I don’t approach my writing as an effort to transcribe history. I set out to honour the lives lost amid war and revolution, and to speak to the lives transformed in the aftermath. My first concern is that the novel, a work of fiction, must be utterly believable. It is a contained world, finite and intimate, populated by characters who must live and breathe on the page. I want you to care about that world and the people who inhabit it.

That’s describing it with a writerly eye, looking back. But when I sat down to write In the Shadow of the Banyan, it was the loss and pain I endured as a child that came to the forefront. The challenge was to render the experience as faithfully as I remembered it. At some point, as a writer, you forget that you’re describing suffering. You feel it. You relive it.

Your writing carries the weight of personal and collective memory, yet it also participates in shaping a public memorial to Cambodia’s history. As memory is not always linear – it circles, refracts, distorts – how do you navigate the complexity of remembering as an intimate act and memorialising as a public one?

I think the two go hand in hand. Memorialising allows us to mark the stark and brutal truth of acts committed – unambiguously. Remembering in its most private form allows us to see the complexity of truth, and to seek our own understanding of something that might otherwise seem fixed and definitive.

One can’t replace the other. Historians may estimate the number of lives lost, yet within that seemingly mind-boggling number are intimate losses – a father, a sister. And each single loss is immeasurable. Most readers have not lived through genocide, but many have experienced the death of a loved one. That can be a window into something larger.

To take that image of refraction that you mention, I suppose a memorial in the typical sense is imposing and opaque, whereas I hope my writing acts more like a prism that encapsulates the minute and personal while intimating myriad other lives touched.

Specifically, with time, your first novel has become part of the cultural record of Cambodia’s history. Has seeing it absorbed into that collective memory altered your sense of ‘ownership’ over it?

When I was an aspiring writer, I didn’t have such a book from my own people to turn to. Before I wrote Banyan, I used to feel that the Khmer Rouge experience was one I lived through alone, again and again – that no one could possibly understand what I’d survived.

My experience as a survivor is still uniquely mine, in all its specificity. So, to be honest, it still surprises me to hear another Cambodian say ‘That’s just what happened to me!’

While Banyan has been translated into 20 languages, for many Cambodians it remains inaccessible. For that reason, some of the most gratifying responses I’ve received are from other Cambodians, particularly the younger generations who have inherited the trauma. It’s important to me that the novel speaks not only to those far removed from Cambodia’s history but also to those who live directly in its shadow.

There are other resonances I could never have anticipated. From Iraq to Argentina, Turkey to South Africa, Brazil to the Philippines, readers have described to me how the work speaks to them on a very personal level. These are people seemingly without prior interest in Cambodian history. They write of the loss of family members, the loss of home, the fear of political persecution or upheaval, the destructive power of unchallenged ideology. In a world where the language of political violence is resurgent, where mass atrocities unfold before our eyes in real time, I hope that the story of one girl’s journey will continue to spur reflection about the consequences of our collective choices.

What freedoms – and what responsibilities – does fiction offer when writing about real histories of violence and displacement?

Fiction offers a safe place to view an experience from multiple angles. You can slip into the minds and hearts of however many characters you bring into the story. You can see through their eyes. That’s not only a freedom, though. For me, an author writing about real suffering, it’s a huge responsibility. In this sense, fiction is not magic conjuring up the improbable. It’s a mirror that reflects reality.

In both Banyan and Music, storytelling is used as a means of survival for the characters within. What do you think is the difference between telling a story to survive the moment, and telling it years later to survive the memory? Why is storytelling so critical in times of violence? 

In the moment, when it’s a matter of survival, you tell yourself a story. You create a world to set yourself apart from the impossibility of that nightmare. Afterwards, it is a way of confronting what you have survived and why. It is a reckoning.

Both are acts of hope.

When I write, it’s with the belief that I am not alone, that there are others out there who might want to know my story, who might enter into it with me. I write not out of desperation but out of a sense of urgency, a feeling that this needs to be told and heard. It has become my purpose – even a reason for living.

In Banyan, the voice is that of a child shaped by your own lived experience; in Music, the narrator is more removed from your personal biography. How has your relationship to the ‘self’ in your narratives evolved between these books? What made you interested in writing your second novel with more distance – both in structure and subject – from your own experiences?

Both novels are deeply personal to me. It’s true that Banyan is more autobiographical. There is this child self that I carry within me. I needed to protect that self – who in the novel is Raami – and be faithful to her experience. While Music is not as autobiographical, Suteera draws on much of my own emotional journey. She’s an adult, her feelings and views much more mature and nuanced, so I didn’t feel I needed to protect her in the same way.

Banyan is a story that puts the reader in the act of witnessing. I was very conscious that, to fully grasp the horrors committed, the reader needs to confront the genocide from the perspective of a small child, and to hear her voice.

In Music, the atrocity is already established within the first pages, and the narrative is set in the aftermath. Probing the complexity of how this arose, and probing the relationship of perpetrator and victim, requires some distance – years of reflection. The novel is much more contemplative. The two principal characters, Suteera and the Old Musician, are worlds apart in their perspectives but bound by an interwoven past. I wanted the reader to be equally drawn to both. That called for a different approach to the writing, one that forces the reader to inhabit these dual realities, to feel the colliding force of their memories.

In both Music and Banyan, music and myth shape the narrative as much as memory or history. How do these different elements function differently in the act of storytelling?  How do these non-verbal or non-linear forms allow you to tell truths that might resist more straightforward narration?

Truth itself is not linear – certainly it’s not straightforward. It’s multidimensional. The same truth can appear differently from distinct perspectives. If your intention goes beyond recording dates and events, you need a medium as multifaceted as the truth you’re trying to convey. Fiction needs flexibility, and the fiction that most compels me is acrobatic.

But I wouldn’t say that I chose music or myth to achieve a certain narrative effect. I listen to my characters, and these are just such essential aspects of their emotional worlds.

Within a piece of music, a memory is invoked, an emotion preserved. You think you’ve moved on, then you hear a melody, and everything comes back. For the Old Musician, music is at times the only way to communicate; words have become foreign, even dangerous. Music can also bypass memory. A song can assuage a pain whose origin you can no longer identify, a hurt that remains lodged in your body long after the memory that invoked it has receded.

As for myth, it is a collective creation. I think of memory as finite. It’s personal. Once you’re gone, that memory goes with you. Myth, by contrast, lives beyond you. It allows you to leap across time and geography. It’s shared memory that takes the shape of a tale, told and retold. My own story resides first in my memory, but my daughter can retell it in her voice, and others can pick it up and retell in theirs. And possibly it lives on indefinitely.

Your novels contain as much absence as they do detail: moments withheld, histories only hinted at. What is the value of acknowledging the limits of knowing, especially when writing about trauma? How do you decide what a story should leave unsaid, and what work those silences might do for the reader?

The most devastating thing for me is this: knowledge doesn’t bring back what is lost. You can know the past intimately, but that understanding doesn’t undo the destruction, doesn’t recover the lives buried in those mass graves. A daughter can stare at that monument of skulls, but even if she locates one that belongs to her father it doesn’t undo his death or his suffering.

Knowing is a kind of pain, and you must be certain that you can bear that pain before you go seeking answers. Sometimes the best way to drive home that sense of something between loss and death – that place of not knowing – is to make it feel that it’s just on the periphery of the pages. To describe it would lessen its magnitude and alter its emotional resonance. Little is said between Suteera and the Old Musician, but that does not indicate that they have little to say. Had they intended to voice it all, they would not have found the strength to face each other. In experiences of trauma, often the things unsaid bear the greatest weight.

I’m conscious as well that Music is a more demanding novel, in the way it asks the reader to grapple with this unknowing. It is perhaps easier to mourn loss and to feel the release of survival. But Music dwells on questions that are not so easily resolved, if indeed they are resolvable. Many readers have become accustomed to a quick pace of action and dialogue, and a clear resolution. The clash that happens in Music, by contrast, is of things remembered, fragments on the border of memory, the silence that surrounds the sound.

It’s been more than a decade since In the Shadow of the Banyan was published, and eight years since Music of the Ghosts. In that time, what in your relationship to these books – and to your writerly self – has changed the most? 

Lately, I’ve been feeling that these two books are my other selves. I don’t have this struggle any more between fearing that these memories will be lost versus living with them daily, confronting each other in the battlefield of my mind. I don’t have to carry these experiences in my own body all the time. They have another place to go. When an emotion returns, I can tell myself, ‘Oh, yes, I wrote about that.’ That has brought a lot of comfort. The books are these other selves that understand an important part of me because they too embody what I’ve lived through. They now share the burden of remembering and preserving.

There’s a certain comfort in knowing that these stories now live with others as well. I’m also grateful to the translators who’ve devoted their attention and skill to my work. I can only imagine that a translator writing in Japanese, German, Polish, Russian or Czech is influenced by the language of war and revolution in their own societies, and I’m curious how that shapes their telling.

The post Knowing Is a Kind of Pain: An Interview with Vaddey Ratner appeared first on English PEN.

The cloudy day fortifies me with fresh energy to keep walking down from the intersection of Haile Street to the ring road, the wide street bustling with students, workers and street vendors who, like me, walk as if nothing awaits them. Forward! More metres to go, Bushra, I tell myself, staring at faces and places while my ears and the clamour insist another world of sound belongs to me, a parallel world of rackets. Then comes the sound of a sharp nail scraping inside my head, below my skull, rising with every step. But my feet take me, in one of their few moments of recklessness, toward Coffee Corner.

From afar, my eyes spot what used to be the entrance – or so I imagine from where I stand, separated by a street and the traffic, frustrated drivers honking their horns at pedestrians. I continue along the pavement, then finally stop at the end of South Ring Road. I watch the cars emerging from many streets: left from Haddah Street, which runs transversely; or from above Haddah Street; from al-Hadiqa Street; or from Algiers Street, lined with malls and large commercial concerns. This area was, once upon a time, the commercial heart of Sana’a. In the neighbourhoods branching off from these two streets stand the villas of the capital’s old money, with their high, flower-draped walls obscuring the view of those walking by. The pampered dogs you sometimes encounter on the pavements, and the enchanting tranquillity you feel, compel you to observe that the velvety life of times past has now vanished, not knowing what has become of its owners.

Standing at the end of South Ring Road – at the intersection with Algiers Street, where there is a large roundabout crowded with cars coming from all directions – I see on my right the building of the General Secretariat of the General People’s Congress, the former ruling party, whose façade was burned several times during the war years; a façade now festooned with Houthi flags and pictures of its fighters, while the Congress’s banner has been moved to the back, in comical mockery of the bloody conflicts and successive disasters that have befallen this country. To the left of the General Secretariat, on the opposite street, is Coffee Corner. You could once see, above its black iron door, a circular garland of flowers and a small sign with a picture of a cup of coffee that you would love to sip slowly. The front gate of the café, the young guard who wore a smart black suit, the life that thrived here: all have disappeared. I approach the café, passing by a flower nursery where Sadiq and I used to buy potted flowers and roses in the early years of our marriage, before the war. The nursery is still there, resisting the harshness of life, but as I look around at the place, at the façade and at my memories, I know that the war has done a lot of damage, not only to people but also to places, walls and buildings; to the appearance and identity of the city, the beauty that distinguished Sana’a; to its famous cafés, which were frequented by visitors from other cities; and to its social spaces for interaction, entertainment and contemplation. The cafés have become ruins, victims of widespread destruction, destruction that you can smell and touch, that you can relive with your own eyes as you sift through your memories. But can writing encapsulate the destruction of places, or document that sad blindness that has folded away beautiful memories and the flow of life, walling them in a permanent prison of darkness? My eyes have grown used to sudden changes in life, to the ugliness of the past, to landmarks being destroyed.

In the past, there was a front gate here overlooking Algiers Street, which you could see from afar, and which the tides of people flowing from the streets and alleys would rush to in the morning, evening or scorching afternoon. There would stand a cheerful guard, a young dark-skinned man who would greet you with a broad smile as he searched your bag, often with lukewarm enthusiasm, frowning if he saw something you tried to sneak into the café. As you walked through the door, you would encounter a half-metre-wide courtyard paved with small stones, after which you would be captivated by the café, the people and the place, the calm familiarity of it all. On the right and left sides, tables and chairs shaded by colourful umbrellas were arranged in geometric patterns that added charm to the place. Nearby sat small islands planted with flowers, roses, and grasses. Right in the middle stood a building constructed from old bricks, with marble steps leading you inside. You would see the coffee machines on a long black marble counter, various drinks lined up behind it. Your eyes would then trail the workers in their black uniforms and white napkins with the café’s logo emblazoned on them as they flitted around like bees. The aroma of coffee would flood your nostrils and transport you to older, happier times.

The side rooms spread throughout the building, their elegant décor reflecting the richness of that lost era. You would be amazed by the softness of the red sofas, which beckoned one to relax and contemplate. On the wall hung a Sana’ani sitara that would leave you impressed by its historical authenticity, its blue centre and red edges that hadn’t faded in spite of the vicissitudes of time. The end of the building’s staircase opened onto the back courtyard, where you would see the large iron gate through which would drive luxury cars dropping off or picking up the girls and boys of the upper class. To the right of that gate stood a small, independent building with a glass façade – the café’s library, its shelves lined with Arabic and foreign books, works in translation as well as novels by Yemeni authors. On the wall, a lavish painting by a Sudanese artist hung for sale; the paintings changed every week. In the library, you would be greeted by a young intellectual asking you what book you desired to read while you caught sight of another comfortable red sofa, a reader perched behind it, a book in his hand. The warmth of the place and the smell of books and coffee would transport you to happiness and peace.

In that bygone era, time would slip away from you; as you grew older you would leave the café library and spill into the back yard, where you would meet a man in his forties lovingly watering the flowers, shifting the watering can from one place to another. You would see the tables and chairs where young men and women used to congregate, people whose fate is now a question mark in the harsh light of war.

This was an epicentre of Sana’a’s pre-war cultural and political life. It now seems so distant, as if separated from us by a chasm several light-years wide; separated from the life that bustled in the café, in its spacious garden adorned with flowers and trimmed roses, where you could take in the vivid sky as you sat in your comfortable chair, behind a table for writing and meeting friends, while a bright umbrella sheltered you. Or, when the sky clouded over and it rained, where you would race to find a seat inside the café, and sat therein would be poets and journalists from across the capital, busy, hunched over their laptops, writing or reading. Over there, in his favourite corner, was journalist Jamal Jubran furiously typing away on his laptop. The writer Ahmed Qasim Damaj, with his slender stature and warm smile, would arrive every evening, his courteous son and young intellectuals in tow, and they’d take their places behind the large table. Foreign journalists and writers – French, American, everything – who clearly loved Sana’a would ask about the architecture of the Old City.

You would catch a glimpse of the journalist Tanya Holm, who moved to Sana’a and lived there for many years before the war. Or the director Khadija Al-Salamy, who had come from Paris, busy with ideas for a new film. Her warmth and affection radiated through this space. And there they invariably were, the men conducting business deals, in tune with the faint strains of a Bob Marley song playing in the background.

Here, in this café with its diverse clientele, you would be engulfed by the full spectrum of social classes and lifestyles that would be swept away by the coming flood of war. Here, in this café, at the table near the stairs and the flowers, I used to sit and write, watching the passers-by and friends who are now scattered across the world.

I open my eyes to now, to the concrete walls that have taken up more than half of the café, the void that has sucked away the familiar faces, friends and chatter. I notice an armed young man entering through the back door that has remained open since the front door has closed, followed by a man with a protruding belly, looking around anxiously. I think of another meaning for the ruin we are living in. I rest my head on the seat in the small concrete maze and smile at Sadiq, then I contemplate the worker’s half-heartedness as he places two cups of coffee on the table for us while we wait for our friends. The silence that envelops the place in the afternoon heat, as war rages on, pulls me inward, pulls me to travel back in time, to the war’s beginning.

My last visit to Coffee Corner was in April 2015, in the first year of the war. Air raids were the soundtrack of the skies above Sana’a. Cars stretched out as far as the eye could see, loaded with bags and furniture – a scene of displacement unprecedented in the city’s history. There was no electricity in the city, no electricity in the house. Sadiq and I were at Coffee Corner, settled on seats that are no longer there, and I began to write an article while the journalists and writers around us discussed their predictions for the course of the war, before most of them left for the capitals of the diaspora. At that time, life was but a little flickering flame about to go out.

What does war do to places and memories? In the fullness of time, it undermines, chips at, folds away this brief and fleeting history of Coffee Corner, a history that ultimately belongs to me, that is not an accurate documentary record of the transformations of the place. Did I mention that in the second year of the war, part of the façade of the café was destroyed after a coalition airstrike on the Popular Congress Party building opposite the café? Then, that in another month of the same year, I believe, shrapnel from a missile cut short the life of a young worker in the café’s library? Then, when fighting broke out between combatants in December 2017, that part of the café itself was destroyed? That another war destroyed what remained of life here in the cafés and coffee shops, as the new authorities closed them under the pretext of tackling gender mixing. Bustling hives including Café Ofelia, Moon Café and Bin Wa Qshar Café. These authorities expelled people from a space barely large enough to drink a cup of coffee to the battlefronts, or to their homes, to suffocate them behind wall after wall of prohibition, separation and sectarianism? What war does to places and memories!

The post Coffee Corner appeared first on English PEN.

Words carry weight because of the way you use them; how you place them in a sentence, how you pick one over the other, how you refuse to explain them. It gives everything away. It reveals you, the speaker. And when you have access to only one language – a language that fundamentally doesn’t recognise you, that doesn’t have words for what you are trying to say – you must have the courage to bend it like clay.

My parents met in college in Kerala, where they were studying to become medical imaging technologists, and soon after they graduated they got married and found jobs in Saudi Arabia. I was born and spent most of my childhood there. We lived in a small desert town that no one had heard of and where my parents worked at the main hospital. They quickly learned how to be quiet and blend in, like lizards in the desert.

I went to the only international school that happened to teach an Indian curriculum. There were kids from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. My Grade Two class spoke nine different languages at home – none of them Arabic – so it helped that the official language of the school was English. I had a teacher who taught me how to fall in love with the English language. She taught me to pay attention to the words. I came home every afternoon with new ones on my tongue and tried them out in sentences. My parents, bewildered, bought dictionary after dictionary to satiate my curiosity. Ours was a small school, and most of our classrooms were in a portable trailer. We had a library that doubled as the computer room. I read every book in there at least twice. Wherever I went – in our close-knit Indian-Pakistani-Bangladeshi-Sri-Lankan-Filipino community – I found books to read, and people would lend them to me, no questions asked. The book I read the most was Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. The novel is set in Cornwall, England. There was nothing I had in common with the characters in this book, and yet I felt at home reading it. It was a source of comfort. It didn’t occur to me that I couldn’t see myself in that story, or any other story I had read until then.

When I was eight, I tried to write a novel. All the characters in the novel had light skin and blue eyes. I didn’t have the imagination then to understand that I had subconsciously accepted that I was not at the centre – that I was, in my own life, at the edge, or even invisible, and was fine with it. I wrote essays and stories for my school magazine, but I wasn’t in any of them and, until years later, I didn’t think anything of it.

I moved to a boarding school in Kerala when I was thirteen, and a few years after, I got my hands on this book everyone kept talking about which had won the Booker Prize in 1997. The author – this curly-haired beautiful woman – was all over the news because people outside India said that she was brilliant. She also kept getting into legal trouble in India for the words that she used. That book was The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. I had never read anything so beautiful before, and yet I was enraged by it. This book, unlike anything I had read until then, was about my people. The characters looked and sounded like us – my parents, my friends, their parents, extended family. Their concerns, their humour, their hope and hopelessness were familiar. I felt exposed, like the safety of being at the fringes had disappeared. There was nowhere to hide in three-hundred-something pages. Surely, that couldn’t be safe, right? Literature was no longer something I read from the sidelines. I was inside it. I put it away, and read Rebecca again, looking for comfort. But it didn’t feel the same anymore.

Following the publication of The God of Small Things, an English historian told Arundhati Roy during a radio show in London that the very fact that she writes in English is a tribute to British Imperialism. He meant it as high praise, because he had loved her work. But the thing is, if you read The God of Small Things, even though it was written in English, it feels like it wasn’t. It feels like it was written in a version of Malayalam, or in something more than language. Something that captured the essence of a people so effectively that the language becomes irrelevant. The English historian probably felt the way I felt when I read Rebecca – in awe of something you cannot see yourself in – but unlike me, he was not comfortable or familiar with that feeling. It only makes sense that he felt compelled to give the credit for the brilliance of Roy to British Imperialism.

Roy does not explain things that require explaining to the average English reader. She writes about Ayemenam like it is the centre of the world, like its people are the only people who matter. When she uses words that are specific to the place, to the people, she doesn’t explain them or apologise for them or put them in italics. She leaves them out there in the open, for everyone to judge and question and not understand. One reviewer of The God of Small Things on Goodreads gave it a scathing one-star review and said that it was just meaningless gibberish. They were so enraged at being forced to read about a community that didn’t include them, and instead of trying to understand it, they declared their hate for it. Roy is not ashamed of not being understood. She stands there, right at the centre, with a delicious, humble confidence, and says what she has to say. She uses the English language to decentralise itself. I think this is what Toni Morrison meant when she said ‘I stood at the border, stood at the edge and claimed it as central. I claimed it as central, and let the rest of the world move over to where I was.’

My great-grandmother lived with us for a couple of years during my late teens. She had, by then, started to succumb to old age. Her bladder had lost control, she needed support to walk, and she couldn’t hear very well. My mother had her move in with us to give her whatever dignity we could, but people treated her as something worthless. During that time, I found out that she had been a writer in her youth. A writer! I had known her all my life, and no one had ever mentioned this before. She wrote in Malayalam, which meant that, for me, her work was not accessible. I asked her to teach me the language. I could speak the language fluently, but the written word was foreign to me. The 56 letters of the alphabet – 15 vowels and 42 consonants – tortured me. The loops and circles and curves, and the subtle differences in sounds they caused remained unapproachable. Every day, I read with her for half an hour – loudly, so that she could hear. She was patient with the many mistakes I made. I got better – I could soon read billboards and destination signs on buses and, with difficulty, newspaper headlines. She died not long after, standing, holding onto a dresser. My mother said that she died peacefully, knowing that she had done something worthy in the last days of her life.

I lost the language soon after that.

I wonder what kind of a writer my great-grandmother was. I wonder if she wrote as if she, her people, our people, were at the centre of it. I wonder if she had written all the things she wanted to, without inhibition.

When I first started writing seriously, I had already been in North America for almost a decade. Unlike my parents in Saudi Arabia, I didn’t need to camouflage myself to be safe. But I was, at first, apologetic for taking up space on the page, as if what I was writing about was too much, too little, too heavy, too silly, too trivial, too everything. But I was consumed by the desire to say exactly what I wanted to say. I turned to fiction, where I felt I could write from the centre of my life. What if I could give words to this strange, unmoored sense of belonging – of belonging nowhere and also anywhere? What if I could give the reader what they didn’t know they wanted?

On the page, unlike in the real world – or, worse, on social media – there is space for the nuances of who I really am. On the page, I feel safe to first present the box I was placed in, and then to shatter it, to be anywhere but in the box.

After my short story collection, Peacocks of Instagram, came out, I got to travel to many literary festivals and talk about the book. I had dreamed of this for years. At many of those festivals, I had the indelible joy of people coming up to me to express how much they had loved my book. Some of them would go on to tell me about the one time they went to India in the 1970s or 1980s and educate me about a city or a practice or a custom they had encountered. They meant well, of course. They simply couldn’t see themselves in my stories and had to find a way to forge a connection. And instead of getting offended, I thought, maybe I got this right. Maybe I managed to create something good and specific – that I made someone who didn’t find themselves in it not only keep reading but come up to me and try to claim a part of it. Surely that should mean something?

A reader who read a story in the book about a group of young South Indian girls learning Carnatic music at a Hindu temple in California asked me why there were no white people in the story. She seemed bewildered, offended even. I said it was because it was my story, and I wanted to place these scrawny little brown girls smack at the centre, as if no one else mattered. I said that I did it, because I wanted to do it. I said that I learned it from Arundhati Roy. I only said one of those things out loud, but I am a writer, and here, on the page, I have more courage.

The post There Is Never One English appeared first on English PEN.

From my mother’s movements, I know that fear is both panic and composure. It’s a hot summer’s day, yet she takes off her shorts and pulls on her winter velvet trousers. In the face of male assault, women fear more than just death. The threat is no longer imaginary, but clearly visible through the window. One cannot control fear. I tremble with hysterical laughter when my mother warns us that the soldiers have already entered the village, that we must stay silent when they arrive. Because of my innate boldness, she addresses me especially.

My hands are clenched, but I don’t think about fear. Only of escape. In my child’s mind we all survive. There is no other outcome.

Twenty-five years later, I photograph the remnants of that time. My grandmother’s house, the basement, the apple tree and wooden bench, the railway, the field, and the Bosna River. Crime scenes and escape routes. I collect photos, documents, objects. I record the testimonies of survivors. Witnesses. I am a witness myself. I read mine and my mother’s diaries, our letters – everything that will lead me back to that time, to the day I was forced to grow up.

As a child, I am a believer. I think death means that the souls of the deceased are in heaven, but I don’t think about the souls of those who survived. The morning after the attack is equally horrifying for the survivors. The narrow dusty road is soaked with blood. It is a hot August day. The blood, thickened by heat, lures the flies. Someone has to wash the concrete in front of the house, to take a shovel and scrape off the top layer of bloodied soil and dump it somewhere, soil that should have been buried with the dead. I know that now.

This task was given to our grandfather. In my child’s mind, he is the strongest man in the world, maybe even the scariest. At that time nobody knew that he was the weakest, that he would eventually fall to pieces and commit a crime himself.

The testimonies lead me to an empty garage that, at that time, served as a morgue. I think about how someone had to lay dead bodies on plastic sheets, in several rows, close the garage doors and leave them there overnight. Someone had to take photos of the motionless faces. At the time, we believed that the photos would serve as evidence in a trial that never began, for a crime that no one was ever held accountable. It is likely that they never will be.

The summer smells of tar-soaked railroad ties, warm blackberries, and crushed tomatoes. It is yellow and dusty. Only the forest and the birds are black. I stand on the balcony of my house and call Ivana, my fourteen-year-old cousin, to come and see how I have decorated my room. She waves at me, and says she will come later, she has other things to do right now. It is the last time I see her. She was killed in front of her home on August 16, 1993. On that narrow dusty road.

At that time, we live in a different village across the Bosna River, but that day we return to pick fruits and vegetables from the garden. Everything is already overripe. If it rains, it will rot. We return by nightfall. Back then I didn’t know that daylight is scarier than the night.

In the village across the Bosna River, we live in a house in front of which grows a large weeping willow. Its branches hang down to the ground, and it is dark inside the canopy. The willow tree is my tent. A hiding place. It’s where I read my first book for adults, The Prisoners by Lajos Zilahy. It is the only book that I have, rescued from someone’s home library. The love story of Peter and Miet. Children gather around me as I read aloud. There is no radio, no TV. We discover worlds through books. They listen carefully during the sex scenes; they don’t care for the rest of the story. I keep the book under my pillow in the room where I sleep. The room is small, there is only enough space for the bed and a narrow cabinet. In it I find expired cake decorations; remnants of shredded coconut, dried almond flakes, colourful sprinkles. I chew and swallow. My stomach growls. I read and think about how, one day, I will meet my own Peter, and I will cry when we say goodbye to each other.

As we flee, I realise that there is a wild animal inside me. I run faster than anyone. I leap across the dusty road into dry grass in a single bound, crawling, tearing, scratching my way forward. I crash through the cornfield in front of me, the gravel from the railway scatters beneath my feet. I don’t hesitate, not even at the river. It’s deep and fast even in summer. I take off my shoes, I can’t afford to ruin them, I have no others. Beneath my bare feet moves mud and slimy river weeds. The water rises to my armpits. Just a little further, and we will be safe.

I’ve learned that fear comes with a tightened throat and lungs gasping for air. I can hear my grandmother’s rasping breath as she lowers herself onto the concrete steps in front of the house and begins naming the dead. Liar! I think. She must have lost her mind. My mother gives her sweetened water, but grandmother’s throat is dusty like the road, it cannot be quenched by water.

We don’t go to Ivana’s funeral. The cemetery is on a hill, exposed, visible from the woods like the palm of a hand. To me, she is not dead, just gone. The first proof of her death is a photo from the morgue. It was published by Globus, a Croatian weekly newspaper, in an article about war crimes in Central Bosnia. The entire family is at our house. There are too many people crammed into the room. I sit on the floor. We are all silent. The newspaper passes from hand to hand, wet from sweaty fingers. The children look too. There is no point in hiding anything from us anymore. When I see the photo from the morgue, the wild animal inside me howls. I’m twelve, and I’m scared that we will forget what happened to us.

Years later, I begin writing the story about that summer of fear, death, loss, but also of love. While I’m trying to find and collect material for my novel, I go to that village across the Bosna River. I take my camera everywhere. I walk along the battered road. It’s late summer again. The weeping willow tree has been cut down, and the house renovated. It’s not the same anymore, there is no point in taking photos. An old man is tending to the front lawn. Should I go up to him, tell him that we once lived here. I walk towards the fence then change my mind. I’m not sure it would mean anything to him. I continue down the road to the house where Ivana used to live. It began decaying before it was even finished. I take photos from a distance. I still remember the smell of dust, kitchen grease, and mice. The house is a dark blot in the middle of a blooming meadow.

wenty days after the attack, I learn that a wild animal lives inside our grandfather too. He kills a man, out of rage. They occasionally let him out of prison on the weekends. His thick, unruly hair is now cut short, his glittering eyes visible. He has a rifle, for sure, and he will kill us all. I think. I run inside the house; afraid he will chase me.

I tried to find documents from the trial, to reach more witnesses. I find almost nothing, and nobody from the village wants to talk about it. They know I’m a writer, that anything they say will end up in my book. My grandfather remains an enigma. Both, in life, and in the story.

We returned to the village across the Bosna River in the winter of 1993. It’s safe now, but we are still afraid. We live in soot and cold. Inside, the walls are black from the flame and smoke of the oil lamps, and outside we choke on coal smoke from the chimneys. Winter is black, like a burnt forest, like birds.

We only heat one room in the house, and life happens around the stove. I’ve learned how to make candy from melted sugar and my fingers now smell like caramel. We taste our first candy in a long time. We go to Ivana’s grave and leave some for her under the wooden cross, next to a bouquet of evergreen branches decorated with Christmas ornaments. Somebody takes a photo of us children, standing beside her grave. Small, serious faces. I can remember heavy snowflakes.

At that time, I read even more. On my shelves there are collected works of Ivo Andrić, Marija Jurić Zagorka, and Russian classics. By the stove, I develop an addiction to escaping into fictional worlds, and all I can think about is how to leave this place. I’ll be Countess Nera. Anna Karenina.

My bedroom is freezing. To reach it, I have to pass the dark hallway, past the staircase under which the wolf lives. I no longer run in fear with my eyes closed. I’m no longer afraid of the dark, or the wolf. Only of the forest in broad daylight.

Under my pillow I still hide books.

And keep running, running…

The post The Wolf No Longer Lives in the Dark Hallway appeared first on English PEN.

How many generations does it take for a culture to become native? For the tattoos of names and labels to set in blood, for postures to solidify in bones? By whose volition do the branches of trees become tresses: poets, and dreamers, who claim the language of the stars. The language of this poetry is often luxurious, but the poetry itself is not a luxury. In fact, to truly appreciate it, you’d have to have let every object, everything go, (at least once), as Bulleh Shah or Ghulam Farid, two Panjabi mystics, have said.

I’m addressing the notion of an attachment to one’s native or ethnic culture. A culture itself, in spite of its perceived nativity, was also once born and invented. Is it my perceived nativity of Panjabi folk music that calls me to it? Is it something in the blood and the bones?

Summer 2023 in Manchester. I’m at my friend Ràjveer’s house, and we’re celebrating his dad’s birthday by having a mehfil. I’m standing by a laptop with my friend – Spotify open – and he tells me ‘I’ve got a song for you.’ He selects the Punjabi Mehfil Vol. 1 album, plays Ghulam Ali and Afshan’s ‘Methoon Peeche Kyoon’, which isn’t the actual name of the song. ‘These recordings are a mess’, he tells me. That song becomes my most played song of the year.

How did this happen? Before 2023, my Spotify Wrapped would usually be a United Nations meeting of genres; dominated primarily by US rap. In 2024, four of my top five most-listened-to songs were Panjabi folk songs, and they had an average length of 17 minutes and 58 seconds.

One of my top songs was ‘Janda Hoya Das Na Gaya…’ by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Nusrat was one of the most popular South Asian musicians, chiefly a proponent of qawwali music, but also of other religious-musical traditions in the region, as well as Panjabi folk music. In the chorus, Nusrat sings:

Janda hoya das na gaya
chitthi keri watan wal paava.
(He left without telling me where he was going
to which homeland should I send my letter?)

Spotify was just one plot in the digital garden I was cultivating. I have a flowing saved folder on Instagram, growing fast and wide, alongside a TikTok bank and YouTube playlists for more unsung varieties. The YouTube algorithm began recommending songs to me with less than 100 views, many of which would then enter my playlists. I brought together Panjabi geets, qawwalis, shabads, bhajans, naats and filmi songs. I found live stage recordings with camera setups, as well as simple recordings of singers out in nature or in their homes. Naturally, each of these expressions have a different flavour. The stage recordings are usually more planned and grandiose, sometimes lasting for over forty minutes. The recordings from folk singers out in nature, while generally much shorter, are the most memorable for me. They have simultaneously the worst and best video quality; the smallest in pixels, but greatest in heart.

In one of my favourite videos, Sain Bodhi Shah sings verses from one of the most popular and culturally significant poems, Heer. Heer was born in the 18th century, written by poet and mystic Waris Shah. The poem breathes Panjabi culture: the ploughed land, the brazen passion, the floaty faced jogis, the juggernaut hearts. The poem is, in an outward sense, a tragic love story between the characters Heer and Ranjha. Waris Shah, in a move atypical of his time, used the colloquial language of the people to write his story; choosing not to write in respected languages which had an existing poetic reputation such as Farsi. Shah’s story presents a female lead character who breathes with agency, who raises her voice as if it is her birthright. The story and its characters remain symbols of courage today, reinvigorating spirituality in people and reminding them of the beauty and dignity in their culture, the crimson love in their blood.

As a child of diaspora, it might be redundant to say I grew up dealing with the echoes of another world; sometimes harnessing them, sometimes drowning them out. Music and poetry are so integral to Panjabi culture, where lifetimes of folk songs and annals of poems are widely bestowed the honour of memorisation. Just the evocation of the first beat of a song or poem will inspire a passionate response from many a Panjabi – a turning and raising of the hand, a glowing smile and a headshake, and any combination of ‘aahaa!’, ‘wah!’, ‘Allah!’, ‘Waheguru!’ and ‘kya baat hai!’.

There’s something in the English terms ‘folk song’ or ‘folk music’ that, to me, evoke the archaic or the unpopular. Until very recently, I would have said there’s a stark contrast in the reality of these terms and music in the Panjabi language – but with the growing popularity of musicians such as Diljit Dosanjh and AP Dhillon, you now might have to specify that you mean ‘the classics’ when you want to tell someone you’re into Panjabi folk music. The likes of Diljit Dosanjh and AP Dhillon have found an international audience which includes non-Panjabi speakers, while the audience of the folk music remains predominantly limited to Panjabi speakers.

Panjabi poems and folk songs can perhaps be characterised by their cutting, undressing honesty – something which, in the past, caused anger to be levelled at writers and singers. Bulleh Shah wrote of delicate and beaming divine connection, yet he criticised the funnels of organised religions that were widely practiced in his time. He writes:

Panj veylay lok, aashiq har veylay
Lok maseethi, aashiq qadma vich.
(Five times, for the people (referring to prayer); the aashiq, all the time.
The people, in the mosque, the aashiq in their footsteps.)

Bulleh Shah challenges the limitation of prayer to a place of worship, suggesting that prayer should be something embodied. The aashiq is one who embodies ishq, a divine, transcendental love, which exists beyond human divisions such as race and religion. Bulleh Shah was chastised in his time for his beliefs by those whose mono-religious edifices could not contain such multiplicity; such horizon-shattering love. His poems have been famously sung by Abida Parveen, who has breathed new life into Bulleh’s poetry in the 20th and 21st centuries. I hope to see her perform live one day.

While the mehfil in the summer of 2023 was a defining moment, an earlier, equally important moment took place in 2020. I came across a YouTube channel called The Dream Journey, which records live folk music performances across Pakistan. The most popular videos on the channel feature English subtitles – perfect for modern engagement, or for those of us in the diaspora who might not completely understand their mother tongue,I was already writing at that time and was drawn to writing through a perennial or spiritual lens – one that could, as well as satisfy my metaphysical longing, encompass the two cultures I inhabited.

Na fanaa meri, na baqaa meri
(I can claim neither impermanence nor infinite existence)

These words, written by Kabir Das, were sung on the channel by Maulvi Haider Hassan Vehranwale. The video features a whole qawwal party singing together, which included both the young and the old. As a 20-year-old, the majority of my age mates weren’t interested in traditional music and metaphysical topics like that. I’d sometimes feel internally that I was too young to be thinking about all this so deeply, but seeing children in this video, who in some moments sang louder than the lead vocalists without mics, I felt affirmed.

Still, internally, there lingered a feeling that all of this was too serious, and this was not normal early-20’s-occupation. It could be said that this notion of age and time is a Western one, and to a great degree I feel it is. But truthfully, I also faced the surprise of family and peers, who saw me getting into this music and poetry that was “before my time” and doing so “before” the time I was supposedly ready to. Societally, an association has been made between asceticism and age, as well as age with knowledge and wisdom. But I couldn’t rest with this notion.

One of my top songs on Spotify in 2024 was 38:18 minutes long. I’m trying to think of juxtapositional equivalents to short and long songs: A speedboat ride and an excavation, A TV episode and a film. Most of these longer songs are live recordings, and they feature the additions of audience sounds and musical mistakes, which wouldn’t be found in a studio recording. In a world where commitment and an attention span are often deemed hard to come by, or worse,relics of a bygone era,there’s something radical and humbling about engaging with music in this way. More satiating.

What we choose to dedicate our free time to are things we love and care for, right? I would be remiss not to mention that the spirituality of the music, or its appeal to my sense of diasporic dislocation, were not strong enough to take so much of my time and attention. It’s not just the song, it’s the life it is attached to; of the tears I have given to this music, most have been for love. For romantic, platonic, familial, and humanist love. Baba Farid writes:

Kaga sab tan khaiyo, mera chun chun khaiyo maas
do naina mat khaiyo, mohe piya milan ki aas
(O crow, eat all of my body, chew and chew at my flesh, but don’t eat my two eyes, for I have hope of meeting my beloved.)

Many Panjabi folk songs are about heartbreak and separation, and some of the resolutions in the lyrics are soothing and transcendental (I was just trying to get over my ex! I wasn’t trying to transcend my physical body!)

Tears, also, for a vision of cultural renaissance: the wearing of colours that are seldom worn anymore, the lonely feathers of forgotten, colourful birds. How beautiful to be in their lineage, the mystics, the criminals of conscience; where it is not the equivalence of blood that joins, it’s the equivalence of something else. My friend Ràjveer challenged my idea that for the song to travel, it must live in the bones. ‘If this were true,’ he said, ‘the music would die with people.’ He instead posited the spiritual and metaphysical as a carrier of these songs and stories. If the stirring of this music is afforded only to those who are in the regional lineage of its creators, how humanist is it – how truly transcendental is its love?

Whatever the answer, there’s something in the music that sends jolts of frenzy to my body today, with the faces of an uncanny, reassuring resonance. Jubilant colours can be, will be, worn again, and there’ll always be people of integrity in every generation.

This music should be lived in, then lived out.
Bone should connect to fingertip, blood to your tears.
What will I do with my hands?

Don’t blaspheme the words of poets with their echoes.
Don’t regard the listeners by the words they collected.
Analyse pisiform bones instead.
Observe the echoes of their veins.

The post To Which Homeland Should I Send My Letter? appeared first on English PEN.

RAPHAEL CORMACK: I have two answers to this question. The first one is the simple one. My first book, Midnight in Cairo, was a history of the 1920s and 1930s entertainment industry in Egypt’s capital. As I was doing research for that project, I reasonably frequently came across references to stage hypnotists and spiritualists who appeared on Cairo’s cabaret stages alongside some of the biggest musical stars of that era. I started to ask myself what they were doing on these bills and what audiences made of them. That soon led me towards Tahra Bey and Dr Dahesh but it also led me towards many others like them – Dr Salomon Bey the hypnotist, and other fakirs like Rahman Bey and Hamid Bey. It was a whole scene that has now been almost entirely forgotten.

The second answer is more complicated. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we can see the 1920s and 1930s as global decades or, at the very least, write the Middle East into the standard histories of the period. That is something I was trying to do by writing about the entertainment scene in Egypt, which was globally connected. I saw an opportunity to do this with the occult too. If you read anything about the early twentieth century, it doesn’t take long before you come across some manifestation of the occult, whether it’s theosophy, spiritualism, hypnotism or another mysterious art. Not only was it very popular, it seems to me to capture something of the spirit of the age: irrationality, hope, post-traumatic anxiety, and curiosity. Again, I saw a chance here in the characters of people like Dr Dahesh to write the Middle East back into the story of the interwar period.

Neither of them were strictly speaking doctors, in the conventional sense of the word. But they used that title with all seriousness, and used spectacle and mysterious methods to convince a large section of their public that they had superpowers. Why do you feel that, 100 years ago, as you feel now, people in fear of drastic historical changes and the arrival of a new unpredictable era wanted strong men in politics and men who claimed supra-scientific or supernatural powers in private?

There is an uncomfortable connection between these holy men and the strongmen dictators of the period. When I started this book, I felt quite a lot of sympathy for the occult and I still do (to an extent). I was drawn to its desire to create a new world, its rejection of the corruptions of the material world, and also, to be totally honest, its fun and charismatic characters. But the more I researched the harder it was to ignore the links to various kinds of fascism. These links were rarely direct (neither Tahra Bey nor Dr Dahesh were fascists – nor were they really involved in any kind of politics at all). Still, the indirect connections were very strong. Not only were there similarities between the way that these holy men held their followers in their sway and the way that the strong men like Hitler and Mussolini inspired such devotion, but also the rejection of bourgeois rationalism and the appeal to a great new world coming were eerily alike. Something about the occult seems fundamentally non-egalitarian, despite its frequent claims to promote the equality of all humanity. As Anna Della Subin has said, talking about the same period, ‘occultism, the realm of hidden, elite mysteries, seemed to contradict the spirit of democracy.’ If one person or a small group of people can claim special access to the world beyond the veil, a hierarchy necessarily emerges. It’s only a few steps away from dictatorship.

Tahra Bey: an Armenian pretending to be an Egyptian Fakir in Paris and the maternal cousin of Charles Aznavour. Is this how a refugee one century ago found a way to fame and success in the West?

Tahra Bey’s Armenian-ness is clearly a key part of his story. For those who have not read the book, Tahra Bey came to Europe in the mid-1920s, claiming to be an ‘Egyptian fakir’ and performing various miraculous feats which baffled the scientific establishment. He could seemingly control his body with the power of his mind, changing his heart rate at will, piercing his flesh without feeling pain, and putting his body into a death-like state during which he would be buried alive in front of a live audience. All of these things astounded audiences, who were also were drawn by his exotic garb (flowing white robes and headdress) and his claims to be a fakir descended from a long line of fakirs. These stories, though, were all false. He was an Armenian from Istanbul, born Krikor Kalfayan.

As I was writing this book (and partly helped by the discussion after a talk I gave on the subject at the Moon Station in Athens) it became clearer and clearer to me that Tahra Bey’s identity as an Armenian refugee was crucial to understanding his persona. In Europe at the time Armenians faced both discrimination and suspicion. I interpret his construction of the mysterious Eastern persona as an attempt to style himself as an exotic and interesting outsider, rather than a suspect refugee as many Armenians in Europe were seen. Likewise, his whole act – his imperviousness to pain, his conquest of death – could pretty easily be read as a response to the traumas of the Armenian genocide. Although Tahra Bey himself does not seem to have personally witnessed violence, he would undoubtedly have heard stories and many of his relatives would have perished in the 1910s.

I think the period you chose is an extraordinary period of history, and I find it fascinating you chose to explore it through Dr Tahra Bey: ‘Tahra Bey born in Istanbul . . . travelled across Europe out of the ruins of the Eastern Mediterranean until he reached France as a refugee in 1925. In Paris, advertising himself as an “Egyptian fakir” from a long line of mystics, his ability to manipulate his physical body in inexplicable ways using the power of his mind made him a summer sensation. . . . Dressed in exotic Eastern robes and talking about a forgotten Eastern science of the spirit, Tahra Bey gave Europeans exactly what they wanted to hear.’

Do you feel that there was something that the East possessed which audiences in the West craved, and which Tahra Bey delivered for them in the character of a Fakir? What was it? 

What we learn from Tahra Bey is that people in the West were obsessed with the idea that they could be saved by Eastern philosophies but that they really only wanted a simulacrum of the East not its reality. The craze for Eastern wisdom in the 1920s was not informed by true curiosity about the long traditions of mysticism from across Asia and North Africa. In fact, many people were often confused as to whether Tahra Bey was Egyptian, Indian, or something else entirely. The embrace of the East was largely just a rejection of the West. It was based on very little knowledge and so many people were fooled by anyone who came along dressed in long robes. A few people did eventually embrace the spiritual traditions of other cultures, including Sufism, and learn about them seriously. But these people were few and far between.

In the case of Dr Dahesh, your second subject, a Palestinian who moved to Beirut after the formation of Israel and used western science as a cloak and justification for his ‘magic’, soon becoming a celebrity in Beiruti high society, do you think that he is in a way a mirror image of Tahra Bey? Instead of dressing in Eastern robes, he wore western suits; instead of talking about Ancient powers and techniques, he claimed ‘Western Science’ as his source of extraordinary power.

Dr Dahesh is the centrepiece of the second part of the book and his story guides that narrative. I use his story to write the Middle East back into the history of the modern occult – not as an exotic, mystical fantasy, but as a real place with real people in it.

Dr Dahesh also fits into the narrative nicely because he first appeared on stage in 1929 doing an act that was clearly inspired by Tahra Bey and his fakirism. Dahesh would pierce his flesh without feeling pain and bury himself alive just as Tahra Bey had done in Paris. However, instead of dressing in long white robes and headdress like an exotic Rudolf Valentino-style Sheikh, he put on the garb of Western modernity. Soon he began to talk of hypnotism and spiritualism instead of fakirism, explaining that this new science could unlock many secrets. He was not the only one, either. Many hypnotist spiritualists were active at the same time, some more famous than Dr Dahesh and some less so.

Unlike these other hypnotist-spiritualists though, Dr Dahesh went on to form his own religious movement. People who were stunned by his miraculous abilities – ranging from materialising large objects out of thin air to reading their minds – were drawn to the complex metaphysical doctrines he espoused and were inspired by his calls to unite all religions under the banner of Daheshism.

One obvious interpretation of all of this would be the one you proposed: that in the ‘East’, ‘Western science’ was playing the same exotic role in the public imagination that Tahra Bey’s mysterious ‘Eastern’ doctrine of fakirism did in Europe; that they are mirror images of each other. There is much to be said for this interpretation, but I would add one more thing to it as well. As I show in my book, these hypnotists were really doing something extremely similar in form and content to the things that Jinn summoners were doing at the same time. In the early twentieth century, traditional practices using the power of the Jinn to access mysteries from the world beyond were still popular. However, they were considered backwards by many bourgeois modernisers in the region, because Jinn summoners were the subject of many high-profile legal cases in the 1930s, accused of charlatanry and fraud. Still, many people would go to them to find answers to their questions – who stole my money? where is my lost ring? should I travel abroad? who will I marry? and so on. Hypnotists – who put their mediums into trances and told audiences to ask them extremely similar questions – unlike Jinn summoners, claimed the power of modernity as well as its prestige.

The Middle East in the 1920s and 1930s was not experiencing the same fears of civilisational collapse as Europe, but it was going through something equally momentous. A combination of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the increasing encroachment of European colonial powers in the region led to a period of uncertainty and instability. Many at the time looked to modern science, which seemed to be delivering all kinds of inexplicable wonders, to fashion a new almost magical existence.

Is interest in magic and the supernatural simply a misguided cure for feelings of fear? Or do you think that people do believe that our paradigms of knowledge are too narrow, making them open to a vision of the world that transcends scientific materialism? Do you whole-heartedly believe they were both full-on charlatans? Or do you think they were also in touch with realms of knowledge to which modern science does not have access?

This is a question that hangs heavily over this entire subject. But it is not an easy one to answer. I have a few different ways of thinking about it, and will lay out a few. Firstly, pretty much the entire history of the world makes it clear that humans are not satisfied with scientific materialism alone. Some people will always seek out the mystical, the spiritual and the sublime, no matter how irrational it may be. That seems to be a pretty ironclad fact of human nature. The question of whether the metaphysical plane is ‘real’ is harder to answer. In some ways, I like to look at mysticism and the occult as one language and scientific materialism as another. They are both ways of interpreting the world. In some cases, they will express the same thing with different words, and, in others, they will have words or phrases that don’t translate into the other language. To speak of a language as ‘true’ or ‘false’ or ‘real’ or ‘fake’ doesn’t seem right. Perhaps it is the same with the materialist and spiritual interpretations of the world.

Things become very difficult when you write a history book about the occult. History is a materialist language. To ask, for instance, whether Dr Dahesh truly accomplished miracles is not a historical question. To ask why people were attracted to his message and what he offered people, however, is a historical question. As is the question of why some people were so opposed to him. So, these are the things I have focused on.

In order to answer the other question, a new genre of writing is needed. I very briefly toyed with the idea of turning this book into a work of fiction but decided that it wouldn’t solve the problems. What we need is something between fiction and non-fiction that can leave the question of logical truth hanging suspended before us. I am not sure what that is.

Before Political Islam turned into a political and militant movement, first used by the West as a weapon against leftist movements in the Middle East during the cold war, and its transformation into a target after 9/11, did Islam have more of a mystical and/or romantic image in the West? Was the idea of the East being a hot bed of terrorism and religious extremism as wide-spread then as it is now – before the establishment of the state of Israel and before the rising of the oil-rich Gulf states?

The idea of the Arab world being a hotbed of extremism goes back to at least the late nineteenth century, though in those days they would have called it ‘fanaticism’. There is a good argument that this view of Islam and Muslims as particularly ‘fanatical’ or extremist was really solidified with the rise of colonialism in the Middle East (opponents to colonial rule were branded ‘fanatical’ or irrational). Today, ‘terrorism’ seems to be a political category rather than something rooted in objective fact – at least, I cannot think of any consistent definition of the term that seems to hold water and corresponds to how it is used.

At the same time there has long been a simultaneous view of the ‘East’ as mystical, exotic and mysterious. The two have gone hand in hand since at least the nineteenth century. The two can make sense together if you say that the West is committed to viewing the East as irrational and illogical; sometimes this takes the form of ‘fanaticism’ or ‘extremism’, sometimes of ‘exotic Eastern mysteries’, but the basic fundamentals are the same.

In fact, I think it’s no coincidence that at exactly the same time as Tahra Bey is becoming a star in Paris, the French colonies in North Africa are being threatened by the revolutionary president of the Republic of the Rif Abdel Krim. As I say in my book:

When a man in ‘Arab’ robes and a headdress appeared in the Parisian press, it was most often in the role of dangerous enemy of France. But Tahra Bey, a mysterious man from the desert in long white robes and with a dark beard, had not come to take their empire; he had come to save their souls. For some, no doubt, he was a conscious or unconscious salve for their colonial anxieties.

What are the illusions the East has about the West – what we could consider the opposite lens to Orientalism? A lens where the ‘other’ looks and sees what it wants to see? And apart from the wonders of modern scientific inventions, how do you feel the eastern view of the West has changed over the last century? 

The question of views of the West in the Middle East through the twentieth century is an extremely complex one, over which debates have raged. There are questions of modernity, colonialism, capitalism, and religion lying behind them all. Obviously, too, Eastern views of the West cannot simply be a reverse of Orientalism because that concept is so tied into power as well as simply perception. As Edward Said notes, all cultures to some extent have stereotypical views about other cultures, but what marks Orientalism out as something different is the way that these views are turned into a discourse that implicitly justifies Western rule in the East.

Still, I hope that the characters in my book, particularly Dr Dahesh and the other hypnotists, provide one way to look at this multifaceted question. They demonstrate the growing fascination with the West in the early twentieth-century Arab world and they show how far it spread. But, just as Tahra Bey reveals the ignorance of many in Europe about the realities of the Middle East, so these hypnotists show how people were willing to believe extremely outlandish things if they were presented as miracles of Western science.

I love that you’ve chosen to cover popular culture and strange phenomena in the region such as charlatans and fakirs. Your first book was about women in Cairo’s 1930s nightlife scene, while this book is about two unusual men who have pursued careers as magicians, seers or charlatans. Your interest in the world of entertainment and magic is a great way to show a side of the Middle East to which western readers don’t often have access. Do you feel that you saw a gap in the narratives about the Middle East, and realised while living in Cairo that you wanted to shed a light on that?

My aim has really always been to show the fun parts of Middle Eastern history, in particular popular culture and entertainment. To be honest, this is not primarily out of a desire to change the minds of Western readers about the Middle East, but because those are the stories that interest me. I am drawn to counter-cultures, the demi-monde and the kind of people who do not usually feature in ‘serious’ history. I like to read books about that kind of thing, and I like to write them too. If you’d asked me five years ago, when I started writing this book, I might have said that it might also change some stereotypes about the Middle East and show a different side to the Arab world than pictures in the news. Now, though, I am not sure I feel that way. After the Israeli onslaught in Gaza and the constant dehumanisation of Palestinians there, as well as the total lack of interest shown in the war in Sudan, I don’t really think my books are going to change the minds of people who don’t see Arabs fully as people. I’m not currently optimistic about the power of literature or writing to change minds. The primary audience of my books is (and probably always has been) people in the Arab world, people from the Arab world, or people who know the Arab world.

I have, though, been thinking a lot about comparisons with my previous book, Midnight in Cairo, which focused on female performers as opposed to the holy men of this book. In a lot of ways, the way that male occult performers of the 1920s and 1930s are perceived in polite society is not too dissimilar to the way that the dancers and nightclub singers were seen. In the Middle East, as in Europe, they were often seen as a dangerous threat to society and the nation. Both hypnotise and deceive their viewers, taking their money and leaving them bereft at the end. Of course, the comparisons are not direct. But they open up interesting avenues of inquiry!

Talk to me about the parallels you see between the era you explore – the turn of the twentieth century – and our current turn of the century: the rise of fascism, the proliferation of magical thinking and the business of delusion in the wake of the collapse of another empire and the birth of a new century. 

I also see these parallels to our current age and find them quite difficult to interpret. One of the core arguments of my book is that the occult makes up the avant-garde of the collective psyche. If you are looking to find the anxieties, fears, hopes, or dreams of an age, then the best place to look is with the gurus, holy men, and occultists. In 1920s Europe, people were disenchanted with Western civilisation and were searching for a whole new way to see the world. In the Middle East, they were fascinated by the potentials of modernity, but were worried about its connection to imperial powers whose reach was stretching across the region. Today, in the wellness gurus and the new-age movements of the day which appear to be the analogues of the occult movements of the 1920s and 1930, we see the same thing happening. In my interpretation (though others may have different views) what these groups promise is a way to cope with the anxiety of the world that feels as if it is about to fall apart. I don’t feel we are in a world that has collapsed, but rather one that’s tottering. People are trying to hold fast to what exists, and there are all kinds of people who are trying to convince you that if you buy this product, if you do this course, if you meditate the right way, then everything will be alright. But it won’t.

The post Ancient Magic vs. Modern Magic: Raphael Cormack in Conversation with Rana Haddad appeared first on English PEN.

It’s a very beautiful question. I haven’t thought much about the objects I’ve had bad conversations with, if you like, but here is one that just came to mind. Many years back, I picked up a World War Two hospital stretcher and converted it into a stool. Within that stool I made a window, and within that window I installed a video camera running a video piece called Don’t Look Back – when video was still an exotic part of our existence. It was a stool that looked steady, but had originated from a stretcher, an object that in many ways isn’t about steadiness. But whenever I revisit it, I wish I hadn’t done that. I wish I had left it to speak in its original voice; I wish I had worked with that voice, rather than converting it. I enforced myself too much on that piece. These days, I feel much more at ease at not interfering too much with an object’s voice and form.

Are there things I wish I’d picked up? There are many books, from many places, that I simply didn’t have the means to carry all at once. But there is one book that particularly comes to mind: I was in Damascus in 2007, and I saw a very beautiful book in Arabic that had been damaged, broken to pieces and pages torn out, its spine stitched and repaired by many hands and threads. I didn’t know at the time that I wouldn’t be able to return to Damascus again – that it would be my last visit. If I had picked it up and brought it back with me, it would have been such a forecasting metaphor, telling evidence, and an appropriate object to deal with the present and ongoing situation in Syria from a distance. It would have been a reading of an unforeseen future I wouldn’t have imagined.

That’s a very beautiful answer – thank you. When you do pick up a book – when you select it as something that you will transform and transmute into a piece of visual art – what it is that makes you pick up that book? Is it the materiality, its aesthetic as an artefact? Is it the content of the book, its literature? Is it both?

It depends on what I’m working with. In 2015, I made an installation called Another Day Lost. It was a huge miniature model of a refugee camp: small tents made from book pages and medical boxes, surrounded by burnt matches – one for each day since the start of the Syrian uprising. Every day at 12 noon, I went and burned one more match and added it to the piece – a sort of living sculpture, if you like. I needed tonnes of books, because the installation was in five locations simultaneously. So I went to an Oxfam bookshop and asked them ‘Do you have any books that you just cannot sell?’ They said they did, and they sold them to me for 1p each. Hundreds of them. They still had to be about particular subjects, materiality and categories, though – home, migration, war, language; subjects related to a refugee camp. I took those ideas and found books that related to them in different ways – ‘home’ might have been a book about making cakes, ‘migration’ a book about birds. But the magic – something I didn’t anticipate – came when I spread these former book pages and medical boxes out as miniature tents, and, when you came close to them, you found poetry in accidental marriages between images and words. A flower next to a tank. Those connections were so spontaneous. So there was intention in selecting those books, with diverse readings on home or lack of it but also the accidental magic created by the viewer.

The whole idea of using books came when I was in Cuba. In Havana, people were taking furniture to the beach, breaking it to pieces, and making boats to migrate to Miami – the furniture of the old home being used to make the journey to a dream new one. I was working on The Epic of Gilgamesh, and was drawn to use pieces of found chairs, where you could read the remnants and forms of the furniture. And when I came back from Cuba to Cambridge, I started seeing much more clearly what was available around me. In Cambridge, that was books. And my art pieces started involving and responding to them.

Serendipity seems to run through your work. The serendipity of your experiences, and how they inform your work; the serendipity of how meanings land together; the serendipity of political moments and material conditions shaping how your work is viewed.

Yes, it does. Years ago, I met a wonderful Scottish woman who had a beautiful Encyclopaedia Britannica from her father. She didn’t need it anymore, but didn’t want to throw it away, so she gave it to me. For three years, the volumes sat in my studio; I didn’t know what to do with them. Then, one day, I just sat down and started working with them. Against all this alphabetised knowledge, all this wonderful material, I created my pieces. The series is called One + eleven = two, because between two drawings you see in one volume are eleven that you don’t. That was when I started really using books in my work – I mean, working with their content, but not being restricted by it. Sometimes, I saw a word. Sometimes, an image. Sometimes, maps, or nothing. Serendipity. I spent seven months going through and responding to the forest of words, and occasionally to the illustrations and maps.

Words are forms of practice as well as material for your work. In Urgent Archive, there are names of women written – or maybe drawn – in Arabic on the glass window at the front of Kettle’s Yard. You wrote those names with your non-dominant hand an in reverse – or maybe you drew them. Could you talk a little about names and naming in your work, and about your non-dominant hand?

The moment you asked that question, it took me to a place. A very appropriate place. When I was a little boy, I couldn’t form the first letter of my name. As the letter ‘I’ in English sounds like an ‘eye’, in Arabic ع  also sounds like an ‘eye’. Another serendipity. I came crying to my mother, so disappointed with myself, and she asked me what was wrong. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I cannot write this stupid letter.’ She asked me to show it to her. She was illiterate, but she looked at the letter and held my hand in hers and copied it – once, twice, three times – and then let it go, and I carried on copying it until I could form my ‘eye’. She said to me: ‘Don’t look at it as a letter. Look at it as a drawing.’ And that stuck with me, that very beautiful and generous idea that a letter is a drawing, that a drawing can form a language, that language is made of fragments of drawings. That’s something I’ve held onto when making found poetry – that words are sculptures.

Much later, I started teaching her the alphabet. She wanted to be able to write to my children, my two boys. In one note to them, she drew the alphabet and the numbers. That was a very powerful experience for me – how she was trying to teach them as she was learning. I made some pieces in response into her precious handwriting, including a piece made upside down and with my wrong hand. I was trying to be closer to her by imitating her. It was called Afterimage. And I found that, while my right hand – the adult – was overtrained, my left – the child – was still fresh. In fact, whenever I’m stuck, I go to my left hand. My non-dominant hand is a treasure.

In 2000, when I was asked by a photographer which object I would most like to take into the new millennium, I took weeks to decide. Then, when I invited him to my studio and had nothing in front of me, and he asked what I had chosen, I held my left hand in my right. That was my object that I didn’t want to lose.

When I made that window in Kettle’s Yard, I used it: if I had used my right hand, it would have been pure recording; with my left hand, I could breathe slowly, read the names slowly, and think about the enormity of the loss. The window piece was an extension of a piece exhibited inside the galley called Killed, Detained and Missing, a list of women written on an old pianola role, next to a speaker where I recited these names.

You talk about your right hand being overtrained, and it turns me to a question I want to ask about your training. Or, specifically, about training and place. You’ve talked elsewhere about your study in different practices, and about how those practices aren’t labels but a network of practices coalescing. But what I’m interested in is the relationship between training and geography – about the relationship between form, and the spaces in which those forms entered your practice. Syria, Russia, Cuba, the UK; painting, drawing, writing, theatre design (not in that order). How does space bear on practice?

I come from the volcanic mountains in the south of Syria. So even my journey to Damascus was about a different geology, different accents. And then, in Damascus, I was in a tiny room (nicknamed the Half) in a big city – an old Damascene house, where all my materials as a painter had to fit into that small, low-ceilinged room, but everything around me in Old Damascus was material for painting. In fact, as well as regretting not picking up that book, I regret that in those days I did not look more, see more, excavate that present. I had a very intense four years there, where I started sculpting and re-sculpting my ways of seeing. The mud of Old Damascus became my mud. But I needed to breathe after the intensity of the early 80s, and I left for Baku, and then Saint Petersburg.

That’s where I dived into theatre as a solo performer – and I hadn’t expected, at all, that this was a language I would dive into much later in my life. I found I could convey a feeling without saying a word, and that was very special to me. It shifted my practice – there was more about the relationship between body and space, body and light. Gorbachev was doing his perestroika, and I was doing mine (to myself). Damascus was fine art, Arabic, heat, south; Saint Petersburg was architecture, Russian, freezing cold, north.

And then I came to Cambridge, where everything is so miniature-like. After Saint Petersburg, Cambridge looked like a theatre set, but it was also where I had studio space for the first time. Theatre design was an obvious thing to study in London. But I knew I was not an architect, nor a theatre designer. Having my studio next to the ADC Theatre, and encountering all the old props discarded behind it and using them in my work, is how that space most shifted my practice.

I take my studio for a walk with me wherever I am. I take my eyes with me too. And I pick up objects from a place, not reading at the time what these objects might become, just letting it sit, letting them tease me a bit and teasing them back, then the action of seeing but not seeing the final product, and then finding that the piece is shaped by all these conversations, places and forms. That’s a bit dangerous for an artist known for a particular style, a particular language that people expect of us. But I’ve found that, though I love painting and I am a painter, I don’t mind venturing into unfamiliar mediums, novel places. This risk enriches me, and enriches my articulation of a feeling.

So maybe it’s about the serendipity of how place and time and form encounter each other, but the constancy of your eye amid all those shifting encounters.

I’d like to take this idea of movement and return to the idea of migration you mentioned earlier. Migration has figured in your work for decades. And the figure of the boat has been an ongoing part of this. You’ve spoken elsewhere about how the boat has been, for you, a way to articulate the violence of conflict without centring images of conflict. And I’d like to explore the ethics and aesthetics of the boat a little.

I was at Glastonbury this year, and Banksy’s inflatable boat passed a few feet in front of me in a crowd. By the time I’d left the crowd and got signal on my phone, critics and politicians and voices on social media had all already weighed in with loud (often awful) opinions about it. Because of our polluted political and cultural discourse, the image of the boat has become so contested and fraught – often as a way of avoiding talking about the boat itself. Easier to address an artist’s work about refugee deaths than address refugee deaths themselves, perhaps. As an artist with many famous works involving boats, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Thank you for asking this. You see, this is the problem with creation. There are three stages to any creation: pre-creation, the process of creation, and the process of seeing it in hindsight. And they don’t necessarily reveal the same picture. And relationships with the actual and the metaphorical shift, too. Boats have meant different things in my pieces – and different things, of course, to the audiences viewing them.

I made a model of the Bibby Stockholm barge out of sardine tins, called Keep Them at Bay. I was playing with language, with material, with scale to respond to this inhuman solution. Another piece: on the day the Rwanda Bill was agreed, I made a performance called Stop the Bombs, Not the Boats: I took children’s milk bottles, filled them with red ink, and threw them onto a flattened tent so that it was bleeding, and walked with the stained tent to the top of Castle Hill. That piece is about the boat – the metaphor of the boat – even if it doesn’t use the image of the boat. And then there is the 101^st piece for the British Museum’s 100 objects series, Dark Water, Burning World, the little boats made from bicycle mudguards with their burnt matchstick people. And Precarious Passage, one of these boats sailing through a hole burnt in the book A History of the World in 100 Objects. Actually, I happen to have it with me here now [holds up book in left hand, boat in right hand, and places the boat through the hole in the book]. This is both image and metaphor. You see, migration is not a current issue. It is the history of humanity, and the history of life – cells migrate, trees migrate, ideas migrate. For me, this boat is not a scale model. It is a scale metaphor. We are all emigrants from our first home, the womb.

And here’s another piece – Siege Two, which is made from a typewriter, and is dedicated to Marie Colvin, who lost her life in Homs [holds up piece]. If you look [turns piece in the air], it has another shape in the form of a boat. I showed this at the Venice Biennale, in this form – as a sailing, destructed, very fragile boat. I remember being confronted by many questions when I went to the Biennale and saw a real refugee boat that had been rescued. Barca Nostra (‘Our Boat’) by Swiss-Icelandic artist Christoph Büchel. That was not an easy thing. It was so emotional, so suffocating. There isn’t a place for imagination anymore, when reality is surrounding you like this. It took me some time to digest it. I’m having difficulty even thinking about it now. So I suppose I have found that there is a difference between a piece that takes you to something but leaves you to continue making your own journey, and a piece that is in your face, does not let you escape from it, that goes at an aggressive speed, but in our times, I think there is a room and a need for both approaches.

The immediacy of the confrontation – a collapse of image and metaphor into nothing other than that immediacy.

Yes. I think of the carpenter from Lampedusa, Francesco Tuccio, who after 11 October 2013, when 311 people died in the boat that sank there, made crosses for the Eritrean and Somali survivors using wood from the wreck. And then made a sculpture, a large cross, where you can still see the paint on the wood.  The Cross was donated by him to the collection of the British Museum. His was a boat made into a cross; mine was a bicycle mudguard made into a boat. I know I am touching but not answering your question fully. And that’s because this is still an ongoing question for me.

Thank you. It’s such a generous answer. And of course it is ongoing – past, yes, and present, yes, but also ongoing and future. I’d like to end by asking you a question to do with tense and time. It’s something right there in the title of Urgent Archive. There’s a story behind that title (and maybe you can talk about that), but I want to ask specifically about the contradiction in it – of archiving, and its sense of slowness and past and permanence, and of urgency. Is it a viable task to archive the present? To have an ongoing archival practice? Or must this always be a retroactive, retrospective endeavour? I don’t want to pre-empt your answer, but I realise we’ve spoken about how a found object isn’t just a thing of a moment; that it is a thing of the past discovered in the present for use in a future, those timelines always butting up against each other. So, a horrible question: is, as artists, there a moral incumbency of archiving as we go, of archiving the emergency and urgency of the present, or can we leave that, for posterity, to the future, as an act for the future?

Ah – a very lovely question. You know, I only encountered the word ‘oxymoron’ very recently. I’m a work-in-progress too – I don’t shy away from that. I think of the phrase ‘leave to remain’, as I say that.

As you reference, the title of Urgent Archive is about Mansour al-Omari, a human rights journalist who recorded the names of his fellow prisoners using ragged strips of cloth and blood as an ink. But the interest in the word ‘archive’ also comes from my interest in seeds. Because seeds are an archive of themselves – archiving their past, their present, their future. In this tiny universe are three tenses all at once. But now let me go back: the first piece I did in relationship to Syria is called Excavating the Present, and it’s all to do with X-ray images, and how mothers in Syria have to collect the body parts of their children in order to mourn them. You know, in many languages there’s no distinction between past and present. And I wonder if the word ‘archive’ is a Western construction of how to deal with the past. It’s such an elusive word. It sounds out that word ‘ark’ at its start – it has a kind of motion in it, of life in it. And life is not fixed: it has multiple tenses in it. My intention is not the past; it is the present, and how one can construct a past or a future from it.

I’ll give you another example. For one of my pieces, I took Aleppo Citadel, and the destruction of Aleppo before the earthquake, and made it out of Aleppo soap. This is a form that transmits itself throughout time: it shrinks, it is discoloured. It’s an interesting archive.

I’ll tell you one more story, and then I will finish. I planted some wheat outside Kettle’s Yard a while ago. I had planned to go and harvest it and make bread though this piece, and tell the story of the bombing of Aleppo Seed Bank and how, ICARDA having lost control of it in 2016, it managed to retrieve the first accession from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to initiate regeneration and reconstitute the full profile of the collection in Syria. But Syrian wheat and the English weather didn’t work out. It died. And I didn’t want the piece to be about death. So I decided to construct an artist book/ herbarium out of it. I was all prepared and ready to make a performance piece out of this yesterday. But an hour before my arrival, the gardeners unknowingly cleared everything away. I was a little devastated, but I realised there where tiny fragments of the wheat, tiny little remains, from which I wanted to create an archive. These tiny fragments told a story of the whole. I know I’m scratching a tiny mark on the surface of this colossal loss, and that’s what I must do as an artist.

Thank you for these beautiful questions.

Thank you for these beautiful answers, and this beautiful one to end. I’ll tell you what I thought as I sat with the phrase ‘urgent archive’: only when you don’t see life as urgent do you think of archiving as a future act about the past. When you know and see and live emergency, archiving becomes such an obvious emergency act. Timelines capitulate. It isn’t about recording what has gone, isn’t about thinking or rethinking for whom this archive is created: it is simply about a moment, and a moment of preservation. And I think there is something very beautiful about seeing the ways in which artistic practice can be an act of preserving in the present, within which time past, present and future can fall where it may. Sorry – I shouldn’t steal the last word.

OK, I’ll steal it back. You remember your first question about regret? And my answer about that book in Damascus that was so torn to pieces? I see this now: that book was archiving the destruction before it happened. It was sending me a message that I didn’t hear. It was hidden, and was only passing by the market in Old Damascus. This fleeting encounter taught me that one must be present, and almost alert, to sense the hidden. This is why I am trying to make an herbarium out of the fragments of wheat. You see, look at this [holds up a single fragment of a stalk of wheat]. You would just walk past this without noticing it. But though it might sound pretentious, I am going to make a meal from this. A meal for the mind’s eye.

Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

The post The Mud of Old Damascus Became My Mud: A Conversation with Issam Kourbaj appeared first on English PEN.

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.

The post Shouldering the Boat appeared first on English PEN.

For me, the easy part of writing is the intoxication of a new character – following and understanding their rhythm, so to speak – so it’s always a matter of discipline for me to stop writing new characters. But I knew early that a chorus would be vital to tell this story. I wanted to navigate polarisation, how we are exposed to information, who and what convinces us, how we form our opinions and how we take a stand. And the way polarisation presents to us in these times is that the arguments held by two opposing sides are mutually exclusive, that there really isn’t much room for doubting one’s own side or conceding to a part of the other side’s argument or venturing out into the grey, into the nuances. We’ve got used to dismissing the other side completely; social media and fake news have made it quite easy for us to do so. My father (right wing) is exposed to his information, his choir, and I (left wing) to mine. And, ultimately, it can make us very obedient to our sides, and can sometimes make us lazy in our critical thinking. Around the time I started writing this book, in 2018, I was dismissing everything my dad was saying as ‘fake news’, and vice versa. But in the novel I wanted to make it hard to choose one side as correct and dismiss the other; I wanted to make it hard to be told what to think and be obedient, so I asked each of my characters to try their best to convince me.

Who walked into your head first: Vetur, Eyja, Ólafur or Tristan (or someone else)?

They came in the order in which they appear: Vetur, Eyja, Óli and Tristan. Each one asked me what would happen to them in this society.

How did you collaborate with Larissa on the English translation? I can imagine those voices threw up some translation troubles.

Me and Larissa have worked together for almost five years now, and I think we have a very beautiful partnership in translation. She is a wordplayer, like me, and we both like to goof around with the text. But I think the biggest challenge in The Mark was Tristan. His voice was written in a very specific Icelandic sociolect, half-English, half-Icelandic, that’s considered to be very poor Icelandic. The half-English part obviously slips seamlessly into an all-English translation, and so Larissa needed to find an all-English way to express the character, which I think she did very well. My Portuguese translator, Luciano Dutra, had to find another solution: he chose different dialects, because English slang in Brazil would indicate an upper-middle-class education, and even sophistication.

Can we talk about political fiction? All fiction is political. Most work we call ‘political fiction’ is work that has something expressly to say about political issues. The Mark is political fiction in the sense of engaging utterly directly with political processes, theories, questions. Does that make you a political novelist?

Well, let’s be frank, political fiction sounds very dry and serious – an ‘eat your vegetables’ kind of genre. And although I love vegetables today, I didn’t love them as a kid, unless they were on top of a pizza. So I want to write a pizza with mushrooms, onion, peppers. A loaded pizza. Characters and style will always be priorities number one and two for me. I think speculative fiction, a highly political genre, often finds the balance of a vegetable pizza: in a playful way, shifting the angle a little bit to look at society from a slightly different viewpoint. I think it’s a brilliant way to engage people in political thinking.

How has the book been received – and perhaps used – in Iceland?

It was initially hijacked by the vaccination debate when it came out in Iceland. I had finished the book in January 2021, just as the first vaccinations began, and the debate and craziness didn’t start until later that spring. But when the book came out, in October 2021, it was all that interviewers asked me about. There are certainly similarities: in The Mark, you can voluntarily take The Empathy Test and mark yourself in an official registry, open to the public; more and more private and public spaces are closing their doors to unmarked people, which constitutes one third of the population. And because the book considers both sides of the debate – whether The Empathy Test should be mandatory or not – there was suddenly a dialogue for the anti-vaxxers to engage in. There I was, six months pregnant, with a vaccination band aid on my arm, scrolling through comments by anti-vaxxers and pro-vaxxers, using the book as a platform.

What I will say is that the vaccination debate is a good example of how, as a herd, we collectively decide how best to ensure our survival, and then ridicule those who didn’t accept the terms. It’s an example of how hard it is to second-guess, or to go against the right opinion. We were in a rush and so we made medicine in haste, and every other week something new came out – that women under 40 shouldn’t take this brand, the stories of complications after vaccination (I know a guy who lost all his body hair, a woman who started having heart problems; I have friends who didn’t get their periods for months). And can’t you feel it, now, when I step a little bit into the grey area, the danger of it? That – this – is what I initially wanted to explore in The Mark. I vaccinate my child, and if somebody told me to get a fourth shot of Pfizer tomorrow I would. My point is: we must be able openly to discuss the grey.

Are referenda good things?

Yes. They are a vital part of democracy, and a vital part of making citizens feel like they have a say. I am more concerned about fake news, about the ways in which we’re vulnerable to information. There have always been different newspapers. A socialist newspaper and a conservative newspaper and so on. But the speed of it all has changed everything – the speed of information, the access to information and therefore the access to fake news, the access to online spaces that build societies on fake news. You can become an extremist in anything in a course of a day.

What are your hopes for Icelandic literature (at home, and internationally)?

At home: I hope the big publishers start publishing something other than just middle-class trauma porn in poetry.

Internationally: I hope somebody buys the rights to two novels coming out in October 2024, Amity by Brynja Hjálmsdóttir, and Jumbo Jets by Tómas Ævar Ólafsson.

Could you speak a little about technology and freedom? The Mark is speculative fiction, in many ways – it’s in a future and it imagines future technologies that raise questions about the promotion and limitation of freedoms. Is technology a threat to freedoms (personal and collective) – has it always been?

Yes, how do we define freedom?? Are we free within a group? Let’s paraphrase: are we ever free within a group? The group is a safety measure: we flock together to survive and to protect one another. But we compromise our total freedom, the freedom from being watched and surveyed and disciplined by one another. There are so many rules! How you converse, how you use your eyebrows while speaking, what to say. And so, as a result, so many freedoms. But, alright, usually we define freedom like John Stuart Mill: we are free as long as we don’t hurt others within the group.

When writing The Mark, I became a little obsessed with the thresholds between private and public spaces. Most of us have some kind of territory to call our own – a place where we are free from the group, where our nervous systems can relax – but as soon as you step out of your bedroom door, or out of your apartment, you have entered a public space. And what happens to your nervous system when, with technology, the group can supervise individuals much more efficiently? And step into your holiest of private spaces, your ability to empathise? As you can read, I have no answers, only questions.

Finally, as the author of a book so deeply interested in the idea of empathy, can you talk about the role of literature in fostering it? (Or, put differently, therapy or books?)

Well, I do believe in the general idea that reading other people’s narratives, whether these people are characters or are real, trains our ability to imagine other people’s existences. But I am also deeply interested in the dark side of empathy – whether empathy, which has been the antidote for evil for some decades, can also blind one’s judgement. There is a difference between understanding an evil act and excusing it.

My answer will always be both (I am a child of divorce): therapy and books.

Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

The post You Can Become an Extremist in the Course of a Day: An Interview with Friða Ísberg appeared first on English PEN.

Before 20 August 2012, the environment for freedom in Myanmar was grim: enduring, extensive and prolonged censorship, alongside comprehensive state propaganda. Then, on that day, the pre-printing censorship process was suspended. But though the so-called freedom of the press was introduced, writers and the media could still not feel free; they remained tightly bound by their subconscious minds, shaped by decades-long state censorship, and the pen remained chained to the hand of censorious peers and the censorious self. Self-censorship was ingrained, and it took time to find an exit. And peer-censorship was even more sensitive – it was novel, stemming from new forms of group pressure, and would require new forms of resistance.

While ‘media freedom’ became a positive catchphrase among political activists who had lacked the opportunity or privilege to apply for publishing licences throughout the military era, there were other sides to it, too. Many military-backed media outlets were recklessly disseminating the horrific news from Rakhine state without adhering to journalistic ethics, fanning the flames of hatred ignited by racial and religious discrimination. Censorship – all the barriers to a free press – was an obstacle in addressing hate speech propaganda – something the PEN Charter sees as an ‘evil’ of the free press. I doubted the new ‘freedom’ we had in 2012.

In 2013, with the establishment of organisation registration laws, PEN Myanmar was formed. We employed creativity and engaged in numerous expressive projects to pursue the true freedom we desired. PEN Myanmar’s first project, the Conflict-Sensitive Media Monitoring Survey, aimed to uncover evidence of how media freedom had been exploited to fuel hatred and social discord, identifying both the perpetrators and the media platforms utilised for such purposes. Across 2014 and 2015, we undertook various projects – ‘peace writing contests’ for short stories and poetry, poetry slams, ‘literature for everyone’ (Yatha Asone Asan) initiatives, literary evenings – designed to fight the fight against hate speech, promote peace through creative expression, engage with minority language communities and, crucially, provide a platform for communities to exercise their right to free expression while nurturing an essential and vibrant literary culture.

One standout project was Literature for Everyone Creative Expression (LFECE). Literary talks have been popular throughout Myanmar’s history – albeit usually adopting a lecture-style approach. While some reading groups would hold discussion-based events, they were not accessible to the broader public. With civil liberties a fundamental principle for democracy, PEN Myanmar endeavoured to establish LFECE as an inclusive, aesthetically driven, secure platform.

Over the space of a decade, PEN Myanmar organised over 150 LFECE events, across fourteen states and divisions and in the Naypyidaw region. Participants from diverse backgrounds – students, farmers, labourers, office workers, religious practitioners, writers, literature enthusiasts from different ethnic groups – joined these activities. But as that decade passed, regulations were imposed on such literary talks, due to the perception that they often veered into political discourse – advocating for democracy, criticising the military, and scrutinising the government of the time. Obtaining permission to hold them became harder. Our LFECE events took place in small communal venues – monasteries, libraries and churches, with smaller groups of attendees. We had to be creative. But it meant we could engage with local writers, poets and – especially – youth who were aspiring to become authors.

The fundamental requirement for participation in this project was wholehearted engagement. Members of PEN Myanmar – renowned writers and those writing anonymous– would recite their works or sometimes works they admired, inviting the audience to respond either through commentary or by presenting their own pieces (regardless of whether they had been published). Occasionally, members would deliver poetry or visual performances, encouraging active participation from the audience. And in many instances the audience responses exceeded expectations. In one village, an illiterate farmer joyfully contributed impromptu poetry, likening her experience to the rising sun despite her age being akin to sunset. Her expression of freedom was applauded by the entire audience.

The true success of this endeavour lay in the community’s belief that, through LFECE, they had begun to recognise the role of creativity and literature in advancing and safeguarding freedom. They had gained the opportunity to share their creative expressions on an equal footing with well-known writers and poets, and had learned how to engage in respectful, mutually listening discussions on other political, economic and social issues. In many instances, community members were moved to tears, their voices genuinely heard and valued, a newfound freedom they had never before encountered.

PEN Myanmar’s leadership was able to establish relatively accessible channels of communication with the National League for Democracy (NLD) government. Consequently, we intensified our advocacy efforts, conducting initiatives such as a ‘Freedom of Expression Roadshow’ to fourteen regional parliaments, campaigning for the Right to Information Bill. We continued to focus on informative, analytical and creative endeavours, including Edu-entertainment programmes promoting federal democracy, conducting ‘literature inclusiveness surveys’, and facilitating capacity-building programmes that trained student union members to become champions of freedom of expression. We continued to organise numerous literature-related activities – LFECE, the Link the Wor(l)ds translation workshop, Collective Dream poetry performances, literary cafés, literature evenings, a short-story writing curriculum, screen-writing courses, and creative writing workshops featuring both international and local authors.

Many writers’ organisations in Myanmar prioritise purely literary endeavours, often misconstruing PEN Myanmar’s initiatives as reliant on foreign funding. But our primary objective has always been to safeguard and advance freedom of expression, fostering a vibrant literary culture and establishing a connection between formal education and literature. Despite criticism, we have merely employed creativity in our activities to pursue the freedom we aspire to achieve.

I steadfastly believe in the power of creativity as a means to broaden our freedoms, recognising freedom is not fully attainable only through practical means – especially in my country. The act of being creative doesn’t require permission from external entities, including censorship boards. But once our creative acts are published, our physical and social freedoms become endangered. Repressive regimes curtail our civil liberties, arbitrarily arresting us and imprisoning us as means to control and suppress dissent. And so when it comes to creativity, freedom is not simply a matter of chance. It is a result of a conscious choice.

After the coup in 2021, several writers met untimely deaths. Others endured arrest and imprisonment. Others found themselves without platforms to exhibit their work as the military revoked news outlets’ licenses. But, despite the upheaval, many writers remain in Myanmar, continuing to write without expecting publication, financial gain, recognition, applause; without fear. They have harnessed their creative freedom to explore diverse means for readers to interact with their creations.

Before the coup, many writers and poets actively contributed to online platforms, attracting sizeable audiences. But the surge in arbitrary arrests linked to social media posts has led to a reluctance – on 13 April 2023, Kyaw Min Swe, an editor and journalist, was apprehended by the military shortly after he changed his profile picture to a black image in solidarity with the victims of airstrikes on a village in Sagaing Region. Meanwhile, the doubling of data prices and the rising cost of SIM cards, combined with the decrease in writers’ incomes, has greatly restricted online accessibility. Nevertheless, over time new online magazines and YouTube channels (operating from foreign countries) have emerged and gained traction, notably supporting fundraising efforts for the Spring Revolution against the resurgence of military. From time to time, these channels also release audiobooks of well-known novels and short stories.

In March 2021, the military announced that issues falling under the purview of the News Media Law and the Printing and Publishing Law would be subject to adjudication in military courts. These courts possess the authority to impose capital punishment. Despite the prohibition of certain pro-revolution writers’ works in local bookstores, some publishing houses have managed to release novels and other literary works. While some writers still find it necessary to remain in hiding, book launches have become spaces where some can safely engage with the public.

The enactment of the Organisation Registration Law in October 2022 intensified requirements on associations like PEN Myanmar, with severe penalties for activities that diverge from the regulations. Now we require additional creativity to sustain our work, with our members dispersed across various locations. I cannot divulge the current activities of PEN Myanmar. What I can affirm is that we continue to employ our creativity in pursuit of the freedom we aspire to achieve.

Writing demands reflective time. For writers, creativity is not only about freedom but also about the pursuit of it. Censorship restricts the publication of literature, but not its essence of freedom. Tragically, in June 2023, Nyi Pu Lay, president of PEN Myanmar, passed away due to a medical emergency while in hiding. But we discovered that, in that time, he had penned numerous short stories under pseudonyms, and sketched landscapes from various parts of the world. He had used his artistic ingenuity to carve out the freedom he sought.

Ma Thida is a medical doctor, writer, human rights activist and former prisoner of conscience. In 1993, she was sentenced to 20 years in prison for practicing freedom of speech but was released in 1999. She was awarded international human rights awards, including the Reebok Human Rights Award, the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award, Freedom of Speech Award and Disturbing the Peace; Courageous Writer at Risk Award. She was the inaugural elected president of PEN Myanmar from 2013 till 2016.  She served as a board member of PEN International from 2016, until she was elected as chair of their Writers in Prison Committee in 2021. She was a research associate at Southeast Asia Studies council at Yale University for 2021–2022. She moved to Germany as a fellow of Martin Roth Initiative for 2022–2023, and is currently a fellow of the Writers in Exile programme of PEN Germany.

The post Creativity Rests in Hunting for the Freedom We Want to Have appeared first on English PEN.