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  • No Propaganda on Earth Can Hide the Wound that is Palestine: Arundhati Roy’s PEN Pinter Prize 2024 Speech

    No Propaganda on Earth Can Hide the Wound that is Palestine: Arundhati Roy’s PEN Pinter Prize 2024 Speech

    Arundhati Roy’s PEN Pinter Prize 2024 speech.

    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 the Wire.

    ~

    I thank you, members of English PEN and members of the jury, for honouring me with the PEN Pinter Prize. I would like to begin by announcing the name of this year’s Writer of Courage who I have chosen to share this award with.

    My greetings to you, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, writer of courage and my fellow awardee. We hoped and prayed that you would be released in September, but the Egyptian government decided that you were too beautiful a writer and too dangerous a thinker to be freed yet. But you are here in this room with us. You are the most important person here. From prison you wrote, ‘[M]y words lost any power and yet they continued to pour out of me. I still had a voice, even if only a handful would listen.’ We are listening, Alaa. Closely.

    Greetings to you, too, my beloved Naomi Klein, friend to both Alaa and me. Thank you for being here tonight. It means the world to me.

    Greetings to all of you gathered here, as well to as those who are invisible perhaps to this wonderful audience but as visible to me as anybody else in this room. I am speaking of my friends and comrades in prison in India – lawyers, academics, students, journalists – Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Khalid Saifi, Sharjeel Imam, Rona Wilson, Surendra Gadling, Mahesh Raut. I speak to you, my friend Khurram Parvaiz, one of the most remarkable people I know, you’ve been in prison for three years, and to you too Irfan Mehraj and to the thousands incarcerated in Kashmir and across the country whose lives have been devastated.

    When Ruth Borthwick, Chair of English PEN and of the Pinter panel first wrote to me about this honour, she said the Pinter Prize is awarded to a writer who has sought to define ‘the real truth of our lives and our societies’ through ‘unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination’. That is a quote from Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

    The word ‘unflinching’ made me pause for a moment, because I think of myself as someone who is almost permanently flinching.

    I would like to dwell a little on the theme of ‘flinching’ and ‘unflinching’. Which may be best illustrated by Harold Pinter himself:

    I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

    The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’

    Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

    Remember that President Reagan called the Contras ‘the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.’ A turn of phrase that he was clearly fond of. He also used it to describe the CIA-backed Afghan Mujahideen, who then morphed into the Taliban. And it is the Taliban who rule Afghanistan today after waging a twenty-year-long war against the US invasion and occupation. Before the Contras and the Mujahideen, there was the war in Vietnam and the unflinching US military doctrine that ordered its soldiers to ‘Kill Anything That Moves’. If you read the Pentagon Papers and other documents on US war aims in Vietnam, you can enjoy some lively unflinching discussions about how to commit genocide—is it better to kill people outright or to starve them slowly? Which would look better? The problem that the compassionate mandarins in the Pentagon faced was that, unlike Americans, who, according to them, want ‘life, happiness, wealth, power’, Asians ‘stoically accept […] the destruction of wealth and the loss of lives’—and force America to carry their ‘strategic logic to its conclusion, which is genocide.’ A terrible burden to be borne unflinchingly.

    And here we are, all these years later, more than a year into yet another genocide. The US and Israel’s unflinching and ongoing televised genocide in Gaza and now Lebanon in defence of a colonial occupation and an Apartheid state. The death toll so far, is officially 42,000, a majority of them women and children. This does not include those who died screaming under the rubble of buildings, neighbourhoods, whole cities, and those whose bodies have not yet been recovered. A recent study by Oxfam says that more children have been killed by Israel in Gaza than in the equivalent period of any other war in the last twenty years.

    To assuage their collective guilt for their early years of indifference towards one genocide – the Nazi extermination of millions of European Jews – the United States and Europe have prepared the grounds for another.

    Like every state that has carried out ethnic cleansing and genocide in history, Zionists in Israel – who believe themselves to be ‘the chosen people’ – began by dehumanising Palestinians before driving them off their land and murdering them.

    Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians ‘two-legged beasts’, Yitzhak Rabin called them ‘grasshoppers’ who ‘could be crushed’ and Golda Meir said ‘There was no such thing as Palestinians’. Winston Churchill, that famous warrior against fascism, said, ‘I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time’ and then went on to declare that a ‘higher race’ had the final right to the manger. Once those two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, dogs and non-existent people were murdered, ethnically cleansed, and ghettoised, a new country was born. It was celebrated as a ‘land without people for people without a land’. The nuclear-armed state of Israel was to serve as a military outpost and gateway to the natural wealth and resources of the Middle East for US and Europe. A lovely coincidence of aims and objectives.

    The new state was supported unhesitatingly and unflinchingly, armed and bankrolled, coddled and applauded, no matter what crimes it committed. It grew up like a protected child in a wealthy home whose parents smile proudly as it commits atrocity upon atrocity. No wonder today it feels free to boast openly about committing genocide. (At least The Pentagon Papers were secret. They had to be stolen. And leaked.) No wonder Israeli soldiers seem to have lost all sense of decency. No wonder they flood the social media with depraved videos of themselves wearing the lingerie of women they have killed or displaced, videos of themselves mimicking dying Palestinians and wounded children or raped and tortured prisoners, images of themselves blowing up buildings while they smoke cigarettes or jive to music on their headphones. Who are these people?

    What can possibly justify what Israel is doing?

    The answer, according to Israel and its allies, as well as the Western media, is the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th last year. The killing of Israeli civilians and the taking of Israeli hostages. According to them, history only began a year ago.

    So, this is the part in my speech where I am expected to equivocate to protect myself, my ‘neutrality’, my intellectual standing. This is the part where I am meant to lapse into moral equivalence and condemn Hamas, the other militant groups in Gaza and their ally Hezbollah, in Lebanon, for killing civilians and taking people hostage. And to condemn the people of Gaza who celebrated the Hamas attack. Once that’s done it all becomes easy, doesn’t it? Ah well. Everybody is terrible, what can one do? Let’s go shopping instead…

    I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.

    When US President Joe Biden met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli war cabinet during a visit to Israel in October 2023, he said, ‘I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.’

    Unlike President Joe Biden, who calls himself a non-Jewish Zionist and unflinchingly bankrolls and arms Israel while it commits its war crimes, I am not going to declare myself or define myself in any way that is narrower than my writing. I am what I write.

    I am acutely aware that being the writer that I am, the non-Muslim that I am and the woman that I am, it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible for me to survive very long under the rule of Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Iranian regime. But that is not the point here. The point is to educate ourselves about the history and the circumstances under which they came to exist. The point is that right now they are fighting against an ongoing genocide. The point is to ask ourselves whether a liberal, secular fighting force can go up against a genocidal war machine. Because, when all the powers of the world are against them, who do they have to turn to but God? I am aware that Hezbollah and the Iranian regime have vocal detractors in their own countries, some who also languish in jails or have faced far worse outcomes. I am aware that some of their actions – the killing of civilians and the taking of hostages on October 7th by Hamas – constitute war crimes. However, there cannot be an equivalence between this and what Israel and the United States are doing in Gaza, in the West Bank and now in Lebanon. The root of all the violence, including the violence of October 7th, is Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and its subjugation of the Palestinian people. History did not begin on 7 October 2023.

    I ask you, which of us sitting in this hall would willingly submit to the indignity that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to for decades? What peaceful means have the Palestinian people not tried? What compromise have they not accepted – other than the one that requires them to crawl on their knees and eat dirt?

    Israel is not fighting a war of self-defence. It is fighting a war of aggression. A war to occupy more territory, to strengthen its Apartheid apparatus and tighten its control on Palestinian people and the region.

    Since October 7th 2023, apart from the tens of thousands of people it has killed, Israel has displaced the majority of Gaza’s population, many times over. It has bombed hospitals. It has deliberately targeted and killed doctors, aid workers and journalists. A whole population is being starved – their history is sought to be erased. All this is supported both morally and materially by the wealthiest, most powerful governments in the world. And their media. (Here I include my country, India which supplies Israel with weapons, as well as thousands of workers.) There is no daylight between these countries and Israel. In the last year alone, the US has spent 17.9 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. So, let us once and for all dispense with the lie about the US being a mediator, a restraining influence, or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (considered to be on the extreme Left of mainstream US politics) put it, ‘working tirelessly for a ceasefire’. A party to the genocide cannot be a mediator.

    Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds.

    Polls show that a majority of the citizens in the countries whose governments enable the Israeli genocide have made it clear that they do not agree with this. We have watched those marches of hundreds of thousands of people – including a young generation of Jews who are tired of being used, tired of being lied to. Who would have imagined that we would live to see the day when German police would arrest Jewish citizens for protesting against Israel and Zionism and accuse them of anti-Semitism? Who would have thought the US government would, in the service of the Israeli state, undermine its cardinal principle of Free Speech by banning pro-Palestine slogans? The so-called moral architecture of western democracies – with a few honourable exceptions – has become a grim laughingstock in the rest of the world.

    When Benjamin Netanyahu holds up a map of the Middle East in which Palestine has been erased and Israel stretches from the river to the sea, he is applauded as a visionary who is working to realise the dream of a Jewish homeland.

    But when Palestinians and their supporters chant ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’, they are accused of explicitly calling for the genocide of Jews.

    Are they really? Or is that a sick imagination projecting its own darkness onto others? An imagination that cannot countenance diversity, cannot countenance the idea of living in a country alongside other people, equally, with equal rights. Like everybody else in the world does. An imagination that cannot afford to acknowledge that Palestinians want to be free, like South Africa is, like India is, like all countries that have thrown off the yoke of colonialism are. Countries that are diverse, deeply, maybe even fatally, flawed, but free. When South Africans were chanting their popular rallying cry, Amandla! Power to the people, were they calling for the genocide of white people? They were not. They were calling for the dismantling of the Apartheid state. Just as the Palestinians are.

    The war that has now begun will be terrible. But it will eventually dismantle Israeli Apartheid. The whole world will be far safer for everyone – including for Jewish people – and far more just. It will be like pulling an arrow from our wounded heart.

    If the US government withdrew its support of Israel, the war could stop today. Hostilities could end right this minute. Israeli hostages could be freed, Palestinian prisoners could be released. The negotiations with Hamas and the other Palestinian stakeholders that must inevitably follow the war could instead take place now and prevent the suffering of millions of people. How sad that most people would consider this a naïve, laughable proposition.

    As I conclude, let me turn to your words, Alaa Abd el-Fatah, from your book of prison writing, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. I have rarely read such beautiful words about the meaning of victory and defeat – and the political necessity of honestly looking despair in the eye. I have rarely seen writing in which a citizen separates himself from the state, from the generals and even from the slogans of the Square with such bell-like clarity.

    The centre is treason because there’s room in it only for the General…. The centre is treason and I have never been a traitor. They think they’ve pushed us back into the margins. They don’t realise that we never left it, we just got lost for a brief while. Neither the ballot boxes not the palaces or the ministries or the prisons or even the graves are big enough for our dreams. We never sought the centre because it has no room except for those who abandon the dream. Even the square was not big enough for us, so most of the battles of the revolution happened outside it, and most of the heroes remained outside the frame.

    As the horror we are witnessing in Gaza, and now Lebanon, quickly escalates into a regional war, its real heroes remain outside the frame. But they fight on because they know that one day–

    From the river to the sea

    Palestine will be Free.

    It will. Keep your eye on your calendar. Not on your clock. That’s how the people – not the generals – the people fighting for their liberation measure time.

    Arundhati Roy was trained as an architect. She worked in cinema as an actress, screenplay writer and production designer. In 1997 she won the Booker Prize for her first novel The God of Small Things which was translated into more than 40 languages. Her second novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) has been translated into more than 50 languages.  

    Her non-fiction books include Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2014), Broken Republic: Three Essays (2011), Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (2009), The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2002), The Doctor and the Saint (2013), and My Seditious Heart (2018). Her latest book of essays is Azadi: Freedom, Fiction, Fascism (2019). 

    She has been honoured with the Norman Mailer Prize for Distinguished Writing (2011), the Sydney Peace Prize (2004), the Mahmoud Darwish Award (2016), and the Lannan Foundation’s Cultural Freedom Award (2002). 

    Photo credit: George Torode

  • Mostar’s Sniper Tower

    Mostar’s Sniper Tower

    Tayiba Sulaiman on memorialisation.

    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.

    ~

    I’m wearing the wrong trousers for trespassing – summery and wide-legged, they keep snagging on bricks. It is August 2023, and I’m climbing over a half-collapsed wall of the former Ljubljanska Banka in Mostar, Bosnia. I’m yet to be convinced that going in is a good idea. More than this, I am worrying about whether it’s right. At the top, I turn around to lower myself down to the ground floor where my family are standing. Before I jump down, I catch sight of a woman on the balcony of the apartment behind the building. She doesn’t smile. I feel a chill go through me. The building is not supposed to be accessible to the public; the local council have boarded and fenced up all the entrances, except for this accidental opening around the back.

    In theory, I celebrate civil disobedience, but in practice I’m already feeling there’s something fundamentally wrong about our being here at all – not just because of the rules of the present, but because of the burden of the past. This was once a space of militarised violence. Because of its height, the building was occupied by Croat forces and used as a sniper tower during the two sieges of Mostar, the first of which began in April 1992 and the second around a year later. The building’s grand glass façade was shattered, and has now been cleared away as if it never existed. Only concrete remains. Abandoned after the war, it has become a sort of unofficial gallery for street art, graffiti and murals. And it was this we wanted to see.

    I’d worked with Remembering Srebrenica the year before I started university. It was likely because of a heavy awareness of human suffering during the Bosnian War that, when I had the chance to visit, I’d expected to find its legacy memorialised everywhere I went. Of course, the idea of memorialising a war is much hazier than I’d assumed it to be, especially where an agreed version of events is still being debated. At the Srebrenica memorial site, I read a 2021 report which describes the ‘opposition to the official recognition or condemnation of the genocide by states, local governments, and institutions’ in the region. The war is over, but the story isn’t.

    The traces of conflict are impossible to miss – there are bullet holes in so many buildings in Sarajevo and Mostar, and many testaments to the dead. There’s the fountain in Sarajevo’s Veliki park paying tribute to children killed in the siege, the statue of Ramo Osmanović calling for his son Nermin, the endless white stone gravestones of those who were killed during the war. But I suppose what surprises me is how inconsistent the attempt to make sense of the war’s brutality seems. We’d visited Mostar’s Museum of War and Genocide the day before, and were bewildered to discover how blurrily the conflict’s historical context was presented. It felt like an avoidance of finger-pointing, of accusation. We had watched footage from November 1993 of the destruction of the old Stari Most, Mostar’s Ottoman bridge, as Croat Defence Council soldiers cheered, but later, standing with crowds at the reconstructed bridge, we struggled to track down an acknowledgement of what had happened there. (Online, I find a plaque in Croatian naming and condemning its destruction, but in English, there’s only a stone that reads ‘DON’T FORGET ‘93’, without contextual information.) During our trip, we visit several museums documenting the Bosnian genocide, none of which are state-funded. They are supported by the Dutch government, in atonement for the massacre that Dutch UN forces allowed to happen at Srebrenica. The British government also contributes financially towards the upkeep of these museums – even as it looks directly past the genocides it is endorsing elsewhere in the world. There is a process of memorialising, but it feels like it’s always slightly out of your line of sight.

    It is clear to me that this tower can’t be treated like a tourist spot. I’d read several accounts of it where the fact that it was once used to murder people from a safe distance was almost ignored. I didn’t want to barge in somewhere demanding to see the art, disregarding the wishes of the people – perhaps even of the artists ­– and I didn’t want to stir up the ghosts of the crimes that had been committed there. It seemed to me that there was something sacrilegious about it.

    I stand there on the ground floor, trying to decide whether it would be better to turn back. Turning, I catch sight of my dad walking past a wall, on which someone has spray-painted the words:

    God is Here Don’t Worry 🙂 Go All way up…!

    I am thrown by the idea that someone has predicted exactly my sense of doubt, moved by the fact that they have somehow eased it. I hadn’t expected the building itself to coax me forwards. I hadn’t expected to find something holy here.

    ~

    I trail after the others, who are already exploring the bottom floor. Standing water expands murals of warped, ghostly faces and makes mirror-images of the words. The first thing that stands out is how multilingual the graffiti is. Some German phrases are printed in block capitals – ‘DEIN TUN DU BIST’; WHAT YOU DO IS WHAT YOU ARE. Even the inscription FCK AFD. Later, I find whole excerpted paragraphs from Homer in English, alongside insults, questions and declarations. If the artists who have taken over this building have an argument to make, it’s not one that has been communally decided. These multilingual voices speak past each other, between each other, around each other.

    Where one artist’s work has spread out to cover parts of an older contribution, these voices overlap. It’s a completely different model to the established avenues through which we usually find work in translation. Here, space is as in demand as in a packed magazine. Everyone is after the best spots. But, in this case, there’s no point at which the work is finished. It’s last come first served. For me, this building is a place where established ways of doing things – of making art, of translating, of thinking about the past – are jumbled, exposing their weaknesses, and where the whole question of the value of a consistent, coherent take is thrown into question. In a way, the building is like an anti-gallery. There’s no governing board to steer the direction of its contribution to Bosnian history or culture, and there are a fair share of names scratched into the stone. There’s no single curator, no strategy of inclusion or exclusion. Anything can – and very likely will – be overwritten by anyone.

    Slowly, we begin to head upwards. I hadn’t expected the overwhelming openness. Forget bannisters, railings, or anything else to hold onto. These stairs don’t even have walls. It’s a risk assessor’s nightmare, but there’s something liberating about the false sense of dizziness induced by the sweeping skyline. It’s safe enough, so long as you’re sensible and avoid the edges. I feel like a child riding a bike without stabilisers. But I can’t get too comfortable, because even if there’s no danger now, the awareness of past threat hangs over me. So much of this art is haunting; the mural of shifting faces which spans a corner, warping outwards, and the sly, subtle warning to avoid the exposed lift shafts where someone has spraypainted two arrows, one pointing upwards and one downwards, respectively labelled ‘HEAVEN’ and ‘HELL’. The fall would be fatal. It’s a privilege, of course, to wander through this place in a time of relative safety. I find myself longing to know when exactly each piece of graffiti was done, to help put a context to this strange balance of beauty and of sinister reminders.

    To my surprise – despite my feeling of solemnity – so much of the graffiti is out of pocket, even funny. On one wall on a higher floor, in front of a stunning view of a hill which holds the city in its palms, someone has spraypainted ‘RATE THIS PLACE ON TRIP ADVISOR’ and completed it with a line of stars. It makes me laugh at its daringness, its cheekiness, in English, making a demand of us, understanding us as interlopers. While the first bit of graffiti that had encouraged me onwards might have wanted people to visit, the sentiment isn’t necessarily shared by all: these artists won’t let us get too comfortable, and they know who we are. I love this sharpness and humour, which goes on in the face of its own destruction, its anarchic defiance. Here, the past isn’t something to be swept away or standardised or replaced with a nice, coherent, comforting argument about the human capacity to kill or the grand horror of war. In the tower, ruin is met with something utterly and undeniably alive.

    From the highest floor, we look down and see my mother and my youngest brother below us in the park, playing on the bridges over the water. Snipers once took aim from the top of this building, and here I am, waving at the tiny forms of the people I love most in the world. Maybe it’s the greenness of the water, or the beautiful mosques and churches tucked behind every street corner, but Mostar feels like a peaceful place today. From this vantage point, I wonder how much of that peace is the sort that survives on silence, or at least relative quietude. The worst traces of the war have been cleared out of sight, but the bruises remain, and if you stray too far from the centre, you find places like this, where the legacy of the war still throws a long shadow. I find many things in this strange tower on the city’s edge, but peace and quiet isn’t one of them. It feels busy, loud with all the voices it contains. It echoes with the laughter and disagreement of artists, teenagers, soldiers and ghosts.

    ~

    The sniper tower stands tall as a reminder that whether we assemble memorials to a nation’s history or demolish all traces of war and conflict, we are constantly curating a relationship with the past. A messier, more multivalent way of engaging with shared history will continue somewhere out of sight. If we want to see this in action, we must seek it out and make sense of it for ourselves. I suspect that this is really where my initial discomfort was rooted. Entering a space like this can feel like taking the burden of understanding, of a fair and nuanced approach to atrocities, entirely onto your own shoulders. There’s no approved version of events explained neatly on the walls; you might not be armed with a reading list; there’s no state-sanctioned approach that will tell you what to think. I’m not sure that this passive but comfortable engagement with the past on predetermined grounds is the most responsible way to look at history as it stares up at you from beneath the rubble.

    I maintain that there’s great value in staying sensitive, to remaining somewhat in awe of a place and its ghosts. But I also think we need to interrogate the feeling that things would be better if someone else could just think their way through the problem of reading the past for us. Sometimes you need to jump the fence and see for yourself. I had worried about disturbing a grave silence here that doesn’t exist the way I had imagined it. Instead, the tower is an open-ended place of countless voices speaking past and to one another, and I’m glad I took the chance to hear them. From the top of that building, a place where the past is so visceral and unsettled, the present looks different to me: equally unmade, equally full of overlaps and disagreement, and yet constantly in danger of being shaped into stories that tell us, comfortingly, that they are complete.

    ~

    We leave the building; it’s getting late. We stop to play in the park, where we pick ripe figs, climb over the fountains, and take photos of my little brother in front of the incongruous but delightful statue of Bruce Lee. A bridal party drives past as we walk over a roundabout and towards the city centre, honking their horns loudly. The ease of slipping back into every day life here makes me even more aware of the quiet with which a place’s history can recede from memory, conveniently pushed to the parameters again.

    Where will this impulse to forget, whether it comes from the people or the state, leave places like the sniper tower? Perhaps it’ll be boarded up again for another decade; perhaps it’ll be demolished; perhaps one day, the history will be put to one side, and it’ll be renovated into upmarket flats, like Berlin Prenzlauer Berg’s Wasserturm, which contained an early concentration camp in 1933. The tower stays in my mind as I first saw it, with my little brother playing in the concrete skeleton of what was once a glass revolving door. All that’s left is a cylindrical structure jutting out onto the street corner: four panels of concrete and four gaps. On three of the panels, a pale blue starry night is painted, with the same phrase written underneath in English, German and a third language. Google Translate tells us it is Bosnian, but an alternative, perhaps more accurate name is BCMS: Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian. All of these are one language, divided up to fit today’s national borders. I picture my little brother weaving between them, unaware of what this place has meant and may go on to mean. And I imagine myself, doubtful and curious, standing under its odd canopy, reading the same words in each language: WE ARE ALL LIVING UNDER THE SAME SKY.

    Tayiba Sulaiman is a writer and translator from Manchester. She graduated with a degree in English and Modern Languages in 2023, and completed an Emerging Translators Mentorship with Jamie Lee Searle in 2024. Her recent translations from German include poetry by Swiss-Croatian writer Dragica Rajčić Holzner and a verse script for the 2024 Droste Festival at the Centre for Literature, Burg Hülshoff. She also writes poetry and prose; her work has appeared in Prospect Magazine, Briefly Write and on The Poetry Business’ blog. She is a member of The Writing Squad.

    Headshot credit: Rumaisa Jilani

    Photo credits: Tayiba Sulaiman

  • When I Walk in Gaza, I Put My Hands in My Pockets

    When I Walk in Gaza, I Put My Hands in My Pockets

    Ahmad Bassiouny writes from Gaza. Translated by Ibrahim Fawzy.

    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 can’t find an introduction that fits. I’m fed up with counting genocide days. The number of martyrs is high. My fingers ache. I feel as though the teeth of the dead are biting me, clutching at me; I’m a tomb for martyrs, and inside me are many, and the dunes in my heart are dry. I’m an autumn tree; my leaves fall one by one. The tomb is full. Get an axe to cut my fingers. I’m done with counting.

    ~

    All Will Know

    Strolling down the souq in al-Nuseirat, witnessing the destruction of homes and markets, I bump into our building’s guard. We engage in chitchat about the ongoing atrocities. He shares the heart-wrenching news that my home and my brother’s have been bombarded. I say, ‘No problem. Money will come again. What really matters is souls.’Material harm, rather than a dear one, as the Palestinian proverb goes in such times of destruction. ‘How are you and yours?’ I ask.

    ‘I’m still alive, and my wife and children are still with me,’ he says. ‘But the rest of my family has been martyred. My siblings and uncles are all gone. Our building was bombed. They exterminated us.’ His eyes are red.

    I console him, ashamed. I share that my niece’s son, along with my cousins’ children, are all martyrs, and that the fate of my niece’s second son – he was kidnapped by the occupying forces – is unclear.

    He consoles me, pats my hand, and so I do the same, turning martyrs over in our fingers.

    ‘Where are you staying now?’ he asks.

    ‘Here in az-Zawayda. Near the historical site. You?’

    ‘I took shelter in a storehouse. The people there welcomed me in – may Allah compensate them.’ His voice wobbles.

    ‘How do you buy what you need?’

    My question seems to strike him. ‘I sold my phone for 500 shekels,’ he says. ‘And I’m spending them.’  I see the overburdened pride in him. ‘I need to feed my kids. I sold my phone – so what? Why should I keep it? Who would I call? My family’s all gone. I don’t want any more news. And if I became a martyr, everyone would know anyway.’

    ~

    Muhie/Mukhie

    Today, Muhie is sick. A ten-person family was displaced along with us and Muhie is their three-year-old son. He’s in the very first stages of soaking up Arabic, pronouncing ‘ha’ as ‘kha’, ‘sa’ as ‘tha’. Arabic weeps when he speaks. We call him Mukhie the Israeli because the way he pronounces Arabic is like a settler learning it for the first time. Ironically, Mukhie is fair skinned with blue eyes and blond hair. If Israeli soldiers saw him or heard him, they’d think him a hostage.

    Normally, Mukhie wakes up, greeting everyone with a cheerful ‘Mornin awl’, and then moves towards me, gives me a ‘Mornin’ too, and asks if there is water, and Arabic weeps.

    ‘Morning, Mukhie!’ I say, smiling. ‘All the water is for you.’

    He has become the soul of the camp. He helps us chop and collect the logs. He plays with the children of the village, acts as their leader. Everyone surrounds him. But at the same time they somehow steer clear.

    Muhie’s father is frightened for his children. He tries to shield their eyes from the panic and the fear. ‘When you see a tank, I’ll let you drive it,’ he had once promised Muhie. And then Muhie had admonished his father: ‘We saw tanks and soldiers but you didn’t let me drive. You said “Not now”. I don’t like people lying to me’.

    Except it didn’t sound like this. Every word was mispronounced. Arabic wept. If I wrote it how he said it, you wouldn’t understand. But this is Muhie, and this is how he speaks. And the sixty of us on the farm have learned and adopted it.

    I ask Muhie’s father about his promise. ‘I don’t want him to be traumatised by the tanks and soldiers,’ he says. ‘So I told him, “I’ll let you drive it unless you give me trouble,” so that he’ll think of the tank as nothing more than a car. Only when he grows up will he understand that it’s the car of the dead.’

    But as I say, today, Muhie is sick, grappling with a stomach bug because of contaminated water. He coughs as if a tank is marching over his chest. His lungs are inflamed from the dust of the ongoing shelling. This is a child who thinks life is just a toy: he holds it, turns it over, loosens and tightens its screws, pulls at its rope, all so that he can understand its structure. The crucial point remains: death isn’t a core part of his life.

    ~

    The Tale of Two Cancers


    ‘A cup of coffee and some water, please. After that, I’ll tell you everything.’ He is Abou Ali, a 55-year-old man. He is new to the farm. He lost his wife and their only child after the occupation forces bombarded the house that had sheltered them for 40 days. They had been martyred shortly after he was displaced.

    Abou Ali had refused to leave Gaza. He had promised not to repeat his father’s mistake, not to carry the stories of a third and a fourth migration on his back. So he had decided to stay in Gaza, to witness the occupation’s violence. We don’t like to hear about it, but we must, because collective memory is built on shared scenes, the accumulated narratives of the farmer and the land.

    ‘As I prepare to go to bed,’ Abou Ali says, ‘I pray three prayers: the Isha Prayer, the Absentee Funeral Prayer for the martyrs, and the Night Vigil Prayer. Then I lie on my bed, and before sleep creeps over my eyelids I place my ID in my shirt pocket and a piece of paper with my full name in my trouser pocket. Just in case. If my house is bombed with me inside, and I’m torn to pieces, my name might then be found in my hand or foot. That one night, as death surrounded us, I took my pen and wrote my name on my hands, my feet, my chest. I felt like a narcissist.’

    That night, Abou Ali’s house was bombed. When the window fell onto him, thick pieces of concrete came with it and formed a pyramid over his body. And when the ceiling fell, that pyramid shielded him. ‘I don’t know how I survived. What I did know was that I could no longer stay at home. I headed to al-Rantisi Hospital, where they care for children with cancer. It’s become a refuge for children and families escaping two cancers: disease and occupation.’

    He continues. ‘When they controlled the area around al-Karama Street, and they set out from the  roundabout that separates al-Karama Street from al-Nasr Street, and the quadcopters fired on every passer-by – that night, I don’t know how I fell asleep. When I woke, it wasn’t to Fairouz’s voice, but the tank’s muzzle hailing me at the window under which I slept. And at that moment, I realised that cancer had spread through the body of the city.’

    He continues. ‘They ordered us to hold our IDs in our right hands and raise white flags in our left and exit the hospital one by one. They then directed us to walk in a straight line from al-Nasr toward al-Galaa Street until we reached the checkpoint on Salah al-Din Street, where we could pass to a safe area. I didn’t comply. I veered off from al-Galaa Street toward al-Rimal to reach Shifa Hospital. As I was walking, I saw corpses thrown to the ground – men, women, children, teens. Some had been hit by sniper fire, more than once. Some had been shelled, more than once.’

    He continues. ‘Here is a hand and a head. There a foot and a toe. This is a shoulder. I didn’t know who had leaned against it. But it was lying in a long street today, no one to carry it. This street was a tomb with neither tombstones nor sand. Just corpses. Even the undertaker’s corpse was lying on that street.’ He continues.

    ~

    The Story Isn’t a Story, Nor the Hero a Hero

    I understand. I understand that we have grown accustomed to stories with happy endings, or at the very least with a hero. Even stories with sad endings have heroes. But here? Nothingness. The story isn’t a story. The hero is not a hero. Nor is Gaza that Gaza that I know, the Gaza I used to tell others about.

    Once, in Ramallah, a friend had asked me, ‘Ahmad, tell me about Gaza. What colours is it? How does it smell?’

    ‘Gaza is shelter for me and all Gazans,’ I had said. ‘The sea is ours; the streets are for us. When I walk in Gaza, I put my hands in my pockets. I know the streets. I never fear getting lost. I never expect an attack from a stranger. I stroll through Gaza in peace, as though I were in my own bedroom. I have wandered the streets of Cairo, Amman, Istanbul, Doha and Ramallah with my hands in the air and nothing in my pockets except for my phone. My hands were ready for strangers. In all my life, in all my places, I have never felt secure anywhere except in Gaza.’

    Today, a year and a half after that answer, I now say, ‘You might read, Ghadeer, that all the world is safer than Gaza. Today, my hands are in the air, crossed like Christ. Today, my pocket is a graveyard. When I put my hand into it, my fingers embrace a martyr. Today, the stranger is here. The attack is a silent cancer. Today, I’m fed up with counting genocide days, and the tomb is full.’ shoulder their boats: poets reciting their poetry standing up, writers ached and hunching over their desks, the many named and nameless who carry the suffering of the world on their shoulders to the shores of the sea.

    Ahmad Bassiouny is a Gazan writer. He holds an MA in Political Science and International Relations from the Doha Institute for Post-graduate Studies. His work has appeared in various outlets, and he produced a number of documentaries for Alaraby TV. 

    Ibrahim Fawzy is an award-winning literary translator. His translations have appeared in various literary outlets. He is an editor at Rowayat, Asymptote, and Minor Literatures, and podcasts at New Books Network (NBN).

  • Find Your Mind

    Find Your Mind

    Tallulah Howarth on embracing your poetic mind.

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

    This piece is in partnership with The Writing Squad, an organisation that exists to create and support the next generation of writers in the north of England. It 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.

    ~

    There is a spectrum of unexpected and expected imagery. We maybe tend to tip towards the safety net of cliché in our writing, but poetry goes beyond a literary exercise in close observation. Poetry – its unexpected imagery – is necessitated outside of our writing.  It’s an ongoing commitment to, a deep understanding of, a forging of, a tuning into your version of the world. Yes, dominant cultural narratives exist that may feel safe socially. But it will do you little good to follow these routes. You must decide to walk, to regularly take yourself off the beaten path of your own psyche.

    ~

    This spring, I took myself on a solo day trip to Hebden Bridge – what Julia Cameron would call an ‘Artist Date’ – and walked up towards Hardcastle Crags. I stopped some distance up the incline to note down the paragraph above, unknowingly touching on the initial ideas for this essay. 

    As Billy Collins expressed in a poetry workshop at the White House in 2011, the idea of a poetic voice is ‘very mystifying in the minds of young people.’ Don Paterson, by whom my MA Writing Poetry class were lucky enough to be given a lecture, thinks our obsession with the ‘great individual voice . . . is worthless.’ I tend to agree. When I hear the phrase ‘find your voice,’ I find it vague, overused, somewhat of a cop-out.  What do writers mean – really – when they say you need to ‘find your voice’?

    I’ve come up with several possibilities. Maybe ‘voice’ is the themes to which you return, your values, your tone of writing, your language, your sense of identity. Maybe it’s a combination of these things. But surely these are changeable with each new poem? With character poems, the ‘voice’ of the verse changing is encouraged. We’re not expected to believe that the villainous speaker of a poem is the poet’s true voice, and don’t kick up a fuss when the following poem assumes a different character and voice entirely. How does this question interact with ekphrasis, from the Greek ‘to speak out,’ giving voice to voiceless characters or objects? I’m not convinced that there’s one underlying, contiguous voice in any body of work. But this is a muddy debate – and perhaps an unhelpful one for young poets to focus on when developing their writing.

    I was chatting with my housemates about this in the kitchen. They are dancers and artists, so they had welcome insights. One of them suggested that you might have found your voice when you stop imitating others. Here’s another spectrum, of legacy and originality. I’m interested in the hunger for originality – which I naïvely previously desired, or to which I felt I had to adhere. I’m interested in the balance between acknowledging or honouring your inspirations and actively choosing to stray from dominant cultural narratives. There’s a sense that you have to say something that’s never been said before, in a way that’s never been done before; this desire to be the first, the best, the youngest, the freshest, the most unique. Maybe this phrase ‘finding your voice’ is about our cult of the individual, our elevation of individual successes in society.

    In neoliberalism, we are all in competition with each other. The more uniquely identifiable a poet’s voice, the more marketable they are. Experimentation and multidisciplinarity are often slighted, each a betrayal to a homogenous body of work. Artists are asked what their ‘unique selling point’ is; my fear is that this need to ‘find your voice’ simply lends itself to creativity being commodified and gatekept. It also may hinder true creative expression, where such expression involves deviating from the poet’s expected voice.

    It’s not such a terrible thing to pay homage to other poets and artists. Harking back to those you idolise can be done with respect and can birth great writing. Young writers usually start out by imitating work they like, and I don’t think there’s a clear-cut ending to this – rather, our writing becomes a synthesis derived from multiple inspirations and our own experiences. I reckon my best work has the sensuality of Sharon Olds’s poetry, the clarity and hopefulness of Ellen Bass, and the multidisciplinary approach of David Wojnarowicz. Your inspirations are your creative peers and ancestors. Lean into the collective intelligence that Brian Eno coined as a ‘scenius.’ We don’t need to claim we’ve got somewhere alone, nor do we need to chase uniqueness. You and your experiences are inherently unique.

    There are poets who we can read anonymously and yet recognise some of their habitual writing patterns or their distinctive tone. Even now, I understand that I’m writing to you with a certain voice – my voice – and have ironically struggled to balance a formal and personal tone here. This essay isn’t an argument against the concept of voice, rather one for developing a poetic mind over a poetic voice.

    In my evolution as a young writer, one of the biggest perspective shifts has been from seeing poetry as a hobby or vocation to seeing it as an ongoing commitment to developing a poetic mind. I found I couldn’t separate the suggested twenty hours of independent working for my Poetry MA from the rest of my life. Going to art galleries, reading, commuting, urban walks, protesting and conversing all became grounds for poetry ‘revision.’ I stopped counting the hours.

    A poetic mind is convicted, confident, open, questioning and perceptive in all areas of life. To embody what I mean by conviction, I want to share a line from the novella Somewhere a Band is Playing by Ray Bradbury.

    The rats practiced graffiti on the walls and spiders played harps so high that only the hairs inside his ears heard and quivered.

    What a commitment to his own order of things! I love when poetry does this too – throws you into the deep end of nonsense and leaves no space for questioning (see ‘Liverpool Disappears for a Billionth of a Second’ by Paul Farley). As Mary Oliver says, ‘the poet must not only write the poem but must scrutinise the world intensely.’ In doing so, you gain a penchant for linguistics and your life attains this quality of depth – becomes a deeper joy, a deeper sorrow.

    The poetic mind is innately political, because it understands the interaction between all living things. Andrei Tarkovsky didn’t think of poetry as a genre, but as an ‘awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.’ Your poetry finds voice, maybe, when your mind has an active engagement with the sense that there is a vibrancy or life to all objects. This elusive voice can’t be found on demand, but it will follow your sense of self, and your rooted place in the world.

    Everyone deserves access to these things: time spent in nature, the ability to step out of the cyclone of daily life, to journal, to contemplate. They shouldn’t be privileges, but undeniably are. So how can we ‘find our mind’ in ways that are within our reach?

    Embrace serendipity; have faith in what you are saying; understand what you value and live by it. Be non-urgent, self-aware and caring in how you relate to others. Look at the world closelyin metaphor, imagery, texture and direction. Experience it vibrantly. When you walk, let your necklace pendant pendulum against your chest like a heartbeat. Be sure to look at those footprints that walked the path before you and acknowledge where you have been in line with them, where you have strayed. The rest will come; the poetry will come.

    Tallulah Howarth is an award-winning poet and multidisciplinary creative based in Leeds, currently studying an MA in Writing Poetry at Newcastle University. Her poetic voice is intimate, hopeful and observational. They are an alumni of Union: The Northern School for Creativity & Activism, and a current member of The Writing Squad. She has had publications in three Young Identity anthologies, HEBE Poetry Magazine and Now Then Magazine, to name a few. In 2019, they were shortlisted in the top five for the BBC Young Writers’ Award. In March 2024, she was The Poetry Business’s Digital Poet-in-Residence. They are particularly passionate about foraging, archives and Polish jazz.

    Photo credit: Marta Zelent

  • I Need to Build a Different Library

    I Need to Build a Different Library

    Finlay Worrallo on writerly intentions and the translation of ideas.

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

    This piece is in partnership with The Writing Squad, an organisation that exists to create and support the next generation of writers in the north of England. It 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.

    ~

    In 2021, I wrote some poems about my perception of history for a publishing project called VIBE. I’m not sure if they’re the strongest I’ve written, but like sprouting seeds they’ve informed quite a bit of my subsequent work. They explored the question of how the future will respond to the present, and what it means to be part of a story that’s still being written. One contained these lines:

    Prisoners of history, we all are bare-breasted
    wooden mermaids, heads stuck out, eyes wide and wet
    with spray, cutting a path through the unfolding blue,
    breath-taken, blinded by the white foam of the present.

    Now, these lines seem overworked. But overworked or not I managed to use words to crystallise a very particular image, and there’s little else I strive for as a writer.

    I don’t always pull this off. Sometimes I have a clear image in mind and simply can’t find the right words to transpose it into a reader’s. For instance: the sun rising over you, a gold coin suspended mid-flip over your hand, two golden circles shining at each other. The side the coin will land on is undecided, and thus a metaphor for getting out of bed in the morning and not knowing if you’ll cry today. A solid enough image for a poem, but expressed in such meandering prose, it simply won’t do. Many times I’ve been stuck at my desk wanting to bang my brain against my reader’s, physically forcing the images over. I’m sure most writers and translators would sympathise: sometimes words are barely enough to carry our thoughts across the divide.

    Borges understood the difficulties of transmuting ideas. ‘You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?’ he wrote in ‘The Library of Babel’. The line sends chills down my spine. To me, it speaks of the great contradiction of literature: how ideas can be transmitted almost endlessly and yet never the same way twice. Borges died 13 years before I was born, but his words echo in my mind and anchor my perception of language. Except when he wrote of the Library he saw a different one to the one I see when I read his work. There’s no replicating the images that flashed through his mind when he wrote – exactly how the soft lamps of the Library glow, how its staircases spiral off into the darkness – and there’s no replicating the ones that flash through my mind as I read. I build a different Library in my head, simply because no two people read a book the same way.

    Since I first read Borges, I’ve found that his influence has reverberated through my work. The most notable example, oddly, was a project about intelligent isopods. I spent the better part of last year writing eight short stories for a collaborative chapbook called Unfurl: Portrait of Another World. Although physically slim, it was a sprawling work of speculative fiction that recorded a planet’s entire history, with the increasingly clear implication that the mysterious race living there, known only as the People, were giant woodlice. Without consciously intending it, my contributions became a series of reflections and meditations by various scholarly characters on journeys of discovery: classicists translating text, archaeologists uncovering artefacts, explorers wading into new territories. Reading my own work back, I concluded that what fascinates me the most, both as a writer and as a reader, is the very dynamic between writer and reader – an act of translation, as one individual attempts to decipher another’s thoughts across the divide. Trying to unpick everything crammed into a single image, maybe a single word.

    I wrote in an intense, fixated state, picking details from my co-writers’ pieces to respond to. I wanted my translations to be part of a history, even if it was just a history we’d invented. It was my whole world while I wrote it. But now, a year later, my writing reads like the work of another writer to whom I’m now responding. To continue these pieces would be another act of translation.

    Writing, reading and translating all seem to me to be variations on the same action, different aspects of the same process – a three-faced lamp that allows one to light up the darkness of past and future as though history were a spiral staircase sinking abysmally and soaring upwards above us in the Library.

    ~

    My tendency to historicise my own story goes back to starting a diary at 6. I’ve now reached a point where, experiencing a moment, I think as I experience it about how I’ll turn it into prose later, wondering whether to be pithy or sardonic or heartfelt. I suppose I have one eye on a future not yet written.

    I’m not sure if thinking about how my future will react to my present allows me to bemore present, but it certainly makes me notice the details of history, from big things like issues dominating the news cycle to personal details like what I currently prefer for breakfast. I write these diaries as a dialogue with my future self, who I know will reread them to charter the unknown. My mood is no longer quite a coin tossed high to catch the sun – how I eventually translated that mental image – but it still helps enormously to look back on my younger self stressing about something and realise, with a jolt, that it all turned out fine long ago.

    Writing allows me dialogue with my past. So, I write to be reread. I read to translate other writers’ words into my language and enrich my voice. And then I write in the hope of being translated in my turn. Reading this, you are translating my words into your language, forming a singular version of this essay in your head. I give you my thoughts in an attempt to guide yours in a particular direction, but ultimately your reading, your response, is yours and yours alone.

    Finlay Worrallo is a queer cross-arts writer studying at Newcastle University. Following a Modern Languages BA, he is now set to study a Creative Writing MA to focus on his art. He writes poetry, prose and scripts, and enjoys experimenting between and beyond established forms. His primary themes are the fluidity and flexibility of language, the relationships between things created and their creators, and the modern-day queer experience. His work is published in VIBE, Queerlings, 14, Ink Sweat & Tears, Impossible Archetype, Pennine Platform, the Braag’s speculative fiction chapbook Unfurl: Portrait of Another World, and the Emma Press’ anthology Dragons of the Prime: Poems about Dinosaurs.

    Photo credit: Finlay Worrallo

  • Writing What We Know

    Writing What We Know

    Jade Prince on writing Gen Z authentically for the screen.

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

    This piece is in partnership with The Writing Squad, an organisation that exists to create and support the next generation of writers in the north of England. It 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.

    ~

    TW: mentions of sexual assault and abuse

    I’m sat in a pub with a few girlfriends. The second season of Sex Education has just dropped, and we’re engrossed in deep discussion. Conversation eventually rolls around to ‘the bus scene,’ where a character is assaulted on a bus and struggles to cope. After an exchange in which many of the show’s characters divulge their own experiences of sexual assault and harassment, they band together to ride the bus with their friend in a moving show of solidarity. As we chat, we express how much it means to see such a freeing depiction of the many shapes sexual assault can take. There is a palpable sense of the unsaid. Though we keep our histories to ourselves, there is an unspoken awareness that this scene breaches the personal for nearly all of us. We don’t need to have our own therapy session like the characters in the show; the scene has done it for us. We instead all express our connection through the same sentiment: ‘I just wish I’d seen this when I was younger.’

    This is not the first time we’ve used this sentence, nor the first time I’d expressed it myself. I’ve had countless conversations in which people have said that a recent film or show has offered an insight they wish they’d had access to before: learning how to heal from heartbreak, the importance of strong female friendships, that other men also cry. Despite our world spilling over with easily obtainable information, my generation often find ourselves turning to the screen to locate feelings beyond the search engine. What is presented as entertainment now also functions as education. As the industry begins its long-overdue – albeit slow – catch up with representation, people are beginning to see their personalities, their experiences, their feelings explored in front of them. TV and film allow for a level of introspection that many find even if they aren’t necessarily looking for it to begin with.

    This is the core of why many writers, including myself, are drawn to writing. The capability to stir a viewer or reader’s emotions is one of the greatest joys that being a writer offers. Admittedly, the current landscape of TV does make scriptwriting feel like a strange sort of calling. I elected to write my own show after acknowledging how empty the world of script still is, despite my enthusiasm for the form’s education–entertainment fusion. Often, I begin pitching my script to people I know by asking them to name the most recent show that authentically explores the experience of living in your 20s. Most say Friends, and I remind them that the characters are all in their late 30s by the end. Others might bring up the 2012 show Girls (an excellent show, but overwhelmingly American) or New Girl from 2011 (again, drastically American and more rooted in comedic depiction than reality). Better, more recent examples occasionally given are Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum or book adaptations like Everything I Know About Love. The prompt often sparks shock and laughter as people realise they are only able to identify one or two shows. An almost identical conversation always follows, in which everyone praises this era as the most exciting, most confusing, and, often, most defining time of one’s life. Why, then, it is posed to me, is there such a writerly chasm? Whilst I don’t necessarily have an answer, I do have a drive to begin bridging the gap. It’s overwhelmingly compelling as a young writer to be able to fill this space, particularly given how rare the opportunity is to write into such expansive literary real estate.

    People critical of my generation often focus on how we have grown up with the rise of social media and fast technology. They speak about the impact it’s had on our brains, attention spans, and senses of self. I like to note that impending climate devastation, political turmoil, regressions in attitudes towards minority communities, and a general and overwhelming lack of stability in our futures have also done a considerable number on our development. And yet none of these pressures are uniquely new. In this lies the strange beauty of writing a coming-of-age story. I can explore patterns of behaviour that are undoubtedly products of the contemporary era. I create characters that mirror my girlfriends and their alarming tethers to dating apps, constantly aligning their sense of self with the rate of their matches. I watch them grimace at the perverted remarks they receive, then listen and nod later when we’re a couple glasses deep and admitting that it secretly makes them feel desired. I also write characters like those mates always down for a good time and a few too many, whose dependency on comedy and drugs masks a deep bile of self-hatred, uncertainty, insecurity. I write about girls internally feuding over their bisexuality, wondering if their interest in men is more a product of the world’s pervading preference for heterosexuality, struggling with the ways their orientation often puts them on the isolating outskirts of many queer circles. These experiences – these types of people and their personalities – are not as specific to the contemporary era. To write them into life alongside the modern moments provides a chance for both writer and viewer to acknowledge the comfort and residing strength in the strange humanity of your own struggles and difficulties.

    It is this catharsis that primarily fuels my writerly drive. While all of the experiences I’ve discussed are from those around me, I also write to examine and work through my own feelings and moments. I wish I could say I’m removed from that old cliché to ‘write what you know,’ but it’s an unnervingly deep part of my writing process. The show lets me use characters to work vicariously through my own difficulties; the strain of living life after heavy abuse, the almighty task of trying to successfully participate in the expected vivaciousness and spontaneity of my 20s while also dealing with long-term PTSD. I think of myself at 16, back when phrases like ‘gaslighting’ and ‘guilt-tripping’ weren’t mainstream, when I had never seen any media that addressed assault, abuse, or rape. To have seen a show like mine would have completely revolutionised my understanding of my experiences, helping me to recognise what was happening and possibly begin vocalising what I had endured. I then think to myself at 19, in that pub with my girlfriends talking about sexual assault on screen. Though I didn’t directly discuss my own encounters, it was the beginning of understanding how freeing it can feel to talk about such moments and everything that comes with them. Now I sit here at 23, writing an essay in which I softly discuss my past and the project through which I aim to empower both my own voice and the voices of others. There’s always a relative responsibility as a writer that forces us to recognise just how far-reaching and impactful the act of writing can be. We have the capability not just to acknowledge gaps in content, but to fill them with sensitive, thoughtful, interesting work. I look forward to when I once again get to look back, sometime in the next few years. Hopefully, I will have begun to make my mark, educating and entertaining people on the experiences and feelings of my generation. Perhaps even more hopefully, I aim for the day that generations after us won’t have to repeat that phrase the girls and I once shared round that pub table, for they will have seen it all.

    Jade Prince hails from Essex, England. She was a runner up for the Alison Morland Prize 2020, had work published in Ink, Sweat & Tears, Poetry & Audience, and Sunday Mornings at the River amongst others, and currently holds a place with The Writing Squad. She has a BA in English Literature with Creative Writing and a MA in Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Studies from University of Leeds. She currently spends her time writing a coming-of-age TV show and working for the NHS.

    Photo credit: Jade Prince

  • Beatnik Snappers and Salt Bae Sprinklers

    Beatnik Snappers and Salt Bae Sprinklers

    Elena Barham on the ongoing lack of access to the arts for working-class writers.

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

    This piece is in partnership with The Writing Squad, an organisation that exists to create and support the next generation of writers in the north of England. It 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.

    ~

    On my first poetry residential, after someone had performed, I enthusiastically rubbed my fingers together like Salt Bae. It was a motion I’d observed over the Zoom meetings arranged ahead of the residential. Initially, I’d clapped during these sessions – inaudibly, like a Punch and Judy puppet. When I’d finished hyper-focussing on my own Zoom image, I saw the others doing the Salt Bae routine. I thought it was clever and meaningful – that it meant the performance had been brilliant, that it was seasoned – and I felt cultured.

    I’m from a post-industrial working-class town of low-social progression in the North – a lot of ways to say that Barnsley has been consistently underfunded. Growing up, I always wrote, but despite being zealously encouraged by my brilliant mum, the underfunding of the arts in my wider community meant I wasn’t encouraged outside my home. When I was 7, a well-intentioned teacher told me that a boy in my class was much more likely to become a Formula One driver than I was to become a published writer. I didn’t know why she said it, but five years later I was elated to have published my first poem. I’d be well into my teenage years when I’d meet other creatives, let alone feel a part of a network.

    ‘Why are we finger snapping because of the beatniks?’ I asked when I learned of my error. ‘Why would you sprinkle like Salt Bae?’ came the reply. Both are valid questions. If you didn’t grow up in what often seems a very middle-class literary world, you throw yourself in and adapt. And when you’re the first in your family to pursue a creative career, you rely on your own cultural cues; you sprinkle like Salt Bae.

    Of course, there are times when this isn’t possible. Only two years ago, I attended the start of a series of Zoom playwrighting workshops aimed at those from the North that met a working-class criteria and was described as being led by working-class creatives. During the session, the director of the company suggested starting with icebreakers, ‘I know, let’s all say what the first play we remember seeing was – and please don’t count amateur dramatics or musicals!’ He shared his own earliest experience – going to see Hamlet while at prep school. I had never seen a professional play.

    If I’d been younger, I’d have stayed on and lied. Instead, I realised that this wasn’t the type of course from which I’d derive value. If I were to attend a session like this now, I’d like to think I would’ve stated one of the many amateur dramatic productions I’d seen and loved. There’s a peculiar joy to amateur dramatics – to watching of a diverse group of people, managing jobs and families, create something of no financial benefit to themselves but for sheer passion. Yes, you might see someone in the wings meant to be unseen, an accidental foot poked out, but that does not devoid the production of artistic merit. I probably wouldn’t say all that; I’d feel pretentious. It would be too obvious that I was once a perpetrator of amateur dramatics. I guess elitism runs deep.

    I recently saw The Seagull for the first time. It features a widely celebrated author, Trigorin, who feels his success is an elaborate prank and that he is only good at writing nature descriptions. Every writer experiences impostor syndrome at times, but if you’re from a working-class background this can be an overwhelming feeling. ‘But that was awful,’ you often think, as someone compliments a recently published piece of yours. ‘Did anyone else enter this nationally advertised competition I won?’ you wonder. ‘What if me being accepted onto this course was part of a new Channel 4 social experiment,’ you think. I think wherever Trigorin was from must have been a little bit like Barnsley.

    You’d think technology would erode some of these barriers. And this has happened to an extent. With online meetings, freelancers no longer have to travel to London for interviews, saving time and travel fees that are often overlooked in the industry. Conducting writing programmes in such a manner mean that participants can be readily recruited from across the country. There’s no doubt that online courses and opportunities have improved access within the industry, and that I’ve greatly benefitted from it. But as I’ve met other writers who’ve been accessing events for the majority of their lives, I feel strongly that the internet alone cannot bridge the gap.

    To create a country where the arts are valued, there must be engagement at a regional level. Accessible online events are – so far – mostly aimed at adults. How can a working-class child hope to become a writer if they simply don’t have access to literary communities? It’s obviously not impossible, and I know this first-hand. But it’s still improbable. In my late teenage years, I knew several working-class writers my age from the same region who were exceptionally talented, despite a lack of creative opportunities. Yes, people change as they age, but how can it be that none of them write now, neither professionally nor personally? Sadly, I understand why.

    For a level playing field, we need the normalisation of the arts in places like Barnsley. The idea that working-class people are uniformly uninterested in the arts is so casually ingrained in the class system. While calls to fund the arts in working-class areas grow ever louder, there’s still a pervading rhetoric that the arts are not wanted or, worse, needed by the people who live there, that they are in fact hostilely opposed. On several occasions, including in an interview for a commission, I’ve been told that, coming from my hometown, I’ve done well to have achieved the things I have. This is always meant to be complimentary, I know this, but when people compliment me in this way, I wonder what exactly they think happens in working-class towns and cities. Poets shot on sight. Novelists exiled from Barnsley, a town that has produced several notable writers.

    To fund the arts is to create the next generation of artists. To fund it in these particularly overlooked areas is to create writers with new stories to tell. When I was a teenager, I was captivated by the kitchen-sink realist writers of the 60s, the so-dubbed angry young men. I loved how their writing still seemed so fresh, so daring – unlike much of the work produced by their upper-class counterparts. Could you imagine a working-class literary revolution happening today? I think it could. Just as a novel is improved by variety, so is the literary industry. Why shouldn’t the Beatnik snappers and Salt Bae sprinklers coexist?

    Elena Barham writes prose, poetry and plays and lives in Barnsley with her two cats. She is the 2022 winner of the BBC Young Writers’ Award with her short story Little Acorns and the 2021 winner of Ilkley Literature Festival Young People’s Poetry Prize. Last year she was delighted to be included in the Northern Dreaming anthology by the British Library as part of LEEDS 2023 – a project by working-class creatives aimed to empower working-class children. Alongside studying for her English Literature degree, she is a correspondent for arts, theatre and culture for Forge Press and has recently written her first film screenplay.

    Photo credit: Elena Barham

  • Shouldering the Boat

    Shouldering the Boat

    Sema Kaygusuz on language, water and renewal. Translated by Nicholas Glastonbury.

    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.

    Whenever I think about language and literature, which constitute the basic fabric of being, and whenever I succumb to my curiosity and cobble together a piece of writing, I feel always like I’m on the open seas. As you read this essay that I have titled ‘Shouldering the Boat,’ I would ask that you hear my voice as though you are on land and I am out at sea. I find myself resorting to this image now because of a spiritual experience I had while trying to write something about poetics and creativity. I discovered, in the course of consulting sources during my research, that the creative mind can become all the more creative by departing from land. By submerging itself in water. This is true not just for writers, but also for composers, musicians, painters, sculptors: each must have a sea of their own that allows them to break free of the language they inhabit. A sea apiece, to upend the gravity of culture on land. Because when we imagine that moment when we float along like a piece of wood on the surface of the water, when the weight of our bodies becomes suddenly lighter, our minds loosen up, our senses go numb, we are unmoored in fantasy. In order to be just so properly unmoored, though, we must first, of course, build a boat.

    I was thinking about the notion of yenilenme, renewal, a common desire among us modern people. The word renewal strikes me as somewhat insipid, but it nonetheless conjures in my mind’s eye an image of a departing boat. This is a boat that belongs to neither person nor heritance; rather, it is a boat that the seafarer built on their own and for themselves alone. To be renewed, I realised, one must first be unmoored in one’s own metaphorical sea, wherein one can find one’s own myths. Let me do my best to explain this. I’ll show what I mean by shouldering the boat at the end.

    If we think, by contrast, of the concept of yenileşme, innovation, we recognise that it lexically encompasses other people. Like invitation, or inclusion, or involvement. In this sense, innovation necessitates others to achieve the new. It might precipitate a new form of interaction with others, or innovative organising and innovative encounters might be how the new is devised. But the concept of renewal is, at least in my opinion, a more singular – even solitary – act. A person giving up on something within themselves, opting to replace it with another approach, another state, another dream or spirituality or attitude. Progressively adopting the new as a means of losing – even mourning – the old. Seeking creativity, this form of solitude surely requires something feminine: the courage to return to the waters upon whose surface the moonlight shines.

    In the monotheistic religions of the world, each and every human is understood to be born from dust and returned to dust, born from earth and returned to earth. By contrast, the watery life left to us by polytheistic cultures has been consigned to the psychomythologies of our darkest subconscious. Yet every person who emerges from the amniotic waters of their mother’s womb finds themselves seeking out and returning to those waters with every daydream and reverie, with every act of fantasy and imagination.

    Virtually all creation myths posit that water originates the universe – that life comes from water. In fact the very notion of individual descent depends on water. According to Thales, water is what ‘gives birth to all beings.’ In the Vedas, water is called mâtritamâh, mother of mothers. Water’s feminine quality, its description through the fundaments of the maternal, symbolises the creative potential of humankind. And yet the tempestuous waves that one surmounts in pursuit of creativity, chasing after that which is unique and incomparable, are not always so compassionate. At night, for instance, sea monsters emerge. Just as it gives life, water takes life too. It’s trustworthy when still, murderous when stormy. Though it pledges immortality, as in the water of life, it nonetheless churns round us like a deadly whirlpool. Water has the capacity to terrify – with the giant squids and monstrous fish it conjures in our nightmares – even as it beckons – in the form of water nymphs, mermaids and sirens – each of us on a quest for renewal.

    In his book Images and Symbols, Mircea Eliade examines how water represents spiritual energy. When water flows peacefully and as planned through its intended channel, it can symbolise a life well-lived. Whereas waters that overflow or gush forth, as floods or tsunamis, threaten the stability of land. To dip oneself into water – presuming that one can re-emerge from it – renders the mind and the ego productive; it increases one’s life force, because contact with water brings one into relation with the source of life itself. Likewise, water is shapeless on its own, even as it wears away at what has already taken shape, and gives shape to new forms:

    [The Waters] dissolve or abolish the forms of things, they ‘wash away sins,’ and as such are at once purifying and renewing. It is their lot both to precede the Creation and to reabsorb it, incapable as they are of surpassing their own modality – that is, of manifesting themselves in forms. The Waters cannot get beyond the state of the virtual, of seeds and of what is latent. Everything that has form manifests itself above the Waters, by detaching itself from them. On the other hand, as soon as it is separated from the waters and has ceased to be potential (virtual), every form comes under the laws of Time and of Life; every form therefore acquires limitations, participates in the universal becoming, is subject to history, decays away and is finally emptied of substance unless it be renewed by periodic immersions in the Waters, repetitions of the ‘deluge’ with its cosmogenic corollary.

    What I mean to say with all of this is that one must set out to sea, no matter how stormy it may be, in order to be renewed. By boat or by caique, setting out to sea so that one can return, in other words, to the cosmic mother. By interesting coincidence, the word caique comes from the word kayġuk, an Old Turkic word derived from the word for ‘return.’ One must navigate uncharted waters, must risk the dissolution, abolition, or purging of all forms, so that one can return from dreams and from reverie, bringing ashore new forms. Whatever new thing we bring back to shore, even if it is simply ourselves renewed, is altogether new until it is defined through other objects and beings.

    But first, we must build a boat. We must be the crafters of a simple boat, whether by hollowing out a tree or by tying together reeds as they did in ages past. Our books, our histories, our lives are the specifications for this abstract boat we mean to build. But building the boat: that is the responsibility of us, the seafarers. In ancient Greek they used the words tekhnao – to craft with skill, to produce – tekhnikos – skilled in art or craft – and tekhnites – artist, craftsperson. These words are at the heart of tekne, the Turkish word for boat. To build a boat with technical craftsmanship is not easy. As we build, our hands may bleed, our backs may ache, our skin may burn under the searing sun. And then it is our task to shoulder the boat and carry it to the shore, to float it in the sea. Before the creative mind can carry the seafarer, the seafarer must carry the creative mind: with patience, care and discipline, free of delusions, abiding by the laws of physics.

    To tear oneself from land and from language and set out to sea in a boat is no less than to risk dying and being born again in the artistic struggle; it is, moreover, an act of existential defiance against the world.

    The waters can assist us in this defiance. There are, as you know, five rivers in the underworld of Hades: Acheron, river of woe; Cocytus, river of wails; Styx; river of dread; Pyriphlegethon, river of flames; and Lethe, river of forgetfulness. But there is one additional river: Mnemosyne, which restores to memory what the Lethe forgets. Artists, astronomers, musicians, poets, tragedists, historians, dancers, scientists: these are the people who, by drinking from the waters of the Mnemosyne, are brought back to life. It is these people who shoulder their boats: poets reciting their poetry standing up, writers ached and hunching over their desks, the many named and nameless who carry the suffering of the world on their shoulders to the shores of the sea.

    Sema Kaygusuz is one of Turkey’s leading female writers. Her debut novel, Yere Düsen Dualar (Wine and Gold) won international recognition upon publication in 2006. In 2007, she wrote the screenplay for Yesim Ustaoglu’s film Pandora’nin Kutusu (Pandora’s Box), which won the Golden Shell at the 2008 International Film Festival in San Sebastian. She is the author of the short story collections Ortadan Yarisindan (In the Middle of the Half), Sandik Lekesi (Box Stain) and Doyma Noktasi (Saturation Point), which established Sema Kaygusuz as a distinctive voice in the canon of young Turkish literature in the new millennium. Her novels The Well of Trapped Words (translated by Maureen Freely and published by Comma Press) and Yüzünde Bir Yer (translated by Nicholas Glastonbury and published in English by Tilted Axis as Every Fire You Tend) were also awarded PEN Translates grants. The latter was inspired by her own grandmother, and deals with the feelings of shame and guilt experienced by someone who survives a massacre. Kaygusuz is a recipient of both the Cevdet-Kudret-Literature Award and the France-Turquie Literary Award. In 2016 she was named laureate of the prestigious German Friedrich Rückert Prize.

    Nicholas Glastonbury is a translator and anthropologist living in New York. His translations of Turkish and Kurdish fiction and poetry have appeared with or are forthcoming from Tilted Axis Press, Comma Press, Soho Press, Sandorf Passage, Nightboat Books, and elsewhere. He holds a PhD in cultural anthropology and currently serves as a postdoctoral associate at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University.

  • You Are Now Holding the Embers With Your Bare Hands

    You Are Now Holding the Embers With Your Bare Hands

    Syrian writer Rosa Yassin Hassan on exile. Translated by Nawara Mahfoud.

    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.

    Have we really survived? – October 2015

    This question has always preoccupied my mind and remains more pressing than all other questions. They describe us as ‘survivors’ from oppression, tyranny, war and destruction, torture, drowning, hunger, scorching heat and extreme cold. But have we really survived? How do you define survival in the first place? Is it the mere fact of physically enduring, remaining alive as creatures that breathe and function biologically? Surely, if that is the case, the term to describe us should be ‘remained alive’ and not ‘survivors’.

    Time passes in exile, but in exile the passage of time is different than in other places. It is almost as if it has a different formula, one that makes the hours unbearable and lingering, so that you feel that your entrapment in the maze of exile is endless, while simultaneously making you feel that your years have slipped away, passed you by while smiling and mocking you and your life.

    Time in exile is not one block that either passes heavily or speeds by in a consistent manner. It does not allow you to adapt to it. No, time in exile is separate and, at times, contradictory blocks, each block with their own mood and rhythm that might contradict your wishes and desires. Place is also different in exile from how you once understood it – the ‘here’ and the ‘there’. My body is ‘here’ while my soul remains ‘there’. Physics is here, chemistry there. Sometimes you say ‘here’ to refer to ‘there’. Other times you may say ‘there’ while talking about ‘here’. An exceptionally vague dialectic, an interchangeable relation in which the two places end up intertwined to form a special maze that only exacerbates your maze of time and renders you unable to define your time or your place – welcome to exile! 

    So, as time passes in exile, you discover that those who died are the survivors and that we did not survive. A truth that contradicts everything you have heard all your life! But there’s a problem: though you have not survived, survivor guilt is consuming your heart; it is like paying for a sandwich to have it stolen from you before you’ve even had a bite. A guilt that makes your entire life in exile become dedicated to compensating for that guilt: I have stayed alive while many others perished! That thought will look you in the eye every morning when you look in a mirror. You will remind yourself then of that line the old man told Deigo in one of your favourite movies, Twice Born, as he suffers with survivor guilt after escaping the war: ‘It was easier to run to the grenades than walking on ruins’. ‘No! You are wrong!’ you would answer him. But then you would end by repeating his final words: ‘I am ashamed to belong to the human race. God will not forgive us!’

    Later, when you walk into your kitchen, you will spot the paper with part of Apollinaire’s poem written on it, which was made into a song by Leo Ferre:

    Under Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine
    And our loves
    Must it remind me
    Joy has always come after pain

    Under Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine
    And our loves
    Must it remind me
    Joy has always come after pain

    Let come the night, let ring the hours
    Days go by, I remain

    Love goes away like this flowing water
    Love goes away
    How slow life is
    And how violent Hope is

    Let come the night, let ring the hours
    Days go by, I remain

    Days pass, and weeks pass
    Neither passed time
    Nor loves come back
    Under Mirabeau bridge flows the Seine

    ~

    Can I call it the era of silence? – April 2016

    You woke up one morning back in the early days of your exile. You felt lonely, and a new convection made it impossible for you to be able even to lift yourself out of bed: It was all in vain!

    Nothing is important anymore, and all that once was has now collapsed into a bottomless abyss! Everything we dreamt of, everything we fought for, for which many of us lost our lives. Now our country lies in ruins, our bodies piling in the graveyard the Mediterranean has become, and many of us are scattered in countries of exile, some friendly and some hostile. Many remain stuck in the death camps, besieged by hatred. We are the plague of this new world, mere nobodies living in places that do not know us, no-ones living in times that betrayed us. Believe me, my friend, many of these haunting thoughts will race through your mind. They will even stick their tongue out, mocking you.

    I have lost my ability to take action; our ability has been squandered, just like everything we ever lived for!

    Many of us have found ourselves stuck in such a morning and not been able to overcome it till the moment of our suicide. Suicide, here, is not merely a physical action – not at all! Sometimes we commit suicide while we stay alive. Silence is the answer in such a case; in such a morning, silence is the cleverest solution possible.

    Silence, on many occasions, is the most eloquent response possible.

    Do you remember the quote from Judith Butler that we debated for a long time? ‘Nietzsche did well to understand that I begin my story of myself only in the face of a “you” who asks me to give an account. Only in the face of such a query or attribution from another – “Was it you?” – do any of us start to narrate ourselves, or find that, for urgent reasons, we must become self-narrating beings’

    In exile, you will face this question on a daily basis: Who are you? And this very same question is the mirror, and the gentler version, of the description that would become synonymous to you: a nobody! But that is why, in reaction to this very point, I decided to adopt Butler’s response to this dilemma: I have the right to remain silent in the face of such a question! ‘The silence articulates a resistance to the question: “You have no right to ask such a question”, or “I will not dignify this allegation with a response” […] Silence in these instances either calls into question the legitimacy of the authority invoked by the question and the questioner or attempts to circumscribe a domain of autonomy that cannot or should not be intruded upon by the questioner’.

    Okay then, this ‘domain of autonomy’ is the space in which we should contemplate the past events: Were we wrong? Was there a possibility for things to turn out differently? What shall we do in the future? And many, many more questions that you have asked yourself, and that I have asked myself, and that have remained without answers and might remain so in the future. Others have been asking themselves these questions for over a hundred years; yes, the French Paul Valery stood at the end of the First World War with his thick moustache and warned: ‘And yet the facts are clear and pitiless: thousands of young writers and young artists have died; the illusion of European culture has been lost, and knowledge has been proved impotent to save anything whatever; science is mortally wounded in its moral ambitions and, as it were, put to shame by the cruelty of its applications’.

    Yes, that was true back then. But what about today? Well, nothing has changed; the shame has only became more shameful.

    And so, faced with this existential moment and all these feelings of shame, absurdity, guilt, and lack of confidence, solitude becomes the only solution for this simultaneously private and public crisis of yours, the only possible choice that can help you reassess and search for answers. Solitude is a very dark place, and its darkness will allow you to see clearly, for light blinds the vision. Only then will you praise solitude as Paul Auster once did, where ‘solitude’ does not mean ‘lonely’, but rather indicates keeping to oneself, so that we do not have to see ourselves in the eyes of others, for what will we see if we were to watch ourselves in their eyes?

    When two of the most fundamental factors of your self-perception in life are compromised – the homeland and the identity – and, as this duality once governed your life, you now do not belong to the ‘old’ homeland nor to the ‘new’ one, you are stuck in purgatory, a punished soul that doesn’t inhabit the earth anymore, nor can it reach the heavens.

    Thus your most profound convictions are shaken, and nationality becomes intertwined with exile. Nationality is the affirmation of belonging to a place, its people and culture. The interaction between nationality and exile becomes similar to the dialectic between the slave and enslaver as defined by Hegel, where two opposites redefine, dictate, and reshape each other.

    Solitude becomes a manifesto of the defeated in their attempt to overcome their defeat.

    ~

    We and the other / the other and we – August 2021

    Is it our ‘activated’ identities that lead us to fall into the trap of ‘otherness’? Maybe!

    One of the many meanings of exile that we contemplated in our earlier discussions is that exile leads us continuously to scrutinise ourselves and our values in relation to the ‘other’, and to question to what extent we are truly democratic.

    You said that we came from dictatorships who want everyone to accept that there is one political outlook – or else! From patriarchal, unilateral societies who want everyone to accept that there is only one acceptable social, gender and sexual identity – or else! That we descended from neighbouring cultures that suffer in accepting one another, cultures that want everyone to refuse to acknowledge ethnic, national and sectarian diversity – or else! And I agree with you to a degree: these authoritarian regimes have long worked to destroy the foundations of citizenship and undermine all political, civic, and cultural activism and dissent.  We hardly knew each other in Syria, a country as diverse as a mosaic; communities lived like isolated islands, ignorant of one another, while each harbouring an incredible number of unfair prejudices – at times even naive notions – towards one another. We were ruled by fear, and more fear, and only fear. We have struggled for democracy – we started a revolution for it, we sacrificed a great deal. But I wonder if we really ever understood the real meaning of democracy?

    You said to me that we were simply unacquainted with democracy, and that this was normal after decades of repression – despite the fact that no one has the right to deny us our entitlement to live in democratic societies, just as all people of the world have that entitlement. But experiencing democracy in exile makes you question how truly democratic you are. Can you honestly say that your thinking, attitudes and behaviours are truly democratic? And, in the first place, are these countries of exile in which we now live true democracies that protect our rights?

    The meaning of freedom in exile remains ambiguous, like the meaning of democracy. I can’t think of a better adjective to describe it. With time, you realise that personal liberties have expanded to take over all other rights and freedoms, marginalising all other liberties away from the centre of our activism and influence, and that ‘they’ do not own the truth as much as they do not own the forefront of freedoms and democracy. That is when you reach a disillusionment that there is no utopian place of democracy, freedom and truth, that such a place existed only in our perceptions, and that the meanings of ‘us’ and ‘them’ are vague and confused. You will say that I’m being pessimistic and prejudiced, and I would answer you by quoting Heraclitus: that while seeking truth, you should expect the unexpected; the path to truth is arduous and, if found, remains ambiguous. 

    Do you remember what Butler said about the Italian feminist Adriana Cavarero? That in Cavarero’s book Relating Narratives, ‘in stark contrast to the Nietzschean view that life is essentially bound up with destruction and suffering […] Cavarero claims the question of the “who” engages the possibility of altruism, […] argues that we are beings who are, of necessity, exposed to one another in our vulnerability and singularity and that our political situation consists in part in learning how best to handle – and to honour – this constant and necessary exposure. […] In her view, I am not, as it were, an interior subject, closed upon myself, solipsistic, posing questions of myself alone. I exist in an important sense for you, and by virtue of you. If I have lost the conditions of address, if I have no “you” to address, then I have lost “myself.” In her view, one can tell an autobiography only to another, and one can reference an “I” only in relation to a “you”: without the “you,” my own story becomes impossible’.

    And because of that, and in an attempt to answer these questions, and during the time of solitude, trying to refigure my priority while sitting in the dark alone, thinking about the others that now steadily impose themselves into my life, and about my inner and external battles, all these roads converged into one main road, and the question was: Do I walk down this road, or do I quit?

    Walk, I decided. Walk and follow your heart. For you will not find another guide through this maze but your heart.

    And when I encountered a book that was recently published in France entitled Sororité, a collective work edited by Chloé Delaume, I felt that it contained a message for me. This book reminded me of who I am and helped me find myself, having lost me amid the storms and mazes of moving into exile. Yes, I am a part of a universal ‘sisterhood’, and yes, I am still capable of being influential and can remain so no matter where I move. Freedom is not just a practice; it is a way of thinking. Democracy is not just a practice but an ideology and set of values that are subject to change.

    And that is how I made the decision to return to writing, and I shall tell you all about that in detail shortly. I mean, writing saved me from myself. I became deeply convinced that any debate about the intellectual and political structure of the ‘feminist movements of the third world’ should be focused on two issues: internal criticism of the dominant Western feminist movements among whom we now live in our exile (it is important here to point out that these do not at all constitute one bloc, in the same way that ‘we’ are not one bloc); and working to create independent feminist strategies for the movements of people of colour based on their cultural, historical and geographic characteristics. The first is a project aiming to analyse and deconstruct white complex hegemony, and the second is a project aiming to build and construct for the currently disjointed margins made of people of colour.

    ~

    Intersections – there are many intersations! – February 2017

    It is difficult for anyone to understand what Kimberlé Crenshaw meant exactly when she coined the term ‘intersectional feminism’ unless they are a ‘woman’ who is ‘of colour’ and ‘from the third world’ and now lives in the ‘white’ exile. I wonder if there is another woman who actually recalls the term every time she physically stands at a crossroads. It is, as I would imagine you would think, rather funny!

    Being marginalised should not be considered a new experience for women like us, you once told me. You explained that I come from an Arab country ruled by dictatorship, social patriarchy, and religious powers that infiltrate social and political authorities; that’s a lot of forces marginalising me! Maybe that is true, but marginalisation in exile is a different experience.

    Suffering marginalisation in your own country cannot undermine your solid awareness of your identity. It cannot, even slightly, influence the way you identify yourself, your place in your society and in life in general. On the contrary, marginalisation in your own country makes you hold on more insistently to the reasons that led to your marginalisation in the first place – maybe because you were accustomed to this marginalisation and have developed your own mechanisms to cope with it, or maybe because you believe that it was your home, and that no one in the whole wide world can take that from you, or maybe because your analytical tools have dissected all these intersections of powers that were marginalising you, and they stopped retaining any influence over your thinking anymore. It is just as Fernando Pessoa said in The Book of Disquiet: ‘The generation I belong to was born into a world where those with a brain as well as a heart couldn’t find any support. The destructive work of previous generations left us a world that offered no security in the religious sphere, no guidance in the moral sphere, and no tranquillity in the political sphere. We were born into the midst of metaphysical anguish, moral anxiety and political disquiet’.

    This disquiet that we lived as marginalised men and women in our homeland was the main drive that formed our awareness, thoughts, ideology – simply all of our intellect. Marginalisation in exile is different; we have become the other, the ‘unknown’, who have come from ambiguous places. Even those who knew our homeland never considered it fit for living by European standards. You become the ‘stranger’ riddled with contradictions.

    OK, I will tell you a personal experience as an example that might help explain my idea more clearly. A few years ago, I started teaching as an assistant professor at the German Orient Institute in the city of my residence, Hamburg. Although I am a descendant of the Arab culture, and I write in Arabic, in the institute I found my intellect marginalised. As a daughter of this culture, I was treated as less knowledgeable than the German orientalists. There was a simple message, every day: We know more about you than you know yourself, we understand your culture better than you do, we can even teach you about your society and history if you want!

    You are met with prejudgements everywhere you go. The feeling is best expressed by Indian feminist Chandra Talpade Mohanty: ‘A homogeneous notion of the oppression of women as a group is assumed, which, in turn, produces the image of an “average third world woman”. This average third world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and being “third world” (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimised, etc.). This, I suggest, is in contrast to the (implicit) self-representation of Western women as educated, modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions’.

    I suddenly found that I am now a part of one homogeneous and large bloc named ‘the women of the third world’, a bloc that is ‘helpless’, that is often described as comprising victims of certain social and economic systems, as victims of male violence, victims of colonisation, victims of the Arab family system, victims of economic developments and women’s roles in liberal development, and last, victims of Islamic jurisprudence. I often encountered bizarre questions laden with a sense of superiority: Are women educated in Syria? Do you use cars? Do you have airports? Do you have fridges?

    So, is this what cultural marginalisation in exile means? This marginalisation has been discussed by Said and Bhabha and Spivak, and many other men and women of colour who lived in the white centre. You, as a refugee of colour in exile, are extremely dangerous, even though you might not be aware of that. You are the coloured point in the predominant white discourse; you question the certainty of the answers the orientalists have, and their convictions. You set the question of culture as expressed by Bhabha, because you split the white discourse and writing and question it. You are diverse; your writing is rich with the experiences of these men and women of colour and their suffering in their homelands and, at the same time, it invades and addresses the white centre it now inhabits.

    In exile, and without any prior preparation, you find yourself part of the time and space inhabited by those who are exiled, banished, colonised, oppressed, deprived, the people of colour and the rest of the marginalised groups, whether this marginalisation is because of their race, gender, religion or class. That is when the attempt to marginalise you culturally starts, not just marginalising you according to the direct meaning of the word, but also symbolically. This would make you more capable and inclined to express solidarity with other people of colour, and maybe you will choose to march in demonstrations and protests for causes that were not part of your priorities before. Maybe you will start supporting Black Lives Matter. Perhaps you will passionately defend a woman who wears a hijab, who was discriminated against as a result of her hijab, despite the fact that you fought hard and long against religious powers infringing on personal and social rights.

    This new cultural solidarity gives you a deep feeling of unity with the other margins, for the struggle is one, and it is against a capitalist white centre that perceives itself as ‘better’ and ‘more civilised’, more cultured, and with a superior knowledge of everything, including your culture and history. It works, even if subconsciously, to indoctrinate you with its beliefs, perspectives, convictions. 

    I know you will question if we will live the rest of our lives in this constant struggle. My answer is simple: No. In this white centre, there are many who share your opinions and convictions despite being, biologically, the descendants of this centre. And they will convince you that cultural hybridisation – this mixing of cultures and at times conflicting opinions and ideas, ideologies and convictions, persuasions and religions – is the bright face of the future, and would create the only cultural context upon with the entire post-colonial school of thoughts could agree. 

    And despite the fact that a lot has changed since the 1980s, I believe that the argument Anour Abdul Malek presented in Social Dialectics: Nation and Revolution remains relevant: that modern imperialism is dominant, and its ‘violence taken to a higher level than before – through fire and sword, but also through attempts to control hearts and minds. For its content is defined by the combined action of the military-industrial complex and the hegemonic cultural centres of the West. All of them founded on the advanced levels of development attained by the monopoly of the finance capital, and supported by the benefits of both the scientific and technological revolution and the second industrial revolution itself’.

    And, thus, my conviction was becoming stronger every day that my writing – as a woman of colour who is the subject of many prejudices, marginalised and exiled – is the weapon I should never lay down, not even for a moment. That is what I will explain to you now.

    ~

    In praise of gossiping – December 2017

    OK, my dear. I have thought long about our last conversation and wanted to expand on it and explain my viewpoint further.

    Let me say that literature is merely a profound expression of loss, as Lion Feuchtwanger said seventy years ago. Or maybe language is the only piece of the homeland that we carry with us no matter where we go, and maybe it is the remedy for our unbearable losses. I am deeply convinced that writing is a form of resistance, always has been and still is. Writing our memories is a resistance against diaspora and oblivion; documenting alternative narratives and memory is a political action and an ethical stance, writing for salvation.

    I find myself grinning every time I remember this Andrea Dworkin quote: ‘Gossip among women is universally ridiculed as low and trivial, gossip among men, especially if it is about women, is called theory, or idea, or fact’. I can see you smiling as you read the line! Gossiping and writing are one in essence: raising one’s voice. Which is why gossiping is also a form of resistance.

    In an attempt to answer one of the most controversial questions of the post-colonial era – can the subaltern speak? – Gayatri Spivak, in her book of the same name, argues that the question of ‘woman’ seems most problematic in this context. Clearly, if you are poor, black (or of colour) and female, you get it in three ways. Here, you must recall our earlier discussion about intersectionality. This question will linger for a long while, and there have been varying answers to it so far. And thus, as subjects and identities are formulated against a background of patriarchal and imperialist systems, the perception of you as a woman becomes framed by a rather violent machine of a stereotypical image of a ‘third-world woman’ who remains stuck between tradition and modernity. This, my dear, is the first world, and it will spare no effort in convincing you that, as a woman of colour, it will rid you of your unfair and unjust culture. As a result, were you to say what might undermine that notion, your words would be belittled as gossip.

    A woman of colour remains a subject and never becomes an I.

    And that is what makes our alternative narratives important – not just our alternative narrative against the narrative of the tyrant regime in Syria, but also our narrative against anyone and everyone who makes us subjects and not selves. The victors/ the tyrants/ the mainstream always write the official history, a fact we have to accept. But who is to say that writing/ literature/ languages/ gossip isn’t the alternative, secretive history of people? They become our history, the history of the margins, that they try to obliviate in their official histories.

    There will always be those who argue that we will never be objective in writing our histories. Or maybe, as Edward Said once said, that ‘while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind for ever’. Perhaps that is true, but who says that writing needs to be objective in the first place? Is any writing completely objective? And how do you define objective? Bear in mind that modern, Western culture is, in big part, the production of exiles, immigrants and refugees. Like us!

    The narrating self – the I – is the one that creates alternative narratives, and we are the narrating selves for our stories, busy weaving our past and planning our future. It’s remarkable that the bigger the sacrifices we make for a cause, the tighter we hold on to it because we want to give meaning to our sacrifices and the suffering we endured, just like a bereaved parent screams my child has not died in vain. In politics also, there is the syndrome of our kids did not die in vain! That is why we write, and we gossip.

    In her book In The Company Of The Fire Thieves, Conversations With International Writers, Joumana Hadad wrote that “In a debate between Umberto Eco and Antonio Tabucchi about the role of the intellectuals at the beginning of Berlusconi’s rule, Eco wrote in a newspaper that intellectuals needed to keep their silence, for there had been a lot of noise and a large number of speakers. He added that intellectuals were not obliged to address political or general current affairs, using the following metaphor: an intellectual is like everyone else; if his apartment caught fire, he calls the fire brigade.

    Tabucchi responded that, of course, he would call the fire brigade. But he would also try to understand whether an electrical circuit malfunction or arson had caused the fire, and that this is the role of an intellectual: to reveal more than authority declares.”

    This is a good reason to write ‘there’, and it is a good reason to write ‘here’ as well.

    ~

    Is it the paradigm of societies? – May 2018

    A German man drinking his beer in a bar asked me where I was from. (Here, I do not intend any allegory. The man was German, and he was drinking beer in a bar.) When he realised I was an Arab from Syria, he said: ‘Well, you are a beautiful woman, but I am allergic to camel hair!’ and burst out laughing.

    Well, I know what you would say, and the scores of questions you may have because of this highly offensive comment, and I only describe it as such to be polite. How do I compare to a camel? And why does being from Syria make me relate to a camel? Why would he think he could come anywhere near me? You are going to be upset when I tell you that I totally ignored him, looked at him, pitying his stupidity, and then continued my conversation with my friends as if he did not exist.

    Did I tell you that I came to understand exile as the organic relationship with the other, a mirror for both your personal and collective consciousness and subconsciousness? Many of your old axioms stop being certain, and your perspective has been altered. Maybe because you now find yourself needing to explain yourself at every juncture; you have to explain to the ‘others’ about yourself, your society, your culture, your beliefs, and the most mundane details of your life. It is all alien to them, and you feel as if you are explaining yourself to yourself, as if you have to reidentify yourself before you can explain it to the other.  We are strangers, haunted by strange and ignorant questions.  We are all the same person, perceived with no differentiations between us: we are from an alien and backward place, a desert, where women do not work and men are controlling. It is the stereotype that exile has about us.

    And thus, the issue of racism against foreigners starts preoccupying your mind and many of your conversations. And the foreigners are us. Many of us turn into masochists, hunting for news of events here or there to assert to ourselves that the other is racist and then say: ‘See, I told you, they hate us!’ Many even rejoice when confronted with racism, and the truth is that you do not need to search very hard to encounter racism. I always fail to understand why some rejoice when they prove they face racism. The prism we use to analyse racism is often misguided and blinded; we always fail to acknowledge our racism against others as well. I can almost hear you crying out in objection: ‘Us? Us!’ And I would answer that racism is not one coherent block. It is multiple, multi-layered, and variable in complexity.  

    Zygmunt Bauman writes about Pierre-André Taguieff: ‘In his impressively erudite study of prejudice, […] Taguieff writes synonymically of racism and heterophobia (resentment of the different). Both appear, he avers, ‘on three levels’, or in three forms distinguished by the rising level of sophistication. The ‘primary racism’ is in his view universal. It is a natural reaction to the presence of an unknown stranger […]. Invariably, the first response to strangeness is antipathy, whichmore often than not leads to aggressiveness. Universality goes hand-in-hand with spontaneity. The primary racism needs no inspiring or fomenting, nor does it need a theory to legitimize the elemental hatred- though it can be on occasion, deliberately beefed up and deployed as an instrument of political mobilisation. At such time, it can be lifted to another level of complexity and turn into a ‘secondary’ (or rationalised) racism. This transformation happens when a theory is supplied (and internalised) that provides logical foundations for resentment. The repelling Other is represented as ill-willed or objectively harmful, in either case threatening the well-being of the resenting group.   […]. Finally, ‘tertiary’, or mystrifactory, racism which presupposes the two ‘lower’ levels, is distinguished by the deployment of a quasi-biological argument.”

    Do you think, my dear, that we are inflicted with primary racism? This question has been pressing for a while now.

    So, let us remember our lives together and ask: was it racist that we mocked the accent of the Turkmens and Armenians who lived among us when they spoke Arabic? Did our facial expressions resemble the sarcastic and amused expressions we are met with when we speak German? Was it racist that the religious rituals and practices of many minority sects were often ridiculed? And what about our insults against the dark-skinned Arab tribesmen in Syria? Was that racist? Was it racist for the urban townspeople to look down at the villagers? We have to admit that all of these were forms of primary racism that occur ‘naturally’ and are hidden. Still, this racism never led to racist actions or behaviours between the various classes and ethnicities of the Syrian people, and there was never a structured racism that built a deep resentment of the other. We were truly one people, but there were internalised feelings of suspicion and ‘otherness’ and, at times, even ‘apprehensive fear’ of one another: the majority Arabs were apprehensive of the other ethnicities; the Muslims were apprehensive of the other religions; straight people were apprehensive of queer people; the Sunnis were apprehensive of the other sects; and the opposites were also true. The political camps of regime loyalists and regime opponents were also afraid of one another.

    We were shocked by the naked expressions of racism in the ‘here’. Racism in exile surpassed the first level into the second (the other as harmful), and at times, and this is where the danger is, to the third (‘a quasi-biological argument’). Is it because we are defeated in this ‘here’, broken and full of trauma, and have been thrown out to a strange land with a strange culture that we now have to call our “here”?

    OK then. No matter what your answers are, racism remains the everlasting disease humanity has suffered over the ages. We could expand on the subject for hours and hours. It is the irrational fear of foreigners, xenophobia, and it is the belief that one’s own race, people and culture are superior to others, ethnocentrism. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that the primal problem of humanity, the root of many social disasters, is the notion of superiority; that a certain people are superior to others, that a certain human being is superior to others, and that a certain group is superior to the rest. Thus, superiority becomes a deep-rooted and generalised ideology in the consciousnesses of different peoples, the paradigms of societies, the cornerstones of their perception of the world.

    I spend a long time contemplating the levels of racism people exercise in the ‘here’ and the ‘there’.

    ~

    Final note: holding the embers with bare hands! – June 2023

    I came to visit, but you were not there. I felt I had many urgent things to tell you!

    Edward Said quoted Hugo of Saint Victor, the twelfth-century Augustinian mystic: ‘The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land’. I will never stop contemplating this quote, for the question of belonging is one of the most challenging questions I face in exile. Does it mean we kill our feeling of belonging to a certain place on this earth and we then belong to all the places? Does it mean that places are mere geographic locations and that belonging should be to a shared memory, people, culture, or even an idea? Then, memory could become a homeland, culture could become a homeland, ideas could become homelands.

    Do not ever allow anyone to dictate to you what your belonging is!

    And despite the fact, as I have told you before, that I consider myself part of the third wave of feminism – a wave that is extremely diverse with the writing of people of colour – despite its uniqueness, it remains part of the wider international movement. It is similar to what Henry James referred to in ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, published in 1896: that a literary work is like a small motif in a carpet, one of scores of others that makes the design of the carpet, and the carpet is the international literary scene. The beauty of the entire carpet starts with the beauty of each individual literary work, as a unique expression of its culture, and as part of the wider international literary scene. The literary work is a motif that completes and interacts with the other motifs.

    So, it is the third wave of feminism, as Sara Gamble described it – or the ‘final wave’, as some critics of feminism named it to describe developments that took place during the ‘fourth wave’ of feminism, or what some have dubbed ‘post-feminism’. The majority of Arab feminist activism falls under the last category. However, there are generations of feminists who would rather be identified as a continuation of the former waves, and not be dubbed post-feminists, because they believe the term undermines feminism and portrays it as an obsolete notion. There are so many names, terms and identifications with which you and I might identify or not. What matters is that we should never consider any thought or ideology sacred.

    Do not ever allow anyone to dictate to you what your ideologies and beliefs are, either.

    And despite the fact that some consider the third and fourth waves of feminism to be short-lived trends, the vast geographical areas in which they have been influential invalidate such arguments. Both waves have been active and influential in many marginalised communities and communities of colour, including many third-world societies and Arab communities far from the white centres where the concept of feminism emerged and was developed by consecutive generations.

    These waves’ work attempted to adapt to the unique characteristics of each of the societies in which they were active. Many who were part of these waves started believing that our freedom is not merely to copy the experiences of others, but to try to adapt the concepts of feminism to our own experiences, beliefs, and principles. As a result, we mixed feminist activism with political, creative, economic, and cultural activism and awareness-building.

    Do not ever allow anyone to dictate to you what your questions are, nor their timing!

    However, political activism in third-world societies is an integral part of feminist work in these societies, whether as direct or indirect action. Considering we have lost the ability to engage in direct political action and activism in our society, let us resort to political activism through creative works whose aim is to build an awareness that can lead to change. These are the embers I chose to hold on to with bare hands: addressing politics through creative writing is an identity and belonging for me, and I rely in my writing on true experiences, the same as many third-world feminists do. This writing is an effective way to break the silence, to give a voice to those who otherwise are voiceless, to raise awareness. Writing the testimonies of women, their experiences of repression and persecution, teaches other women about it all. Women become the mirror of women, and the margins become the mirror of other margins.

    Do not ever allow anyone to undermine your belief in your power, the power of the margin, nor in your efficiency, the efficiency of the margin amid the societies of the mainstream.

    Choose to belong to humanity ethically, to feminism culturally, to the margin of people of colour ethnically, to be active and critical socially, and to rebel intellectually. You are now holding the embers with your bare hands, and you know very well the price the subaltern pays when she chooses to speak out loud.

    Finally, stay strong, my friend. I hope we meet again soon.

    Rosa

    Rosa Yassin Hassan is a Syrian novelist and feminist writer and activist. She has published eight novels and many articles in various Arabic newspapers, periodicals and websites. Several of her novels have been translated into German and French, and her 2009 book The Guardians of the Air was longlisted for the 2010 Arab Booker Prize in 2010.  A dedicated feminist, Rosa is active in various feminist groups. Rosa wrote and advocated for democracy in her home, and in 2012 she was forced to move into exile. She has been living in Hamburg, where she has taught ‘Arabic Roman Reading’ at the University of Hamburg.

    Nawara Mahfoud is a Syrian freelance journalist and translator. 

  • To Fill the Void: A Conversation with Chloe Gong

    To Fill the Void: A Conversation with Chloe Gong

    Chloe Gong on how YA fiction and Shakespeare shaped her writing voice.

    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.

    ~

    Chloe – thank you so much for speaking with me. I wanted to start by asking about your writing practice. You’ve been writing for almost half your life. What first ignited your craft? And what tools have helped you sustain it?

    Thank you for having me – I’m so happy to be here chatting. I started writing because I was a big reader. I was a huge fan of the franchises that were erupting in the 2010s during the dystopian and paranormal romance era. When I ran out of books to read from my borrowed library stack every week, I essentially had ran out of hobbies. My whole teenage life revolved around books; if I wasn’t reading, I was thinking about reading, or probably talking about it on Tumblr. What I loved most was the escapism. To fill the void once I had finished my library books, I turned to writing my own. As the years went on – and I picked up more hobbies and interests – escapism evolved into a love for storytelling. It felt wonderful to create a whole world that would feel real to a reader – as real as my favorite books felt to me. I have to remember that I’m creating something out of nothing, and it shouldn’t be like sitting down to write a to-do list – reframing the work as “not work” is a tool that helps keep the creativity running.

    Your books take inspiration from Shakespeare, but as someone who has raised reading YA fantasy, I can see the influence of the likes of Cassandra Clare’s Mortal Instruments series on your books too. What made you gravitate towards blending Shakespeare and YA? And how has reimagining work like Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It changed how you see the originals?

    When I first began reading, books like The Mortal Instruments, Divergent, Daughter of Smoke and Bone, The Raven Cycle and so on were huge influences for my love of storytelling. I was 14 – these were the books that were made for me! This was also the background I’d come from when I started writing These Violent Delights several years later; though I’d started reading adult fiction, non-fiction, classics, I was still most familiar with YA, and so that’s what I wanted to write. I do sometimes wonder how much of Jace Herondale’s sardonic influence bleeds into every love interest I’ll ever write.

    The Shakespearean angle was something I stumbled into. The original pitch for These Violent Delights had been: ‘Two rival gangs in a blood feud are forced to put aside the bloodshed when a monster rises and starts killing all their people’. And since there would be some sort of romantic storyline between the two enemy children, there was no way someone would hear that and not think ‘Oh, Romeo and Juliet’. I chose to embrace the similarities and offer a new lens on the story. I kept running with it, adapting As You Like It for Foul Lady Fortune. It’s given me a new appreciation for the originals, because I needed to decide what I thought the backbone of the play was; what it was specifically for me. Only then could I faithfully hold the heart of it and change out what I didn’t need.

    You have written two relatively standalone series that exist in the same Secret Shanghai universe. Your worldbuilding is consummate, while also critiquing established ideas about fantasy and interrogating the genre’s colonial baggage. With all this in mind, how did writing within an existing universe free or hinder your writing?

    Initially, there was a lot of pressure in writing a spin-off, because it had to be both similar enough to justify being set in the same world, and different enough to warrant being a new series rather than a continuation. My approach was to write These Violent Delights and Foul Lady Fortune in two different genres; though they share some of the same cast, These Violent Delights is historical fantasy while Foul Lady Fortune is more of a noir spy thriller. Between the 1920s and 1930s, Shanghai underwent enormous change, and the feeling I was trying to evoke when portraying the two decades is different. Historical fantasy, with a monster rising from the river, was most fitting for These Violent Delights as it grappled with colonialism in the late 1920s and with the elite’s own role in the destruction of their sense of identity. By the 1930s, we were less concerned with the West and more with impending Japanese imperialism, as well as domestic politics as Shanghai tried to put one unified fighting force forward. As a result, Foul Lady Fortune was full of double-spies and triple-spies, of ‘superpowers’, and of questions of responsibility to your government. I tried not to think of the existing universe as a limit, but more as a framework I could play with depending on what the new series needed.

    I’d like to talk a little about BookTok, and the resurgence in fantasy readerships. How do you balance the pressure to write for your audiences with your own artistic priorities?

    I try to separate things – to think about audience expectations as something to keep in mind for engagement, and artistic priorities as what dictates the writing process. Of course, there’s bleed over: if I’m thinking about a character’s decisions, I’m also thinking about everything I have read within the genre and what felt satisfying to me as a reader, and I gravitate toward choices that have expected payoffs. It’s nice to lean into elements that readers are passionate about, taking advantage of the romantic tropes that are present, or leading toward plot twists that are guaranteed shockers. But these must exist for the sake of the story before they’re looked at with an eye for marketing, or else the story loses its heart. I’ll never insert anything just for the sake of an audience expectation, but I can make use of what already works for the book I’m trying to write.

    What’s next for you?

    I’m currently working on my next YA, a cyberpunk trilogy opener called Coldwire. I am forbidden from saying too much until we have an official summary, but it is set in a near future world where life has moved to virtual reality. It has corporate soldiers waking up to the system, mega-corporations trying to take over the world, anarchists and hackers, etc. It’s everything I loved during the dystopian era, but written for a new tech-driven generation. And I’m so excited about it!

    Chloe Gong is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Secret Shanghai novels, as well as the Flesh and False Gods trilogy. Her books have been published in over twenty countries and have been featured in The New York Times, PEOPLE, Cosmopolitan, and more. She was named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 for 2024. Chloe graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in English and International Relations. Born in Shanghai and raised in Auckland, New Zealand, she is now located in New York City, pretending to be a real adult. Visit her online at thechloegong.com and on Instagram, X, and TikTok at @thechloegong.

    Photo credit: One Grid Studio