: Saša Stanišić

    Interview by Tasja Dorkofikis.

    Before the Feast is set in Fürstenfelde, a small village in the former GDR, on the day before its annual feast. Why did you decide to set your story there? Do you know the area well? And is this central European location and scenery important to your writing?

    I had a mosaic kind of tale in mind which was based on a really small village in the Bosnian mountains, a place where the ancestors of my family lived for centuries. The village is on the verge of disappearing; only about 20 people live there today. I wanted to write the stories of those still remaining, the legends of the region, its beauty and horrors, in order to keep something, anything alive and save it from being forgotten.

    Soon I realized that this kind of approach was more of a documentary project than a fictional one. I continued the research but stopped the writing.

    The topics of decay, disappearance, life and death in remote areas didn’t cease to interest me even after my work in that village was done. And so I created my own village, in which I could write fictional prose as much as I liked, and placed it in Germany’s northeast where many problematic issues of German and European societies are visible – unemployment of the youth, a strong right-wing movement, the loneliness of old people and so on.

    I didn’t have a very deep knowledge of the region, which is why I spent a lot of time in Uckermark and did research, talked to people, read and learned. It is a region with a literary tradition of its own, but not much has been written in recent times.

    I found that many stories from ‘my’ ancestors’ village were very similar in their core to stories I was being told or researched in Uckermark. There is something beautiful in the fact that such different cultural landscapes share similar motives and story-telling devices, which in the end means that Europe is nothing more than a village itself. A big and angry one, eerie and manifold, but in the end just a village.

    You thank the people of Furstenberg, Furstenfelde and Furstenwalde at the end of your novel. How much is the book based on real local history?

    I actually never went to those places (except Fürstenwerder). The thank-you note is itself fiction, since everybody is always trying to find the ‘real’ in fiction.

    There is a bit of local history revolving around the end of World War II which I took as the background for one story; also bits of GDR history are relevant. But there is much more invented history and even pieces from Bosnia which I used and transferred to Germany without changing too many parameters.

    The book was never meant to be a fictional mirror of history. It even plays with the fact that history is always different depending on who is writing it. The winners, the losers, the historians, the authors of fictions.

    In the novel the local historical archive is mysteriously broken into and stories escape, allowing myths and memories flow through the village during the night. Why this fascination with collective memory and the past?

    As a writer I am fascinated by memory (and its flaws) as a constituent of our present lives. I cannot write honestly about a 90-year-old former soldier without trying to understand his views on war as a young man or his thoughts on the military and his own time spent with a weapon.

    Collective memory is a kind of a myth in itself. There is almost never such a thing as complete agreement on how historical events unfolded, because there is always that one person who will say, ‘I don’t believe,’ and, ‘This is how it went,’ no matter how much evidence would prove him wrong.

    Even written records are never complete and perhaps not even correct, or they’re forged; in any case, many might say they are not to be trusted. I like the mistrust.

    I like the flaws of remembrance and the insecurities of biographies. I am not interested in the past as a moment in time but in the present as a carryover of all the memories and dealings in and with the past.

    The village of Furstenfelde is in decline. Is writing about this place your way of keeping it alive?

    Not really. Maybe it would be so if it actually existed. While dealing with the past of the village of my ancestors, I realized that I am either a fiction writer, or a journalist or a museum curator, but never all of those things together.

    Also – unfortunately? – fiction can’t save much from disappearance. It might provide insight for those who are interested and maybe even create a good story which will forever become a part of the cultural heritage of a place, but only a fantasist would give it actual healing powers.

    This novel has a wonderfully rich host of local characters, from an aged painter, a teenage bell-ringer and a suicidal ex-soldier to the vixen who lives in the nearby forest. The reader has a strong feeling that the animals, people and landscape are all connected together. In fact, the book is often narrated by a collective ‘we’. Who are ‘we’ in the story? And why did you decide on this constantly shifting perspective?

    In creating a mosaic of a village I kind of wanted the mosaic itself to have a voice which was stronger than its singular pieces. Only a ‘we’ could provide such force.

    Also, ‘we’ is very often used in rural contexts, for example in conversations. It provides a sense of unity and agreement, and at the same time it divides ‘us’ (the villagers) from ‘them’ (the outside world), thus creating a strong group feeling which always has more credibility and strength than one single voice.

    The ‘we’ in the story is a kind of collective voice of the village itself. I tried to imagine how it would sound if all the people who ever lived in this place merged into one. It would be protective towards the village since it consists of the village, it would be harsh because times were mostly harsh, but it would also be sensible and even poetic because of all the sensible and poetic voices that have lived in Fürstenfelde. And so on: the aim was to create a kind of a choir with singers long dead and some still alive, always singing, because a village is never quiet, not even in its darkest hours.

    You arrived in Germany with your parents at the age of 14, having fled the war in former Yugoslavia. You now write your books in German. Beyond the Feast is stylistically very rich with wonderfully surprising changes in tone and timescale. Tibor Fischer in the Independent said that you manage to ‘put a bit of Balkan fun into the Reich’. Do you think that the fact that German is your second language contributes to your linguistic inventiveness? How has your mother tongue affected your writing?

    Not much really. I have no idea what Balkan fun actually is, I lived there only for those 14 years and the last one or two were not really fun. People tend to believe that writing has much to do with our biographical upbringing. That might be true for some people but for me writing only has to do with the actual topic I am writing about. For me a good writer of fiction is someone who can adapt to any milieu, setting, person and bring it to life on the page – no matter how far away this milieu, setting and person is from the writer’s background.

    So the answer would be: I am linguistically inventive because the language is there to be linguistically reinvented – if, and only if, it works for a story and a character’s way of speech.

    How do you feel about your adopted homeland?

    It is very hard to think about such a complicated, manifold, unreal construct as a ‘country’ as if it were a hat. Even hats are not really simple. But simpler than ‘Germany’. I’ll try:

    I don’t really know how I feel about the very complicated hat Germany. It is colourful. To wear it makes me happy at times, sad at times, angry at times, confused at times. I like to wear it because it doesn’t really fit me or anyone else. Sometimes I must lift it for couple of weeks and put another hat on since it tends to get narrower over time. France is a good alternative hat.

    Anthea Bell, who translated both your novels, is a wonderful translator. She has been widely praised for this and for her other translations. How do you work with her and with your other translators?

    There are no words to describe the beauty, precision and literary quality of Anthea’s work. May she live and translate forever.

    I enjoy working with translators in general. They are the best readers: very focused and critical.

    Find out more about Before the Feast, published by Pushkin Press.

    Find out more about How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone on English PEN’s World Bookshelf including a free, downloadable reading guide.

  • The great replacement

    Translated from the French by Sarah Ardizzone.

    No one can fail to notice that the way we get our news is changing. Print newspapers are dying; Facebook is now the biggest online platform for news. Although this might seem excitingly democratic, there is a big danger that we each retreat into our own little bubble. That we see only what we want to see. We build walls around our communities of interest. What does this mean for Europe? Well, in my case, I am privileged to know a group of young journalists who are fighting this kind of insularity in France.

    It all began with the Bondy Blog, an honest and ambitious initiative by a group of journalists from the Swiss magazine L’Hebdo.  After the international shock caused by the 2005 riots in the French ‘banlieues’ (migrant suburbs), the Hebdo journalists wanted to go and see what was really happening – out there, on the ground. They decided to be somewhere in that reality: that somewhere was Bondy (in Paris’s north-eastern suburbs), on an estate called the Cite Blanqui.

    In my view, the proper job of journalists is to make sure the public sees the reality of what’s happening, and this means that journalists need to dive in, rather than watching from afar. It sounds simple enough, but few journalists dare to do this, and fewer still take the time it requires.

    Today, nearly 12 years later, the blog is run by a local team of young journalists from multi-racial low-income neighbourhoods, and hosted by the website of the French daily newspaper Libération. Its televised format, The Bondy Blog Cafe, is broadcast on LCP (the parliamentary channel): this features a group of young people interviewing, with rare sensitivity, a different political personality each episode.

    This on-the-ground style of journalism is non-sensationalist; instead, it focuses on the ‘sensation’ of what it feels like to live in these neighbourhoods – all this makes a big difference.

    My first contact with Bondy Blog was when I met two (very) young members of the team, barely fifteen at the time: Mehdi Meklat and Badroudine Saïd Abdallah. They had come to interview me following the publication of my second novel, Dreams from the Endz. And I’ll never forget their fresh and lively approach, the relevance of their questions and, above all, the way in which they understood my answers. Theirs was a deep understanding.

    Later on, I got to know Mohamed Hamidi, who edited the Blog for a while and who these days makes feature films, the most recent being La Vache, a poetic and unifiying family comedy which has been a popular hit.

    In 2009, I remember following the weekly column of another Faïza, Faïza Zeroulala: we didn’t just share the same name, but also the same sense of humour and the same taste for words.

    As I followed these young people’s output, over time, I felt that we were like-minded, especially in our desire to re-appropriate the subjects that spark public debate. We wanted to set the record straight, to make our truths heard, to tell the story differently, to make sure the public sees something else. For me, this happened in my novels, for them, in their articles.

    When I hooked back up with Mehdi and Badrou, they had a slot on the public radio station France  Inter as columnists on the programme of the excellent journalist, Pascale Clark, who had spotted them… on the Bondy Blog, of course.

    Mehdi and Badrou write with four hands and speak with one voice. I was a fan of everything they did.

    On the publication of my fourth novel, Men Don’t Cry, I was a guest on the programme, and I was very touched when they decided to dedicate their entire slot to me. That same day, I had the privilege of introducing them to Elisabeth Samama, my editor at the time, and she offered to publish their first novel, which appeared a year later: Burnt Out.  (This is the personal journey, behind the human interest story, of an unemployed Algerian man who immolated himself in front of his regional job centre after warning the centre’s directorate by email. In order to understand this desperate gesture, Mehdi and Badrou had to imagine everything, and the result is a magnificent novel).

    That’s what I mean by above and beyond, again and again – always.

    This year, in February, Bondy Blog ‘occupied’ the Pompidou Centre in Paris, for a week of programmed events specifically aimed at teenagers stuck in Paris during the holidays. I led a fiction-writing workshop.

    The Bondy Blog team’s can-do attitudes, vision and talents are all about wanting to play an active role in our era, through images, words, art and beauty, via an approach that’s grounded in reality and that offers a fresh vision.

    I am now involved in a new collaborative project called Teleramadan, which is reinventing what a magazine can be. Its creators are Mouloud Achour, producer, interviewer and director of Clique.tv, and Mehdi et Badrou (who’ve already had a heartfelt introduction from me).

    I’d urge you to download the magazine, and read its editorial on Teleramadan.fr. Today, more than ever, we continue to be actively engaged, despite a negative and hostile climate in which fear and pessimism have gained ground. It’s a matter of urgency that the public has the opportunity to see, to read and to understand – so that we don’t let ignorance and fear win. It is for that reason we’ve adopted the nauseating concept initiated by the extreme right in France, that of the ‘Great Replacement’, a contemporary theory about the barbarian invasions. Yes, we want to be the ‘great replacement’, but according to our own definition of what ‘great replacement’ means.

    “We are the present. We are the Great Replacement of an archaic system, which no longer speaks to us and has never considered us as its children. We are radical in our ideas: we will go to the ends of beauty. We will write when you want us to be quiet, and fight when you’ve decided it’s time for us to sleep. We will reclaim our place, which has been taken by those authorised to think for us. We only wish to speak in OUR name. About OUR tastes and OUR colours. We are the Great Replacement of a generation that is active online to counter the cheap shots. We are artists, manning the frontlines alone, ready to take on every battle. We are the rebels of a society that no longer knows how to look itself in the eye, or to listen to those beating hearts.”

    Visit the Bondy Blog.

    Read more about Dreams from the Endz and download a free reading guide to the book on the World Bookshelf.

  • Am I a European writer?

    I’m a Danish writer. I’m not a Danish writer.

    Two statements equally true. How can it be? I was born and grew up in Denmark, have a Danish passport, and write my books in Danish. So de facto in terms of national definitions: I’m a Danish writer. Yet I don’t feel Danish. My mother is Austrian, my father half-German. Language emerging from culture, my more dramatic Slavic temper has never resided well within the limits of Danish laid-back wordings. And since the age of 23 I’ve mainly resided outside of Denmark.

    As we didn’t speak German at home, I didn’t grow up bilingual. Rather than German, English became my second language, and when I was a teenager, through the books I read in their original language, through the films, the music, it became my emotional language. The lack of sensual breadth in the Danish usage of language pushed me to choose another. And though until recently I still wrote all my fiction in Danish, I’ve felt the Danish language to be a constant challenge for the hot-bloodedness of my heart. My pen has had to make sentence structure-loops and grammatical twists which would be correct in the eyes of no Danish teacher, but which were necessary to express the stories of my mind in this straightforward Scandinavian tongue, not fit for Alpine crevices and ravines.

    From early on I was continuously told by my editors that my books are ‘so un-Danish’ – something I’m not sure was meant as a compliment, but which a bit defiantly (or perhaps purely out of necessity) I decided to take as such. Not only did I write in a tempestuous language, my subjects were often far from the Danish mainstream agenda (genocide in the Balkans, or ethics in modern contemporary art and life), and even my characters had far-flung (from Danish) origins. Realizing that this ‘un-Danishness’ would always undermine any attempt I might make at being ‘a Danish writer’, I finally – after my fourth novel or so – accepted it.

    But then what identifying label should I use?

    Originally educated a macro-economist, I became a full-time writer in 1995. I have worked for the EU and United Nations across the globe, from Dar es Salaam, Maputo and Dhaka to Brussels, Milan and New York. Thus, I would prefer to say simply ‘writer’, with ‘citizen of the world’ implicitly understood. But for those who wish to put my books on a regional shelf, ‘European’ at least feels much less wrong than Danish. After all, the conglomerate that is Europe today carries an almost endless range within it.

    The literature which has formed me is no more Danish than I am: my inspirations come from as far afield as Faulkner and Gogol, Achebe and Laxness, Cortazar and Hamsun, from Cervantes to Camus, Mahfouz to Woolf. I have taken advantage of the writer’s privilege of choosing my favourite teachers across the centuries, spanning Shakespeare and Dickinson, over Hardy to Jeannette Winterson, Dante over Canetti to Calvino.

    To the question ‘What is my Heimat?’ I have no answer. New York is my favourite city, that most multicultural place of all, with room for everyone. Yet, the Atlantic being too wide for comfortable commutes, I’ve recently moved back to Europe, this time choosing an all new home-base in Elsinore, at the edge of Scandinavia where the North Sea meets the Sound headed for the Baltic Sea. A corner of Denmark that breathes the very universe, echoing the secret truth which is that the contents of my bookcases are probably my true Heimat.

    Having always worked closely with all my translators, and occasionally making culture- and language-specific adjustments, it’s perhaps no surprise that a few years ago I started a process which would become a major ongoing work: fully adapting one of my books to the history, culture and geographic specifics of each country where it is published. War – what if it were here tells an imagined reversal of the refugee crisis (centred on a family fleeing their war-torn European country), and depends upon its readers being able to identify with the characters. When the book had its first translation in 2011, into German, I knew an entire rewrite would be required; I’ve now done 12 country-specific adaptations with more to come. Some of my editors have told me that this has never before been done in the history of literature. Yet, I simply did it because it felt right, because the story demanded this level of adaptation, of empathy. Perhaps it is also a reflection of the fact which is the essence of being multicultural: to be understood you have to always be ready to adapt yourself to whatever culture you navigate within at any given moment. You are, always and everywhere, your own interpreter.

    By now we are so many millions who have more than one culture – bi-, tri, quatro-or more – that it feels increasingly nonsensical to use the limited national labels of human identity. This is particularly true in a field such as literature, where all writers in their souls essentially belong to universal humanity over and above any nationality. Yet, it’s how the world of literature is still organized: how bookshelves are categorized in the bookshops, how prizes and awards are given, how invitations to panels at book festivals are classified. How you will find us listed in the encyclopaedias, the Wikipedias.

    Danish being an incongruity for me, even an impossibility – I do embrace the wider river of the regional. I am a European. I am a writer.

    Am I a European writer?

    You be the judge.

    Janne Teller CREDIT Anita Schiffer-FuchsJanne Teller is a critically acclaimed and best-selling Danish novelist and essayist of Austrian-German family background. She has received numerous literary grants and awards, including the prestigious American Michael L. Printz Honor Award for Literary excellency. Her literature, that circles around existential questions of life and civilization and often sparks controversial debate, is today translated into more than 25 languages. Janne Teller has published six novels, including the existential Nothing that, after initially being banned, is today considered a new classic by many critics. Janne Teller is also a human rights activist, and was one of the initiators of the 2013 Writers Against Mass Surveillance campaign. She is a member of the Jury of the German Peace Prize.

    Photo credit: Anita Schiffer-Fuchs

  • Jalada Africa: translating the continent

    The members of Jalada Africa first broached the idea of translations on the fringes of a spoken word event in uptown Nairobi in June 2015. The event showcased, among other acts, dramatized performances of stories and poems published in an earlier edition of the serial Jalada anthology, Sext Me. We had already begun work on the Language issue, our fourth, in a bid to move beyond talk and actively respond to long-running conversations around the lack of publishing in our African languages. With the Language issue, we sought to stretch our limits as writers-turned-publishers of creative works by other African writers. We were determined to do the Language issue at a scale that had never been attempted before. After an intense five months of editing, we published an anthology of essays, short stories, poems and photo essays that featured 23 African languages, alongside Mandarin, Bengali, Hindi and Polish.

    Publishing the Language issue introduced us to the infinitely intriguing possibilities of translation for a literary magazine. That late night in a Nairobi bar, talking serious things in the most unserious of environments, we failed to consider the magnitude of the work that lay ahead. But the seed had been sown, and was later nourished by the warm reception for the Language issue.  We quickly realized that a submission from Professor Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in our next anthology would give it both historical and ideological grounding. It was this idea that spun into the first Jalada Translations issue.

    Our initial communication with Professor Ngũgĩ – through his son, Mukoma, who has been so generous and supportive – was borne out of the need to bridge the gap between his generation and ours. If only we reached out, we could tap into the cultural wealth that distinguished scholars have garnered over the years. We believed that, by this, younger visionaries could access and amplify the voices of those who came before us, leveraging the infinite possibilities of technology and the growing connectivity between peoples of the world.

    The enthusiasm for the Translations issue from across the continent was deeply encouraging. We had conceived it with little experience and knowledge of the very complex world of literary translation. Our hope was to draw in translators from across the continent and with all levels of experience, and in just a month, we had forged connections with a diverse set of skilled people – from a Professor in Cape Coast in Ghana, a university student in Somalia, to a recent high school graduate in southern Nigeria. We nurtured a close relationship with all translators and worked to create a warm and supportive environment of sharing, learning and working. This initial kernel grew into a team of more than 100 people, with translators working alongside editors, proofreaders and assessors to fine-tune every single sentence.

    There was a new high every day. Texts in African languages I had never seen before kept coming through; I was ecstatic! There were also low moments. A translator lost a friend. Another was involved in an accident and had to be hospitalized. Another was mugged on the streets of Johannesburg and lost valuable personal property including a laptop and a translation in progress. Many translators also battled days of creative crises and doubt. In the end, it was a transformative endeavour for many in the team. I learned that translation is not an industry of manufactured words, but a subtle human relationship with words and language and individuals and love and life. We will forever appreciate the time and effort that translators, editors, proofreaders and assessors across the continent and diaspora volunteered to help Jalada create something that had never been done before.

    This mass hard work and sacrifice culminated in the publication of Ituĩka Rĩa Mũrũngarũ: Kana Kĩrĩa Gĩtũmaga Andũ Mathiĩ Marũngiĩ (The Upright Revolution: or Why Humans Walk Upright) by eminent author, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, in over 30 African languages, effectively making it the single most translated short story in the history of African writing.

    Media outlets in at least four continents wrote with the greatest enthusiasm about the achievement and impact of what we had done. And, for me personally, it was then that I began to understand the true significance of the process, not out of prior knowledge or experience, but out of love and the faith that all languages are equal. I stand safe in the knowledge that I have attained a language conscience, and hopeful that this language awakening will do the same for millions of Africans who can easily access wonderful stories in their own languages on any device.

    Visit the Jalada Africa site to read Jalada Translation Issue 01.

    Visit Africa as a Country to read Mukoma wa Ngũgĩ’s response to Jalada’s translation of his father’s work.

    Find out about more great African literature in translation at Africa Writes 2016, 1 – 3 July.

  • ‘My God, so much sex?’

    Translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha. Illustration by Soraya Gilanni Viljoen.

    If, confined by three or four days of constant, torrential rain, someone were to discover Jack Kerouac beneath the pillow, Milan Kundera and Sylvia Plath on a chair in the veranda, the poet Jibanananda Das on the water-filter, and Salvador Dali and James Joyce when chasing a rat into the larder, and if, on top of all this, that someone were to be a Bengali writer, especially a woman writer, would the awakening of her reckless impulse to write a novel like Panty not seem as natural as the stormy winds that accompany rain?

    It was probably just such a thing that happened to me in 2004. Even if this is not entirely true, it certainly created a provocation, although I was not aware of the provocation at the time. Yes, I choose the word ‘provocation’ deliberately, for the word ‘inspiration’ is not applicable in this case. Whatever it is that inspiration might enable, it does not teach you to take a huge risk, to leap into the unknown without thinking of the consequences. Inspiration is a civilised thing. Whereas provocation clearly wants me to plunge into a ravine.

    So I succumbed to a provocation in writing Panty, and it was undoubtedly a serious mistake. For this novel not only maligned me, it also played havoc with my son’s school-life and destroyed the reputation that my publisher Ananda Publishers had acquired over the years. It made me face numerous questions, it brought me into disgrace. Nor was it particularly pleasant for Arunava, who translated the novel into English. Although he has never told me this, I know for a fact that he has also had to face criticism and censure. All of which makes me conclude that the treasure trove of Bengali literature, already replete with many gems, would not have been particularly diminished had I not written this novel, but maybe my life would have been more peaceful.

    But I was driven at the time by an obsession to create something new in terms of content and form. A woman cornered or pushed into voluntary exile in the process of analysing all the vulnerabilities in her life gradually realises that her life is neither a woman’s nor a man’s, even as her circular journey takes her towards independence from mere feelings, and, gradually, into a freedom where being in love with someone is the only thing that seeks an identity, while there is no identity crisis involved in the other struggles of life, in sensuality, in an awareness of the divine, or in death. It was to write this truth that I began to seek a minimalist form.

    At this point just one particular image kept returning to me – that of a young woman arriving at a rundown apartment to stay for a few days, and discovering a tiger-print panty. This image provoked me to write about her, but it was mute, unable to express itself. Subsequently it occurred to me that it’s because we don’t understand life fully that we have to resort to surrealism. This world, this universe, our suffering and our agony – none of it is beyond the reach of explanation. But we can seldom travel the distance.

    It also dawned on me later that I wrote Panty while caught in a passion for symbolic writing, in order to recover from the fatigue of the linear narrative of a hundred thousand words about a familiar world which I had completed a few months earlier. To tell the truth, I now handed myself a rejection of that earlier novel. But I think that even though I wrote the novel, I shouldn’t have chosen this particular title. Because, to the majority of Bengali readers, a novel about gender politics, power, sexuality, sexualism, and the intensity and the sensations of sex, written while forsaking sexual political correctness, is nothing but pornography.

    I don’t get it. People don’t read books out loud. Why are they so troubled by hardcore sex within the covers of a book? Why this discomfort? And if it’s written by a woman, everyone is shocked. Instead of wondering why she has written what she has, the predominant source of wonder in the soul is: ‘My god, so much sex? That means she knows all this. How could she have known? From practice, obviously. If she’s had so much sex she must be a whore.’

    And so, a simple equation. She writes sex, she must be a whore. In a man, however, it’s a sign of genius. All these sexual realisations have come from the company of many women. And why should he not have that company? A woman will obviously go up to a talented male writer uninvited, right? What if he’s not an established writer? Even so. How is that possible? Because there’s something called adventure that a male is entitled to, after all. Men have always been judged for their qualities and women, by their character. Of course, this is not widely applicable to Western society anymore. This is our regional truth.

    Panty was a form of automated writing. A declaration of war against writing thousands of pages of chewable pulp. I do not know whether it was successful. There’s no doubt that the book was read. People were disappointed after getting nothing in the novel to justify their secret reading of it. Strangers would ring me. ‘What next? Condom?’ These things still pursue me. I survive these days basically by concealing the writer in me. That one image is destroyed by two hundred forms of humiliation.