Things are always different on the ground. And often surprising. That’s why I am an experiential writer and not an academic one. Encounter – with people and place – is central in my writing. My encounters with the people of the border region showed me just how ideology can be in turns powerless and powerful. The ideology of a single national, religious, ethnic identity tends to be counterbalanced, often, by the reality of people and communities having poly-valent, multi-faceted, messy and interesting pasts and presents.

So for instance, many of the Turks of Thrace are descended from Balkan Muslims expelled from Greece, Bulgaria and Bosnia some 100 years ago and some speak remnants of Slavic dialects. My friend and translator in Turkey, the photographer I call Nevzat in the book, is one such person – and it was thanks to his Bulgarian language, passed down by his grandmother, that I was able to access the people of Turkish Thrace at all. Despite the savage and stupid border imposed on this region during the Cold War, it is very much a ‘Thrace without borders’, as a Bulgarian Orthodox priests in Edirne put it.

On the other hand, the iron curtain and its legacy is a powerful reminder of how ideology can cast a lasting spell over a region. Part of that legacy is a spirit of paranoia, fear, and a choking sense of the unspeakable – this is some of what I tried to capture in Border. It is also symbolic that the iron curtain was recycled and sold as scrap by locals. The scrap of history: this is the future of all inhumane borders and walls, because they go against the flow of time and understanding. On the whole, I feel that ideology of any kind takes greater hold over the minds of those without much variety of life experience, those with sheltered lives. The more varied your life experience, the more sharply you can see through the facade of an ideology. This is why it’s so vital for all of us to cross various borders and see how things are on the other side. That way, the human principle always wins over dogma.

Increasingly it seems to me that separating past, present and future is a futile task, they inform each other so much. I’ve read in another interview that you’re interested in ancestral legacies, and I was wondering if you could expand on that a little bit. (For me, personally, my ancestral legacy is something that drives me to make up for past shortcomings and crimes.)

Your take on it sounds intriguing! A futile task indeed – because the real task is to truly understand these connections and change the groove of repetition. William Faulker nailed it: ‘The past is not over yet. It’s not even past.’

I’m interested in how small acts of kindness or cruelty can impact generational and collective fate. There are many such cases in Border. For instance the nice man in The Village Where You Lived Forever, locally known as Indiana Jones, whose shepherd-father back in 1984 saw a young East German fugitive trying to cross into Greece, eating some apples in what he thought was Greece but was still Bulgaria, and duly handed him over to the border police who beat him to death. The whole village lives with that memory. If you spend time there and listen to people, it’s as if that young man is still there, eating his last apples.

My interest in legacies from the past began during the journeying for Border, and went on to become a new book, To The Lake. I explore how ancestral legacies (emigration, exile, war, tyranny, perfectionism, idealism, nationalism) travel down generational lines to each of us. None of us is spared, we all carry the past, whether conscious of it or not. Through the landscape of the Ohrid-Prespa Lakes in the south-western Balkans, I explore how we each carry psychic, emotional, political, and cultural legacies from our families and nations. Families are microcosms of nations. I start with myself and my maternally inherited fear of loss.

I wanted to ask you about belonging. In Border, you frequently touch on the idea that you could be at home anywhere, a notion that you question throughout the book. I wonder what you think about belonging now, years after your trips to the border. And in a more general sense, I wonder if you think it’s possible to feel at home everywhere, growing up, as we have, in states that indoctrinate us with the idea of ‘the nation’ as the ultimate indicator of where we belong.

‘Home is where they understand you,’ said the German writer Christian Morgenstern. And ‘Home is where they can pronounce your name’, in an Irish proverb. Where do we feel understood, and where do we bring the light of our own understanding? That’s a good indication of where we belong, at least for a time. Ultimately, we all belong in love – love is our true home. Wherever we are engaged with something that we truly love, and whoever we share genuine love with – that is our home. I grasped this through my encounters with the people of the Border – the last shepherds, lighthouse keepers, voluntary workers, gardeners, story-tellers, border people like Marina in Strandja Mountain who live in a plundered humanscape, but who continue to nurture what is left and infuse it with meaning and even magic.

Nationally shared markers can be powerful in terms of cultural community (where they can spell your name…). As for me, these days I feel at home wherever there is unspoilt nature. I don’t miss living in Bulgaria, but I do miss speaking Bulgarian. Language is a powerful home and a powerful psychological glue. It is Bulgarian – and by extension other Slavic – languages that has made books like Border and To The Lake possible at all. Even if English is my literary language and therefore also my home.
But artists should never be too comfortable anywhere, and good art by its very nature crosses all borders.

Tell me about your next book. I’ve read that it’s a psychogeography of two lakes in Albania and Macedonia. I’m assuming that one of these is Lake Ohrid, where your grandmother (is that right?) is from. Like the border you writer about in Border, this is a region of religious syncretism, mixed languages and cultures, but it was also less of a periphery, at least in Yugoslavian times. What has been different about this book project, compared to the previous one? What has been similar?

Yes, To The Lake is a journey around the Ohrid-Prespa basin – one of the world’s most ancient lake basins. Like Border, the lakes today sit on a triple national border (North Macedonia, Albania, and Greece) and are very much a periphery. But they were shaped by successive civilisations, starting in antiquity with the Illyrians and the Macedons. The more personal journey into family dynamics is my way into the broader exploration of the southern Balkans with their extraordinarily stubborn legacies of trauma and survival.
While the border with its masculine militarism was the central metaphor in my previous book, the lake is the central image here –  a feminine, gathering place, but of course the deeper truth turns out to be more ambiguous and uneasy. Because lakes are also places of secrets and death.

Writing about South Eastern Europe is very often shaped by a curious mixture of exoticising and negative stereotypes. (Or Balkanism, as Maria Todorova called it.) Border has had great success, and I wonder what that has felt like. Have you felt like an unofficial and perhaps unwanted ambassador?

Balkanism is a cousin to Orientalism, and both are caused by the fact that often, we the natives of the Balkans or the Middle East, with our extraordinarily polyphonic histories and hurts, are narrated by others – usually others from the dominant colonising cultures. We resent that, of course, but passively. The curious result is that over time, we have become others in our own eyes – a strangely self-obscuring syndrome whereby we struggle to narrate ourselves to the outside world and are then extra resentful that the only times we are ‘noticed’ is when there is a war or some other negative event. This is changing, though. Contemporary Balkan writers are being translated into more languages, and there are also more of us Balkan natives who write through a double or even multiple cultural perspective, thanks to the free movement of people after the Cold War. Thanks to the removal of various walls.

I’m a poet and storyteller. The artist’s job and destiny is to be subversive – very different from the role of a spokesperson. My focus is on capturing the essence of place and human experience. That is where my loyalty is: to the truth of the human historio-geographies I explore, because I love them so. If anything, I am an ambassador for the powerless, those who live history instead of writing it safely from behind a desk. So that history is not always written by the victors.

Kapka Kassabova is a cross-genre writer with a special interest in human geographies and the hidden narratives of places, people, and peripheries. She has published several works of narrative non-fiction, as well as poetry and fiction. Border: a journey to the edge of Europe was shortlisted for, and won, multiple awards, including the British Academy Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding, the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year, the Edward Stanford-Dolman Travel Book of the Year, and the inaugural Highlands Book Prize. Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, she is now based in the Scottish Highlands. Her forthcoming book is To The Lake: a Balkan journey of war and peace (Granta/ Graywolf 2020).

Author portrait by TD.

Interview by Theodora Danek.

The post Living History: a Conversation with Kapka Kassabova appeared first on English PEN.

I came into translation about 15 years ago, because there is a gatekeeping of voices-not only internationally, but even within the Indian context. This gatekeeping is along the lines of inequalities: caste and class and gender and race. So, the Anglophone Indians would read/ discuss/debate issues that were being written about in the English media, and then on the streets of Tamil Nadu, there would be another discourse. As a Tamil woman, it was quite schizophrenic — and I sort of did my early books of translations, of the Dalit leader Thirumavalavan to fill what I felt was a huge void in what was being consumed in English. This concern about putting voices out there – who are not amplified or picked up easily within the Anglophone discourse – has been a motivation behind my choice of projects.

The four women poets who appear in Desires Become Demons, Malathi Maithri, Salma, Sukirtharani and Kutti Revathi, are crucial, radical voices. Their work cannot be contained within their poetry alone, they are also active politically in articulating the rights of women and oppressed people. Their poetry is incandescent in its construction, and explosive in its purpose. They are writing within and against a society that is seemingly progressive, a society that covers-up its male hegemony in various guises. Their feminism attacks the caste system, say, in the poems of Sukirtharani. Their feminism clamours loudly for female desire and the negotiations women have to make for gaining a little autonomy in the poems of Salma. Malathi Maithiri and Kutti Revathi both tear apart the charade of Indian nationalism, they are sharp in their criticism of imperialism and war. As a feminist writer myself, I often encounter the average Westerner who assumes that all of us are in need of rescuing – and I think such a book, such a project, turns that trope on its head. In so many ways, it is poetry that says, ‘Listen. Learn.’

It is not just saying, ‘women are equal to men’ – it goes beyond that to say, ‘Look, the caste system is rotten’, ‘Look, language is unequally constructed’, and asks difficult questions. An interview is too short a space to unpack how feminism in the Tamil context would wary from the Western, neoliberal definition of feminism. I hope I’ve answered at least a part of your question.

In your foreword to Desires Become Demons, you point out that Western feminism sees nationalism and feminism as ‘inherently opposed concepts’. I wonder if you could say a bit more about that. I guess I see the struggle for self-rule as separate from nationalism, if that makes sense, but I do also realise that as someone from Austria, my understanding of nationalism is exclusively negative.

Because Western feminism is actually capitalist, imperialist feminism. Imperialism and capitalism are not going to be happy to probe their role in the creation of what are modern-day nation states. They are not going to acknowledge the sinister effects of colonialism. When linguistically, culturally disparate people are grouped together for the purpose of colonial administration, do they constitute a nation? India, Sri Lanka—these are all nations that were products of the British empire. Obviously people will revolt against this, and they would seek their own autonomy, respect for their language, the right to read and live and speak their language. I’m not an Indian nationalist—to borrow from Lenin, I see India as a prison house of nationalities. Kashmir is today the most occupied place on the planet. Tamil Eelam has been militarised in unimaginable ways. If Kashmiri people, if the people of Tamil Eelam demand the right to be recognised as a nation – I see it important to support that struggle. This nationalism of the oppressed, yearning to break free, is different from the fraud-nationalism of corporate capitalism and religious jingoism.

You’ve referred to yourself as a a Marxist feminist in a previous email. In some ways, When I Hit You is a brilliant deconstruction of male (faux-) Marxism. Could you elaborate on what it means to you to be a Marxist feminist? I wonder how your Marxism is shaping your feminism and vice versa. 

In a world that is not so label-dependent, it would be fine to just say writer, and get on with it. But there’s an urgent need to say feminist, if only to channel the rage I feel at how women are treated in society (and by extension, within literature too). But feminist as a label has been most glibly, successfully and criminally hijacked by capitalism (the new feminists are Sheryl Sandberg and Ivanka Trump and Theresa May), so you need to qualify that with exactly specifying what sort of feminist you are, and I think Marxist-Feminist just about captures it. I think that the creation of an equal, just society is impossible under capitalism, which is why we need to learn from the mistakes of the past and imagine other ways of living. I think understanding caste, class, race inequalities is fundamental to any understanding of women’s struggle. All the same, even to the point of annoyance, it is important to reiterate the fundamental need to address women’s questions within a Marxist framework (and other liberatory, emancipatory, or radical movements) because you blink, and then you are in the kitchen making tea for the male comrades. And men on the left would conveniently label you a petit-bourgeois feminist just so that their own authority does not get challenged.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that brilliant article in Another Gaze on the Making of the Millennial Woman – especially about whose voices get heard (privileged, white, see above), but also about how, as young women, we’re essentially asked to prioritise the personal, to prioritise ‘feelings’ in our art in order to conform to expectations. But I’m also very wary of falling into the trap of: ‘When a man writes about something, it’s about everyone. When a woman writes about something, it’s just for women.’ Where do you see the balance in all this? How do we avoid withdrawing into a sphere of making merely inward-looking art, while at the same time not conceding that ‘male’ art is somehow more worthy?

Thank you for your opinion on that piece, and for sharing it with me and the readers of this blog. It is enlightening to me, just to realise how difference works. I have to honestly say that coming from very different contexts, our experience indeed varies. I do not ever remember prioritising the personal, or being asked to do so when I started writing. I started as a translator (so the personal was hidden), I wrote political essays (the personal was hidden), and I edited a magazine (the personal was hidden). I tried to articulate myself through poetry (which I yearned to keep secret and personal, alas!). When I had to write a novel, I chose a political /historical theme because that was most urgent and pressing, and also because I dreaded that if I wrote a love story or a romance or something it would be seen as kitchen-drama, you know! I think a lot of young women from similar backgrounds could do the same – merely to resist being boxed in, and to be taken seriously. But then, life intervenes, and rudely awakens you and makes you realise that irrespective of how emancipated / empowered you are, the fact that you are a woman could be used against you, violently even, and then, my second novel happened. So, here I was, first writing about a massacre in 1968 where scores of Dalit agricultural workers and their families were killed for striking for higher wages, and then, in a moment I was pushed from this bloody battleground to write about what happened in my bedroom. I do not think male art is worthy, neither do I (any longer) think that the political is something separate from the domestic. I think it is a dangerous, false dichotomy.

Meena Kandasamy is a poet, fiction writer, translator and activist who was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. She has published two collections of poetry, Touch (2006) and Ms. Militancy (2010), and the critically acclaimed novel, Gypsy Goddess (2014) and When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017). Exquisite Cadavers is forthcoming in November 2019. She edited and translated the poetry chapbook Desires Become Demons (Tilted Axis Press, 2019). Meena holds a PhD in sociolinguistics and lives in East London.

Interview by Theodora Danek.

The post Channeling the rage: an interview with Meena Kandasamy appeared first on English PEN.

Reading The Wind that Lays Waste made me think about the role of honesty in religion – and other belief systems – and what role objective truth has when confronted with personal belief. There is a conflict between those who believe that religion is a job that pays the bills, a cynical ploy, or a true calling. Do you think of honesty and truth as something subjective?

I find it very hard to think about religion – any religion, but particularly Christianity – as an exercise in honesty. But in constructing the novel’s universe, I found it interesting for Pearson – a priest with a lot of charisma, and as such suspicious because we’ve got used to seeing religion as a money-making endeavour– to be a contradictory character. Is he an honest man, a liar, a fanatic, a great pretender? Is he a bit of all those things? I like the fact he’s an awkward character who challenges people who, like me, have little faith. And I like that, at the same time, he can generate conflict in those who do believe, making them wonder: what if I’m surrendering to a madman like that myself? We know he’s done some pretty murky things in his past, that he’s abandoned his wife to pursue his preaching, and other things that aren’t mentioned but that continue to haunt him. Can a man change? I think so. That’s something I do believe in. I believe in people’s capacity to transform themselves, to become more humane and more empathetic with the rest of the world. And I believe, or I only believe, in that when there’s no divine or magical intervention. Only when it’s a purely personal transformation, with all the limitations that we have as humans, do I think it’s real. Maybe not permanent, but real.

Your protagonist Pearson is a preacher who has power over his followers like the Pied Piper over his flock. What connection do you see between men like Pearson, and charismatic religion? 

In countries like mine, very large and with many social and economic inequalities, churches like this serve a social function that the state leaves unoccupied. They set up in the poorest regions and have a lot of influence in the community, directing people spiritually, looking after drug addicts and alcoholics, calming violent tendencies. Of course, it’s all in exchange for an addiction to God. They serve a paternalistic function in that sense too, meaning that, as you say, there’s a strong relationship between religion and fatherhood. In the novel, the notion of fatherhood is heavily questioned, in the relationship between Leni and Pearson. She hates her father, and – as I think most girls do when they’re teenagers – thinks he’s an idiot, and yet at the same time she respects the preacher, as if they weren’t one and the same person. Meanwhile, probably because they haven’t fully come to terms with it, the relationship between Brauer and Tapioca is very different, a lot freer. Brauer doesn’t try to change his son’s fate, even though letting him choose may mean ending up alone and abandoned. There’s an idea of horizontality in Brauer: my son is not my son; more than anything else he’s a person who can make his own decisions. I didn’t have children because I didn’t want to, it didn’t seem like the right plan for me. It weighed on me, the idea of having to be responsible for someone I’d then have to be generous enough to let go of. If I’d had a child, I think Brauer would have been my model.

What role do (or should) charismatic, powerful men have in society today?

Charismatic and powerful men, at least in our societies, see their role as looking after their own interests rather than serving others. That’s how it is, and more and more so as neoliberalism takes hold of our governments. In Argentina, Evangelical Christianity hasn’t yet reached the spheres of political power (at least not as powerfully as it has in Brazil), but the Catholic Church is embedded in the state and constantly interferes in the state’s decisions, blocking laws that are fundamental to women’s health, such as the right to abortion or sex education in schools.

In this book, you expose the hypocrisy of religion, but also the egocentrism of fathers. I’ve read about one of your other books, Chicas muertas, which chronicles three femicides from the 80s. I’m interested how you feel about the intersection between politics, power, activism and literature. Where do you see yourself in the square?

I think the role of writers and artists in general is always to be on the opposite side of the road from power. Even if we sympathise with some governments more than others, we always need to keep a critical and careful eye on what’s going on around us. More than the rest of my books, Chicas muertas (Dead Girls, forthcoming by Charco Press, 2020) somehow drew me out of the comfort of my home and made me take a public stand alongside it. I owe my activism to it, my continuous involvement in speaking out and reflecting on issues like gender violence, hate crime, abortion rights. I think I was already a feminist before this book, but writing, publishing and promoting it was a way of reaffirming my feminism. I’m not interested in writing literature that’s didactic or propagandist, but I’m sure anyone can read between the lines of any of my books and see what I think about certain things, where I stand in relation to the world we live in.

Selva Almada (Entre Ríos, Argentina, 1973) is considered one of the most powerful voices of contemporary Argentinian and Latin American literature and one of the most influential feminist intellectuals of the region. Including her debut The Wind that Lays Waste, she has published two novels, a book of short stories, a book of journalistic fiction and a kind of film diary (written in the set of Lucrecia Martel’s most recent film Zama, based on Antonio di Benedetto’s novel). She has been finalist of the Rodolfo Walsh Award and of the Tigre Juan Award (both in Spain). Her work has been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Swedish and Turkish. The Wind that Lays Waste is her first book to appear in English (published in collaboration with Graywolf Press, US).

Interview translated by Annie McDermott & Carolina Orloff.

The post Not permanent, but real: a conversation with Selva Almada appeared first on English PEN.

At the moment when literature does justice to what it claims for itself, even the literature of apolitical authors is political. And for a simple reason: literature, like art in general, is one of the possible pathways to truth. And the truth is always revolutionary – because we live in ideologically complex systems of perception and have, consciously or unconsciously, veiled reality around us. To that extent the search for truth alone is a political project. There are people, artists, writers who do this consciously, and there are artists who do it unconsciously, with an incomprehensible and inexplicable instinct. That is the difference between Kafka and Brecht.

Give me an example from contemporary literature.

Let me answer that metaphorically. There are artists who build their art like bees build their honeycombs. The bees have no plan, but they build in infinite perfection. And then there are artists who are architects. Everything already exists in their heads. They can reflect on what they do, they can plan it. Of course, there are also mixed forms. There are people who already know what they are doing, but leave a lot of room for instinctive things. In contemporary literature I’m observing an interesting phenomenon. Many authors started their careers with certain political commitments. And they have all now become silent. There is almost an unspoken consensus in this generation: that there is no point. One of the last politically committed authors was Günter Grass. When he died I said that a literary epoch had come to an end.

For my part, I was influenced by authors like Dickens, Èmile Zola, Balzac and Victor Hugo; later also by Latin American literature, which is a great narrative literature, always in opposition to a multitude of dictatorships. So it’s no surprise that I am who I am now. However, I am not at all interested in turning myself into a schizophrenic person: I don’t want anyone to think that I’m an artist one day and an activist the next. When I get politically involved, I do so as an artist. That’s important to me.

It sometimes feels to me as if certain contemporary ‘national’ literatures are more political than others. 

Well, let me give you an example of political literature from the UK where there is no obvious political intention, but where there clearly are political and analytical implications: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, which in a way tells the story of the fall of a political empire through a single character.

But Ishiguro wrote this novel twenty years ago. His work has changed since then.

I think that this mood (of not engaging politically via your art) is really getting stronger and stronger – to my great regret. It’s as if people think, ‘When everything is going down the drain, then at least I want to create something beautiful, but there is no point in getting involved in anything.’ On the one hand that is regrettable. On the other hand I’m actually quite happy when certain artists don’t say anything anymore because I have noticed that they are simply not very well-informed. When you talk about the EU with writers, you notice that they simply have no idea what’s going on. Then again, I am very grateful for Elfriede Jelinek – for either putting her finger on the wound or, in an ingenious double stroke, for throwing salt into the wound.

Jelinek and you are of a certain generation of politically engaged writers. For me that begs the question of what comes next – in my generation, for example.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but that is irrelevant. In the end, we have to judge the artistic and aesthetic quality of a work – and its implications, no matter what the author thought. I always like to remember what the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács said: that a work of art is only a work of art if it is smarter than the author.

Let’s talk about the nation state. If the nation state really dies, and this is the ideological goal, then many hurdles must be overcome that have to do with the indoctrination of the people. What must happen for that to happen? I am thinking above all of the media, sport, etc., all of which are in tune with the fact that the nation state is important.

One thing must be said in advance, you cannot abolish the nation state. You can’t sit down and dismantle it. It is a process that operates, just like all historical processes, with many small steps. At the moment when the nation state can no longer do what we expect it to do, it will also stop functioning as a source of identity. Because it’s not simply down to the idea that I need a national identity, because otherwise I wouldn’t know who I am. We expect the nation state to fulfil certain tasks. There will indeed be desperate attempts to equip it radically with everything we expect from it – a brief flourishing of nationalism. But it is clear that it will die in the long run because it can no longer solve many problems: finance, the internet, ecological problems, they are transnational. What we need instead is an upgraded, functional European parliament.

We must also bear in mind how young the idea of the nation is. My grandparents lived in a state and society that had no national idea, but that worked on the basis of a common market, a common currency, a common bureaucracy: the Habsburg Empire. It was destroyed by nationalism. Nationalism as an idea has blood on its hands.

Robert Menasse was born in Vienna in 1954 and studied there before moving to Brazil, where he lived for six years as a professor of literature at the University of São Paulo. He is the author of several novels translated into English, including Wings of Stone and Reverse Thrust, and of a work of non-fiction, Enraged Citizens, European Peace and Democratic Deficits: Or Why the Democracy Given to Us Must Become One We Fight for (2016). In 2017 he was awarded the German Book Prize for Die Hauptstadt (The Capital), which is out in English now, translated by Jamie Bulloch.

Interview conducted and translated by Theodora Danek. With thanks to Corinna Zifko for participating in the conversation.

The post Blood on its hands: a conversation with Robert Menasse appeared first on English PEN.

A woman, coming from the third world, throwing herself into the arms of civilised Europe, lady in distress and so on – that’s victimisation! When you’re described as an exiled writer, you’re supposed to tell that story and only that story. But I’m not telling the story of Turkey right now. With my new book, How To Lose A Country, I’m telling the story of the rest of the world. I’m trying to tell Europe and the US their story.

So you’re holding up a mirror to the West.

Yes. It’s already hard, being a woman from Turkey, to be taken seriously. There is that orientalist thing – you can speak about my country, but I can’t speak about your country. And I’ve experienced that, from an audience in the UK, I’ve been told that I can’t speak about Great Britain because I can’t understand Britain.

Why not? Because you’re a woman or because you’re foreign?

Well, I was telling a friend of mine about the reaction I’ve been getting while launching the book: the challenges, the resistance. She told me, You’re a woman and you have ideas. Nobody likes that. When you have feelings, they love it. When you have ideas – not so much.

I’ve been thinking about the brilliant essay you wrote a few years ago about being seen as a victim. There’s an odd tension about Westerners who want to ‘help’.

A few years ago, when I launched another book, a woman in the audience folded her hands and said, What can we do for you? I felt like I was a panda, being adopted by a website. What was interesting was that at that time, Brexit was happening. It was so amazing to see that the British were still convinced that they’re in a position to help other people. You know those clichés, those roles, they don’t work anymore.

I guess the UK hasn’t done its reckoning with its past yet and still sees itself in a certain role.

It’s doing that right now, but in a very tense way. It’s messy. This is what populism does to a country: it makes debate impossible. All of a sudden you realise you’ve lost the basic consensus of how we communicate, the basics of rationality. I can see what will happen in the UK because it’s the same pattern everywhere.

So what do you think will happen?

It’s not going to get better on its own unless the side that promotes rationality and sense has some more political power. Everybody, not only in Britain, has to realise that this is about politics, it’s about morality, and it’s not going to get better on its own. Everybody has to do something.

I guess that brings us to the question of personal responsibility.

It wasn’t always like it is now. It wasn’t like this before the 1980s in the UK, but then this woman with her handbag arrived, and then suddenly people became political objects. They weren’t subjects anymore. This didn’t just happen in England. It has become the motto of our age to say, ‘Oh I hate politics’ – without realising that that is the most political statement you can come up with.

It’s the height of cynicism and privilege.

It’s a very political statement because you’re giving up on being a subject. And it makes you very open to authoritarianism.

So what is our personal responsibility in the current political state? Is it being an active voter, is it activism?

Before that, before any of that, what I see happening in Europe is this: they’re getting caught up in an excess of emotion. It doesn’t solve anything. Expressing your emotion is an ideological pattern. After neoliberalism took over, it made us think that antagonism is not good, confrontation is not good. But they are good. Get rid of the emotions and start using your mind. This is how I escaped from my own anguish regarding the political situation in Turkey and my position in it. It is not personal. Unfortunately our generation has to suffer the last crisis of neoliberalism and therefore a crisis of democracy. Unfortunately we have to deal with this.

If we need to take emotions out of politics, what do you think about the idea of left wing populism as an answer to right wing populism?

I think that the remedy for right wing populism is going to come from the new generation. The right wing populism we’re seeing now is a 21st century problem, and we’re trying to deal with it with 20th century tools, with political parties and so on. I’m expecting a lot from climate strikers. Sooner or later they are going to come up against the hard surface of neoliberal greed, and they will soon understand that they have to fight against big capital and so on. They’re going to invent ways of doing so. Since it’s not invented, we just don’t know yet. It’ll be like Tahrir Square all over again.

You touch on Hannah Arendt in your new book. Tell me why you think she’s still relevant.

We have to remember that that generation was a defeated generation. There’s a bit of a defeatist layer there; broken people remaking themselves. I do think that what has changed since then is this social and moral transformation that made me reverse her term from banality of evil to evil of banality. Now evil is not as obvious. It comes in the form of banality. Trump is a great example of this. Banality, when it builds up and becomes a political identity, qualitatively turns into evil . Whereas before, evil was very obvious, it wore uniforms. It is different now, it comes across as something that we consider not that dangerous: Oh, it’s another idea in the free market of ideas, oh, it’s just another opinion, another faith. But all these small political choices add up to create their own form of identity.

What do you think of the concept of the marketplace of ideas?

It’s still relevant. Otherwise the British media wouldn’t still be obsessed with giving space to this or that idea, would not be giving space to Nigel Farage.

Do you think everyone has the same access to the marketplace of ideas, especially when it comes to questions of freedom of speech?

That is the most bullshit illusion that has ever been created. I’m not even going to discuss this.

Coming back to the idea of victimising Turkish writers that we spoke about earlier: what is the best way to counter these notions?

You know, we don’t have time for arrogance at the moment. Every country has its material to feel superior over others. In Turkey, we had the Arab world. We used to think, Oh all those crazy things happening in Arab countries. Now people think exactly the same thing about Turkey. But it is in fact happening to you, in Europe, and you’re so absorbed that you don’t even see that it is happening. Global solidarity is crucial at this time because right wing populism cannot be defeated in just one country. They’re already cooperating, so get your act together!

Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish novelist and political commentator, whose journalism has appeared in many major newspapers. She won the Edinburgh International Book Festival First Book award for her novel Women Who Blow on Knots (translated by Alex Dawe and winner of a PEN Translates grant), and the Ambassador of New Europe Award. Her new book, How To Lose A Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship, is out now.

Ece was in conversation with Theodora Danek.

The post No time for arrogance: a conversation with Ece Temelkuran appeared first on English PEN.

I’m especially interested in exploring our most natural relationships – the bond between a parent and a child, or the relationship within a couple. But I’m only really interested if I can find something new in these relationships: spaces that I had never thought of before, the line at which the natural starts to become quite strange or abnormal. This helps me to rethink my own relationships, to look at them from a more distanced perspective and take the risk of pushing against my own instincts in a way that I probably wouldn’t dare to do in real life.

You often analyse close human relationships and show how they’re weird and creepy. What makes a family such a good subject to analyse in fiction?

It’s an instinctive space that I find myself in. Family is the place where we are shaped, where we suffer our first tragedies. When we don’t know anything about the world yet, we start to learn about it through the family. This is from the view of the child. From the point of the view of the parent there is an even bigger tragedy: there is not any other love more sincere, with better intentions, than a parent’s love. You only have goodwill. But at the end, when you’re trying to protect and form the other to survive the world, at the same time you also deform them, block them, surround them with fears and family matters. It is another kind of tragedy that no matter how good you are trying to do it, you will always also hurt your children. I think it’s an interesting dilemma.

Your fiction has sometimes been described as almost dystopian, in terms of the relationships you describe. 

I think fiction starts with something really unusual. Normality is a big lie, one of the most hurtful lies with which we are confronted. We keep trying to be normal, day after day, but normality is a fiction. It is a space between you and me, but there is nobody who occupies that space. It’s empty. When you build relationships with the people you are closest to, you build connections not in the good moments. You build the best connections over sorrow and forgiveness and acceptance that the other is really different from you. The idea of normality disconnects us.

If you were to create new types of relationships – a utopia instead of a dystopia – what would they look like?

It would be a society in which we’d never come up with the toxic concept of ‘normality’: this mid-point between my being – unique and strange – and your being – equally unique and strange. This fictitious and arbitrary point that we all want to reach, that causes us to limit and shrink and adapt ourselves: our largest social falsehood.

Do you feel that this idea of what is normal is different in different societies that you have encountered?

Yes, absolutely. Some of the stories in Mouthful of Birds are about this. For example, there is a teenager who eats birds and the family seems to be very worried about this behaviour. But we actually eat birds! In some countries, people eat live fish. So why is eating a live bird considered cruel? Again, we’re talking about normality. The idea of normality is a social and economic construction. Sometimes people talk about these short stories as fantastic stories. Maybe there are one or two that are really fantastic, but all of them are about the uncanny. The fantastic genre is built around something that can’t occur in our world. But the uncanny is constructed with something that is strange, that is uncommon, but real. And this makes the stories more terrifying.

Can you tell me about your most recent novel, Kentukis?

As a reader, I realised that literature still has a big problem with technology. We live immersed in technology, we think of technology…

… almost as a natural resource?

Yes, exactly. But then if you try to translate it onto the page it’s high-tech fiction. I found this very disturbing. Why is it normal in our everyday life but when we read about it we feel that it’s the future? I think it’s because literature is the space where we think about ourselves and our culture, and technology is developing really quickly. We’re not capable of dealing with technology and building limits: cultural, ethical, legal, private limits. I was thinking about these themes, and I thought, how can I talk about the problem that we have with technology, the miscommunication we have through technology, without having technology as a problem in the novel. Without turning it into science fiction, into a novel about the future.

Kentukis is a novel about human relationships, about the problems of language, isolation and loneliness. In an ever more globalised and interconnected world, we often see technology as the root cause of all these issues, or maybe as the common denominator that links these problems. But it’s unfair to lay the blame solely at the feet of technology. Some form of technology has always been there: it’s not good or bad in itself. This book is about the dark and strange underside of any form of digital communication, that is, another human being, as fragile, fearful and, potentially dangerous as we are ourselves. It’s about connections between people, not between people and technology. The kentuki is a connection between two people that allows a citizen of one part of the world to connect to a citizen of another part of the world. They get linked forever, but they don’t know who the other is.

I’m interested in how your books are being read differently in different languages and contexts, particularly Fever Dream.

Something that happened a lot is that countries that are well informed about what is going on with agrochemicals immediately got what is going on in the novel. They can read and judge the danger; for them, the dangerous works in a very real, concrete way. Then there are countries where they don’t have any idea. They’re not well informed, even when they have those agrochemicals in their own countries, for example Mexico. In Mexico there were elements of the novel – the continuous miscarriages, children that are physically deformed, animals that drop dead – they read all of these signals as related to ghosts, something mystical. It was a nice reading. Of course it is a book that is built to have all these reflections, so that worked. But it was nice to see how different the same secrets, sign posts, can be read. On the other hand it became clear how a society that isn’t well-informed is capable of seeing ghosts everywhere.

You have lived in Berlin for five years now. How are you finding it?

What I don’t miss about Buenos Aires is the simplest thing: as a Latin American woman, I’m not allowed to go out alone at night and come home alone. It would be so dangerous that it would be stupid to do so. A taxi is also dangerous. Even if you go out with your friends, you have to bring your boyfriend, or a friend drops you home by car. If you take the risk of going home alone, when you’re finally home, you send a message to your friends to say, I’m home. It took me five years of living in Berlin to realise that what that message was really saying was: I’m alive. When I go out in Berlin, I come home at three in the morning, and I feel so free. I told myself that I deserve it. It’s my right. And that’s when I get a little furious with Latin America.

Samanta Schweblin is the author of three story collections that have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Juan Rulfo Story Prize, and been translated into twenty languages. Her debut novel Fever Dream was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017. Her collection Mouthful of Birds is out now. Originally from Buenos Aires, she lives in Berlin.

Interview by Theodora Danek.

Photo: © Alejandra López

The post Normality is fiction: a conversation with Samanta Schweblin appeared first on English PEN.

I actually didn’t record the stories – I collected them. There’s a difference. I don’t record. The thing is that by mere accident I discovered something that was very little known. I suppose nobody knew it: that after the Nakba [the 1948 Palestinian exodus, ed] – where villages were destroyed, people were expelled – the Israeli army gathered people in one area of the cities, this area was encircled with wire, and the Israeli soldiers called it ‘the ghetto’. The Palestinians had never heard the word ‘ghetto’ before and thought it referred to an area where Arab people lived. This happened in many cities. Knowing that I started to investigate, to ask, to read. There were some writings about the exodus from Lydda which was the most well known exodus of the nakba. They had to walk into the wild, and it was July 1948, summer. Men, women, children, old people. Many died from thirst. But nothing was written about the people who were left behind, so I began to collect the stories of these people, how they lived, and then I decided to write this novel.

And this is the first of a trilogy?

Yes, the second novel is coming out in Arabic now, and I’m beginning to write the third one. It’s a long process. I collected stories from people who stayed in Lydda. I can’t go there of course, so I skyped. And then I met many people who escaped and went to Amman, to Jordan. But the major difficulty was how to recreate the life of the ghetto because very few people can tell you about it and most of them have died. So I had to recreate it myself, which opened a huge debate.

Why was it that the story of the ghetto wasn’t written down before?

Well, most of the stories of the nakba weren’t written down. When I published The Gate of the Sun it was the first real account of the story of the Palestinian exodus and the massacres of 1948. It was never written down, that’s what happens with trauma.

My Name Is Adam is structured around the relationship between silence and speaking.  Silence is the major hero. People suffering from such a terrible trauma – for example the protagonist Adam – don’t want to remember. It needed time to come out, and now things are coming out.

It must have been an intense process of speaking to people.

It was very difficult. Victims don’t like to speak. When I went to them I went with huge knowledge, and because they knew about The Gate of the Sun, they knew me. That facilitated it. With Gate of the Sun it was much more difficult. I’m telling the story of an invented character, Adam. What I describe in the novel is about water, food, where they slept, their daily lives – that is true, but all the other things are of course fiction.

You’ve stressed in the past that your purpose is not to write history.

I write about the human experience. But in order to arrive there you have to put the background in. And unfortunately history is written by the victors, it was written by the Israelis. The details are mentioned in those stories, but they aren’t filled out.

So history is written by the victors and the rest is silence. Do you feel a responsibility to take on those stories?

It’s not a matter of responsibility, it’s a matter of love. I write because of love, not of responsibility. The major factor in life is loving others, and identifying with them. It’s an act of identification. The victors write history, but the victims write stories. And I think the stories will win. If there is a competition, the stories win.

Because they’re more powerful?

Yes, I think so. And they’re more profound. They give interior lives, real experience, while history is interested in power structures etc.

Isn’t it almost a contradiction to write about silence? As soon as you write you’re not silent anymore.

Consider the mother of my protagonist Adam: she never spoke, she spoke in fragmented words and stories, but she didn’t want and couldn’t speak. And afterwards you discover why: she didn’t tell him his whole story – that he was an orphan, etc. But how to portray the fragment of words that come from beneath the story? This was my challenge in writing it. How to create a dialogue with silence. There’s is this one sentence, when Adam meets a woman, that I like very much. When he describes her he says, You are beautiful like silence.

Because silence is a gift?

Silence is a way of communication. We don’t need language all the time. We misinterpret communication. I think about personal communication: looking, touching, that is communication. And then there’s the silence of disaster, real disaster. A city that was totally empty, looted, destroyed, young men of the ghetto obliged to get dead bodies left in the houses and burn them. In such a situation silence becomes totally different.

It becomes healing?

Yes. There is another part to the equation. Mamoun, the one who was like a father to Adam, is blind. Mamoun describes he sees with his blind man, as if this blind history needs a blind man to uncover it.

What, for you, is the balance between entertainment and values in a novel?

Entertainment is part of the work of novels. We have to tell a well structured story that people can read, and which you as a writer want to live in. The condition is simple: if I believe the characters, that they are real, then I can continue writing the novel. You have to identify something which you can identify with, which people can identify with, and it must be well structured.

Elias Khoury is the author of thirteen novels, four volumes of literary criticism and three plays. He was editor-in-chief of the cultural supplement of Beirut’s daily newspaper, An-Nahar, and is Global Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. My Name Is Adam (translated by Humphrey Davies) is out now.

The post Silence as communication: a conversation with Elias Khoury appeared first on English PEN.

Jonathan Wright: I think it is much the same. I’ve been surprised by the warm reception it’s received. I really don’t think any other book that has been translated from Arabic into English has received such attention.

So what is different about this one?

JW: It’s really hard to say. I suppose it’s the topicality and the fact of the invasion of Iraq and so on. The title helps. And having good publishers. They’ve been very aggressive. It would be nice if books succeeded just based on their merits but that’s not the case.

Do you feel that there is a difference between how Arabic books are perceived in the West versus how other regions are perceived?

JW: I’m not sure there is! I think we’re doing rather well. When you look at the number of titles translated from Arabic – if you compare it to, say, Chinese literature, I think we’re doing rather well. I’m certainly not complaining. Obviously there are preconceptions about what Arabs might be writing about. Often people are surprised that they write about the same things as everyone else – you know, falling in love and everything else.

Do you feel that Arabic books are used more for their anthropological insights over their literary quality in the West?

JW: I’m sure this is true, yes. But I don’t find that particularly offensive or problematic. Except that it does raise the question of representation and to what extent these particular novels are representative of the whole, because a novel is under no obligation to think about being representative, that’s not its business.

What’s the purpose of the novel then, for you?

JW: Well it’s not for me to say and it’s a mix of things. But personally I have a reputation in the Arabic-English world for being a bit of a populist. I quite like the idea of finding books that have a fast pace and are gripping, that have a story that grabs your attention. There aren’t many, and they’re quite hard to find, but if they’re there I’ll do them.

It’s great to add translated title to the mix of what ordinary people are reading so that they don’t notice that they’re translated. I try as far as I can to make myself invisible and not to remind the reader too much that this is a translated world.

Ahmed, what is the purpose of the novel for you?

Ahmed Saadawi: I believe that the reason for writing a novel is connected with the ancient tradition of storytelling. When the first person told stories it was firstly for amusement and to satisfy the curiosity of other people and their desire for information and knowledge. There’s also a metaphysical reason. Because the world that we see is insufficient. These are all elements in the essence of novel-writing today.

Would you say that storytelling and the novel have the same purpose as religion? After all, religion also has metaphysical elements, plus entertainment value etc.

AS: That’s an interesting question. Yes, all these things have some connection: dance, art, prostitution, literature, everything. They all had religious objectives. And then art no longer was required to serve a religious purpose. It was based more on human experience of life. Religious texts tried to tell us that there’s a depth to life and that there’s another world beyond. Similarly, art tells us that there’s depth to life, but in the same world, not in another world.

What is the role of religion then in Frankenstein in Baghdad?

AS: The religious element is strong and fundamental in the novel. The process of making the What’s-Its-Name is taken from Muslim and Christian traditions, because the spirit is animated by the soul. And in the story there’s a reference to a saviour. It’s a saviour in a political context. But in the Arab world in general the political objective is not distinct from the religious objective. In difficult times people do revert to religion. In Iraqi Shiite culture the concept of a saviour is extremely important: the Mahdi. In the 1990s after the Kuwait war the Americans did serious damage to the country and life became very difficult. A lot of people said, This is the time that presages the coming of the Mahdi. Even in 2005 when sectarian violence was intense, there were at least three people who claimed that they were the Mahdi. All these elements are included in the identity of the What’s-Its-Name.

If religion is important, and you said storytelling is important, what is the role of truth versus storytelling in your novel?

AS: Religious belief, political belief, dogma: all of them tell a story and say, This is the truth. People will fight another to assert the truth of their story. Novels tell us that in fact there isn’t one story. Everybody has a piece of a true story. It is like the story of the blind people and the elephant.

Six blind people all touch a part of the elephant, and they never know the whole elephant?

AS: That’s how it is. Nobody has the whole truth.

Jonathan, what’s the one book you’ve translated other than Frankenstein in Baghdad that you think deserves the most attention and praise?

JW: Last year I did an Egyptian book which I really liked and hope will be a big success. It’s a memoir of a middle-aged Egyptian gay man, In The Spider’s Room. It’s really quite a moving story. He spent seven months in jail. They have a round up of gay man and he’s arrested. The authors did interviews with many of the men who were picked up. But it’s not based on any particular person, it’s fiction.

Ahmed Saadawi is an Iraqi novelist, poet, screenwriter and documentary filmmaker. In 2010 he was selected for Beirut39, as one of the thirty-nine best Arab authors under the age of forty, and in 2014 he became the first Iraqi to win the prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction. This prize was awarded to Frankenstein in Baghdad, which also won Le Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire in 2017, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. He lives in Baghdad.

Jonathan Wright is a British journalist and literary translator. He studied Arabic at Oxford University. He is the translator of Hassan Blasim’s The Iraqi Christ, which won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2014.  He has served as Reuters’ Cairo bureau chief, and he has lived and worked throughout the region, including in Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon, Tunisia and the Gulf. His translation of In The Spider’s Room by Muhammad Abdelnabi is out now.

The post The blind and the elephant: a conversation with Ahmed Saadawi and Jonathan Wright appeared first on English PEN.

Last night, in the midst of unsettled darkness,
I found myself at the axis of the earth for a moment,
holding it taut between my outstretched arms.
And as I struggled to keep those frozen poles apart,
I saw I could prepare these icy limbs
and melt them wondrously between my two hot palms.
So there I stood on the summit of the loftiest peak:
a simple woman, glowing with love again,
ready to salute the world once more.

– Mahvash Sabat

Adapted from the Persian by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani. Based on translations by Violette and Ali Nakhjavani.

You spent nearly ten year in prison in Iran for your faith and your work on behalf of the Bahá’í community, during which time you wrote remarkable poetry. While I understand that you had written some poems before I believe this was your first collection?

I always loved poetry and literature from early childhood. Often my thoughts were actually poetic in nature, I would use poetry in my thoughts. But I never had time to actually sit down and write poetry.

I want to say something that probably isn’t going to be very beneficial to me but I’ve always had an internal clash or struggle or fight with poetry. I always resisted poetry. My work was bureaucratic, in an office, so whenever I would write – my work involved writing a lot of letters – I would look at my written work and I would say, ‘Oh this looks like a piece of poetry’. I would just rip it apart, throw it away and think, ‘I need to work harder and write something more proper’. I would resist and fight poetry.

One theme that really stands out for us in your poetry is nature and your love of nature. What I find very interesting is the contrast between the environment you were in, where you had no access to nature, and how your love of nature totally shines through in your poetry. Was this a conscious decision and a way of maintaining a connection with the outside world? Where did it come from?

I never consciously make a decision about what to say in a poem: the poem itself says itself. So the poem happens. It doesn’t happen because I have decided that it should happen. It wasn’t a conscious decision to write about nature. The nature just bubbled out.

I know that nature is always part and parcel of poetry. But I want to add that for our poets – the classical Persian poets – nature has almost been an external thing, almost to the point of being lifeless, ornamental, outside.

For me this wasn’t the case. For me, nature was something that was completely transfused inside me. It wasn’t an external thing. It was part of my spiritual being.

For me, life means beauty, life is a flower, life is meadows, beauty is meadows, life means steadfastness, steadfastness is like a moment.

Bahiyyih Nakjhavani [who adapted Prison Poems into English] has described your poetry as ‘a way of re-imagining the natural world’. Does that speak to you? Is that the relationship you feel with your poetry?

I see in my life the direct relationship between nature and the passage of life, the story of life. I wrote in one of my poems – even though I was not in nature, I was not in a place surrounded by nature – that when they imprisoned me, when they surrounded me with walls, I actually began to destroy these walls and break them down.

You mentioned the tradition of classical Persian poetry and how nature in it is almost artificial. I was wondering if there are contemporary poets or more recent poets or writers who you feel have written about nature in a way that is alive, and that corresponds to what nature actually is?

The one that comes to my mind is the famous poet Sohrab Sepehri. When Sohrab Sepehri talks about his inner life, his inner being he connects it not just with the nature but with the outside world and with the outer world. About the rest, I am not so sure.

I want to give you an example of one of my poems. ‘I will build a house up high on the mountains of Alborz’. Alborz is a very famous mountain range in Iran. The prison that I was in was hidden underground, under this mountain, inside this mountain. In my poem I am expressing a wish, a yearning, a desire, to build a house on the summit of Alborz. I do not wish to be buried in the depths of the underground. I am describing what the house will look like. This house is beautiful, it’s on the mountain, it’s going to be filled with flowers and lilies. I am describing how this house is out there in nature, on this mountain.

In the heart, the dead heart of this city, this dead city, [the prison], everybody is talking with words that are full of apathy and grief. There is a place in the poem where I say ‘I want to find another language. A language full of flowers, the blossoms of love’. That these words would have meanings that everyone would understand – like the deep understanding that comes from gazing into someone’s eyes.

My meaning was to express that while in prison – in a very cold and desolate and dark place – the beauty of this world represented by nature was always boiling inside me.

Have you continued to write poetry since your release?

I’ve done a few very important things. I needed to actually gather together all the different bits and pieces [of my poetry], pull them together and collate them. I’m now working on pulling together the second volume that will soon be published in Persian. So that was an important thing that I was busy with.

I think that as I pull them all together it will make up probably four other volumes. So I have a lot of work ahead. Because I wrote these poems in prison and I somehow found a way to get them out of prison, I never actually had the opportunity to review them, to look at them in any way, shape or form.

Fellow poet and PEN Pinter winner Michael Longley chose to share the 2017 PEN Pinter Prize with you last year and in his acceptance speech described you as ‘a lyrical poet who sings the beauty of the world.’ In the world today which is – let’s be honest – a total mess, I think many of us really need reminding of the beauty of the world that Michael describes, and I wonder what role you think poetry can play in bringing those stories to life, in reminding us of that beauty, and to not take it for granted.

In contrast with all this, I actually believe the world is still very beautiful. And this world will continue to be beautiful. And in my own way I’m trying to actually show the real beauty of this world. I think many of us need to do this because there are many people in the world that do not want to see the beauty of this world. They are the ones who most need to see it.

Lights Out

Weary but wakeful, feverish but still
fixed on the evasive bulb that winks on the wall,
thinking surely it’s time for lights out,
longing for darkness, for the total black-out.

Trapped in distress, caught in this bad dream,
the dust under my feet untouchable as shame,
flat on the cold ground, a span for a bed,
lying side by side, with a blanket on my head.

And the female guards shift, keeping vigil till dawn,
eyes moving everywhere, watching everyone,
sounds of the rosary, the round of muttered words,
fish lips moving, the glance of a preying bird.

Till another hour passes in friendly chat,
in soft talk of secrets or a sudden spat,
with some snoring, others wheezing
some whispering, rustling, sneezing –
filled the space with coughs and groans,
suffocated sobs, incessant moans –
You can’t see the sorrow after lights out.
I long for the dark, total black-out.

– Mahvash Sabat

Adapted from the Persian by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani. Based on translations by Violette and Ali Nakhjavani.

Teacher and poet Mahvash Sabet was one of a group of seven Bahá’í leaders known as the ‘Yaran-i-Iran’ – ‘Friends of Iran’ – detained in 2008 for their faith and activities related to running the affairs of the Bahá’í community in Iran. On 18 September 2017, Sabet was the first of the group to be released from prison, having served almost a decade in detention. Sabet began writing poetry in prison and a collection of her prison poems, adapted from Persian by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, was published in the UK in April 2013 (George Ronald Publisher). Sabet was named 2017 International Writer of Courage by poet Michael Longley at the PEN Pinter Prize ceremony at the British Library.

We would like to thank Bahiyyih Nakhjavani for facilitating this interview.

Interview by Cat Lucas and Theodora Danek.

The post Nature bubbling out: a conversation with Mahvash Sabet appeared first on English PEN.

That’s difficult to answer. I would say that a writer has two traditions: the universal tradition, from which he chooses whatever he wants, and the tradition of his own language. This you have to use, to grasp, these two traditions, as if it were a chariot, you have to balance these two. For me Flaubert was extremely important when I was young. Kafka was essential. And from the tradition of my own language I must say I don’t feel like I’m a Spanish writer. I feel like I write in Spanish, which is very different. That means that the Latin American tradition was very important to me, and that my tradition has been enriched by writers such as Borges.

So you see yourself as an international writer?

Of course. We writers live in a global environment. All writers, all real writers, have been influenced by writers from other languages, other countries, other traditions, and that’s what makes us rich. That has always been true. It has always been a mixture of traditions, of influences.

In your most recent novels El Monarca de Las Sombras (English translation forthcoming) and The Impostor, you continue developing your idea of how the past impacts the present. How does the past live on?

At a certain point of my books something changed. Two things appeared: the past as a dimension of the present, first of all. And also, the collective as a dimension of the individual. I mean, when some people say that my books are historical novels I get a bit mad, because I’m not interested in history itself. I’m interested in the past that has not passed. There’s a leitmotif in The Impostor by Faulkner: ‘The past is not dead, it’s not even past.’ That’s the past that really interests me, the one that is still a dimension of the present, without which the present is mutilated, without which the present can’t be grasped.
We all have two inheritances: one good and one bad. Of course we know our best inheritance, because our family tells us about it. But not the bad one. Why? Because people who have lived through terrible things – war, dictatorships – don’t talk about it. A sort of fog covers this bad inheritance. What I tried to do in my last book, El Monarca de Las Sombras, was to look at this inheritance. I wanted to learn about my family, about the supposed hero of my family. He was a young boy, 17, when the war began in Spain, and he became an enthusiastic fascist. He went to the war and was killed in combat in the worst battle of the Spanish Civil War. This guy was the symbol of our worst inheritance: civil war, fascism, Francoism. My entire family was on Franco’s side. What to do with this inheritance? It lives in me. Do I just reject it? Or know it? Or learn about it, to understand it?

That is also a major theme in The Impostor.

Enric Marco, the main character in The Impostor, decides to invent a past for himself. That’s what humans tend to do when we deal with our worst past, both individual and collective, we tend to invent it, to lie about it. What I tried to do is exactly the opposite: let’s look at it, let’s see why it happened. Why is this important to me? First of all, because if you know and understand your inheritance you can use it, digest it, learn what to do with it. If you don’t know it then it’s your inheritance that uses you, that takes control of you. And that’s one conviction that lies in my books, the fact that we should understand, that to understand is not to justify. That’s a very important part of The Impostor. Understanding is exactly the contrary to justifying. To understand is the only way to prevent evil from happening again. That’s what literature, real literature, real thinking does. Of course this is dangerous, but there’s no literature without danger. Real literature is always dangerous. That’s why I think I’m a post-post-modern writer, because I think literature is extremely useful – as long as it doesn’t want to be useful. If it wants to be useful it becomes propaganda, pedagogy, and then stops being useful. If we formulate complex questions in the most complex possible way, we can begin to have instruments so that nothing like it will happen again. If we decide not to understand anything, to simply reject it, we will for sure repeat the same mistakes.

That sounds like a good manifesto.

Well, yes! When I was young I was educated to think that literature was just a game, that it’s just a play. But now I think it’s very serious. Of course I love humour and irony, but humour is the most serious thing in the world!

With The Impostor you have written a novel of truth. Do you think, when it gets translated into a language and a cultural context in which that truth isn’t known, that it somehow turns into fiction? Because to recognise truth you must kind of know the context.

No I don’t think so. A reader who doesn’t know anything about Chinese history who reads a book about that history, would he think that it’s fiction? The whole point of The Impostor is that it’s a non-fiction novel. It is constructed as a novel – a special novel, made up of different genres, because novels can do that as a hybrid genre. But at the end of the day it still tells a factual truth. It uses imagination, but historians do that too. The most important decision I made when writing this book was to stick to the truth. At one point I realised that Enric Marco had invented his whole life. He was a walking fiction. So at a point I decided it was ridiculous to write more fiction. I organised a battle between fiction and fact, the lies that he told and the truths he told. Of course you can still read it as a fiction, and I know people have done so.

I suppose that has happened here, seeing as it was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize.

Yes – that is strange to me, strange but good!

Javier Cercas is a novelist, short-story writer and columnist, whose books include Soldiers of Salamis, The Tenant and The Motive, The Speed of Light and The Anatomy of a Moment. His most recent novel, The Impostor, was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and won a PEN Translates award. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in Barcelona.

Interview by Theodora Danek.

Photograph of Javier Cercas © Sonia Balcells

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