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  • Memory and Responsibility

    Having won the 2014 Jan Michalski Prize for Road to Donbass, Serhiy Zhadan writes for PEN Atlas about growing up in eastern Ukraine, a region now at war, and how love and attentiveness are the lessons of literature in a world of silence and oblivion.

    Translated from the Ukranian by Boris Dralyuk.

    Four years ago I wrote a book about the places where I was born and grew up, about my homeland. I wanted to talk about two things that are of great importance to me and to many of my compatriots: memory and responsibility. The Road to Donbass is, after all, about precisely this – memory and responsibility. And, of course, about all the other things associated with them.

    What does our memory give rise to? Our understanding of the past, our relationship with history, our awareness of our homeland. Responsibility, on the other hand, indicates a readiness to defend all this – our past, our history, our homeland. Something of this kind occupies the hero of my book – as he sinks deeper into his own memory, he discovers things that are at once simple and very important. After trying to recall everything once and put it in its proper place in the past, he comes to terms with his own future, with how he can go on, with what he can hold onto. And it is responsibility, in this case, that is the principle – sufficient and significant – which motivates the hero, lending logic and consistency to his actions. Responsibility to his family, to his friends, to shared secrets, to those who have left, and, most importantly, to those who have stayed and who rely on him. This responsibility is what makes one an adult, since it has a bearing on extremely serious things – like love and hate, or life and death.

    But this isn’t a matter of abstract concepts and categories. Thousands of wonderful books have been written about life, and even more about death. And the same goes for memory and responsibility. For me, the novel isn’t just a fictional story with conventional characters and fantastic situations. No, for me it’s associated with real landscapes and a very tangible geography. These landscapes really do exist – they stretch along the Ukrainian-Russian border, and they are now beset by fighting. You can see the locations described in my book on the news; the same gas stations where ‘more or less rotten’ fellows stood around squabbling are now encircled by Ukrainian ‘Grads’, Donbass’s system of defense against potential aggression.

    Reality has shown itself to be far more ruthless and unpredictable than any fantasy. After all, who could have imagined a year ago that columns of Ukrainian prisoners would be led down the streets of Donetsk, that the morgues of Ukrainian towns would be filled with torn bodies. Today, war, death, pain, loss and danger are part of our everyday reality. And reality itself has somehow wound up in the spotlight. People are talking about Ukraine, arguing about Ukraine – everyone must take a position. In Western Europe, which seems to have recovered and found peace after the impossibly bloody twentieth century, it suddenly became apparent that the threat of a new massacre, a new general war, is still quite real, that history marches on in the streets and in the trenches, and that subtle diplomacy and multibillion-euro contracts cannot protect civilians from the madness and paranoia of a single man, if that man happens to have a high domestic approval rating and a well-equipped army. Ukraine cannot be ignored. It is increasingly difficult to pretend that the war raging on its territory is an internal conflict, increasingly difficult to deny the presence of Russian tanks in the mining towns. The attempts of European leaders to flirt with the aggressor, to maintain a civilized conversation with a man who coolly wipes out hundreds of his own citizens and those of neighboring countries appear ever more dubious and equivocal. To be sure, for Europe, this is merely a nightmare unfolding at a safe distance. The nightmare must be reckoned with, it is impossible to circumvent, but, by and large, it remains at a relatively safe distance, at least for now.

    It’s a great shame that the world only remembered our country when it began to bleed. It’s a great shame that the news about Ukraine always presents bombed-out houses and the dead. It’s extremely painful to know that, even in this situation, Ukrainians have to convince many Westerners of their right to freedom and independence – ultimately, of their right to memory and responsibility. But it’s good that you’re listening to us, that you’re forced to listen, that you don’t pretend that nothing is happening, and that sometimes you even try to understand what’s really going on – in the East, beyond the realms of your comfort and security, beyond the realms of your experience and established notions. It may be precisely in this situation that literature, and culture in general, can be of some use. It may be that today literature provides the only real opportunity, however dubious, to explain something – without agitprop.

    Many among us in the East still believe that literature should educate, should teach. To me, however, this idea about the nature of writing always seemed rather false and frivolous; I’d always thought (and think even now) that literature can only teach love and attentiveness. Moreover, in many cases, these are one and the same thing. In this book, this novel, I also spoke about love and attentiveness. I was lucky to be born and to grow up in eastern Ukraine, yet I was always troubled by the absence of this region, of these landscapes, of these people from the surrounding text – I missed the presence of this air in literature, the presence of this geography in the pages of books. I wanted to write about all of this with love and attentiveness. I wanted to capture countless details and moments that seemed important and decisive. I wanted to understand what makes this region special, unlike any other place in the world.

    Today I realize that most of the things I described remain in the past. And there’s no chance of bringing them back. And there’s no sense in trying. Everything has changed. Even if these landscapes, fields, and valleys will be just as sunny, and the rivers just as warm, war has changed everything anyway, stripping us of many illusions. But, at the same time, it has stripped many of us of fear, of uncertainty, and of indecisiveness. It has left us our memory. And our responsibility.

    It so happened that we, the residents of eastern Ukraine, have now found ourselves in a warzone. The towns where we grew up, the streets and buildings in which we lived, are now the sites of battle or are near them. For many of us the war is a personal matter, even though the majority are not involved in the fighting. But one way or another, we are all now living this war, are all affected by it, all think and talk about it. Sometimes we’re short of interlocutors – people quickly tire of talking about bad, unpleasant things. Sometimes we’re short of words. All the same, one way or another, we must talk. And we must listen. What is said forms memory. And what is heard forms responsibility. Silence leads to death and oblivion. That is why today it is especially important to talk to one another, listen to one another. Listen, even if you don’t agree with what you hear. Listen, even if you know how this story ends.

    You can buy Voroshilovograd by Serhiy Zhadan through our book partner Foyles.

    Find out more about the 2014  Jan Michalski Prize.

    Serhiy Zhadan was profiled in The New Yorker and the BBC.

    His novel Mesopotamia was featured in an article on the unrest in the Ukraine for the London Review of Books.

    See Serhiy Zhadan’s profile at the Suhrkamp site.

    World Literature Today features Serhiy Zhadan and Lyubko Deresh in an essay on the Orange Revolution to the Euromaidan.

  • But why do you write your books in English and Turkish?

    It is a question I hear often. Each time, I need to pause for a split second, the briefest hesitation within the span of a breathing space… How can I explain? How much can I tell? I try to offer a compact, rational answer that would do. Yet, I also know, deep down inside, that my urge to write stories in a language other than my mother tongue was an irrational choice, if it was a choice at all. I did not exactly decide to write in English. It didn’t quite happen like that. Rather than a logical resolution, it was an animal instinct that brought me to the shores of the English language. Perhaps I escaped into this new continent. I sent myself into perpetual exile, carving an additional space for myself, building a new home, brick by brick, in this other land. Being a stranger and an outsider in the English language intimidates me sometimes. It is a challenge, both intellectually and spiritually. Yet the joy and the pleasure I derive from the experience are so much bigger. And whatever pain there is, it is certainly less than the pain of feeling like a stranger and an outsider in my motherland. Somehow, that is heavier.

    I started learning English at the age of ten as I became a student at a British School in Madrid, Spain. At the time, Spanish was my second language. Yet as much as I loved the sound of Spanish, my passion for and pull towards the English language was something else altogether. It was the flexibility of its anatomy and the openness of its vocabulary that struck me, most of all.

    I started writing poems in English, keeping them to myself. When I took the step of writing and publishing my novels in English first, about 13-14 years ago, I was already an established author in Turkey. Immediately there was a negative reaction in my motherland. They accused me of betraying my nation, an allegation I had certainly heard before. They claimed I was ‘forsaking’ my mother tongue for the language of Western Imperialism.

    But I never felt I was abandoning anything. I never thought I had to make a choice between my two loved ones: English and Turkish. In truth, perhaps even more than writing in English or writing in Turkish, it is the very commute back and forth that fascinates me to this day. I pay extra attention to those words that cannot be ferried from one continent to the other. I become more aware of not only meanings and nuances but also of gaps and silences. And I observe myself and others. Our voices change, even our body language alters as we move from one language to another. At the end of the day, languages shape us while we are busy thinking we control them.

    I write my novels in English first. Then they are translated into Turkish by professional translators, whose works I admire and respect. Next I take the Turkish translations and rewrite them, giving them my rhythm, my energy, my vocabulary, which is full of old Ottoman words. Many of those words came from Arabic and Persian, and they have been plucked out of the Turkish language by modernist nationalists in the name of purity. Critical of this linguistic racism, I use both old and new words while writing in Turkish.

    Over the years I have learned that separation, too, is a connection. Writing in English, putting an existential distance between me and the culture where I come from, strangely and paradoxically, enables me to take a closer look at Turkey and Turkishness. Just to give an example, had I written The Bastard of Istanbul –a novel that concentrates on an Armenian and a Turkish family, and the unspoken atrocities of the past- in Turkish, it would have been a different book. I might have been more cautious, more apprehensive even. But writing the story in English first set me at liberty; it freed me from all cultural and psychological constraints, many of which I might have internalized without even being aware of it. The same goes for all my novels written in English first. Sometimes, the presence of absence strengthens a bond and distance brings you closer.

    In my heart, I am a commuter. This means I have to work twice as hard, spend twice as much time on each book. It is a completely irrational, illogical thing to do. Yet I do it because I love it and love, for me, is the key word.

    Like a child who plays with Lego bricks, I play with alphabets. It amazes me to see how a limited number of letters can create endless meanings, infinite stories. I am in love with words and they are never enough. We keep moving, expanding, travelling together. By nature, I am always aspiring to go beyond the boundary drawn in front of me, curious to know what lies beyond.

    That said, there are things I find easier to express in Turkish, such as sorrow and melancholy. There are things I find easier to write in English, such as humour, irony and satire. It is less a linguistic difference than a cultural one.

    ‘But if you are writing in English first, how can we call you a Turkish writer anymore? You are now one of them, not one of us,’ a critic said to me in Turkey last year.

    The truth is, I don’t believe in this artificial duality between ‘us’ and ‘them’.  As much as I respect writers and poets, such as Mahmoud Darwish, who claimed their mother tongue was their homeland, I also sincerely believe that there can be, and are, other paths in the world of creativity and storytelling. Some writers are just nomads. I happen to be one of them.

    I wish I could write in Spanish as well. And in Russian. Or Japanese. But I have no such talents. What I have is two wonderful, beautiful and magical companions of the road. The English language with its grammatical suppleness and immense and ever-green vocabulary and the Turkish language with its agglutinated masses of microparticles and inverted sentences, like the serpentine streets of Istanbul. I love them both and in very different ways and for very different reasons.

    Today, as more and more people are becoming displaced and replaced all around the world, our need to question static identity politics is also growing per day. Rather than a pre-given, fixed, monolithic identity, we can have multiple and fluid belongings. We can even love more than one person. Our hearts are wide and deep enough to do so. And yes, we can also dream in more than one language.

  • ‘I can read’: life and death in Guerrero

    Juan Villoro writes about the recent abductions and murders of students in Mexico, and how they fit a pattern not only of violence but uprising against injustice, as was the case with primary school teacher turned revolutionary Lucio Cabañas in the 1970s.

    Originally published in El País, 30 October 2014. Translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes.

    On 17 October, a group gathered outside the interior ministry in Mexico City to hold a vigil over the body of Margarita Santizo Bucareli. They were honouring the last wish of the deceased woman who had searched to no avail for her disappeared son. The scene was an allegory for a country where politics threatens to turn into a series of funeral rites.

    Mexico’s spiral of violence reached new levels on 26 September with the assassination of six young men and women and the kidnapping of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College in the province of Guerrero. That day, I happened to be in the same province, in the Guerrero Autonomous University to give a conference on the Mexican communist writer, José Revueltas. My host was a professor who, in his youth, had belonged to Lucio Cabañas’ guerilla group. ‘Lucio Cabañas saved my life,’ he said with a strange mixture of admiration and sadness: ‘He ordered me back down the mountain before they killed the people living there: “You don’t look like a campesino (‘peasant’),” he told me. “If they find you here, they’re not going to believe you’re here to grow vegetables; you have to keep up the fight where you’re most useful: in the classroom.”‘

    The guerrilla’s order meant the end of a young man’s dream; at the same time it meant that the life of one social activist was spared.

    The great paradox of the state of Guerrero is that teaching there is a high-risk profession. Cabañas himself became a primary school teacher. He soon learnt that it was impossible to educate a child who did not have food to eat. Together with another teacher, Genaro Vázquez, he headed a movement to improve the lives of his pupils; they came up against official closed-mindedness and so needed to radicalise their line of action.

    The promotion of literary culture has remained a challenge in an area that settles its differences with bullets. In the seventies, two-thirds of Guerrero’s population were illiterate. The Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College was founded with a view to improving this figure, but it wasn’t impervious to the state’s bigger problems: social inequality, the control of the caciques (‘overlords’), governmental corruption at local level, repressive measures as the sole solution to civil unrest, police impunity, and the growing intrusion of drug trafficking. The rest of the country is not immune to these evils. What makes Guerrero stand out is its long history of popular movements that challenge these disgraces.

    In the book México armado – essential reading for anyone attempting to understand this conflict – Laura Castellanos explores this transition from professor to guerilla. Genaro Vázquez founded an Asociación Cívica (‘Civic Association’), which was repudiated by the authorities. Lucio Cabañas set up the Partido de los pobres (Poor People’s Party), but it failed to have any impact on local politics. The government offered its leaders money and political positions (in Guerrero, the two things tend to be synonymous). The leaders rejected this ‘negotiated’ get-out and opted instead for heading up into the mountain.

    The fierce repression of the guerrillas was known as The Dirty War – a redundant euphemism. After Cabañas’ death there were 173 ‘disappearances’. In México armado, Castellanos tells the story of the airbase in Pie de la Cuesta, in Acapulco, where planes would take off to then dump dissidents into the ocean, the same ruthless method that would be used in Chile and Argentina.

    We were talking about José Revueltas and Lucio Cabañas when we heard that six young people had been killed in the town of Iguala. The news was made worse by the knowledge that the horror was not new; on the contrary, and as we had been hearing that day, it had a long history. The violence in Guerrero has been systematically fuelled by military and paramilitary group-organised massacres. Luis Hernández Navarro, author of a crucial book on this problem (Hermanos en armas), points out that every one of the region’s insurrections have occurred after massacres (the one in Iguala in 1962 resulted in the Genaro Vázquez uprising; the one in Atoyac in 1967 was followed by Lucio Cabañas’; and the Aguas Blancas massacre in 1995 preceded the rise of the Popular Revolutionary Army).

    What will the upshot of the 2014 massacre be? Drug trafficking has gained power in Guerrero thanks to the continual, alternating presence of the cartels La Familia, Nueva Generación, the Beltrán Leyva and Guerreros Unidos. But this isn’t the main reason for the region’s decline. Carnival and apocalypse cohabit this bipolar area. The tourist hotspot that is Acapulco and the riches of the caciques exist in stark relief to the extreme poverty that affects the majority of the population. The shocking inequality accounts for the general sense of disgruntlement and offers one explanation for why many people cannot find a better fate than to farm marijuana or kill for fees.

    In the search for the disappeared teacher trainees, other mass graves have been uncovered, containing more dead. Between 2005 and today, no less than 38 tombs of this kind have appeared.

    For half a century, a poor but politicised population has condemned their authorities’ continued abuses. The Ayotzinapa College is a nerve centre of the dispute. Let’s not forget that in the seventies, one of its activists was a certain Lucio Cabañas.

    On 26 September, there were four separate shootings and one target: the young. With the backing of organised criminals, the local mayor spread terror among the trainee teachers, threatening them as they gathered in peaceful protest to remember the victims of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. Once the repressive mechanism was unleashed, they proceeded to open fire against a coach carrying a football team on their way home from a match. Their crime? Being young. Which is to say, potential rebels.

    ‘There is a tension between reading and political action,’ writes the Argentinian philosopher and novelist Ricardo Piglia. Interpreting the world can naturally lead to the desire to transform it. Occasionally, writing, and orthography itself, is a political gesture that defies a barbaric order: ‘To read is to stand up to a hostile life,’ suggests Piglia in The Last Reader.

    Che Guevara spent his last night before being killed in an old, run-down schoolhouse. Already wounded, he sat contemplating a sentence written on the blackboard and said to the teacher: ‘It’s missing the accent.’ The sentence was ‘Yo sé leer’: ‘I can read.’ Knowing he was defeated, the guerrilla leader looked to another means of correcting reality.

    Years ago, a group of teachers railed in by the government decided to take up arms in Guerrero. Lucio Cabañas chose to save one of his men and send him back to the classroom, to teaching – an instrument of war in a lawless country.

    Forty-three future teachers have disappeared.  The size of this tragedy comes down to single phrase, one that opposes impunity, disgrace and injustice: ‘Yo sé leer.’ The Mexico of guns and arms is afraid of those who teach others how to read.

    Mexico is missing the accent. The time will come to correct this.

  • 'I can read': life and death in Guerrero

    Juan Villoro writes about the recent abductions and murders of students in Mexico, and how they fit a pattern not only of violence but uprising against injustice, as was the case with primary school teacher turned revolutionary Lucio Cabañas in the 1970s.

    Originally published in El País, 30 October 2014. Translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes.

    On 17 October, a group gathered outside the interior ministry in Mexico City to hold a vigil over the body of Margarita Santizo Bucareli. They were honouring the last wish of the deceased woman who had searched to no avail for her disappeared son. The scene was an allegory for a country where politics threatens to turn into a series of funeral rites.

    Mexico’s spiral of violence reached new levels on 26 September with the assassination of six young men and women and the kidnapping of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College in the province of Guerrero. That day, I happened to be in the same province, in the Guerrero Autonomous University to give a conference on the Mexican communist writer, José Revueltas. My host was a professor who, in his youth, had belonged to Lucio Cabañas’ guerilla group. ‘Lucio Cabañas saved my life,’ he said with a strange mixture of admiration and sadness: ‘He ordered me back down the mountain before they killed the people living there: “You don’t look like a campesino (‘peasant’),” he told me. “If they find you here, they’re not going to believe you’re here to grow vegetables; you have to keep up the fight where you’re most useful: in the classroom.”‘

    The guerrilla’s order meant the end of a young man’s dream; at the same time it meant that the life of one social activist was spared.

    The great paradox of the state of Guerrero is that teaching there is a high-risk profession. Cabañas himself became a primary school teacher. He soon learnt that it was impossible to educate a child who did not have food to eat. Together with another teacher, Genaro Vázquez, he headed a movement to improve the lives of his pupils; they came up against official closed-mindedness and so needed to radicalise their line of action.

    The promotion of literary culture has remained a challenge in an area that settles its differences with bullets. In the seventies, two-thirds of Guerrero’s population were illiterate. The Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College was founded with a view to improving this figure, but it wasn’t impervious to the state’s bigger problems: social inequality, the control of the caciques (‘overlords’), governmental corruption at local level, repressive measures as the sole solution to civil unrest, police impunity, and the growing intrusion of drug trafficking. The rest of the country is not immune to these evils. What makes Guerrero stand out is its long history of popular movements that challenge these disgraces.

    In the book México armado – essential reading for anyone attempting to understand this conflict – Laura Castellanos explores this transition from professor to guerilla. Genaro Vázquez founded an Asociación Cívica (‘Civic Association’), which was repudiated by the authorities. Lucio Cabañas set up the Partido de los pobres (Poor People’s Party), but it failed to have any impact on local politics. The government offered its leaders money and political positions (in Guerrero, the two things tend to be synonymous). The leaders rejected this ‘negotiated’ get-out and opted instead for heading up into the mountain.

    The fierce repression of the guerrillas was known as The Dirty War – a redundant euphemism. After Cabañas’ death there were 173 ‘disappearances’. In México armado, Castellanos tells the story of the airbase in Pie de la Cuesta, in Acapulco, where planes would take off to then dump dissidents into the ocean, the same ruthless method that would be used in Chile and Argentina.

    We were talking about José Revueltas and Lucio Cabañas when we heard that six young people had been killed in the town of Iguala. The news was made worse by the knowledge that the horror was not new; on the contrary, and as we had been hearing that day, it had a long history. The violence in Guerrero has been systematically fuelled by military and paramilitary group-organised massacres. Luis Hernández Navarro, author of a crucial book on this problem (Hermanos en armas), points out that every one of the region’s insurrections have occurred after massacres (the one in Iguala in 1962 resulted in the Genaro Vázquez uprising; the one in Atoyac in 1967 was followed by Lucio Cabañas’; and the Aguas Blancas massacre in 1995 preceded the rise of the Popular Revolutionary Army).

    What will the upshot of the 2014 massacre be? Drug trafficking has gained power in Guerrero thanks to the continual, alternating presence of the cartels La Familia, Nueva Generación, the Beltrán Leyva and Guerreros Unidos. But this isn’t the main reason for the region’s decline. Carnival and apocalypse cohabit this bipolar area. The tourist hotspot that is Acapulco and the riches of the caciques exist in stark relief to the extreme poverty that affects the majority of the population. The shocking inequality accounts for the general sense of disgruntlement and offers one explanation for why many people cannot find a better fate than to farm marijuana or kill for fees.

    In the search for the disappeared teacher trainees, other mass graves have been uncovered, containing more dead. Between 2005 and today, no less than 38 tombs of this kind have appeared.

    For half a century, a poor but politicised population has condemned their authorities’ continued abuses. The Ayotzinapa College is a nerve centre of the dispute. Let’s not forget that in the seventies, one of its activists was a certain Lucio Cabañas.

    On 26 September, there were four separate shootings and one target: the young. With the backing of organised criminals, the local mayor spread terror among the trainee teachers, threatening them as they gathered in peaceful protest to remember the victims of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. Once the repressive mechanism was unleashed, they proceeded to open fire against a coach carrying a football team on their way home from a match. Their crime? Being young. Which is to say, potential rebels.

    ‘There is a tension between reading and political action,’ writes the Argentinian philosopher and novelist Ricardo Piglia. Interpreting the world can naturally lead to the desire to transform it. Occasionally, writing, and orthography itself, is a political gesture that defies a barbaric order: ‘To read is to stand up to a hostile life,’ suggests Piglia in The Last Reader.

    Che Guevara spent his last night before being killed in an old, run-down schoolhouse. Already wounded, he sat contemplating a sentence written on the blackboard and said to the teacher: ‘It’s missing the accent.’ The sentence was ‘Yo sé leer’: ‘I can read.’ Knowing he was defeated, the guerrilla leader looked to another means of correcting reality.

    Years ago, a group of teachers railed in by the government decided to take up arms in Guerrero. Lucio Cabañas chose to save one of his men and send him back to the classroom, to teaching – an instrument of war in a lawless country.

    Forty-three future teachers have disappeared.  The size of this tragedy comes down to single phrase, one that opposes impunity, disgrace and injustice: ‘Yo sé leer.’ The Mexico of guns and arms is afraid of those who teach others how to read.

    Mexico is missing the accent. The time will come to correct this.

  • Art and Culture from the Frontline: In the hope that Syria Speaks even more!

    Contributing to Syria Speaks, a book that brings together texts and visual arts from the Syrian uprising, offered me an opportunity to ponder – yet again – the perennial question:  what must art and literature actually do in times of war and catastrophe? Do they have an active role to play?

    This question instantly brings to mind works of art and literature that are linked to unfortunate circumstances in the country that produced them, and makes one mentally revisit that art’s outstanding features and consider what one wants to read, and what one doesn’t. A story like Boule de Suif by Guy de Maupassant, which shows the misery of war without entering the battlefield, always stood out to me as an example of a literary work that sensitively documents war’s impact on the self, without lecturing or being reduced to a blunt factual illustration or direct message.

    When I was asked to contribute to Syria Speaks, the old question presented itself to me, but the other way around. Before I knew anything much about the book or who else was taking part, I was asking myself: what do people out there, abroad, want to know about us? And what’s the relevance or importance of a piece of writing by me that looks at the Syrian revolution from a slight remove? Some people seem to think that absolutely all the young people here are activists, spending their time meeting in secret basements and planning the overthrow of the Assad regime; others think that we are all tripping over corpses in the street on our way to work (which of course is not an exaggeration, in some areas of Syria).

    Maybe the best thing, then, would have been for me to simply set down what actually happened to me personally – given that the newspapers are already full of political commentary representing all possible extremes and points of view, for anyone who wants to look at them. In the end I dug out an old text written in the first month of the uprising, just before I left my job working for Syrian state television. At that point there was more hope than there is now; but at the same time the torture videos shot on mobile phones by Assad’s shabiha – and leaked by them or their FSA captors – were still a new phenomenon, and therefore the shock of being exposed to their horror was greater than it is now.

    After submitting that text to the editors, I had the chance to look more closely at other parts of the book, as I translated some of the English material for the Arabic edition. Then, and even more so when it was published and I saw the whole thing, I was glad to see this rich collection present the cultural aspect of the revolution in a fitting and honest way. Each writer and artist had expressed what was on their mind, from their own particular corner and in their own way – ranging from academic articles that analyse the art of the revolution, to actual examples of the works under discussion, and interviews with active figures who have played an influential role in the movement.

    These contributions will be useful for anyone confused by the Syrian revolution and hoping to catch a glimpse of it from a different vantage point. Rather than highlighting where the revolution intersects with the reader’s idea of terrorism, Syria Speaks presents a young and admirable movement that, despite the catastrophic scale of the horror, is intent on fighting one of the most vicious regimes currently to be found on the face of the earth.

    This leads us once again to the question of art and its role: as an enthusiast of ‘art for art’s sake’, I don’t actually want to see literature playing a press or documentary role. What could be worse than the site of such desolation turning into a mere prop for everyone to explore their artistic expression around? Nobody is at all shy anymore, it seems, to make use of the misfortunes of their fellow human beings as material for a creative writing drill. I hope that the opposite will transpire, that this ongoing political and social storm will rage through the predictable, tired fixtures of literary expression and sweep them aside, healing one of the worst things that the long years of subjugation have resulted in for Syrians: the loss of individuality. Individual artistic inclination was treated with such contempt, and was so successfully abased, that many of us were too intimidated to engage with ideas that really touched us personally or strayed from the prescribed set of major stock themes. Our individuality was melted down into a unified mass and then recast in a compulsory conformist mould.

    New artistic approaches and works that have emerged so far with the revolution – some examples of which are to be found in Syria Speaks – are merely the initial point of departure for the revolution aspired to in literature: a revolution that will turn all that has prevailed until now upside-down and carve out new paths for itself in the worlds of narrative writing and visual arts, not only in terms of content but also form. And then everything that we have kept silent about will be addressed, at last. Perhaps it is difficult for this to unfold right now, and perhaps the wave that has swept over thousands of Syrians still needs some time before it can have such an obvious (and hoped for) impact on the stagnation which has pervaded Syrian creativity for such a long time.

  • Soldier No. 9

    This article is part of the English PEN Between EU and Me project, supported by the European Commission

    Translated from the Ukrainian by Amanda Love Daragh

    On 26 August, on the day when Petro Poroshenko met with Vladimir Putin in Minsk, the capital of Belarus,  Ukrainian forces captured an armoured personnel carrier and ten Russian paratroopers. The Russian government, which has been denying the presence of Russian soldiers in Ukrainian territory on a daily basis, was slow to respond but eventually came up with an explanation: they had taken a wrong turning. The paratroopers were captured 20 km from the Russian-Ukrainian border. In a televised interview the paratroopers themselves said that they had been given orders to advance 70 km into Ukraine territory, which is precisely what they were doing when they were apprehended by Ukrainian armed forces. These paratroopers are lucky, really. They are still alive.

    Other Russian paratroopers are being buried in secret – in the village of Vybuty near Pskov, in Bashkiria and in other towns and cities across the Russian Federation. No official information about these burials has been released, but Russian journalists arriving in Vybuty to find out more were met by men in civilian clothing, who attacked them and damaged their car. The journalists were told to leave the Pskov area immediately, or they would end up in one of the local marshes and their bodies would never be found.

    Russians are gradually coming to realise that it is not only local separatist rebels fighting in Donbass, but also a great many Russian citizens, including conscripts, who have been sent there by military command. The mothers of dead and missing Russian soldiers have compiled a list of 400 names and are demanding answers from the authorities regarding the whereabouts of their sons, who only joined the army in the first place because they had no choice.

    But while the Russian government is trying to find answers – or rather, choosing to remain silent – Ukrainian troops are finding more and more mass and unmarked individual graves in territory reclaimed from separatists. One of the latest burial sites was discovered by Ukrainian guardsmen in the middle of a field in the Luhansk Oblast. There were around twenty graves marked with little signs saying ‘Soldier No.7’, ‘Soldier No.9’ and so on. These signs bore no names, no dates of birth or death, because the Russian soldiers and officers lying in these graves are officially still alive and on active duty at various military bases within Russia. Nothing will be done to investigate these graves while the conflict is still ongoing, which means that those who are buried there might remain on the list of ‘missing’ residents of south-east Ukraine and Russia indefinitely. Incidentally, the list of missing Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers is also growing.

    Several days ago I went with my wife and children to our country house, in a village 90 km outside Kiev. We were filled in on the local news as soon as we arrived, and it was not good. A report had come through from the anti-terrorist operation zone that three local men had died after being drafted into the conflict zone, but only two bodies had been sent home for burial. The wife and relatives of the third dead man had simply been told that he had died during an artillery raid and his remains could not be moved.

    At the same time people there seem to somehow accept what is happening. My old friend Viktor, who used to be the local telephone engineer and lives on the street next to ours, said that he is expecting to be called up to fight any day now, so he wants to finish sorting out the heating at home. We have a cold winter ahead of us. Chances are that it will be a winter without Russian gas. Many people living in rural areas are converting their boilers to run on peat and firewood as well as gas. Viktor has already converted his boiler and is currently insulating his single-storey brick house with foam rubber. He would ideally like to brick up one of the windows before winter too, because it is particularly draughty. Viktor has two children, and his priority at the moment is to provide them and his wife with a decent environment in which to spend the winter.

    I heard from another neighbour that some villagers have already stocked up on antifreeze. Yet there is no sense of panic. Everyone is calm. People are digging up potatoes from their allotments, drying them out and storing them in their cellars. Everyone is thinking and talking about the immediate future, about winter, about the gas supply, which is bound to be cut off or at least severely restricted. Hardly anyone in the Ukrainian countryside even mentions Europe or the prospect of a European future for Ukraine. Right now the prospect of the coming winter is more tangible and significant.

    Another date has recently been occupying the attention of a large sector of the Ukrainian population: 1 September. Apart from updates on the military situation in Donbass and Russia’s latest incursions into Ukrainian territory, the subject most discussed on the radio lately has been the start of the new school year. Due to a combination of the military situation and the economic crisis, which has itself been exacerbated by the military situation, the cost of school uniforms, textbooks, exercise books and other school essentials has increased by as much as 30-50%. Salaries, however, remain the same and in some cases have even decreased. But the parents interviewed on the Ukrainian radio and television try not to complain about their predicament. It would be inappropriate to complain about personal problems when their country – Ukraine – is facing such serious problems of her own. Refugee families in towns and cities across Ukraine spent the month of August frantically filling in school paperwork, trying to secure places for their children. Seventeen new children have already joined School No.92 in Kiev. In total, over a thousand children from the Donbass region started school in Kiev on 1 September. Most are children of the regional elite, whose parents can afford the higher cost of living in the Ukrainian capital. Establishing relationships with their new classmates may present a particular challenge for Kiev’s schoolchildren, since many of the Donbass refugees hold Kiev and its inhabitants to blame for the tragedy currently unfolding in eastern Ukraine.

    The militarisation of life in any country also militarises the way people think, and this applies especially to children. The first lesson of the year in all Ukrainian schools was devoted to patriotism and the territorial integrity of the state . Which meant that the school day began on 1 September with a discussion about war, about a war that, for the immediate and foreseeable future, is going to be part of our lives, day and night.

    Ukraine Diaries by Andrey Kurkov, translated by Sam Taylor, is available to buy through our book partners Foyles.

    You can read more about the book at the Random House website.

  • Identity and durability

    Paulo Scott writes for PEN Atlas about the need for Brazilian authors to move away from stories about ‘white guys, living in the big urban centres’, and how a vain desire for durability has stunted the literature of his country

    Translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn

    Anybody would advise caution to a critic of narrative fiction who claims that a work has successfully used recent historical events as a vital component (and also as a backdrop) of its unfolding plot, in particular those events that relate to political positions. Books of this kind run the risk of becoming quickly dated – and there are few things considered worse for a work of literature.

    It is undoubtedly the case that historical events, particularly recent political events, are inevitably susceptible to re-readings and mutations. It does not, however, follow that a novelist ought to worry that his own personal – and therefore decisive – reading of a certain socio-political landscape (even if it is a barely examined one, and whether or not he is writing a predominantly realist narrative), might perhaps be capable of jeopardizing the durability of his story.

    A concern about the durability of a piece of literary production even before it has come into existence – as though such things could be reduced to an engineer’s calculations – is not something that can be taken seriously. Durability is a condition that is disconnected from a writer’s efforts and from his control, though I admit that a misreading of a given political landscape can substantially shorten the life of a novel with settings of a socio-political nature. Readers tend not to waste their time on narrative premises that are flagrantly incorrect (or, even worse, which are exposed by an about-turn in recent events). What I do not see as credible is that the writer should become fearful and run away from any kind of risk, which sometimes is an inescapable dimension of the creative process.

    The period of recent Brazilian democratisation (following the dictatorship that started in 1964), a period already within the gaze of Brazilian history, a period whose conclusion, depending on the criteria you use, ended in the second half of the 1980s, has so far failed to produce an even moderately impressive number of novels that manage to get away from the reality of white guys, living in the big urban centres, belonging to a middle class that is modernised and advantaged. Nor has it produced novels that risk a more substantial (and also more vertically-oriented) and challenging weighing-up of the social impact of recent political choices. There are, of course, people who claim that the country is still in a transitional phase towards true democracy, especially taking into account the demonstrations in June 2013, which triggered political repression that various levels of government considered perfectly acceptable in view of the greater freedom existing today as compared to the exorbitant restrictions in place during the years of the military dictatorship.

    These contemporary novels describe the reality of a social class with access to education and culture in general, which the overwhelming majority of Brazilians do not possess. There is a certain modesty in the choice of narrators, of characters, of plots, of settings and spaces. There is a need to correspond to a contemporaneity dictated by literary production in Europe and North America, as though by reflecting them we might attain some of our own authority or greater visibility or even durability. There is a short-sightedness that is entirely unproductive and anti-literary, if we accept that literature is an important means of getting closer to the other. There is a fear of taking a frank look at Brazilian reality.

    Of course, there are some contemporary writers (I shall not risk naming them) who do not deny the full breadth of Brazil’s culture, and who do not refuse a hard look at Brazilian identity – something that is undeniably interlinked with current events as well as with recent conflicts, with the period of democratisation (which for some people is still incomplete and is not being completed), with a tremendous difficulty in learning from our own mistakes – but they are names not present in any quantity that is reasonable and desirable; they are, in other words, few and far between.

    From this perspective, contemporary Brazilian literature – even keeping in mind those writers producing literature that is original and facing outwards to a Brazilian social reality of relevance, though one as yet little explored – is still quite timid compared to what is being produced in the rest of Latin America, from Mexico to Argentina. Brazil is vast (so vast that whenever it responds as a State, as a Nation, it’s frightening), it has a plurality that is almost impossible to bind together, but this is no excuse. To my mind, taking on a bit more risk and being unafraid to write about what are actually the most pressing concerns within the seriousness that is today’s Brazil would not be a mistake.

    Cultural expression, literary expression, can become dated for countless different reasons, so arranging things in such a way as to avoid the label of becoming dated, whether in theme, in the profile of the characters, in the events that propel the narrative, in whatever it may be, might be an unforgiveable error. Someone once said, and it is worth remembering, that if you are going to write governed by fear, even just with an eye to the little aspirations and vanities related to the illusion of durability, then you would do better not to write at all.

    Paulo Scott is appearing in the UK at the following events.

    He will also be appearing in the US.

    Nowhere People is Paulo Scott’s first novel to be translated into English.

  • ‘While the Gods Were Sleeping’

    This article is part of the English PEN Between EU and Me project, supported by the European Commission

    The Great War is, at least in Belgian literature, a strangely forgotten war.  While our landscape still bears physical witness to the scale of the tragedy – strewn with war cemeteries and scarred by old craters and trenches –  echoes of the Great War in our prose or poetry are rare. Belgium saw no great novels written during and after 1914-1918. There’s a mass of private memoirs, letters, journalistic impressions and the like that are certainly interesting, sometimes even brilliant, yet in a country that, since the second half of the 19th century, could boast a lively, internationally-acclaimed literature, perhaps it is a little meagre when compared to the abundance of French, German and British masterpieces that have sprung from the all too iconic ‘mud of Flanders.’

    Even our historiography remained silent about the war for quite a long time, with the first comprehensive history of the Great War in Belgium being published as recently as 1997. It seems the events unfolding in 1914, the brutal invasion of the country and the extremely harsh conditions under the German occupation, proved to be almost too traumatic for our collective memory and artistic imagination.

    The war also meant the abrupt birth of modernity in my fatherland, or rather; once the war was over the middle and upper classes, who had been celebrating their ‘Belle Époque’, their Golden Age, could no longer ignore the underlying social and political injustices on which their wealth and privilege were founded. Belgium was the first industrialised nation on the continent, despite its modest size, and an economic giant. At the outbreak of the war it was the fourth largest trading nation in the world, and the most densely populated region on earth with Antwerp boasting the second largest port. The country was still utterly 19th
     century in its outlook, however, and in some respects it seemed even feudal. All this came to an end when, in 1918, the Germans left a country they had thoroughly looted, its economic infrastructure destroyed, its standard of living literally bombed back to the level of the 18th century.

    Amid this destruction a new nation was forged. Barely two weeks after the Armistice, the king signed laws granting the Belgians universal suffrage, which finally, after decades of struggle, allowed the labour movement to translate its vast popular support into real political power (women I should add, sadly had to wait for another war to be given the right to vote), changing the country forever.

    So people perhaps simply preferred to look forward, to hope and work for the future rather than to despair at the horrors of the past war, and this is reflected in our arts and literature. The process of rebuilding the nation also meant that the immensely rich and diverse artistic legacy of the Belle Époque gradually became forgotten. The aftermath of the Great War thus created a double void, if you wish, in our national memory – and of course twenty years later another war brought new suffering and trauma.

    My novel, While the Gods were Sleeping, therefore, could never be just another ‘novel of the Great War,’ as Belgium lacks this particular tradition. The book is, in a way, an attempt to write the novel that should or could have been written in the decades directly after the Great War. It pays tribute, even down to the level of syntax and vocabulary, rhythm and metaphor, to the unjustly forgotten literature in our national archives and libraries – the splendid legacy of the Belle Époque in all its glamour and its darkness.  The narrative, however, remains aware that it is written in the 21st century, in a world that is, for better and for worse, the product of the forces which Europe was about to unleash in the summer of 1914.

    I’m glad, of course, that when the book was published in the summer of 2008 it was immediately hailed as a modern classic, but above all I’m grateful to the many texts and stories on which it rests; the legacy from which it could breathe its inspiration, allowing me to give voice to a period that had been shrouded –  both in our history and our literature – in silence for all too long.

    While the Gods Were Sleeping is available from our partner Foyles. The book is translated by Paul Vincent and published by Puskin Press in July.

    You can write a letter as part of the project, ‘Letter to an Unknown Soldier’, with our friends at the Free Word Centre.

  • 'While the Gods Were Sleeping'

    This article is part of the English PEN Between EU and Me project, supported by the European Commission

    The Great War is, at least in Belgian literature, a strangely forgotten war.  While our landscape still bears physical witness to the scale of the tragedy – strewn with war cemeteries and scarred by old craters and trenches –  echoes of the Great War in our prose or poetry are rare. Belgium saw no great novels written during and after 1914-1918. There’s a mass of private memoirs, letters, journalistic impressions and the like that are certainly interesting, sometimes even brilliant, yet in a country that, since the second half of the 19th century, could boast a lively, internationally-acclaimed literature, perhaps it is a little meagre when compared to the abundance of French, German and British masterpieces that have sprung from the all too iconic ‘mud of Flanders.’

    Even our historiography remained silent about the war for quite a long time, with the first comprehensive history of the Great War in Belgium being published as recently as 1997. It seems the events unfolding in 1914, the brutal invasion of the country and the extremely harsh conditions under the German occupation, proved to be almost too traumatic for our collective memory and artistic imagination.

    The war also meant the abrupt birth of modernity in my fatherland, or rather; once the war was over the middle and upper classes, who had been celebrating their ‘Belle Époque’, their Golden Age, could no longer ignore the underlying social and political injustices on which their wealth and privilege were founded. Belgium was the first industrialised nation on the continent, despite its modest size, and an economic giant. At the outbreak of the war it was the fourth largest trading nation in the world, and the most densely populated region on earth with Antwerp boasting the second largest port. The country was still utterly 19th
     century in its outlook, however, and in some respects it seemed even feudal. All this came to an end when, in 1918, the Germans left a country they had thoroughly looted, its economic infrastructure destroyed, its standard of living literally bombed back to the level of the 18th century.

    Amid this destruction a new nation was forged. Barely two weeks after the Armistice, the king signed laws granting the Belgians universal suffrage, which finally, after decades of struggle, allowed the labour movement to translate its vast popular support into real political power (women I should add, sadly had to wait for another war to be given the right to vote), changing the country forever.

    So people perhaps simply preferred to look forward, to hope and work for the future rather than to despair at the horrors of the past war, and this is reflected in our arts and literature. The process of rebuilding the nation also meant that the immensely rich and diverse artistic legacy of the Belle Époque gradually became forgotten. The aftermath of the Great War thus created a double void, if you wish, in our national memory – and of course twenty years later another war brought new suffering and trauma.

    My novel, While the Gods were Sleeping, therefore, could never be just another ‘novel of the Great War,’ as Belgium lacks this particular tradition. The book is, in a way, an attempt to write the novel that should or could have been written in the decades directly after the Great War. It pays tribute, even down to the level of syntax and vocabulary, rhythm and metaphor, to the unjustly forgotten literature in our national archives and libraries – the splendid legacy of the Belle Époque in all its glamour and its darkness.  The narrative, however, remains aware that it is written in the 21st century, in a world that is, for better and for worse, the product of the forces which Europe was about to unleash in the summer of 1914.

    I’m glad, of course, that when the book was published in the summer of 2008 it was immediately hailed as a modern classic, but above all I’m grateful to the many texts and stories on which it rests; the legacy from which it could breathe its inspiration, allowing me to give voice to a period that had been shrouded –  both in our history and our literature – in silence for all too long.

    While the Gods Were Sleeping is available from our partner Foyles. The book is translated by Paul Vincent and published by Puskin Press in July.

    You can write a letter as part of the project, ‘Letter to an Unknown Soldier’, with our friends at the Free Word Centre.

  • When my cat tried to have breakfast at Tiffany’s

    This article is part of the English PEN Between EU and Me project, supported by the European Commission

    Translated from the Greek by Georgia Panteli

    When Zooey was brought to me, and I was pressed to adopt him, he was both lucky and unlucky at the same time. He was unlucky because when I was ten years old I decided that all I’d do in life is read, write and travel all over the world. There was so much beauty out there waiting for me to discover, which meant no children, no dogs and no cats. Nothing would stand between me and the world. Yet he was lucky, too, as the night before I had watched ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ again at the Truman Capote festival and Zooey looked exactly like Holly Golightly’s Cat, only smaller: ginger, smart, nippy. So maybe we could live together like those two, like two good friends, without too much devotion and whining miaows and ‘What will I ever do without you?’ We could live together without belonging to each other.

    I let him stay with me just to try it out. As if he had read my mind, he moved quietly under the armchair and left me to do my work undisturbed. I am not going to name him, I decided. I’ll call him ‘Cat’; Holly knew better. If you give him a name, he’ll ask for more. If he asks, you’ll give. If you give, he’ll give and if he gives, he’ll bind you with invisible strings, the strongest kind. So, no name then. ‘Goodnight, Cat,’ I said and switched off the light.

    It was a stormy night in January. It had been raining all day and suddenly at midnight, with a flash of lightning, the bedroom became as bright as the noon day. I woke up startled. Water was flooding the balcony and was seeping into the room through the balcony door. Thunderbolts fell like bombs out of the sky. With a sudden zap, the power went out in the entire building. I fumbled desperately under the covers to find my glasses and instead touched a furry little ball curled next to my legs. ‘What are you doing here, Cat?’ I asked, frightened. (I never had kept an animal. I had never slept next to an animal before. Their hair disgusted me. Their germs scared me. I didn’t want them on my bed.)

    He was playing possum. ‘Ha, you sly trickster, I’ll show you,’ I mumbled to the supposedly sleeping fluffball. I took him in my hand – he fit exactly in my palm – and placed him on the rug by my bed. Neither too far nor too close: the exact distance one needs to breathe. We shouldn’t get in each other’s face.

    As soon as I put him down, I saw him in a flash of lightning opening his huge green eyes and then Cat, the hypocrite, started crying with all the might his tiny little lungs could afford. My heart broke. Yet I decided to play my cards right. I knew that in relationships cards get dealt early on. Whatever you do, you tread a path from which there’s no turning back. I got up feigning indifference; blindly, I grabbed a bowl of cherries from the fridge and started eating, deaf to his cries, worrying about the room getting flooded. But in the end I made a really stupid mistake: I underestimated my opponent. He was only four inches long, but he was a fighter! For a quarter of an hour he was howling as if there was no tomorrow. He filled his lungs with air and let it out as desperate sighs. Then his wailing dropped to a heartbreaking whimper, which you could barely hear, as though his soul was about to leave his body. His performance was rivalled only by the National Theatre.

    Seventeen minutes later I admitted my defeat. I took him in my hand, put him in front of me and started lecturing him, looking straight into his eyes that were glowing in the dark:

    ’Why are you so stubborn, Cat? What do you want from me? Didn’t we already agree about this? You don’t belong to me and I don’t belong to you. We’ll live like Holly and her Cat, flatmates and buddies, until we find out exactly what we want to do with our lives. I’ll feed you the best delicacies, I swear. And you can wake me up in the morning if I don’t hear the alarm. But we can’t sleep together. We’ll come and go as we please. No complaints, no whining, no “Please don’t leave me alone”, all right? Are we clear? And I swear to you that after I go all over the world and decide where I want to settle down, I’ll take you with me and give you a name. I think I’ll call you Zooey, like my favourite Salinger character. Do you like the name Zooey? Or maybe Truman to honour Holly? And if I get rich and move to New York, I’ll buy you a collar from Tiffany’s.’

    He was listening to me attentively without moving an inch. After I finished talking I took him in my hand and put him back on the little rug. That exact moment there was a loud crack of thunder and a flash of lightning lit the room once again. The kitten ran towards the balcony, from where the water was still coming in.

    ‘Please don’t go, Zooey, I’m scared’, I shouted. He stopped, turned and looked at me with his glowing eyes. Then he turned back, slowly climbed up on the bed and ensconced himself behind my knees. He never left my bed again. And we had breakfast together in the kitchenette; we didn’t give a damn about Tiffany’s.

    Lena Divani was born in Volos, Greece. She is the author of novels, short stories, and plays. Seven Lives and One Great Love is her first novel to appear in English.

    ​ Her novel, ​Seven Lives and One Great Love: The Memoirs of a Cat from Europa Editions was published in May 2014, and is available through our partner Foyles.