On International Day of Solidarity with Political Prisoners in Belarus, Nobel Laureate Ales Bialiatski on letters, solidarity, and compassion. Translated by Valzhyna Mort.
PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.
I always carefully study the images on the postcards. They are extremely diverse. Most often, the subjects relate to animals and birds, flowers and natural landscapes, visual art, and cityscapes. Postcards come from all over the world – from United States and Canada, from Australia and various parts of Europe. I sincerely wish to answer each one, to share with gratitude at least a little bit of the positive energy that enveloped me from head to toe.
But it is impossible: different languages, unimaginable number of letters, limited time. We have no mutual contact. And although the absolute majority of those who write do not expect an answer, the impossibility of answering bothers me badly. I am like that battery, the black box with input terminals, accumulating positive vibes. Will I have enough space, memory, and depth to hold all this positive human energy?
I wonder how worthy I am of such massive human support. An ordinary person with his share of weaknesses and shortcomings, who hardly wants to be a role model for anyone. Or maybe I really don’t understand something, and I underestimate all the significance and depth of the circumstances in which I find myself?
The world has countless problems: war, oppression, violence, cruelty, and hatred. There are entire countries and regions where a human life is worth the price of a bullet from a Kalashnikov. Be it in such a harmless way, with a postcard or a letter, something incites people to send me moral support.
Maybe this is how world solidarity manifests itself? Maybe through these letters of support, a protest against universal injustice is expressed? Maybe they emanate from an overflowing, irrational compassion towards all the offended and oppressed?
Not so long ago, I read the memoirs of a woman of culture, from Moscow. She saw and remembered how, after the defeat of Paulus’s army near Stalingrad, German prisoners were driven in a long column through the central streets of Moscow. Heartbroken people threw bread into this column of captured enemies. Another writer mentioned how they, ‘enemies of the people,’ were given food by saleswomen at Siberian train stations. They came to the trains to sell their milk, cottage cheese, and baked rolls for a good price to feed their children, and they gave everything to the prisoners for free.
Probably, I have become an object that gives other people the opportunity to express their civil position, to show compassion and humanity. Objectively speaking, apparently, there is nothing surprising in this. If people nurture, protect and stand up – often with risk and sacrifice to themselves – for animals, nature, the environment, then why not do the same, even with greater impetus, for our fellow human beings? What’s unusual is the fact that in this case the victim is a human rights defender, who himself tried to help other people.
And yet it seems to me that there is an invisible connection between me and those who write to me without expecting a reply. In these letters and postcards, the victim, who I don’t consider myself to be, often turns into a hero, who I am not, but whom others would like to see in me. A victim and a hero in one person are actually neither a victim nor a hero.
Ales Bialiatski, born on 25 September 1962, is a literary scholar, essayist, and human rights defender. He was a founding member of the Belarusian literary organisation Tutejshyja (The Locals) and formerly served as head of the Maxim Bahdanovich Literary Museum in Minsk. In April 1996, he founded the Viasna Human Rights Centre, an organisation that campaigns for opposition activists who are harassed and persecuted by the Belarusian authorities. Bialiatski was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2022 alongside the Russian human rights organisation Memorial, and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Center for Civil Liberties. On 21 May 2023, to mark the International Day of Solidarity with Political Prisoners in Belarus, PEN International published a letter signed by 103 Nobel Laureates, expressing solidarity with Bialiatski. In May 2024, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found his detention to be arbitrary and called for his immediate release.
Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk in 1981 and moved to the USA in 2005. Her most recent book, Music for the Dead and Resurrected, came out with FSG in 2020 and was the winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the UNT Rilke Prize. Her earlier collections of poetry are Factory of Tears and Collected Body, both published by Copper Canyon Press. Mort has been honored with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation and the Amy Clampitt Foundation. Currently, she is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Cornell University. Mort writes and publishes in English and in Belarusian.
Photo credit: Viasna Human Rights Centre.
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PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.
Jacqueline – thank you so much for speaking with me. I wanted to begin by asking, what made you start writing about the experiences of children, and particularly girls, who are facing difficult realities?
I think it was because, when I was a child, I loved reading but always had a feeling that writers didn’t represent children as they really were. There were no real emotional worries: children were rounding up robbers in Enid Blyton; in school stories, girls were sometimes picked on, but the depiction just didn’t chime with me, even as I enjoyed reading the books. I liked Noel Streatfeild – my favourite book of hers was Ballet Shoes – and the sisters did quarrel, but it just wasn’t any kind of reflection on life. And I don’t just mean my sort of life because I was brought up in a council estate, but many people’s actual private lives. In fact, there’s a moment in one of my childhood diaries where I write in rather ponderous terms that I don’t want to write children’s books when I grow up, because they’re not truthful about children.
I actually really did want to write for children. And I was lucky that, by the time I started writing, things had shifted a little – there was suddenly room for stories like Tracy Beaker and children in care, or Andy in The Suitcase Kid, whose parents are splitting up. Very sadly, there seem to be more children in care now. And certainly many, many more children whose parents aren’t together anymore. Life has changed.
I don’t want to traumatise children, but I do want to be truthful. I want them to be comforted, and I want to have happy endings, and I want to have lots of funny bits to break any tension. I want any child going through a horrible time to feel that there’s somebody out there for them, that they’re not alone, that somebody understands what they’re going through. And, if a child is lucky enough to have a very secure family and lots of friends, for them to be able to empathise with other children who might seem a bit withdrawn or weird or angry.
It does give me great delight when, now, as I sign copies of Think Again,my book for adults, people have said quietly to me that my books had helped them and made a difference to their lives. Who wouldn’t feel pleased and touched that that’s happened?
Empathy really is so central to your books. You write with such compassion and sensitivity about your characters, and I know this has helped young readers to develop empathy towards others, and to cope with issues in their own lives that require the empathy of others.
Empathy is so often coded as a female trait, and so many of your readers are girls – though you of course have readers of all genders. I’m interested in your thoughts on this – on what constitutes empathy, and on its value in literature where empathy can be such a gendered notion?
I know it’s not fashionable to see differences between males and females, but in my experience, if you look at the primary school playground, girls are often going around arm in arm or whispering together, or suddenly turning against another girl, while boys fight or have a fierce argument and then it’s all over and done with, and is kind of more straightforward. I think girls often understand instinctively how somebody else might be feeling – but this is so generalised, because there are obviously many boys who do, and many girls who just want to go out and play football. I do feel that empathy often comes more naturally to women, perhaps because women have traditionally had to raise the children, and to try and think what another person is thinking, what it must be like for that person. That’s where I welcome the fact that so many youngish fathers are very much more in the picture now, wanting to empathise and help out and spend time with their young children.
I think most women would say that they’re almost fine-tuned into sensing when a child of theirs comes home and they’re a little withdrawn – they just know that something’s happened, that something’s gone wrong. But all I can really write about are my own experiences, and that’s the way it seems to me.
What do you think the responsibilities of children’s authors are, especially today, when, for example, online misogyny is on the rise, and children can so easily access this content through social media and the internet?
It’s a huge problem. It’s very difficult. I really don’t know how we get around it, because most children are wily about getting round any blocks on their phones and accessing the most horrible things. Although they’ve got all this knowledge, they’re also in a way more innocent too – they can think that because you see some horrible thing on the internet it must be true that women like to be hurt and humiliated in a sexual relationship. This is what’s so frightening.
There are very good male adult role models, of course. But there’s this sinister new movement about what it is to be a man, and you’ve got all these young boys who naturally want to get on with others and do what is considered right. But what is right, now? I do feel sorry for them. I just think it’s very hard to deal with.
Going back to what you said about writing in a truthful way, because your books deal with difficult topics in such honest and open ways, there’s often conversation around your books being ‘controversial’ or even ‘inappropriate’ for children. What’s your response when people (parents, for example) say they don’t allow children to read your books?
It’s their prerogative. If they don’t want children to read my books, that’s fine. I was in my local bookshop and there was a mum with her daughter and several other girls the daughter’s age, and they were looking at the children’s section. The bookseller is very loyal to me, and has a whole load of my books on that shelf, and one of the little girls said, ‘Oh, oh, Jacqueline Wilson, oh, can I have this one Mummy?’ and she said, ‘Certainly not!’ I fell about laughing in the background. It was very embarrassing.
I think adults often want to keep their children feeling that the world is safe and cozy – and why wouldn’t you? But I don’t think I’ve ever had a letter from a child or young adult saying they couldn’t bear a book. Once or twice, children have said a book made them cry, and I’ve said ‘I’m so sorry,’ but then one of them said, ‘But I like crying!’ It’s a tightrope, because I want to be truthful but I still want to be entertaining. I certainly don’t want my books to be banned.
Maybe adults going through a troubled time might, in retrospect, think that one of my books was too upsetting. But mostly I have had lovely positive reactions. There was a trend going round on social media , ‘Jacqueline Wilson traumatised me.’ But I think that was very tongue in cheek. Then there was a sort of counter-movement of ‘Jacqueline Wilson raised me.’ When Think Again came out and, in the initial weeks, there were t-shirts and tote bags with ‘Jacqueline Wilson raised me’ on them. I made my daughter put one on and photographed her, because she’s the only person who could legitimately say that!
I think that if anyone were to take the trouble to write to me and tell me exactly why they thought a certain book wasn’t suitable, I would read it very carefully and take it seriously. But I’ve never thought This was a huge mistake. It is difficult with books that I wrote, say, 30 years ago, because times have changed enormously. We’ve become much more sensitive about certain issues.
How much do you worry about book banning in general (which is of course a much bigger issue in America, where many children’s books are being banned from libraries and schools, often those which explore similar issues to those about which you write – like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume)? Do you fear this will only get worse?
I have very few books published in America – they have been banned, I think. It’s a problem. But I do think that, here, publishers do struggle so much. Books are much more carefully edited, copy edited, sent to different specialist organisations to make sure that no offense can be taken. I understand all of this. With me, if something has been pointed out to me that could possibly cause offence, I always think very carefully. Mostly, I accept suggestions or edit myself very carefully. Sometimes, as an old lady, I think really? And just occasionally I will say something has to stay the way it is, because it wouldn’t work in any other way. It is a difficult thing.
Do you think the reception of your books would have differed at all if they were primarily aimed at boys, and centred primarily around male characters?
It’s hard to know. Melvin Burgess wrote a book, Junk, about three teenage boys, which delves into their minds, and it was probably a very truthful book, but I’m pretty certain that it would not be on any shelves now – not at all for any sort of issue of literary quality, but because I think people would prefer not to think about what it’s like in a teenage boy’s mind.
If you look at the top ten children’s books, I would say the majority of them have male characters – from Harry Potter to Wimpy Kid and Tom Gates. Books for children also seem to have changed a bit: they are much shorter and much more heavily illustrated; they deal with issues, but in a comic sort of way. Part of the problem is that any book now comes second to looking at a phone. If I was a bookseller or children’s librarian, I would recommend Impossible Creatures by the wonderful Katherine Rundell, because I think she’s a brilliant writer, and because it’s both quite easy to read and deals with such interesting things, for boys as well as for girls.
I’d also like to ask about the relationship you have with your readers. Writer–reader solidarity is something that PEN has been supporting for over a hundred years, and it feels like your bond with your readers is particularly special.
When I was growing up, I adored you and all of your books. I even had a Jacqueline Wilson branded diary that I wrote in, which made it feel a bit like I was sharing my thoughts with you and your characters. I was lucky enough to meet you a few times at book signings, and each time I gave you a letter that I had written, and you always wrote back to me. Your replies are some of my most treasured possessions. What has it meant to you to receive letters from your fans and what does that exchange with your readers mean to you? How valuable is letter-writing today?
It’s so wonderful. I’ve got boxes and boxes of letters children have written to me up in the attic. Initially, I replied to all of them. But it became difficult because I was spending far more time writing letters than actually writing books. Now I can’t promise that I can write back to everybody, but for anybody who writes a really interesting, sincere letter, or who is going through a particularly hard time, I do try and do my best.
I was in John Lewis in Oxford Street recently, doing a signing in the new Waterstones bookshop in the store, and there were four people in the queue who had kept their childhood postcards from me. I’m amazed at the number of people who have kept them. It’s just so lovely to feel that people cared enough to put pen to paper (or crayon to paper!).
There are people I’ve written to almost as if they were nieces. These are very special to me. There’s a young woman in Ireland who wrote to me when she was very ill, when she was about twelve, and we are still communicating. And there’s another young woman I write to who lives outside Glasgow. I recently met up with her, which was lovely.
There’s a young man who I first wrote to when he was about seven. Now he’s 24 and has recently moved to London, and I think he is coming to visit soon – which will be a bit strange for both of us. But it’s lovely to feel that people have really liked my books. I’ve been sent so many photographs over the years of girls’ bedrooms with all my books, and it’s just so sweet.
That’s so heartwarming to hear. Finally, I wanted to ask about your experience of writing for adults in Think Again, compared to writing for children. What was it like revisiting your old teenage characters, now in their adult lives, and your younger readers, now grown into their own adult lives?
It’s surreal. It really is. Often at book signings it’s the mother who’s keener to have a photo than the child. I’ve got this sort of double kind of audience, which is so special.
It’s been in my mind for a long time to write about a few of the characters I wrote about in the past. I had a conversation with my daughter, in which we were playing about a bit and trying to think what might have happened to some of the characters. Other people have done that online, and there seemed to be some interest. Then, wonderfully, someone approached my agent and asked if I’d be interested, and I said ‘Yes please!’ The Girls series was one of the most popular, so I thought Let’s have a go.
You’re opening yourself up for criticism a bit, because everybody has expectations about what might have happened. I’ve had suggestions that are so remarkably funny and lurid and certainly not publishable.
When I was writing about teenage girls, I was endlessly going into schools, and often having to face Year Nine (who can be a bit scary at times). With the permission of the teachers, I could talk to the girls during break time, and ask them what was worrying them the most, who had a boyfriend, whether they were allowed to go out by themselves in little bunches? In Think Again, Ellie is 40; I am obviously way, way, way past 40. I do have some friends who are 40, but you can’t really ask them any really intimate questions, you would feel shy and peculiar and nosy, unless they’re your best friends. So I had to think quite hard about what it would be like for Ellie to be 40. I did have some diaries that I kept when I was that age, but I find it very cringey going back to my diaries, so I tried not to do that. Then, wonderfully, as soon as I started writing, somehow Ellie just came to me.
I found it much easier than I thought it would be. And I loved writing it, I really, really did. I always like writing, but it was something new. I wondered what it would be like going out to promote it, but I’ve never had such a lovely book tour. People were so kind and so appreciative, which is just the sort of boost you need when you think, Oh, I’m getting old; am I getting past it?
A lot of older friends and family have said, ‘Why are you carrying on writing? You’ve made enough money to see you and your partner through and to leave to your daughter; you’ve got a lovely house, and you’ve got lovely books, everything that you would want; why keep on writing, because it must tire you out writing a lot at home and then going out and promoting it?’ One particular friend said to me, very genuinely, ‘I think you should take up doing jigsaws.’ I thought You have no idea what pleasure (and also what anxiety) writing gives me – and it’s not going to happen with jigsaws! I think I just am a writer, and I have to carry on writing while words make sense.
Interview by Eleanor Antoniou.
Dame Jacqueline Wilson is one of Britain’s outstanding writers for young readers. Known for her contemporary stories many featuring feisty characters like the enduring Tracy Beaker, she has also used historical settings for many recent books such as Hetty Feather and The Runaway Girls. Opal Plumstead was her 100th book and The Seaside Sleepover is her 120th. Over 40 million copies of her books have been sold in the UK alone and they have been translated into 34 languages.
Born in Bath, Jacqueline spent most of her childhood in Kingston on Thames. She wanted to be a writer from the age of 6 and wrote her first ‘novel’ when she was nine. She started work as a journalist for DC Thomson in Dundee where JACKIE magazine was named after her. She has been writing full time, all her adult life.
Jacqueline has been honoured with many of the UK’s top awards including the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award, the Smarties Prize and the Children’s Book of the Year. She was the Children’s Laureate from 2005-2007 and holds Honorary Doctorates from the Universities of Kingston, Bath, Winchester, Dundee and Roehampton where she was also Chancellor for six years.
Susannah Dickey on the true crime media engine, Palestine, grief and the PEN Heaney Prize.
PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.
Susannah Dickey won the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize, awarded to a work of poetry of outstanding literary merit that engages with the impact of cultural or political events on human conditions or relationships. The PEN Heaney Prize is a partnership between English PEN, Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann and the Estate of Seamus Heaney. The 2024 Prize was supported by Hawthornden Foundation and the Estate of Seamus Heaney, and was announced on 2 December 2024 at Queen’s University Belfast, in partnership with the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s.
‘Who Has the Right to Be Grieved’ is an essay that expands on Susannah Dickey’s speech on accepting the Prize.
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In December 2024, I was incredibly fortunate to be awarded the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize. The prize, which recognises a collection of poetry with a focus on social engagement, was awarded to my debut collection, ISDAL, in which I attempted to satirise the typical tropes of True Crime podcasts, and ask questions about the broader implications of the True Crime media engine: what does the form ask of its listeners by rendering crimes – and, by necessary association, the victims of those crimes – as exceptional, aberrant, and fascinating? The aim of True Crime is not to engender grief among its audience, nor provide criticism of the systemic violence that leads to the death of so many of the genre’s subjects. Rather, the approach of True Crime is evidence of a dominant cultural pathology that trivialises death. And it was this that I wanted to try and understand.
When I was writing ISDAL, a book that hugely influenced my writing and thinking was Judith Butler’s Precarious Life. Butler asks what makes a life grievable – what qualifies a human being for the respect, acknowledgement and witness implicit within our willingness to grieve them? With ISDAL, the lives at the front of my mind were those of women murdered by practitioners of systemic misogyny. Violence against women continues to proliferate, particularly in the place I call home: rates of femicide in the north of Ireland since 2017 are the third highest per capita in Europe, and the highest per capita in the UK and Ireland.
In our current moment, though, any talk of systemic violence must include an acknowledgment of the people of Palestine and Lebanon. These are people who have also been deemed less than human, both by the Israeli state and by those governments that continue to equivocate, to cower, and to provide weapons to the Israeli army. At the time of writing my acceptance speech, the news of a ceasefire in Lebanon had just been announced; at the moment of writing this elaboration upon that speech, a ceasefire deal for Gaza has been agreed, coming into effect on Sunday 19 January. While the news of the Gaza ceasefire is welcome, just as the news of a ceasefire in Lebanon was, it is abundantly, blatantly not enough, because no ceasefire will ever be sufficient to right the wrongs perpetuated by Israel in Palestine since 1948. In fact, just hours after the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was announced, the Israeli military launched attacks across Gaza, adding to the Palestinian civilian death toll. If these actions tell us anything, it is that a ceasefire agreement does not, in the eyes of Israel and in the eyes of those who arm the Israeli war machine, imbue the citizens of Palestine with dignity, respect, or humanity; given which, this trajectory of dispossession can only continue.
In Precarious Life, Butler talks about the societal perception of violence perpetrated against those who have been strategically dehumanised in the service of military operations. ‘If violence is done against those who are unreal,’ Butler writes, ‘then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated.’ Over the course of the last 15 months, we have seen how the language of negation is used to deny Palestinians their reality – Palestinian children have been referred to as ‘people under 18’; Palestinian civilians have simply ‘died’, or been ‘killed’, often in an abstracted voice, with no specific reference to who, precisely, has been killing them. The goal of this language of negation is to absolve us of feeling – of feeling anything – and to discourage us from critiquing the canny self-mythologising of Britain, America and Israel, which works to make certain bodies, in this case Palestinian bodies, viable military targets.
Many of us are constituted in some way by the social susceptibility of our bodies to violence. While writing ISDAL, I wondered if women being the predominant audience for True Crime media might suggest a mass desire to escape the fact of our vulnerability – that playing the detective or voyeur for a while is a nice escape from the reality, which is that many of us have been, or will be, victims of male violence. While this desire for escape makes sense, what if there is a more meaningful way to face this frightening truth? If, by recognising the distinct but no less conspicuous vulnerabilities of those we are told are ‘other’ to us, we might foment the desire to protest the political frameworks that render so many of us undeserving of care? To grieve the ‘other’, therefore, might be a means by which we can challenge the membrane between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’, to question which lives are presented as real, and which lives are presented as unreal.
A close friend of mine recently attended a funeral home in County Kerry, to participate in a practice in which residents of the parish, even those not closely associated with the deceased or their family, are encouraged to shake hands with the surviving loved ones, to share a moment of communion and condolence. My friend and I talked about how strange this seemed, in so many ways; having grown up in a large city in the north, it wasn’t a tradition either of us were familiar with. We talked about how querying the practice is an obvious consequence of the deliberate and incremental winnowing of public grieving, imposed by those systems and officials who shape our daily lives. Grief often demands that we step outside our typical itinerary; that we reflect upon the value of a life outside of what it can offer to industry, to production, to commerce, to economy. Grief, in many ways, functions in direct opposition to productivity, and it is therefore, in the most literal sense, not a ‘productive’ use of our time. Christina Sharpe writes about this in In The Wake: On Blackness and Being, acknowledging how, through grieving, we dislodge ourselves from the forward propulsion of the imperial present. It is exactly because of this that grief ought not to be reserved purely for those with whom we have shared moments.
I am obviously not so untethered from lived experience that I think it is possible to feel a similar intensity of loss for someone I have never met as it is for someone I love. Rather, what I mean is that grief ought not to be one fixed feeling, and that by casting the net of our grief wider – by permitting some variety in what we mean by the word – it is possible to see how grief can be a political act, a means by which we acknowledge a stranger’s humanity, their deservingness of care for the conditions of their lives, our outrage at the unbearable circumstances of their death. Because the circumstances of these deaths – Palestinian children, gunned down in the street by IDF soldiers; Palestinian families, murdered in their beds amid airstrikes – are indeed unbearable. That we, safe in our cosy privilege, can bear them is a symptom of many intersecting evils: information satiation, imperialist rhetoric, and racism. Mourning the Palestinian people, amid the pressure not to mourn them, is a resistant act. As Lisa Baraitser puts it in Enduring Time, ‘looking after the dead through the practice of grief’ can serve the larger interests of society, allowing us to ‘keep safe political ideas.’ Grieving can galvanise us, spur us on to advocate for those not afforded a voice.
In 2004, Seamus Heaney said in an interview, ‘I can’t think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is change people’s understanding of what’s going on in the world.’ It felt – and feels – wrong, in so many ways, to celebrate a poetry prize in the midst of a genocide, but it is precisely this wrongness that we need to cling to, for the moment in which we fail to feel outrage at genocide is the moment in which there will be no reason for poetry to exist, because our collective conscience will be too rotted, too unfit for purpose, to allow in the kinds of change that are necessary for our salvation as a species. Butler writes: ‘I am as much constituted by those I grieve for as by those whose deaths I disavow, whose nameless and faceless deaths form the melancholic background for my social world.’ Over the course of this 15-month assault, over 45,000 Palestinians have been murdered in the background of our social worlds, each one worthy of our grief. This ceasefire should not bring an end to our outrage, because the ceasefire does not bring with it an end to the grief – a ceasefire does not rebuild the hospitals, homes, schools, and mosques destroyed in aerial bombardments, nor does it bring back those lost, the children, friends, fathers, mothers, and siblings. It is our collective responsibility to feel grief for these losses, because it is our grief that motivates intervention into the injustices facing those still with us.
In response to receiving the PEN Heaney Prize, I’d like to thank Seamus’ family for continuing to be so brilliant, and for continuing to do so much to support Irish poetry. I’d like to thank Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann and English PEN for the work they do, including platforming writers like the brilliant Adania Shibli. I’d also like to thank the judges – Nick Laird, Paula Meehan, and Shazea Quraishi – for drawing attention to all the great books that were on the shortlist. And finally I’d like to finish by expressing my solidarity with and admiration for all those who continue to participate in acts of protest and witness. This ceasefire cannot signal the end of our efforts, or our attention. Free Palestine.
Susannah Dickey is a writer from Derry. She is the author of two novels, Tennis Lessons (2020) and Common Decency (2022). Her debut collection of poetry, ISDAL, was published in 2023. It was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and won the PEN Heaney Prize 2024.
Tetyana Teren on time in London with Victoria Amelina. Translated by Larissa Babij.
PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.
In January 2024, Tetyana Teren, the Executive Director of PEN Ukraine, undertook a residency with English PEN in London, supported by Goethe-Institut London and Hawthornden Foundation. In April 2023, Teren and Victoria Amelina joined English PEN in London for events at London Book Fair and the British Library. In July 2023, Victoria Amelina died from injuries sustained in a Russian missile attack on a restaurant in Kramatorsk, Ukraine. This piece was written during Teren’s residency in January 2024. It was first published in Ukrainian in Posestry in January 2025.
~
Look, I’ve got a little bottle of champagne and a packet of biscuits from Polish Airlines. Nothing has changed since last year. Springtime London is the same – alternately sunny and overcast. The grey carpeting on the floor is the same, so are the four doors leading to hotel rooms and the fifth leading to the stairwell. One door is marked with my name, as it was then, but there is a different name next to yours. I took it down straight away and could sense you winking conspiratorially at these shenanigans. Champagne usually makes me tipsy rather quickly; this time its bubbles go straight to my head, relieving the stress of the long journey and this return to a place where everything looks exactly the same and where nothing will ever be the same.
You pour champagne into the glasses that were standing by the mirror in the bathroom, where I would have put my toothpaste and brush. You were unpacking, toothbrush and toiletries still deep in your bags, when I arrived. You’d just begun hanging up the dresses you brought. ‘They’re all black or navy,’ I remark, ‘of course.’ You once told me that at some point you decided to wear only black or dark clothes until the war ends. ‘But I’m not completely hopeless,’ you reply in your typical manner while reaching into the closet for a white spring shawl. Hanging among the long, dark dresses, it bears an uncanny resemblance to your long blond hair, which always stands out against your clothes. ‘Yeah, sure, that white shawl will change everything,’ I tease. To prove me wrong, you take off your black travel clothes so that you can model a new dress with the white shawl. Watching you from behind, I observe your milky white body, with pronounced ribs and shoulder blades, in black lace underwear, noting the sharp contrast with your light hair and untanned skin. ‘You know, my friend was in an accident once,’ you begin, fastening little buttons all the way up to your chin. ‘When I got to the hospital, she was lying unconscious and I saw her on the stretcher in a black bra and red panties. It suddenly hit me: you never know what will happen to you – or when – and what somebody might think when they see you unconscious in intensive care. So now, as a matter of principle, I always wear matching underwear.’ I admire your white shawl and take a video of you twirling around and stealing glances at the large mirror on the wall.
‘Look, it’s my first smile line,’ I say as we stare at our faces reflected in the mirror. You assure me there is nothing to be seen. Since last year it’s grown more pronounced. I study it every morning and contemplate how my skin will acquire new wrinkles and folds while yours will remain eternally milky and flawless, just like in those photos published by the international media on the day when everything happened. Though, in all honesty, you were never terribly concerned with such ‘girly’ things.
Remember that time when I wrote to you – in a different city, in a different life – saying that I desperately needed a pick-me-up, and we went to check out a clothing store I had discovered that morning on Instagram? I grabbed a heap of blouses, skirts and trousers for the fitting room, and you sat down on a nearby chair, saying your job was to appreciate and document the fashion show. Twirling before the mirror and your gaze, I realise that I already have plenty of clothes, but it’s so nice to be here together, trying on every possible thing. I’ll buy one more white blouse that I don’t really need, but right now I look fabulous and it will remind me of our day. This is an important feminine ritual: picking out and trying on different versions of ourselves. We may ultimately end up with yet another black dress or white blouse, but what matters in this moment is believing that you are taking a decisive step toward discovering a new you. As I went off to pay for the new version of me-in-a-white-blouse, you returned to the clothes racks and then came to the till with two black dresses and a long, orange lacquered skirt. ‘Don’t think that I’m completely hopeless,’ you said, as usual, and promised to wear it on some particularly special occasion. I never did see you wearing it, but that’s beside the point: you were always ready for change, even without a trip to the fitting room.
By this point we’ve each had two glasses of champagne and put on my red MAC lipstick. I need to unpack and get some sleep after two days on the road, and you have a date with your husband – it’s your first time in London together. But here I am sitting on the floor of your room, drinking champagne and nibbling dry biscuits, thinking about this habit of ours – sitting huddled together on the floor, whispering and giggling between sips of alcohol, our bodies emitting sparks. It goes back to the beginning of the full-scale invasion, when we would spend days and evenings in the corridor, sitting on our sleeping bags, waiting for the air-raid alarm to end, sharing a bottle that you had stashed away somewhere. We like sitting on the floor because it provides support; if it’s behind two thick walls, then we even feel safe. Red lipstick is a must: it reminds us that we are alive, you used to say. You reach out to hug me and then slip out the door – adorned in your white shawl and red lipstick – and head down the stairs.
The next morning I knock on your door and announce that today is Easter and that we should go to church. Dressed in a short black T-shirt, you look dishevelled. But I know you weren’t sleeping. You were writing, going through your notes and documents until late, and then you couldn’t get to sleep; in the morning, back to work. You say you’re not the church-going type and urge me to go without you, but I insist that I need to spend this holiday with people – that’s just how I was raised. And we shouldn’t dally in getting to church; today we should rise early, overcoming the desire to stay in bed, as our small sacrifice. ‘I could do with a bit less sacrifice,’ you say, ‘but that won’t happen in our generation.’ And you head off to shower and iron one of your black dresses. We haven’t baked traditional paska or made brightly coloured Easter eggs, but I did dash out to the 24-hour supermarket last night to buy a big muffin to serve as our Easter bread.
There’s a Catholic church nearby, with very few people at the morning mass, and I miss the jubilant refrain of the traditional hymn: ‘Christ is risen from the dead, trampling death by death!’ Still, I try to recreate the mandatory Easter morning joy. The spring sunlight pours into the nave with its high vaulted ceiling and organ music floods each of my cells, uniting me with the others here. You and I came here together and I’m holding a muffin that’s already crumbling and bears no resemblance to a traditional paska, but I’m glad that it’s performing this important role today. You remind me in a whisper that church is not your thing and suggest we finally go find some coffee. From high above, near the source of the organ music, the priest concludes the service with ‘Our Father, who art in heaven’ and then asks everyone to join in praying for those countries currently experiencing war or conflict. He begins reading their names – some are familiar, others that aren’t yet – and suddenly you grab my hand. I get it: we both fear that he will not utter the name of our country, this bird whose left leg is in peril; that he will forget it while trying not to stumble over all those other places in his list that are also rife with pain and death. We fear he will not notice us – two Ukrainian women who came to a Catholic church on Orthodox Easter for a morsel of hope, as crumbly as a muffin from the supermarket. When the voice from above finally says, ‘And especially please pray for people in Ukraine,’ we can’t hold back our tears. We are moved by how right, how just it is that even God on high, along with the priest and the organ, and grieving Mary, and Jesus who rose from the dead, all still remember us today.
‘What are you going to do after the war ends?’ I’ve managed to tear you away from your work again and entice you into another transgression. We are going to stroll around Hyde Park, soaking up the first sun of the season like ordinary people on an ordinary Sunday in April. We’ve brought chardonnay from the hotel fridge, secured in London Library tumbler cups, and we buy cheap sushi from a kiosk and go to watch the stately, domesticated swans float leisurely towards the shore. A moment later they turn back, scared off by the boisterous dogs and children enjoying their first outing of the year unencumbered by puffy snowsuits. There’s a chill coming from the water, so we wrap ourselves in one big cashmere shawl. This pretty picture with swans, dogs, and kids – especially the kids – stirs up a feeling that is always close at hand: the sense of two parallel realities that never meet. And as we stare into the pool, sunlight glinting off the cold water, I ask, ‘What are you going to do after the war ends?’ I don’t have to explain this abrupt shift from enjoying our sushi and the kids and the swans. You say, ‘I don’t know.’ You used to know – at the beginning. You were sure the end was near, and that everything would return to the way it was before. All the things you loved. All the things that mattered. Like taking your son for a walk around the lake to see the swans. But as the distance between ‘before’ and ‘after’ keeps growing – and the connection between them grows more tenuous – you can hardly remember what it was like before, you’ve lost touch with it; after all, you’ve lost so much. ‘Now I think,’ you start, ‘that we will be this way forever – cracked and crumbling. I can’t imagine future celebrations. I see us crying and hugging each other tightly – whoever of us is still here. And I see us working to preserve our memories, so that we don’t forget what happened, and learning to see past the holes in our buildings and ourselves, like the ones in the walls of the Victoria and Albert Museum that we passed today.’
On our way out of the park, I take you to a sculpture of a swan. Its base is surrounded by steel plaques that people have engraved with the names of their deceased loved ones and some final words or wishes. Most of them speak of everlasting love or seek forgiveness or name the heartbroken family members or express gratitude for ‘being by my side through sunshine and rain’. You say this is a wonderful tradition and urge me to take note of it: ‘We will need lots of ideas and spaces to commemorate every name.’
‘When I was a child,’ I say, after hearing your thoughts about life after the war is over, ‘I dreamt of having a special flying carpet that could hold everyone that I love. As long as they were on that flying carpet, nothing could ever happen to them. No burning sun or devastating floods. No war, no death. You know, I still think about this flying carpet and all the people I want it to carry, who will live forever. For ever and ever. Amen.’
On our last day in London, I leave before you. I know that you stayed up late again, working, but that you took something to help you fall asleep. The walls between our hotel rooms are thin, and I try not to make any loud noises that might wake you. Checking the fridge, I find one small bottle of champagne and half of our Easter muffin. I leave them beside your door on the way to the lift and slip a note into the name holder: ‘Love & hugs, sweet Bird’.
I’ve just put a note with the same message next to your closed door. The champagne has washed over me, leaving glimmers of warmth and sorrow. I shake off the tears and biscuit crumbs, which cling like grains of sand to my fingers and red lips.
London, January 2024.
Tetyana Teren is a Ukrainian journalist, cultural manager, and executive director of PEN Ukraine. She has worked as a TV presenter, editor, and journalist for many Ukrainian media platforms. She has cooperated, as a curator, with Ukrainian cultural institutions and festivals, and she is the author of five books of interviews with Ukrainian writers and artists. In 2017–2018, she was the head of the Ukrainian Book Institute.
Larissa Babij is a Ukrainian-American writer, translator, and dancer based in Kyiv, Ukraine, since 2005. She holds a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University and an MA in Cultural Studies from the National University ‘Kyiv-Mohyla Academy’ in Ukraine. She is also a practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method of somatic education. Her writing has appeared in the Evergreen Review, Arrowsmith Journal, the Odessa Review, Springerin, and other publications. Her book A Kind of Refugee, based on her dispatches from wartime Ukraine on Substack, was published by ibidem Press in 2024.
PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.
This piece is part of a year-long series, supported by the Norman Trust, showcasing Gen Z writers and writing. Read our editorial on the series here.
~
Beth Pickens made her way to me through my computer screen on an end-of-summer afternoon – the kind where the sun is becoming italicised in the sky and you notice that the days are getting shorter again. I was attending a weekly series of writing workshops run by Sophie Robinson, and this week’s was about death and writing.
Pickens, an art advisor based in the USA, talked about how she helped artists through periods of creative block that often stemmed from fears common to all writers, one of which is death.
I was always acutely aware that I avoided setting pen to paper when it came to big ideas. Some sort of deep insecurity about the possible outcomes of my art becoming real. I say ‘acutely’, because, as we often do, I put a firmly sealed lid on these fears, never to be heard from again.
We were given a list of seven common fears surrounding death and asked to note down which resonated with us the most. I jotted them down on a notebook page whose margins brimmed with hand-drawn flowers and semi-realistic eyes:
1. I’m afraid to die because all my ambitions, my plans, my projects would come to an end.
2. I’m afraid to die because I would no longer be able to have any experiences.
I’m afraid to die because I would no longer be able to have any experiences.
Yikes. Not something I wanted to continue thinking about. Thanks, Beth, but I’d rather continue to procrastinate starting or finishing any of my projects. The lid went back on.
~
A year and half later, I’d quit my job and started an MA in directing. Work had made me stagnant; I barely had the energy to write, arriving home from two-hour commutes on cramped, narrow trains and falling asleep almost immediately. This was going to be my opportunity to spark that inner creative electricity again, taking those previous writing projects a step further by turning them into films.
My months studying culminated in a film about my family history, exploring themes of migration and identity. As a writer, I’m used to working solo on creative projects. In film, the process is entirely different.
Initially, I was bubbling with ideas. My Pinterest board and notebooks swarmed with images: Narcissister’s colourful and cluttered sculpture of her dead mother’s belongings, David Syke Tatler’s bright and playfully accessorised sock puppets, Edith Di Monda’s cool and mysterious house hats. Trying to bring my ideas to life, I got to work on making a replica of Young & Marten, an old hardware store that used to stand in Stratford. Primary colour paints, cardboard, and some string. My partner would sit at my desk, trying to concentrate on her big nine-to-five responsibilities, whilst I would keep interrupting from the floor to ask if she thought the cardboard building fit well around my face.
Once I began painting, the fun began to disappear. Splendid yellows and grumpy blues gradually turned my prop into a block of cartoon cheese. What had been a solid and coherent idea in my mind turned into something confused, unsure of itself. I didn’t have any time to fix it.
To my surprise, showcasing the pre-vis went fairly well. The audience giggled at my blue and white polka-dot sock puppet; its brown wool hair crazy like mine. They responded well to the stories told by my parents about their childhoods and where we’d all come from. It should have filled me with confidence and pride, but I couldn’t shake off the feeling that something was off. The bubbling ideas were boiling over the brim and dissipating.
~
When I was 15, my nanny passed away from cancer. She’d had it twice before, once before I was born and once when I was 14. The third time it was terminal. My father remembers her as a strong woman who had endured hardship, not only surviving it but living on to become what I remember of her. Encouraging me to have as much sugar as possible at breakfast time; playing cards with her and her friends, gambling in gummy packets; wearing the ponchos, hats and scarves she knitted for me in the biting English winters.
I’m now down to only one living grandparent; both of my mums’ parents had died before I was born. The three losses began to feel more significant as I grew older: I’d lost the opportunity to find out more about my great and great-great grandparents, about these particular paths of my ancestry. My grandmother was from Chakwal and my grandfather was from Amritsar. We don’t know how they met, what their lives were like before they came to England, or the choices made by our ancestors that led to the existences of my cousins and I, all born and raised in London.
1. I’m afraid to create because all my ambitions, my plans, and my projects will come to an end when I die.
2. I’m afraid to create because I will no longer be able to have any experiences when I die.
3. I’m afraid to create because everything before me that has died lives in me now, and I must do it justice.
The lid had come off, the stifling anxiety overboiling. Spilled, it was undeniable. I had to do something to lift this fear of death and legacy.
~
In a weeks’ time, I would be visiting my remaining grandparent in the mountains of Galicia, so I decided to take off with my camera and work out the rest once there.
For the first few days, I ran around frantically, camera at my hip, trying to find a way to shift my fear. I searched in the tops of trees, among marsh green leaves changing into terracotta red. I searched in knee-deep bushes growing smaller strawberries and rounder plums than you get in supermarkets back home. I focused my ears, trying to discern the sound of strolling breezes from lolling sea foam in the distance. In the end, I gave in.
‘I’ve got a migraine,’ I told abuelo. He abandoned planting avocado seeds and sent me to my room with old packets of paracetamol. I climbed into bed, the room unnaturally dark for an early afternoon in the summer. My fingers reached out to the bedside table, reflexively searching. They only found a glass of water.
After the migraine had subsided, I texted my partner about how I was feeling. I’d been trying to film constantly since I’d arrived, hoping each day that something would click and the whole film would be done, just as I had envisioned on the plane over. Her response came: ‘I hate that what started out as a project you were really passionate about and loved has become tainted by others’ opinions.’
This, so simple in its care, was kaleidoscopic. I could see, between the haunting shapes and lurid colours, that I was devastated to face the truth of what had ruined this film for me: I was so worried about doing my imaginary ancestors proud, and creating something my imaginary offspring could connect with, something I had never had, that I was struggling to ground my project in the present; I was only ever looking to the looming deaths of my past and future, and the thoughts of people who did not exist in this exact life, in this exact moment.
The next morning, I used everything in my power to stay present, to follow my gut. I found joy and humour and playfulness in my piece that I’d failed to see – or understand – before. In the editing process, I worked hard at experimenting with my resources, again staying present in my choices, following these instincts with which I was becoming more in tune. I found pride and determination and satisfaction. My artist’s gut is still in its infancy. I still find myself fearing death, and the pressure of artistic legacy. Pickens, in Make Your Art No Matter What, talks about creating a death acceptance practice in which you find small ways to accept death every day. By following my instincts, I am staying only in the present, accepting and co-existing with the presence of death of the future and the past. In doing so, I find life and creativity and success.
AJ Layla is an emerging filmmaker and writer from East London who has a strong focus on themes of transformation and overcoming. During their BA in English Literature and Creative Writing, they became a published writer in poetry anthologies and zines. Falling in love with scriptwriting, they went on to complete an MA in Directing for Screen and Stage, where they were involved in writing-directing various short films and stage plays. Recently graduated, AJ hopes to continue pursuing bold, creative, political art whether that be through the medium of film or writing.
PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.
This speech was delivered at the PEN Pinter Prize ceremony at the British Library on 10 October 2024. It was first published as an exclusive in Mada Masr.
~
Thank you for this invitation. There are few activities I enjoy more than praising Arundhati Roy.
Under normal circumstances, I would be more than happy to spend all of my time on stage recalling favourite characters in her gorgeous novels, and reminding all of you of some of her greatest one-liners.
And no, I’m not talking about the ones about another world breathing that were the italicized email signatures of half the people you knew in early 2000s.
I’m not even referring to the ‘pandemic is a portal’ – those words that pierced the early shock of Covid-19 and helped so many of us to grasp that this cataclysm was going to take us somewhere new and different, and that we had urgent choices to make about what we wanted to bring on that journey.
I’m talking about deeper Arundhati cuts, lesser-known framings that also helped us get our bearings and keep our wits when history suddenly started moving in fast forward.
Like after 9/11, when George W. Bush declared ‘you are either with us or with the terrorists’ and Arundhati reminded us then that we did not have to choose between ‘a malevolent Mickey Mouse and the Mad Mullahs’ – that all the beauty on Earth existed between those two poles.
Or when US fighter jets pummelled Afghanistan with bunker busters, and then followed up by airdropping packets of food aid, and Roy described the display as ‘brutality smeared in peanut butter and strawberry jam’.
Or what she said about the way our phones have become extensions of bodies: ‘Imagine if your liver or your gallbladder didn’t have your best interest at heart.’
Or her scathing take on middle class, professionalized environmentalism, which, she says, ‘Asks the question: How can we change without changing?’
I could go on – I’m a collector, you see, an Arundhati-ologist.
Her novels create worlds nestled within worlds and then worlds within those. The characters in The Ministry of Upmost Happiness embody and inhabit the riotous, uncontrollable diversity that Roy has, for so long, been trying to defend against the dull, monocrop twins of global capitalism and ethnonationalism.
John Berger once observed that Arundhati’s fiction and non-fiction walk her around the world on two legs. Which means that if we want to understand the uniqueness of her stride, we must look and them together, as companions.
Roy has written dozens of non-fiction essay and lectures, enough to fill over 1000 pages in her beautiful anthology, My Seditious Heart, and then some in her recent follow-up, Azadi.
What becomes clear in these pages is that, after God of Small Things, Arundhati became a kind of self-assigning war correspondent, seeking out the places of maximum pain, maximum injustice, maximum state violence – from Kashmir, the Maoist insurgency, the aftermath of the Gujarat Massacre, nuclear weapons tests, and the movement to defend the Narmada valley from drowning.
But she is Arundhati so she did not write about these conflicts and issues like a war reporter, she wrote about them like a novelist. She brought her tremendous gifts as a writer – her bottomless capacity for imagination, her devastating eye for detail and for the perfect, unforgettable metaphor, to find poetry in protest chants, and gallows humour in guerrilla warfare. So many struggles for justice and survival were better understood, more deeply felt, because she chose to help us see them through her artist’s eyes.
There are some writers, though not enough of them, who are willing to confront the ugliest acts that humans are capable of unleashing onto other humans and the natural world. And there are also writers who search out beauty with great insistence, who fall recklessly in love with the world again and again.
But it is vanishingly rare for the same writer to do both of these things: confront the ugly and still search for beauty. Look squarely into the dead eyes of the mob bent on annihilation – and still hold on to a belief in the potential of masses of people to come together to change the world for the better.
Arundhati Roy is that rare writer. So, too, is Alaa Abd el-Fattah. I was not at all surprised when I learned that Roy had chosen Alaa as this year’s Writer of Courage. Though very different stylistically, their spirits are connected in an almost sibling-like way.
It was my honour to write the foreword to Alaa mind-altering book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. Having spent many weeks immersed in his writing, I would also have been happy to spend this short speech tonight praising Alaa’s work – pulling out the insights and sentences that are now permanent parts of my mental architecture.
I could speak to you about his warnings about nationalism, his devotion to participatory democracy, his bold experimentations with form and style. I could share some of the endlessly original ways he finds to express disdain for tyrants, liars and cowards (a trait he shares with Arundhati). I could talk about how rare it is for revolutionaries to look honestly at their own movement’s failures and missteps, which Alaa does with great rigour and care.
All of these qualities, along with his strategic mind and acute analysis of power, made him one of the most important figures the 2011 pro-democracy revolution in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that overthrew the three-decade rule of Hosni Mubarak. There is so much to say.
And yet as I sat down to write this appreciation, of both Arundhati and Alaa, it felt impossible to simply focus on their words – the books, essays and turns of phrase. Nor did it seem appropriate to focus on their impacts – the significance they hold to millions of people fighting for justice, liberation and dignified lives inside and outside their home countries.
I kept getting stuck on a simple fact. That, though their circumstances differ greatly, both Arundhati and Alaa are in danger. In fact, when English PEN invited me to deliver this encomium, the letter contained a caveat, one that should startle us: ‘Given the state of the world, and the targeting by governments of both Alaa and Arundhati, we’re aware that it’s possible that both will be able to join us in person, but also that neither will.’
Alaa should be with us tonight, having finished serving his latest, absurd, sentence twelve days ago. The British government should have used every bit of leverage that it has – and it plenty – to make sure that he was here. They clearly did not. Alaa has already lost more than a decade of his life to Egypt’s dungeons – an incarceration so prolonged, torturous and arbitrary that his mother, Laila Soueif, calls this latest extension ‘a kidnapping’.
Meanwhile, just as English PEN’s decision to award the Pinter Prize to Arundhati Roy was announced, reports came that she could face charges under India’s draconian anti-terrorism laws, with very severe implications for her freedom. That news led to a media frenzy, which put her in further danger, the kind of thing that has brought angry mobs to her door before.
Arundhati is here, thank goodness. But it’s a reminder that we cannot take any writer’s freedom or safety for granted, no matter how renowned or celebrated.
A huge part of what I cherish about Arundhati and Alaa is that, like the best public intellectuals, they help us understand our moment in history. This is hard: change is constant and mostly incremental; the big shifts tend to sneak up on us. So how do we know when we are in a new chapter, one that requires different things of us? We know, partly, because our writers tell us.
‘The pandemic is a portal’, Roy said, we’re going somewhere new. Pay attention.
Alaa, from jail, helped his comrades understand that the Tahrir revolutionary moment had passed, and new strategies were required. A defeat did not need to be the end of the story, but he knew that you can’t write a new chapter if you are stuck in the old one.
I point this out because I think that this night – when it was entirely possibly that neither of our honourees would be free enough to be with us – is telling us something important. I think it’s telling us that we have entered a new era. I think it’s telling us to pay close attention.
Arundhati and Alaa are famous writers so we know about their cases. But thousands of lesser- known activists, journalists, academics, and lawyers are currently imprisoned in India’s jails on draconian or entirely trumped-up charges. And those are the ones who have not been assassinated in the streets after being declared enemies of the state.
In Egypt, human rights group estimate that there are some 60,000 political prisoners behind bars. An unfathomable number, one that helps explain why building shiny new prisons is one of the current regime’s most successful enterprises.
In light of these facts, I want to underline something that can get lost in the apolitical discourse of human rights. Arundhati and Alaa are movement writers – writers whose voices are inseparable from the international resistance to the steamroller of corporate globalism and militarism that surged at the turn of the millennium. The movement looked different in every country, but before social media existed, we were connected to each other and we understood that we were fighting different fronts of the same struggle. From Chiapas to Palestine, Narmada to Genoa, Tahrir to Occupy Wall Street.
This was the other world that Arundhati could hear breathing on a quiet day, the worlds that were always there.
I point this out because the state repression and harassment that these two writers face cannot be pried apart from the repression of the movements they helped build and that built them. Nor can the repression of these movements be pried apart from the fascistic political forces that are currently rising globally to fill their vacuum. Filling it with hate-filled ideologies that feed off legitimate anger at elites but systematically redirect that anger towards the most vulnerable people in our respective societies. Particularly at the migrants who have been displaced by the wars, climate disasters and policies of economic immiseration that our global movements tried very hard to stop.
As multinational corporations rearranged India in their image, Roy described it as ‘the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged […] – the secession of the middle and upper classes to a country of their own, somewhere up in the stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world’s elite. This Kingdom in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically sealed from the rest of India.’
It’s not just India, of course. That successful succession is our world now. And a world like that needs a lot of jails. It needs all kinds of weapons. It needs iron domes – not just in Israel, but everywhere.
Writers with compulsions to tell the truth? Not so much. In fact, there is a special kind of pure, distilled hatred that fascists and tyrants reserve for the people who see them. Truly see them. Or rather, see through them.
And not only see through them but represent a true alternative to them – a politics built on love, solidarity and an open-armed embrace of the magnificence of our differences.
At English PEN, you know that writing is always dangerous business somewhere. That’s why you exist: to champion the pen over the gun and the prison cell. But as we honour these two writers who are both at escalating risk, from countries where the jails and morgues are crowded with other truth-tellers, we must contend with the reality that we have entered a brazen new stage of state violence.
And nowhere more so than in Palestine. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, the total number of journalists killed in Gaza in the past year has reached 176, with 32 journalists in prison.
Just a few days ago, an Israeli strike murdered the 19-year-old Palestinian journalist Hassan Hamad in his home in the Jabalia camp in North Gaza. His remains were reduced to a shoe box.
His colleagues shared a WhatsApp message he had received. It said: ‘Listen, If you continue spreading lies about Israel, we’ll come for you next […]. This is your last warning.’
Yesterday Israel shot and killed Al-Aqsa TV photojournalist Mohammed al-Tannani. Al Jazeera’s Fadi al-Wahdi was shot in the neck. Also yesterday.
So if you don’t mind, tonight’s encomium is for Arundhati, and for Alaa. But it is also for Hassan and Mohammed and Fadi and so many others who believed so fiercely in the power of witnessing that they risked everything to try to shake us into action.
None of this is safely over there. In North America, solidarity with Palestine is costing jobs and reputations. Students and professors calling for divestment have been brutalised on their own campuses. Climate activists in this country are getting multiyear sentences for trying to peacefully raise the alarm about the kind of cataclysmic storm that is bearing down on Florida as we meet. And just a few weeks ago, anti-migrant pogroms broke out in the streets of your major cities.
We are all inside this dangerous new chapter, connected to one another. There is fear in that, but there is strength too. It means there are many new alliances to make, new solidarities to forge, new strategies to devise. And new courage to find. Because as Alaa’s words remind us we ‘have not yet been defeated’.
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and the international bestselling author of nine books published in over 35 languages including No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything, No Is Not Enough,On Fire, and Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World which won the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction in 2024. A columnist for The Guardian, her writing has appeared in leading publications around the world. She is the honorary professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers University and is Associate Professor in Geography at the University of British Columbia where she is the founding co-director of UBC’s Centre for Climate Justice.
Adèle Oliver on drill, resistance, and the Art Not Evidence campaign.
PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.
Towards the end of 2020, on evenings where 5pm felt like midnight and midnight came with a thickness I could not wade through, I took to watching UK drill ‘type beat’ tutorials on YouTube. The gritty Brixton-born rap subgenre had already been written off as inner-city criminal fodder by the media–politician–police trifecta – a process that had happened a few years earlier, when the style was more obscure and was easily disfigured by broad-stroke dismissals (“nihilistic nonsense”, “knife crime music”, “gangland soundtracks”). By 2020, drill’s eminence could no longer be denied. It emerged – a slippery, indelible thing – from inky alcoves to the sterile light of the pop charts with the irreverence of a once-in-a-generation prima donna. As breakout drill artist and then Daily Mail favourite Headie One said that year, ‘I love the truth ‘cause it make them uncomfortable, my lifestyle’s wonderful.’ What a time to be alive!
I needed get closer to this thing. So I entered the genre’s engine room, the underbelly of its tsk-tsk-tsk clomp: the rolling hi-hats that popped like my cracking joints, the snare drums that ranged from slap-in-the-race to punch-in-the-gut, the ghostly melody lines that snaked around the elixir on the poet’s tongue. That is to say, I watched producers – usually teenagers swivelling on gaming chairs in brightly lit bedrooms, dragging oblongs into mosaics of chord sequences and drum patterns, and clacking against noisy keyboards that reminded me of GP surgeries – construct the zany soundscape of a generation. The end product was a ‘type beat’: a high-quality instrumental with all the hallmarks of [insert your favourite artist or producer’s] sound. This was usually posted to a separate video, accompanied by the BPM and essential information for bedroom recording artists.
Beneath these videos, among a sea of emojis, entreaties, eulogies (‘killed it bro 🔥 🔥🔥’, ‘too 🥶🥶🥶’, ‘can I hop on this one 🙏’), several comments beckoned ‘read more’. I would oblige, and read stanzas that were sometimes organised into full song structures and often written in languages didn’t understand: Serbian, Vietnamese, Tamazight, Hindi. I instinctively mumbled the lyrics I understood and liked the comments that forced my brows into furrowed approval and my lips into a taut smile. If you closed your eyes, you could hear the mimicked rapper slide over the familiar textures. If you strained you could hear their voice becoming your own, you could feel your rhymes taking on the vim of a superstar’s. Every night I got to crack open creative expression, peering into its arrivals, departures, returns. It was addictive.
Falling down these behind-the-curtain rabbit holes isn’t unusual; I have spent countless formative hours on trawling through YouTube, ripping over-compressed files from pirate websites, priming myself for my yet-unrealised appearance on a BBC4 music documentary. But, on a particular evening, it took on a new hue. I was on a postcolonial studies master’s programme, and each week we looked at a different form of regional anti-colonial resistance. We called each of these forms ‘postcolonial objects’. This week’s object happened be created by Rap Against Dictatorship (RAD), a Thai collective who used their music to resist the country’s military junta, emboldened by ongoing structures of ‘crypto’ colonialism.
The guest lecturer played a clip of one of RAD’s songs. The connection was choppy, so notes skipped and jutted out of place. A flutter of recognition forced me out of strained daze: I knew the music’s next move, the ghostly, reversed synth pad that crackled out of my laptop speakers, the haunting ebb and flow of the chords followed my humming like a shadow. It was one of the type beats I’d listened to. I was almost certain it was created by DefBeats, a prolific teenage producer who, unlike some of my other faves, rarely did tutorials and never showed his face, just churning out hundreds of beats on his page instead. Everyone else on the call seemed, as far as I could tell, unmoved by the song. But I felt the thrill of puzzle pieces snapping together like these bedroom producers snapped quantised notes onto their digitised staves.
The song, ‘Reform’, became a soundtrack to pro-democracy protests across the country. The YouTube video for it, which currently has over 10 million views, could not be accessed in Thailand after a government blockade. This transnational crossover made me think about how indispensable drill is, how necessary. This rap group in Thailand, formed under the pressure cooker of its military government, bought a type beat from a kid in the UK and used it to mobilise on-the-ground resistance.
On the first anniversary of Art Not Evidence, I’m reminded of this story, and of the parts of drill, obscured by racist moral panic and grandstanding about its lyrics, which first pulled me down the rabbit hole in which I still roam. Drill’s lyrics and the poetics are, of course, art in and of themselves. They should be protected. But let’s not forget that, when drill is criminalised, the foundations of this sonic force, the defiance it demands, and expression itself are under threat too.
We believe that art, and particularly rap music, should be protected as a fundamental form of freedom of expression, and should not be used to unfairly implicate individuals in criminal charges.
– Art Not Evidence Mission Statement
This is what I remember when I write an expert witness report, when the creative musings of a child, enthralled by the same sonic rebellion that captured me, are twisted into evidence of gang affiliation and inherent criminality; and when, four years after my late-night type beat rendezvous, I’m in an alternative provision school in Birmingham, surrounded by a dozen very excited 16 year olds. We’ve transformed the deputy head’s office into a driller’s sanctum: mic connected, lights dimmed, hype men ready. I had to bribe them to sit through an hour-long workshop on the criminalisation of drill with the promise of this studio session. Almost all these children, who for a host of reasons were not in mainstream schooling, from the aspiring rappers who had bars stowed away in notes apps to the quiet ones who denied any affinity to music in the workshop, took to YouTube to find the perfect type beat to record over. I watched them burst from confines of narratives placed on them into the warm embrace of sliding 808s and booming kick drums.
‘Put OFB type beat.’
‘Nah, actually this Peezy one’s hard.’
‘Coldddd.’
‘Miss, can you download this?’
And so, I diligently ripped their requests from YouTube, fragments of lyrics flitting from too-bright screens to my ears, then my lips, tugging the corners of my mouth into a knowing grin. Just like old times.
Adèle Oliver is a writer, artist and PhD researcher from Birmingham. Her book Deeping It: Colonialism, Culture and Criminalisation of UK Drill counters panic-fuelled discourse on UK drill, gang violence, and knife crime, ‘deeping’ drill as a complex Black artform, born out of generations of commentary on and resistance to technologies of colonialism, consumerism, anti-Blackness, and more. Adèle is also a core member of Art Not Evidence and works as an expert witness in cases that use Black youth culture, music, and idiomatic language as evidence of bad character, criminality and/or gang affiliation. Outside of this work, Adèle is a musician, producer, and avid capoeirista.
Issam Kourbaj on found art, the imagery of boats, and urgent archives.
PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.
Issam – thanks so much for speaking with me. Much of your work involves found artefacts and found objects. I want to start by asking: have you ever regretted not picking up an object? Or have you ever regretted what you’ve done with one – thinking, after using it, there was a different piece of art in it?
It’s a very beautiful question. I haven’t thought much about the objects I’ve had bad conversations with, if you like, but here is one that just came to mind. Many years back, I picked up a World War Two hospital stretcher and converted it into a stool. Within that stool I made a window, and within that window I installed a video camera running a video piece called Don’t Look Back – when video was still an exotic part of our existence. It was a stool that looked steady, but had originated from a stretcher, an object that in many ways isn’t about steadiness. But whenever I revisit it, I wish I hadn’t done that. I wish I had left it to speak in its original voice; I wish I had worked with that voice, rather than converting it. I enforced myself too much on that piece. These days, I feel much more at ease at not interfering too much with an object’s voice and form.
Are there things I wish I’d picked up? There are many books, from many places, that I simply didn’t have the means to carry all at once. But there is one book that particularly comes to mind: I was in Damascus in 2007, and I saw a very beautiful book in Arabic that had been damaged, broken to pieces and pages torn out, its spine stitched and repaired by many hands and threads. I didn’t know at the time that I wouldn’t be able to return to Damascus again – that it would be my last visit. If I had picked it up and brought it back with me, it would have been such a forecasting metaphor, telling evidence, and an appropriate object to deal with the present and ongoing situation in Syria from a distance. It would have been a reading of an unforeseen future I wouldn’t have imagined.
That’s a very beautiful answer – thank you. When you do pick up a book – when you select it as something that you will transform and transmute into a piece of visual art – what it is that makes you pick up that book? Is it the materiality, its aesthetic as an artefact? Is it the content of the book, its literature? Is it both?
It depends on what I’m working with. In 2015, I made an installation called Another Day Lost. It was a huge miniature model of a refugee camp: small tents made from book pages and medical boxes, surrounded by burnt matches – one for each day since the start of the Syrian uprising. Every day at 12 noon, I went and burned one more match and added it to the piece – a sort of living sculpture, if you like. I needed tonnes of books, because the installation was in five locations simultaneously. So I went to an Oxfam bookshop and asked them ‘Do you have any books that you just cannot sell?’ They said they did, and they sold them to me for 1p each. Hundreds of them. They still had to be about particular subjects, materiality and categories, though – home, migration, war, language; subjects related to a refugee camp. I took those ideas and found books that related to them in different ways – ‘home’ might have been a book about making cakes, ‘migration’ a book about birds. But the magic – something I didn’t anticipate – came when I spread these former book pages and medical boxes out as miniature tents, and, when you came close to them, you found poetry in accidental marriages between images and words. A flower next to a tank. Those connections were so spontaneous. So there was intention in selecting those books, with diverse readings on home or lack of it but also the accidental magic created by the viewer.
The whole idea of using books came when I was in Cuba. In Havana, people were taking furniture to the beach, breaking it to pieces, and making boats to migrate to Miami – the furniture of the old home being used to make the journey to a dream new one. I was working on The Epic of Gilgamesh, and was drawn to use pieces of found chairs, where you could read the remnants and forms of the furniture. And when I came back from Cuba to Cambridge, I started seeing much more clearly what was available around me. In Cambridge, that was books. And my art pieces started involving and responding to them.
Shores of Power. Photo credit: Mourad Kourbaj.
Serendipity seems to run through your work. The serendipity of your experiences, and how they inform your work; the serendipity of how meanings land together; the serendipity of political moments and material conditions shaping how your work is viewed.
Yes, it does. Years ago, I met a wonderful Scottish woman who had a beautiful Encyclopaedia Britannica from her father. She didn’t need it anymore, but didn’t want to throw it away, so she gave it to me. For three years, the volumes sat in my studio; I didn’t know what to do with them. Then, one day, I just sat down and started working with them. Against all this alphabetised knowledge, all this wonderful material, I created my pieces. The series is called One + eleven = two, because between two drawings you see in one volume are eleven that you don’t. That was when I started really using books in my work – I mean, working with their content, but not being restricted by it. Sometimes, I saw a word. Sometimes, an image. Sometimes, maps, or nothing. Serendipity. I spent seven months going through and responding to the forest of words, and occasionally to the illustrations and maps.
Words are forms of practice as well as material for your work. In Urgent Archive, there are names of women written – or maybe drawn – in Arabic on the glass window at the front of Kettle’s Yard. You wrote those names with your non-dominant hand an in reverse – or maybe you drew them. Could you talk a little about names and naming in your work, and about your non-dominant hand?
The moment you asked that question, it took me to a place. A very appropriate place. When I was a little boy, I couldn’t form the first letter of my name. As the letter ‘I’ in English sounds like an ‘eye’, in Arabic ع also sounds like an ‘eye’. Another serendipity. I came crying to my mother, so disappointed with myself, and she asked me what was wrong. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I cannot write this stupid letter.’ She asked me to show it to her. She was illiterate, but she looked at the letter and held my hand in hers and copied it – once, twice, three times – and then let it go, and I carried on copying it until I could form my ‘eye’. She said to me: ‘Don’t look at it as a letter. Look at it as a drawing.’ And that stuck with me, that very beautiful and generous idea that a letter is a drawing, that a drawing can form a language, that language is made of fragments of drawings. That’s something I’ve held onto when making found poetry – that words are sculptures.
Much later, I started teaching her the alphabet. She wanted to be able to write to my children, my two boys. In one note to them, she drew the alphabet and the numbers. That was a very powerful experience for me – how she was trying to teach them as she was learning. I made some pieces in response into her precious handwriting, including a piece made upside down and with my wrong hand. I was trying to be closer to her by imitating her. It was called Afterimage. And I found that, while my right hand – the adult – was overtrained, my left – the child – was still fresh. In fact, whenever I’m stuck, I go to my left hand. My non-dominant hand is a treasure.
In 2000, when I was asked by a photographer which object I would most like to take into the new millennium, I took weeks to decide. Then, when I invited him to my studio and had nothing in front of me, and he asked what I had chosen, I held my left hand in my right. That was my object that I didn’t want to lose.
When I made that window in Kettle’s Yard, I used it: if I had used my right hand, it would have been pure recording; with my left hand, I could breathe slowly, read the names slowly, and think about the enormity of the loss. The window piece was an extension of a piece exhibited inside the galley called Killed, Detained and Missing, a list of women written on an old pianola role, next to a speaker where I recited these names.
You talk about your right hand being overtrained, and it turns me to a question I want to ask about your training. Or, specifically, about training and place. You’ve talked elsewhere about your study in different practices, and about how those practices aren’t labels but a network of practices coalescing. But what I’m interested in is the relationship between training and geography – about the relationship between form, and the spaces in which those forms entered your practice. Syria, Russia, Cuba, the UK; painting, drawing, writing, theatre design (not in that order). How does space bear on practice?
I come from the volcanic mountains in the south of Syria. So even my journey to Damascus was about a different geology, different accents. And then, in Damascus, I was in a tiny room (nicknamed the Half) in a big city – an old Damascene house, where all my materials as a painter had to fit into that small, low-ceilinged room, but everything around me in Old Damascus was material for painting. In fact, as well as regretting not picking up that book, I regret that in those days I did not look more, see more, excavate that present. I had a very intense four years there, where I started sculpting and re-sculpting my ways of seeing. The mud of Old Damascus became my mud. But I needed to breathe after the intensity of the early 80s, and I left for Baku, and then Saint Petersburg.
That’s where I dived into theatre as a solo performer – and I hadn’t expected, at all, that this was a language I would dive into much later in my life. I found I could convey a feeling without saying a word, and that was very special to me. It shifted my practice – there was more about the relationship between body and space, body and light. Gorbachev was doing his perestroika, and I was doing mine (to myself). Damascus was fine art, Arabic, heat, south; Saint Petersburg was architecture, Russian, freezing cold, north.
And then I came to Cambridge, where everything is so miniature-like. After Saint Petersburg, Cambridge looked like a theatre set, but it was also where I had studio space for the first time. Theatre design was an obvious thing to study in London. But I knew I was not an architect, nor a theatre designer. Having my studio next to the ADC Theatre, and encountering all the old props discarded behind it and using them in my work, is how that space most shifted my practice.
I take my studio for a walk with me wherever I am. I take my eyes with me too. And I pick up objects from a place, not reading at the time what these objects might become, just letting it sit, letting them tease me a bit and teasing them back, then the action of seeing but not seeing the final product, and then finding that the piece is shaped by all these conversations, places and forms. That’s a bit dangerous for an artist known for a particular style, a particular language that people expect of us. But I’ve found that, though I love painting and I am a painter, I don’t mind venturing into unfamiliar mediums, novel places. This risk enriches me, and enriches my articulation of a feeling.
So maybe it’s about the serendipity of how place and time and form encounter each other, but the constancy of your eye amid all those shifting encounters.
I’d like to take this idea of movement and return to the idea of migration you mentioned earlier. Migration has figured in your work for decades. And the figure of the boat has been an ongoing part of this. You’ve spoken elsewhere about how the boat has been, for you, a way to articulate the violence of conflict without centring images of conflict. And I’d like to explore the ethics and aesthetics of the boat a little.
I was at Glastonbury this year, and Banksy’s inflatable boat passed a few feet in front of me in a crowd. By the time I’d left the crowd and got signal on my phone, critics and politicians and voices on social media had all already weighed in with loud (often awful) opinions about it. Because of our polluted political and cultural discourse, the image of the boat has become so contested and fraught – often as a way of avoiding talking about the boat itself. Easier to address an artist’s work about refugee deaths than address refugee deaths themselves, perhaps. As an artist with many famous works involving boats, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Thank you for asking this. You see, this is the problem with creation. There are three stages to any creation: pre-creation, the process of creation, and the process of seeing it in hindsight. And they don’t necessarily reveal the same picture. And relationships with the actual and the metaphorical shift, too. Boats have meant different things in my pieces – and different things, of course, to the audiences viewing them.
I made a model of the Bibby Stockholm barge out of sardine tins, called Keep Them at Bay. I was playing with language, with material, with scale to respond to this inhuman solution. Another piece: on the day the Rwanda Bill was agreed, I made a performance called Stop the Bombs, Not the Boats: I took children’s milk bottles, filled them with red ink, and threw them onto a flattened tent so that it was bleeding, and walked with the stained tent to the top of Castle Hill. That piece is about the boat – the metaphor of the boat – even if it doesn’t use the image of the boat. And then there is the 101st piece for the British Museum’s 100 objects series, Dark Water, Burning World, the little boats made from bicycle mudguards with their burnt matchstick people. And Precarious Passage, one of these boats sailing through a hole burnt in the book A History of the World in 100 Objects. Actually, I happen to have it with me here now [holds up book in left hand, boat in right hand, and places the boat through the hole in the book]. This is both image and metaphor. You see, migration is not a current issue. It is the history of humanity, and the history of life – cells migrate, trees migrate, ideas migrate. For me, this boat is not a scale model. It is a scale metaphor. We are all emigrants from our first home, the womb.
Dark Water, Burning World. Photo credit: Issam Kourbaj.
And here’s another piece – Siege Two, which is made from a typewriter, and is dedicated to Marie Colvin, who lost her life in Homs [holds up piece]. If you look [turns piece in the air], it has another shape in the form of a boat. I showed this at the Venice Biennale, in this form – as a sailing, destructed, very fragile boat. I remember being confronted by many questions when I went to the Biennale and saw a real refugee boat that had been rescued. Barca Nostra (‘Our Boat’) by Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel. That was not an easy thing. It was so emotional, so suffocating. There isn’t a place for imagination anymore, when reality is surrounding you like this. It took me some time to digest it. I’m having difficulty even thinking about it now. So I suppose I have found that there is a difference between a piece that takes you to something but leaves you to continue making your own journey, and a piece that is in your face, does not let you escape from it, that goes at an aggressive speed, but in our times, I think there is a room and a need for both approaches.
The immediacy of the confrontation – a collapse of image and metaphor into nothing other than that immediacy.
Yes. I think of the carpenter from Lampedusa, Francesco Tuccio, who after 11 October 2013, when 311 people died in the boat that sank there, made crosses for the Eritrean and Somali survivors using wood from the wreck. And then made a sculpture, a large cross, where you can still see the paint on the wood. The Cross was donated by him to the collection of the British Museum. His was a boat made into a cross; mine was a bicycle mudguard made into a boat. I know I am touching but not answering your question fully. And that’s because this is still an ongoing question for me.
All But Milk. Photo credit: Mourad Kourbaj.
Thank you. It’s such a generous answer. And of course it is ongoing – past, yes, and present, yes, but also ongoing and future. I’d like to end by asking you a question to do with tense and time. It’s something right there in the title of Urgent Archive. There’s a story behind that title (and maybe you can talk about that), but I want to ask specifically about the contradiction in it – of archiving, and its sense of slowness and past and permanence, and of urgency. Is it a viable task to archive the present? To have an ongoing archival practice? Or must this always be a retroactive, retrospective endeavour? I don’t want to pre-empt your answer, but I realise we’ve spoken about how a found object isn’t just a thing of a moment; that it is a thing of the past discovered in the present for use in a future, those timelines always butting up against each other. So, a horrible question: is, as artists, there a moral incumbency of archiving as we go, of archiving the emergency and urgency of the present, or can we leave that, for posterity, to the future, as an act for the future?
Ah – a very lovely question. You know, I only encountered the word ‘oxymoron’ very recently. I’m a work-in-progress too – I don’t shy away from that. I think of the phrase ‘leave to remain’, as I say that.
As you reference, the title of Urgent Archive is about Mansour al-Omari, a human rights journalist who recorded the names of his fellow prisoners using ragged strips of cloth and blood as an ink. But the interest in the word ‘archive’ also comes from my interest in seeds. Because seeds are an archive of themselves – archiving their past, their present, their future. In this tiny universe are three tenses all at once. But now let me go back: the first piece I did in relationship to Syria is called Excavating the Present, and it’s all to do with X-ray images, and how mothers in Syria have to collect the body parts of their children in order to mourn them. You know, in many languages there’s no distinction between past and present. And I wonder if the word ‘archive’ is a Western construction of how to deal with the past. It’s such an elusive word. It sounds out that word ‘ark’ at its start – it has a kind of motion in it, of life in it. And life is not fixed: it has multiple tenses in it. My intention is not the past; it is the present, and how one can construct a past or a future from it.
Urgent Archive. Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. Photo credit: Jo Underhill.
I’ll give you another example. For one of my pieces, I took Aleppo Citadel, and the destruction of Aleppo before the earthquake, and made it out of Aleppo soap. This is a form that transmits itself throughout time: it shrinks, it is discoloured. It’s an interesting archive.
I’ll tell you one more story, and then I will finish. I planted some wheat outside Kettle’s Yard a while ago. I had planned to go and harvest it and make bread though this piece, and tell the story of the bombing of Aleppo Seed Bank and how, ICARDA having lost control of it in 2016, it managed to retrieve the first accession from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to initiate regeneration and reconstitute the full profile of the collection in Syria. But Syrian wheat and the English weather didn’t work out. It died. And I didn’t want the piece to be about death. So I decided to construct an artist book/ herbarium out of it. I was all prepared and ready to make a performance piece out of this yesterday. But an hour before my arrival, the gardeners unknowingly cleared everything away. I was a little devastated, but I realised there where tiny fragments of the wheat, tiny little remains, from which I wanted to create an archive. These tiny fragments told a story of the whole. I know I’m scratching a tiny mark on the surface of this colossal loss, and that’s what I must do as an artist.
Thank you for these beautiful questions.
Thank you for these beautiful answers, and this beautiful one to end. I’ll tell you what I thought as I sat with the phrase ‘urgent archive’: only when you don’t see life as urgent do you think of archiving as a future act about the past. When you know and see and live emergency, archiving becomes such an obvious emergency act. Timelines capitulate. It isn’t about recording what has gone, isn’t about thinking or rethinking for whom this archive is created: it is simply about a moment, and a moment of preservation. And I think there is something very beautiful about seeing the ways in which artistic practice can be an act of preserving in the present, within which time past, present and future can fall where it may. Sorry – I shouldn’t steal the last word.
OK, I’ll steal it back. You remember your first question about regret? And my answer about that book in Damascus that was so torn to pieces? I see this now: that book was archiving the destruction before it happened. It was sending me a message that I didn’t hear. It was hidden, and was only passing by the market in Old Damascus. This fleeting encounter taught me that one must be present, and almost alert, to sense the hidden. This is why I am trying to make an herbarium out of the fragments of wheat. You see, look at this [holds up a single fragment of a stalk of wheat]. You would just walk past this without noticing it. But though it might sound pretentious, I am going to make a meal from this. A meal for the mind’s eye.
Life Despite All. Photo credit: Issam Kourbaj.
Issam Kourbaj was born in Syria and trained at the Institute of Fine Arts in Damascus, the Repin Institute of Fine Arts & Architecture in Leningrad (St Petersburg) and at Wimbledon School of Art. He has lived in Cambridge, UK, since 1990.
His work has been widely exhibited and collected, and most recently it was featured in several museums and galleries around the world: Fitzwilliam Museum, Classical Archaeology Museum, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; British Museum and V&A, London; Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam; Penn Museum, Philadelphia, Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Venice Biennale and the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
His Dark Water, Burning World is in the permanent collection of the Pergamon Museum and the British Museum. For the BBC’s ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects,’ Neil MacGregor (the former Director of the British Museum) chose Dark Water, Burning World as the 101st object. Dark Water, Burning World is currently on show part of the Wonders of Creation at San Diego Museum of Art, California.
PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.
This speech was delivered at the PEN Pinter Prize ceremony at the British Library on 10 October 2024.
~
I met Alaa for the first time at a protest calling for the independence of the judiciary in 2006. We were in our 20s. He was effervescently protesting with his whole body, jumping up and down like fire. Shortly after, he was pulled by several cops to a police truck. Judging from the scene, he seemed to be enacting a bodily resistance as he was dragged by the police. We always smile when we remember how our first physical encounter is one where his full presence is being actively negated by the police. We laugh at how unflattering the scene was for a first meeting.
Shortly after Alaa came out from his imprisonment, he had an idea. He wanted to convene an assemblage of inventive techies with a heightened sense of political consciousness. He was of the blogging generation and was on the forefront of it; but he was never content with sitting back to think on his own and perform to an invisible public from behind a computer screen. He wanted to go wider and deeper; wider by summoning a convention and deeper by interrogating the very techne through which a whole new politics of expression was emerging.
He wanted to test what it means to work with tech tools to open up channels of knowledge making, ideating and developing discourse. The quest was political, the façade technological, the approach philosophical. We convened techies from across the Arab World, who are also artists, organisers, writers and thinkers. It was our first encounter with how to think and organise intersectionally, with how to break categories open and smuggle their substance from one to the other; technology to politics, philosophy to technology, technology to art and journalism, and so on. You could say it was a kind of rehearsal for the Arab Spring, with our newborn community boasting members from Tunisia, Syria, Palestine, Bahrain and Lebanon among others.
When the Tunisian revolution erupted in December 2010, I was with Alaa in Pretoria, South Africa. He had then moved there to work with localisation software, a technology he was militant about; he wanted to see an Internet where Arabic content flowed seamlessly as though it was its native language; the Internet being, back then, a possible site for an embodied universality.
I cut my trip short to rush back home, get a visa and go to Tunisia – but the wave of Arab revolutions was moving faster than flights – and Egypt’s own revolution broke out on 25 January. I was beaten by the police, who broke my glasses. I wrote to Alaa that day about how he had missed an unflattering scene of me being beaten up and losing a shoe and, most importantly, my glasses – and my vision with them. But we agreed that something new was emerging in the blur.
A few days later, Alaa would pack and come back home; at the time, home was Tahrir Square. Days after, the president had fallen, the government had fallen, the parliament had fallen, the constitution had fallen. I met Alaa in Tahrir Square: he had a list on a draft paper that he was crossing out. Revolutionary change was a laundry list in Alaa’s hands. He was striking out items, and writing out new ones that now needed attention.
What comes next is yet another formidable presence, not confined to protest squares. Alaa went on working with different formations, students, activists, journalists, techies, artists. He taught workshops on how to write a political statement as a poetic act. He worked with youths on how to inhabit the formulaic informational space of Wikipedia with homegrown narratives. He led code sprints for localisation tools. He led meetings on how practicing politics online – as opposed to through the political party – had restored space for emotion.
Let’s Write Our Own Constitution – one of Alaa’s initiatives. He admired South Africa’s experience with the Freedom Charter, primarily for the process of assembling its content through the active instruction of the public to politicians. Rescuing democracy from its representational reductionism, he was dreaming of smuggling Kilptown’s democratic experiment to Egypt, where people, clustered in communities, would convene to write parts of a proposed new collective constitution. Its content inside, he had his eyes on how this form of convening, of coming together, would affect the outcome.
In the months to follow, there were many reversals to the revolutionary triumphalism that we experienced in the early days of 2011. But the ultimate reversal was in 2013: a military coup. By then, my newspaper’s management had decided to pull our funding – as an act of censorship. I became jobless alongside 25 journalists colleagues. I had an intuition that this was going to be the summer of unprecedented political violence and finitudes. I asked Alaa to help us build a website where we could house our displaced journalism, to at least bear witness to the coming summer of violence. He spent days and nights with his partner Manal back then, writing code for our new website. Meanwhile, I was diverting my anxiety about a starting our new project, a project that may stand in the face of the violent annihilation of our voices by playing with Khaled on Alaa and Manal’s couch, as both were busy writing code. Khaled, their son, was almost one by then; he was birthed in a moment of birthing, when the revolution was ascendant – and was now wrestling to make his way into so much uncertainty.
By the time our website, Mada, was up and running, the military was in power and Alaa was in prison. He finished developing our code in smuggled letters and instructions during prison visits. In the ten years that followed, there would be two active bodies of archives of the military’s violent cancelation of public politics: sustained publishing in Mada, and letters to and from Alaa.
Alaa’s handwriting in the letters is barely legible, and reading them is an exercise of deciphering. Sometimes I do it with a common friend, Sarah, who also sends and receives letters. The exercise reminds me of an eerie image described by Frantz Fanon from 1954 of Algerians trying to tune to the jammed transmission of the revolutionaries of Radio Free Algeria. We would start reading some of the letters together, it would turn into a spiritual ritual of some sort, where Alaa is summoned, and suddenly there is much more to the content we are reading. Such is the possibility of form that Alaa was always militant about.
Sometimes, the two archives of Mada and the letters would converge; Alaa’s first years of imprisonment were marked by a determination that a voice can transcend confinement and trespass. His body was incarcerated, but his voice was fugitive. With profound depth, the kind he is ordered to summon within a prison architecture, he wrote about failure as instruction, progress as ideology, Palestine as universal politics.
In his later years of imprisonment, Alaa’s writings shifted to his own predicament as a prisoner, again universalising it to urge a solidarity embodied in a belief that this concerns us all, that we too can be prisoners like him one day. Why? Because states ultimately survive through preserving their right to enact power on our bodies. In a text he wrote in 2019, he described with graphic precision a violent account of his incarceration. He did not do it to invite us to pity him, but to understand that the Authority’s enmity with its opponents is predicated on the negation of the voice and the body. This is a moment when the political failure of the collective has returned us to the body as an ultimate site of resistance.
In 2017 Alaa wrote, ‘I am in prison because the regime wants to make an example of us. So let us be an example but of our own choosing. Let us be an example, not a warning.’ Five years later, he went on his longest hunger strike to demand freedom, and escalated it to a water strike. He survives an imminent death in a moment he movingly describes in a letter. He is woken from unconsciousness to find himself in the arms of his cell mates, some looking at him with eyes terrified by yet another possible loss. Some held his head with care, others held his back. He put it in words and an image was born. Ordained to a jail cell with no exit in sight, Alaa restores his attachment to life through inmate solidarity, not just as his own particular condition, but as a reminder that unrestrained power is built on confinement. And that those in confinement must not to be bracketed off to a margin, a human rights category – they need to become the issue of all issues, the cause of all causes. And for this to happen, there needs to be solidarity.
Today, his mother, Laila Soueif, is on hunger strike for him. Today is Day 11, because 11 days ago, Alaa actually completed his latest prison sentence of five years, but still has not been released.
Sometime in the 1930s, Bertolt Brecht orated a speech to an anti-fascist gathering, in which he spoke about the courage of recognising the truth when it is hidden, the skill to turn it into something we can fight with, the cunning of finding in whose hands to put it and spread it. Through years of a friendship I am so privileged to have with Alaa, I witnessed his digging into origins like a philosopher, turning his findings into political artifacts for organising and mobilising like a politician, and then, essentially putting it all in our hands in codes, letters and articles like an orator.
Alaa’s is a friendship that unleashes political imagination He is a pedagogy that keeps giving, through words and silence. He is the ghost of spring past; he is the absentee we should all summon to presence.
Lina Attalah is a journalist and founding editor of Mada Masr, a Cairo-based independent media platform, where Alaa Abd el-Fattah published many of his writings.
Johanne Lykke Holm on gender, witches, and doppelgängers.
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Johanne – thank you so much for talking to me. Your novel Strega is an enchanting and eerie exploration of girlhood, violence against women, and the aesthetic of artificiality. I’d like to begin by asking you about the novel’s opening. ‘A woman’s life could at any point be turned into a crime scene’ – you’ve previously said that this is an obvious and straightforward sentence to you. How does this idea inform the rest of the story? Was violence against women something you actively set out to write about?
I wanted to write about this internal construction which I believe all women (and I use this word with no regard to biology) carry within them – this embedded patriarchy, this misogyny implanted in the flesh, which shows up, in my experience, as a sort of evil filter: it informs the way we see things.
I wrote that image on the first page of the book, where Rafa looks down on her messy girlhood bed and simply lists what she sees and, all of a sudden, this filter is activated inside her, the internal construction, informing her that this presumably innocent image carries violence inside it. It isn’t innocent at all; it actually looks like a crime scene. The women in the book go through the world with this filter always activated, as if the ‘real’ world is obscured or transformed by how they have been taught to view things, this notion that they’re always in danger. They see the world through this darkened mirror, where everything is potential death or violence or exploitation.
This also means that there’s a doubling effect. Say that I’m standing by some alpine lake, looking at a panoramic view in blazing sunlight, and I’m suddenly overflown with scenes of dead women buried at the bottom of the lake, and so the lake transforms: the panoramic view of a glittering lake becomes the panoramic view of murdered women. I realise that it’s macabre, but I also know that this way of seeing, this proximity to darkness, is at the very core of my writing. It’s like I’m trying to write what has been placed in the shadows instead of what lives in the light.
The world in Strega is very much a women’s one. There are the young girls, the three hoteliers, and the nuns who live in the neighbouring convent. Only once do we hear a male character speak directly, and his one line is somewhat absurd. Was this a conscious choice?
Yes, it was, a very conscious choice. The men are subjected to strongly patriarchal treatment in Strega. When they appear – which, as you say, they hardly do – they are reduced to stereotypes or archetypes. The Hunter, The Father, The Lover, etc. And The Murderer, of course. The archetypal killer. I feel for them, these male paper dolls. It’s not intended as a punishment; it’s not a turning of the tables. It’s more about writing the patriarchal structure as a prison inside which we all suffer inside – including the men, the boys, the tormentors. A prison where all the doors are wide open, and we could choose to leave whenever.
When I wrote the book, this was all very intuitive. It feels important to mention that: when I’m writing a book, I know very little about it. Writing is not an intellectual practice to me, not a practice of the critical mind. It’s all very physical and uncanny and thrilling. In my first novel, there is a sentence about ‘the dark matter of the brain,’ and that’s where I imagine my books are coming from, meaning I’ve realised most of these things much later, when talking about the book and reading from it. I know what I set out to do, but I’m not sure what I’ve done. The reader always knows the book more intimately than me.
It feels like the novel portrays women as being inextricably tied to their material belongings – even in death, the two seem to go hand in hand. As Rafa says, ‘Strega was a murdered woman and her belongings. Her suitcase, her hair, her little boxes of liquorice and chocolate.’ When one of the girls, Cassie, goes missing, her possessions seem to gain a mythic quality and power. Could you speak a little about the relevance of objects in the novel and their connection to girlhood?
This is a wonderful observation. I’m obsessed with objects, or more specifically objects in literature – the listing of things on the first pages of Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge; the way Elfriede Jelinek turns post-war Austria into an uncanny postcard in Wonderful, Wonderful Times; the eerie sweater that appears at a market far from home in Marie N’Diaye’s Ladivine.
And yes, in Strega the objects absolutely belong to the realm of the girl. In that realm, in the girly spaces, I believe the objects are sacred. And things like transcendence and enchantment are deeply connected to things, to materiality. To do things with your hands, to collect amulets and trinkets, to regard a trivial object as precious. And, of course, to be an object in the eyes of others.
I think my obsession with objects might also be rooted in this ongoing visceral reaction to the old, false (but somehow not dead) idea of the writer as some disembodied thinking entity that exists outside the world, on top of the world. Some disembodied and white entity, I should say. This idea of the writer as a disciplinarian, a puppet master, someone in complete control of people and objects – it infuriates me. To me, writing is quite the opposite. It’s all about conjuring something unknown, or something known but not yet visible, through surrendering, through letting go of control, through being very much inside the world and inside your own body. And it’s very much about language as a magic material that’s impossible to discipline.
There’s this quote from Borges that I love. It’s from his Norton Lectures at Harvard in the late 60s. He says:
Language is not, as we are led to suppose by the dictionary, the invention of academics or philologists. Rather, it has been evolved through time, through a long time, by peasants, by fishermen, by hunters, by riders. It did not come from the libraries; it came from the fields, from the sea, from rivers, from night, from the dawn. Thus, we have in language the fact (and this seems obvious to me) that words began, in a sense, as magic.
I also wanted to ask you about doppelgängers, and the idea that women exist simultaneously as their true selves and as a constructed image only performing themselves. The girls are often described through doll imagery, or with a sense of artificiality – Rafa says she feels tired of having to ‘arrange oneself into a woman each morning,’ and the hotel is described as looking ‘like a doll’s house.’ One scene that stood out to me in particular was Cassie’s dance recital during the ball, in which she is replaced by a doll – (spoiler) the last time we see Cassie alive. Do you think all women have a doppelgänger? And do all women have this potential to be replaced by their fake version?
The dance scene you’re mentioning is actually a nod to the ballet Coppélia, or The Girl with the Enamel Eyes, which is based on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s doppelgänger classic, ‘The Sandman’. It’s such a weird and uncanny ballet, and I remember being obsessed with it when I wrote the book.
And yes, I love a good doppelgänger. Take Deborah Levy’s incredible August Blue, where the doppelgänger is everything. She is the key to everything; without her, no book. Levy makes the protagonist hyper-visible to the reader by giving her a double, an illusive sister, a mirror image. We have the ‘true’ Elsa M. Anderson and we have her shadow, this sweet but eerie clone, this wise replica. In some scenes she’s like a friendly spirit, and in others she’s this all-knowing and somewhat uncanny twin. Elsa is written from the inside and from the outside, all at once. And so, the doppelgänger is a wonderful reminder that literature has nothing to do with psychology or realism. An anti-psychological and mysterious embodiment of the weird situation of being a woman. It’s the most wonderful literary trick!
In Strega, on the other hand, Cassie is actually replaced. Girl becomes doll; authentic becomes fake; alive becomes dead – which I think is different, maybe because it’s a vanishing trick instead of a doubling. Cassie the Girl is replaced by Cassie the Doll Corpse. She is replaced by a replica of a beautiful dead girl, but we never see her again; there is no actual corpse, and we don’t know if she’s dead or alive. It’s like she gets swallowed by her evil doll twin, or disappears into the stage floor like the protagonist in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina disappears into the wall of her study. A murder without a body, without consequences.
But to answer your question more directly: I think that everyone who has experienced any kind of exploitation or marginalisation has a deeper understanding of what it means to be double. You learn to put on a mask or a costume. You learn to hide. You might have to become a doll, become fake, become several people.
Beauty standards are also a constant preoccupation for the girls, fears of ugliness lingering even after death (Rafa talks about her desire to be ‘a beautiful corpse’ – ‘I would take care not to be ugly when it happened’). It feels like the girls are always performing to a male gaze, even when no men are present; the potential arrival of a male guest seems to loom constantly. The hoteliers even force the girls to lose weight, giving them a jar of dieting powder for their breakfast. How do your perceptions of girlhood and growing up inflect this?
I grew up in Scandinavia in the late 90s and early 00s, meaning that I grew up in what was viewed as a very progressive feminist context. I also grew up in a context where magazines for tween girls consisted of dieting tips and articles about how to make boys want you. I’m a child of this weird era, where these very radical feminist fanzines co-existed with these horrible commercials with models who were made to look like very thin, attractive corpses. I remember one issue of a magazine in which the models were placed in a chaotic hotel room that looked exactly like a crime scene. Their makeup looked like bruises and their dresses were pulled up by force. They were passive, like mannequins slumped over furniture. It was hot to look like a dead girl back then. It was also hot to be an anarcha-feminist. I sometimes think that I became a teenager on the cusp of two conflicting realities. The generation of lost girls.
I also have this vivid memory of walking through a snowy Stockholm in my late teens, on my way home from a party in high heels and too-little clothes, when I noticed a car driving slowly behind me. I remember being terrified, but I also remember thinking: ‘How do I look?’ Not ‘How do I escape?’ but ‘How do I look?’ It turned out to be some tourists looking for an address in the middle of the night. So yes, I think there is a direct link between my lived experience and that of the girls in the book. I’m just as fucked up as they are.
While some might see the novel’s female collective as a kind of feminist ideal, you’ve spoken elsewhere about the complicity the girls seem to display towards violence against women. In one scene, Rafa and Alba play at behaving like men and fantasise about killing a barmaid, before working on their list of murdered girls. Why do you think the girls display this complicity? Is it somehow a means of protecting themselves from a violence that is otherwise inevitable?
I don’t think it’s just a book about sisterhood. It’s also a book about being complicit in your own destruction, just as you say. The girls are playing with fire, in different ways. They have a fantasy of changing places with the killer, of becoming the violent ones, not just to avoid victimisation, but because they imagine it would give them power and pleasure. There’s this hunger, this bloodlust. They don’t just become sad when Cassie disappears; they also get excited. It’s the most confusing part of the book, to me. I’m not sure what I think about it. But no, the book isn’t just a feminist critique of patriarchal violence. It is also an obsessive investigation of that violence, a longing to be close to the violence. It’s all very sick, I think. Haha!
Finally, I’d love to ask you more about the novel’s title, ‘Strega’ – ‘witch’ in Italian. While you were writing, were you thinking of the girls or the hoteliers or the nuns as kinds of witches? Or all of them, perhaps?
Oh yes, they are all witches. The nuns especially, in my opinion. They are intellectuals, herbalists, sisters. But they are also living in a patriarchal order so strong that no man needs to be present to uphold it. Daddy is someplace else, but that doesn’t matter, they follow his rules anyway. The book takes place in all these separatist spaces that remain patriarchal – the prison doors are open but no one leaves. The patriarchy is written as a form of haunting, maybe. I mean, without patriarchy there wouldn’t have been any witches. The existence of witches is proof of the patriarchy. Outside of that murderous system, they would just have been weird people, you know.
Johanne Lykke Holm (b. 1987) is an author and literary translator who is establishing herself among the most promising up-and-coming literary authors in Sweden. She has translated Yahya Hassan, Olga Ravn, Josefine Klougart and others into Swedish. Her novel STREGA was published in 13 languages and shortlisted for the Nordic Council Literary Prize, the European Union Prize for Literature and the Strega Prize in Italy. Film rights have been optioned. She lives in Malmö. Her fourth novel, Smoke & Mirrors, will be published next year.
