Saturday 30 November saw the return of Poets for PEN. Our fourth poetry night, held at Queen’s College, featured readings from Simon Altmann, David Constantine, and Hannah Sullivan – three very brilliant, very different writers, who were all kind enough to participate in a full and wide-ranging conversation after the reading about the purpose and politics of poetry. Can poetry be a free space, a playing space, where we are not obliged to confront the world we live in? Or should it do precisely that – should it face up to the modern world, be it through registering political injustice or the altogether more banal preoccupations of the Facebook generation? Can we trust words like “beauty” and “truth” when we talk about poetry, or should we be sceptical of those Keatsian virtues? These were but a few of the big and difficult questions which the poets addressed in their discussion, and as they’re the kind of questions we’ve set out to ask ourselves in the past – at our Defence of Poetry event in May 2013, for example – we were delighted that three great minds were willing to share their perspectives with the PEN audience. It was a special night too for our own translation project: during our campaigning sessions every Wednesday lunchtime Oxford Student PEN members have been translating poetry, and at Poets for PEN IV Jennifer Chan and Anna Tankel each read, beautifully, some examples of this work.
Archive for the ‘Writers’ Category
On Friday 29 November we were honoured to welcome the author Mikail Eldin and translator Anna Gunin for the Oxford launch of The Sky Wept Fire, Eldin’s powerful first-hand account of the Chechen resistance. Gunin’s English translation earned the book an English PEN Writers in Translation award. Gunin read extracts from the book, and then she and Eldin participated in a discussion brilliantly chaired by Professor Catriona Kelly, Fellow of New College, Oxford, and co-director of the European Humanities Research Centre. Both were extremely generous in conversation, answering questions on subjects as varied as world literature, the process of translation, Eldin’s decision to write in Russian, and his own personal experiences growing up in Chechnya and during the conflict. It was a very moving event, and we are extremely grateful to Portobello Books, publisher of The Sky Wept Fire, and English PEN, for helping us to arrange it.
You can read more about the book here:
Back in May, and with the generous support of IB Tauris and English PEN, Oxford Student PEN hosted an event to mark the publication of Writing Revolution: The Voices from Damascus to Syria. PEN committee member Nico Hobhouse wrote about the event for the Oxonian Review, and now you can read his review here, too.
On the evening of Thursday 30th May, Oxford Student PEN welcomed Layla Al-Zubaidi and Matthew Cassel, two editors of a recently released collection of essays, Writing Revolution: The Voices From Tunis To Damascus. They came to speak about the new book and were accompanied by Mohamed Mesrati, a young Libyan activist and author of the book’s piece on Libya.
Each of the essays collected in Writing Revolution was written shortly after the Arab uprisings in early 2011, and the authors all directly participated in the events in their respective countries. As such the collection bears witness to times and changes that we have all heard about through the media but have rarely, if ever, seen through the eyes of the protagonists.
Layla and Matthew commissioned eight different writers from eight different Arab countries to contribute. Even this commissioning process proved difficult. Layla recalled the shocking phone call she had with the Syrian journalist, Khawla Dunia, in which she attempted to explain the project while simultaneously attempting to evade the attention of Syria’s notorious phone monitors. As she blustered along nonsensically, avoiding the use of such key words as “activism” and “revolution”, Khawla cut in: “You want to know why I’m engaged in the revolution? Because it’s about our dignity. This is also why I will speak with you on the phone as I please and I will write as I please.” That Writing Revolution got off the ground at all is testament to this spirit of bravery and defiance.
The authors were set no parameters within which to operate and this freedom, combined with the obvious fact that they are all of different nationalities with unique stories to tell, means that each of the essays has a very different and individualised tone. Mohamed explained that at the time he was asked to write he was planning to return to Libya from London—feared, in fact, that he might never return. Thinking that this could be the last chance to record all the ideas that had been brewing throughout his life, and especially in the months following the revolution, his initial contribution was a wild conglomeration of reflections that was gradually cut down to satisfy the demands of the word count. Even in its reduced form his essay is a free-roaming exploration of such diverse topics as the subversions of his childhood (mostly centred around unnerving school teachers by drawing penises in class), the realities of life under Gaddafi, Libyan folk tales, the persecution of his playwright father and the secret political activism of his mother.
Some of the other essays are less playful and lack something of the cautious optimism that underpins the accounts of the “successful” revolutions. Safa Al Ahmad opens her tale of the failed protests in Saudi Arabia with the words she feels she has to utter whenever she meets women from other Arab countries: “I’m Saudi. I’m sorry.” Ali Aldairy bemoans the intellectuals in his native Bahrain who refuse to condemn the killing of peaceful protestors, describing how in February 2011 he leafed through opinion columns in the local papers and “looked for a word repudiating murder and repression. Nothing.”
But even with these reminders of the disappointments that have scarred the Arab Spring from the off, the overall atmosphere of Writing Revolution is hopeful. This is not because any of the writers express a naïve confidence in the future. The hope instead comes from an unwavering sense that the change seen in the Arab world since 2011 is inevitable. Time and again the same motif crops up: it is impossible for people to live under the yolk forever. Ghania Mouffok expresses this sentiment in his essay about Algeria, recording the “demands” of a young protestor who says simply, “We demand to breathe, and that’s a big enough demand in itself.”
Writing Revolution is unlikely to further the various revolutionary causes themselves. Although most of the essays were originally written in Arabic they have all been translated into English (for which the translators received an English PEN award) and the book has not been released in any of the countries it describes. However, as both Layla and Matthew emphasised, their intention was never for the book to change the political landscape—that is changing fast enough on its own. Rather, they wanted to give Arab writers, so long unheard in the West, a chance to step up and tell their own stories. For if the Arab Spring has meant anything it is that Arabs will no longer settle for being victims, for merely being talked about. They can and will speak for themselves.
Earlier this year we were delighted to host an event with the novelists Sam Thompson and Salah Al Haddad. Sam, also a lecturer in English at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and Salah, from Tripoli, had been paired as part of a British Council scheme in which writers from the UK and elsewhere visited each other’s home cities. During Salah’s visit to Oxford, he and Sam discussed his work at a special Oxford Student PEN event. Now Sam has interviewed Salah for Guernica magazine: in a brilliant and fascinating conversation, which also draws on Sam’s experiences from his visit to Tripoli, they discuss Salah’s exile in Ireland, the attempts to revive Libya’s long-suppressed culture, and writing and freedom.
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