It feels like we’re entering an epoch of apocalypses, but so few of us have the energy left to do anything about it. How do you combat engineered moral apathy on such a scale? From which wells can we draw to ignite our collective creative energies? How can we hope to weather what comes?

I don’t know, nor do I think the answer is simple. But as the days and weeks lap into one another, a constant that has helped dispel some of my hopelessness and remind me of art as something other than escape has been Hip-Hop. What we know today as Hip-hop was birthed from a creolised synthesis of different diasporic cultures mixing in the heart of the Bronx, conceived as an expressive tool to give voice to the creativity, love, and anger of the residents of one of New York’s most impoverished boroughs. Hip-hop emerged from the harshest of conditions to consecrate itself as a precious platform for stories of love and histories of rebellion.

Genres analogous to Hip-hop have always been present in my life, with Reggae, Dub, Jazz, and Soul featuring as background music to memories of weekends cleaning the house or family dinners around the table. I see my love for Hip-Hop as a natural evolution from the habitus that was being built around me. The first Hip-hop album I remember hearing was College Dropout by Kanye West in 2005. My older brothers were able to sneak the CD away from my Dad when he wasn’t looking, and in our bedrooms we’d huddle around a busted CD player and listen to a young man from Chicago wax lyrical about his troubled life and hunger for ambition. I didn’t quite understand what I was hearing at the time, yet there I was, a 5-year-old walking around the house rapping “I’ve been working this grave-shift And I ain’t made shit/ I wish I could buy me a spaceship and fly”. What I knew at the time about the perils of retail labour and low wages was next to nil, but there was something both fantastical and familiar about the worlds contained within those records. It was only when I got older that I began to fully grasp the financial struggles that coloured my early years, making me feel things at the time that I couldn’t explain. Perhaps that’s why I felt an affinity to the music; it was offering words and insights to help me better situate my own experience in histories and systems so much bigger than me.

From Blues to Gospel to Negro Spirituals, Hip-Hop follows in a long line of Black musical traditions which oppressed peoples have used  to envision alterities and fantasise better futures. The throughline between the music I grew up with and the music of my parents is that it was always more than artistic expression, it was a portal into a Black interiority that contained love, misery, and plans for escape and salvation. Hip-Hop is just one of the newer sonic iterations of what Black people across the diaspora have done since surviving their abduction from Africa and the harrowing middle passage.

Although the Kanye of today is a gross and tragic shell of his former self, I think the essence of Hip-Hop can most aptly be captured in that one bar of his in Gorgeous:‘Is Hip-Hop just a euphemism for a new religion? / The soul music of the slaves that the youth was missing.’ For me, there is something integral in this short verse – in how it connects Hip-Hop’s ties to the past and illustrates the link between the music of people who were grappling with their own apocalypses – and the music of today. It would be remiss to ignore the context of chattel slavery that made the sonics of enslaved people so urgent and complex; there are, of course, stark differences between the liberties we find ourselves afforded in relation to those before us. But the world in which we find ourselves comes with its own challenges. So when faced with forces seemingly beyond our control, looking back to when a group of people suffered an apocalyptic event can provide perspective to look at the tools they used to help them survive. The music of our past – and by extension art – has been used to communicate and contain powerful messages, evoking ideas of hope, while also having hidden messages codified in them to aid in escape and community building. Those same mechanics were not lost in time but trickled down and manifested themselves in the melodies and rhymes of some of my favourite MCs. From Mos Def’s ‘Umi Says’ to Noname’s ‘Rainforest’, to Denzel Curry’s ‘Walkin’ – Hip-Hop’s more radical essence has somewhat endured.

Yet, as is the case with many other counter cultural forms, over time, it has become subsumed in a capitalist model of production that has championed consumerism over struggle, making hyper-visible braggadocio and machismo in some of the genre’s biggest stars of today (think Drake pushing 40 and still rapping about how many women he’s slept with and how much money he has). Despite this, the genre is still very diverse and is more than the sum of its parts, with artists still managing to retain some essence of what made the genre so impactful to me as a child. Some of my first pieces of writing were 16 bars I’d try to frantically write out to rap over random type beats on YouTube, or to have freestyle battles with my brothers and cousins and friends. It was the first form of poetry that made sense to me, when all other forms I encountered in the Western cannon made me see myself in the third person, through the eyes of some European writer I was told I had to respect. Beyond seeing the value of Hip-Hop as an artform born from strife, I don’t have to listen to a song delivering some grandiose political treatise for me to consider it radical. Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is arm someone with a framework to regulate and understand themselves when they feel like everything else around them doesn’t make sense. For me, the Hip-Hop album that would do that was Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly.

I was 15 when I first heard To Pimp a Butterfly and had been following Kendrick’s journey since Section 80 and good kid, m.A.A.d city, but nothing could have prepared me for the beautiful chaos this album delivered. The album wears its influences on it sleeve, with elements of Jazz and Funk all over the album, colliding to illustrate the joy, pain, and contradictions endemic in Black America (and across the diaspora). The album is aspirational in what it attempts to strive towards, namely a reclamation of the humanity Kendrick feels has been stripped away from him and other Black Americans having grown up under carceral logics that negate their self-confidence and modes of expression. The album endeavours to be a wake-up call to love yourself despite the ways the world has hurt you. It was no surprise to me then that when the uprisings of 2020 began, and the air was electrified by a chorus of shouts demanding the deconstruction of systems of oppression, songs like Kendrick Lamar’s Alright were playing at protests.

Alright encapsulates the undulating hope one must have to imagine a world beyond the pain you might be experiencing. The track’s opening lines (also an interpolation of a speech from Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple) demand your attention by focussing on the mortal danger of life under the intersecting systems of racism and poverty, and how these systems make marginalised people combatants in games we never asked to play. As the song continues, it reaches its hook and culminates in the refrain ‘We go’n be alright’. It’s these few lines that you could hear often repeated at different protests, from the time of the songs release up until the uprisings of 2020 and today. The song borrows from the repetitive nature integral in the spirituals of the past in how its mantra-like chants engage audiences in a rhythm you can hold onto that matches your movement as you march along with it. I think songs like ‘Alright’ functionally and thematically hit that same resonance as the music from which they descend: they uplift and inspire us to resist the overbearing assaults on our daily lives and liberties.

Kendrick commented on the song in an interview with NPR some years ago, “Four hundred years ago, as slaves, we prayed and sung joyful songs to keep our heads level-headed with what was going on… Four hundred years later, we still need that music to heal. And I think that Alright is definitely one of those records that makes you feel good no matter what the times are.” While Hip-Hop can encode in its lyrics a belief that things can change, and that there is something better waiting for you beyond the hell you might be experiencing, it can also offer glimpses into much bleaker realities. Realities that assert that our world is beyond saving, that the damage is done, that – to borrow from one of Public Enemy’s lyrics – ‘Armageddon, it been in effect.’

I was 17 when I first heard Kendrick’s next album, and the world was emerging into a different place for me. I was entering my last few years of secondary school and beginning to question what it was I wanted to do with my life. I was lost and perhaps yearning for that same ecstatic feeling I was used to getting when a new Kendrick album came out. So, I pressed play, and then my optimism fell apart.

In DAMN, Kendrick takes a decidedly darker approach, with his machinations taking on dystopic tones. The world reflected in it is steeped in pain, a world Kendrick feels is out of control and out of sync with the hopes and dreams he once had. There doesn’t seem to be a way he believes we can remain like this. There is no tomorrow. These thematic threads appear in songs like FEAR, where he recounts instances of living closely with death, doubt and fear, opening the song with a monotone mantra that sluggishly spills his woes.

Why God, why God do I gotta suffer?
Pain in my heart carry burdens full of struggle
Why God, why God do I gotta bleed?
Every stone thrown at you restin’ at my feet
Why God, why God do I gotta suffer?
Earth is no more, won’t you burn this muh’fucka?

It’s easy to see where his cynicism may have sprouted from. In the year before this album’s release, Black Lives Matter, as a movement and protest, gained significant traction in the wake of the brutal executions of two black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, by police officers in Louisiana and Minnesota. In conjunction with his growing rise to rap stardom and fans’ expectations of his political responsibility and other personal demons, DAMN culminates in a striking repudiation that the world as we know it can’t be saved.

It’s hard to salvage belief in a world you have become acquainted with through violence, and even harder to think it can be saved. Some Hip-Hop artists recognise this and continue a tradition of earthly rejection used by their ancestors, with folk music and Negro Spirituals possessing thematic similarities in how they can dismiss our material world in search of something else. Those who have abandoned notions of the world’s salvation are not inherently negative or naïve but seek to reemerge from the social relations that bind them into something new.

It’s been eight years since DAMN came out, yet we still find ourselves surrounded by images of death and state violence – continually enduring small daily traumas and sometimes feeling like it will not get better. Death by a thousand cuts. As artists and creatives living in an age in which we are encouraged to dismiss critical analysis as wasteful and see art as pure entertainment and escape, tracing the threads of Hip-Hop, from the past to the present, has helped me to continue seeing art as a weapon capable of arming you with a means to communicate and inspire. Hip-hop has reminded me that this latest iteration of terror only follows in a long line of others that our ancestors have fought in many forms.

In a video on the rap artist MAVI, writer Tosin Balogun discussed hip-hop and its place in times of crisis:

Creating art out of suffering is a haunting, if not a futile endeavour. Deep down, we must know we can’t be saved by colours on a canvas or words on a page. We must know we are chasing a sun that will never set, yet, we are unable to stop. We write and we sing, and we draw and every momentary reprieve from the gaping maw of despair, we attribute to our creativity. The truth is art can’t save the world. Art can only make the world look at itself.

Hip-Hop itself will not save me or you. But I believe art in times of crisis to be the connective tissue that binds us and helps us understand ourselves. I still wake up every day not knowing the exact right way to help things get better. Or I feel disheartened, like I’m not doing enough. The answers to my fears are mine to wrestle with, but the important thing is that I surround myself with things that inspire me to keep going. It is not the song that’s important, but the feeling it’s left me with. It is what I choose to do after I take the headphones off. The apocalypse is here, but it has been with us for some time now, and what lies beyond capitalism is a mystery to me. But what I know for certain is that I don’t want to be dispossessed of my ability to try and imagine something different.

The post Hip-Hop & the Apocalypse 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Find Your Mind appeared first on English PEN.

Years later, while locked in a police cell somewhere between night and day, I struggled to remember any stanza of any poem I held dear. ‘What sort of poet did not carry words with him, closer than his clothes?’ Philip Metres writes, recalling being asked by the mayor of Belfast to recite a poem. When you are stripped of all else, you will need poetry.

It’s not that I’d always been unable to remember poetry. Before the apocalypse of 2020 – Beirut being blown up in the middle of a global pandemic – I would recite my own poems and the poetry of others on stage, hakawati-ish by inheritance. Long Covid infringed on my body in a multitude of small ways, but nothing deflates me more than what it took from my practice. Memory loss is an erasure that we measure by the plain mass of forgetfulness. But that is insufficient. It erases the immeasurable, too: who I am; a descendent, carrying poetry in flesh, blood, hand gestures, and absent mind.

The introduction to the recent Poems for Palestine chapbook says ‘[poems] vibrate between us, move between languages, and connect memory to memory.’ In an unprecedented time, a time of a live-streamed genocide, my instinct was that poetry was superfluous. But Palestinians have told us differently. The words of Refaat Alareer echo between our bodies and murals, vigils and monuments, tying the collective together in a song of remembrance and promise. ‘If I Must Die’ is being carried through the world, one pallbearer to the next; it is the first time I am witnessing people, en masse, hold poetry with such sincerity.

The memorisation of poems has become a yardstick by which I calibrate steadfastness. When Wole Soyinka was kept in solitary confinement for 22 months between 1967 and 1969, in what he called a ‘vegetable existence,’ he was deprived of reading and writing materials. Still, after his release he published a volume of poetry composed in his psyche while imprisoned – poems that he fossilised through the steadfast belief that there would be a time when he could tell them. In A Shuttle in the Crypt, Soyinka, in his own words, ‘maps the course trodden by the mind.’

That is more than memorisation. That is devoted attention. It is Mustafa Khalifa wrongfully imprisoned by the Assad regime for ten years, writing a line a day in his head and repeating it over and over, adding another line the following day and reciting it again, then the next day, and the next. Each passing week and year, as they rolled into one, he would gather more fragments into the narrative he was building. When he was freed, he wrote down all he had carefully devised in solitude, just as it had been stored in his memory. It was published as a novel called The Shell.

There is a distinction between me and those I reference here. I have not found myself in the position of Soyinka or Khalifa (alhamdulillah). I am, however, acutely aware that none of us are immune to such an experience. As a member of a militant pro-Palestine, anti-imperial group in the UK, my movements are well-tracked by British intelligence, and I am constantly waking to news of comrades arrested in the night. One, who is currently facing sentencing, says she favours drinking water and reading poetry now – ‘to prepare myself for the depravation of imprisonment.’

In The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine, translated by Hazem Jamjoum, Ghassan Kanafani writes that, in the 1930s, ‘popular poetry held the kind of power we now associate with mass media.’ The political zajal – sung poems – encapsulated the hopes and anxieties of the working class and peasants. The struggle was captured not through books, but through travelling verse; the rhythm of a common language, a collective consciousness. When I visit my uncle in Lebanon, he mutes the television to recite a poem he wrote 50 years ago. He stops in the forest to recall another – by Keats, by Qabbani. His body is a poetic archive. Travelling with those poems stored in me is an act of exporting revolutionary ideas and heritage. When a child learns refrains from their parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, it’s a way of carrying fragments of territory across borders and time.

Harbouring a poem within you acts as a compass for the everyday. The faithless are missing that accompaniment to the struggle. Yet I believe contemporary, award-winning poetry in the UK often writes against memory. Not intentionally, no, but because the stylistics made popular don’t offer the reader or listener an undeniable pathway to recollection. These are writers who are following the lineage of the Language poets – whose work does excite me, but to whom I’d rarely turn in a crisis. What else can we expect from an epoch of Western writers who’ve had little necessity for the steadfastness of memory?

Mahmoud Darwish’s passages on making coffee in Memory for Forgetfulness come to me every time I prepare my coffee in the rakweh and watch the bubbles rise over the stove’s blue flame. It is a poetry that can be recalled in the seemingly mundane moments of the day, activating them as eternal opportunities to reorient oneself around one’s values. I make my coffee and think of sumoud, think of my ritual as sentient (a living relationship between myself and the qahwa), and I suture into my morning the necessary gratitude for not having rockets fly overhead as I wait for my cup to cool (may those who experience the rockets be protected).

Ahmed Fouad Negm’s words were the chants of uprisings in Egypt. When sung, the words of poetry were universalised, overcoming class associations of literacy. Negm would have his poems smuggled out of prison on cigarette papers, tucked into oranges; the short colloquial refrains were then memorised through music devised by Sheikh Imam, and once composed the written evidence could be destroyed. It illuminated memory as a revolutionary tool against censorship.

Recently, Nejma Collective brought together a group of poets and scholars to speak to a packed room at the Dalston Solidarity Cafe for an event centred on policing and Palestine. I’d learned a new poem I’d recently written, had tried to commit to memory. It was a poem about Ahmad Fouad Negm. It was only the second time in four years that I’d believed I was able, again, to recite my own lines. I’d practised, singing it as a song under my breath, on the bus, in bed. When I had the microphone, I stumbled. Just three lines in. I lost the thread. It was disappointing, but it wasn’t the same as when, during the opening protest of the siege on Leicester’s UAV Tactical Systems, the drone company who supply the Israeli military with warfare technology, I held the microphone ready to recite a poem and it, too, fell from the wings of my breath. This felt more than disappointing; it felt inappropriate.

I keep trying, because when I memorise what I wish to contribute to the world it no longer comes solely from my mind but from my body. To memorise, for an audience, is a consistent pursuit of clarity in belief and dedication. It removes the book from the vision of the author on stage. It is ideas over matter. Practising cognizance and recollection is an act of loyalty to communal remembering; the decolonial blade we must file against the blunting force of collective amnesia, a force we were starkly reminded of at the start of this month during Rishi Sunak’s speech against ‘extremism’. He claimed ‘Britain is a patriotic, liberal, democratic society with a proud past and a bright future. We’re a reasonable country and a decent people. Our story is one of progress, of great achievements and enduring values.’ To commit the poetry of others to heart, and write poems that may be memorable in return, is a small labour in resisting such violent erasure, for the sake of unwavering, people-powered futurity.

One thing I’ve learnt from being Arab in a neo-capitalist-colonial world – where destabilised political economies and vulnerability to warfare have become the norm – is to always have a go bag packed and a few poems memorised. Zionism is waging war on Lebanon in tandem with its genocide on Gaza. My people continue to make coffee under the fighter jets and drones, as we hear of mass funerals working their way up the country.

The tension of the times calls for action, resistance, and focus. When Metres was asked to recite a poem by the mayor of Belfast, he responded with these lines of Seamus Heaney, now made communal:

History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grace.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

If nothing else, prepare for justice: memorising poems takes concentration, which is never a bad thing to develop in a world defined by distraction, the enemy of revolution. It involves dissolving an individual into a wave of togetherness, too. Perhaps I am being called to decentre myself, to invite the poem to use me instead. To use my breath, stay closer than my clothes. Until its final exhale, like my grandfather, I offer this devotion to that which can neither be locked up nor worn down: the living poem.

lisa minerva luxx is an award-winning poet, playwright, political activist and essayist of British Syrian heritage. In 2021, luxx released Fetch Your Mother’s Heart, an innovative poetry collection which received praise in the national press. Their poems have been published in New England Review, the Telegraph (‘Poem of the Week’), Poetry London, Sukoon, wildness, Poetry Daily, and more. Their poetry and essays have been anthologised by Penguin, Saqi, Hatchette and more, and have been translated into Arabic, Italian, French and German.

In recent years, they wrote three verse plays including Eating the Copper Apple (produced by a team of Arab queer and women artists), what the dog said to the harvest (an experimental opera for decolonial climate justice) and The Moon is Listening (with young people from Palestine, Italy, Syria, Beirut and the UK).

luxx guest lectures at universities internationally on post-colonial and decolonial literary analysis, the queer body politic, and revolutionary poetics. In 2020, luxx founded Nehna Hon, an anti-racism community organising group. Before that they were co-founder of eLaa Beirut, an international organisation supporting the mental health services in Lebanon following the Beirut Blast of 2020. They are an active part of Palestine Action. Their short story collection, Raising Sun Son, is forthcoming.

The post When You Are Stripped of All Else, You Will Need Poetry appeared first on English PEN.

I still remember the first poem I wrote and performed outside of a school setting. It was at a Saturday morning poetry session at Leeds Playhouse, then called West Yorkshire Playhouse. Michelle Scally Clarke, a well-known local poet, was the lead artist. I remember not having much exposure to poetry, besides that which came regurgitated in sonnets and haikus. The session released me from the constraints of form and structure; I free-wrote. Michelle encouraged us to dig deep, to tap into weighty emotion and to let it all out on what she called her best friend ‘Tracy Paper’. I’ve not looked back since.

I love writing and have always loved writing. I owe a lot of that to my English teachers and to my Dad, who constantly took me to open mic events, read poetry to me as a child and always found the time to read over my work. But my love for it doesn’t stop me being acutely aware that I have a kind of insuppressible urge to write. Especially when I’m hurting. I suppose it’s my therapy.

Add it to the list of other tragic things I must somehow turn to art to make somewhat bearable.

– ‘How can I write about the weather?’ by Simone Yasmin, commissioned by Metal Culture for In Other Words (2022)

I write a lot about race, about womanhood – Black womanhood, specifically – with misogynoir and intersectional feminism tightly bound to this. I write about social issues: poverty, the climate crisis, human rights violations, the things in between. Taking inspiration from the things happening around me means the themes of my work can be limitless. Despite this, I often find the work I return to – the work that feels most cathartic – is written from my own lived experiences.

I used to say I felt most content when creating. I didn’t mean that in a sunshine-and-rainbows way, but instead that writing releases all the pent-up emotion and places it somewhere more manageable, somewhere more digestible. The link between the personal and the emotion it carries is quite a funny line to flirt with. ‘Funny’ is maybe not the right word – maybe interesting. I’ve always said my goal as a poet is to make people feel. You want the audience to feel the words you’re saying and all the charged emotions behind them. But how do you deliver that emotion without succumbing to it yourself?

Sometimes I write poems so deeply personal that re-reading my work is akin to reliving the experience. I’ve sat in the mirror countless times reading and re-reading my poems until I can strike the balance: just enough emotion for the audience, just enough emotion for me, and, even then, it can all still unravel on stage. I guess you have to detach a little from some of the moments in your writing to be able to perform them – just a little though. If you were touched, moved, hurt enough to pen the piece, I’m not sure the trauma of it stays locked in the fibres of the page on which you first penned it. In fact, I’m sure it doesn’t.

As cathartic as the writing process is, you reopen the wound when saying the words aloud to an audience. It’s impossible not to. And it’s the same with relaying most trauma. The pain doesn’t stop just because you’ve let it breathe; each time you retell it, it takes a little bit of you with it. For me, the self often determines the work. The emotions and experiences I’m wading through tend to manifest on the page. Some of the most personal pieces I’ve written relay my experiences of racism, sexual violence, and misogynoir. They were always the poems that got stuck in my throat on stage. I started to get comfortable with some. Others I stopped performing altogether.

Last year, when I lost my granny and then, very suddenly, my uncle, that all shifted. I began to write about thick and heavy grief. I’m struggling to write about anything else. I’ve only performed one poem from this new work; when I did, I had to grip a chair next to me to stop my legs from giving way. I let the tears fall once I made it back to my seat. I felt sick for an hour after.

I suppose approval has become synonymous with applause. Once you say ‘thank you’ you want the applause to flood the room. Maybe you expect it to erupt and ricochet in echoes. As a performance poet – or a performer of any kind – you want to come off stage and hear praise. You might even hang around backstage to see if anyone shouts for an encore. You try not to look too keen. You want that dopamine hit. You need that buzz. But when you’re performing the personal – when you’ve just broken down, stripped off, stood naked on stage, allowing the audience to feast on your most intimate moments – maybe the response you once wanted is no longer the same.

Maybe the applause becomes muffled and audience faces blur.

Maybe ‘that was amazing’ starts to double back on you as you find yourself reliving a moment that was far from amazing.

Maybe you feel jealousy as people tell you ‘your imagery was so vivid’ and you wish you could have formed imagery from metaphors and similes, not from the events burned on the insides of your skull.

Maybe when they tell you ‘I loved that’ you want to scream because you didn’t.

As audiences, we often want to feel things outside ourselves, or through the feelings of people outside ourselves. To get close to it but not too close. I guess poets, performers, writers, and artists are often not given that grace. We lay it all out and audiences relish in our pain, rarely pausing between the applause to ask if we’re okay.

One evening, listening to the audiobook of Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface as I stood making my dinner, I heard the lines ‘Only she never cared that once the art was made, once the personal became spectacle, the pain was still there.’ Putting the personal out there in poems, paintings, memoirs, whatever medium doesn’t rid the creator of the pain. It still remains past the claps, the clicks, the pats on the back. That’s not to say those brave enough to get up on stage and share some of those personal moments with an audience don’t deserve the praise. They absolutely do – us poets love the clicks. Maybe as audiences we just need to think more about balancing praise with care. Especially when we can see the performer is hurting.

I often reflect with one of my writer-friends on how we met. It was about five years ago and I was watching her perform for the first- time. Mid-poem, she fled from the stage with tears streaming down her face and apologised to the audience. I followed her instinctively to the bathroom, moved by the poem she’d been unable to finish. We hugged, cried, laughed. She opened up to me about her experiences, about how tough it was to share that particular piece in the spotlight. I listened. I didn’t tell her how beautiful the poem was, or that I wanted to hear the rest of it. I didn’t speak about the imagery she’d woven through, or how I loved her use of different languages. She needed the space to talk about the experience, not to celebrate the form in which we’d received it.

I know quite a few writers who craft truly powerful and personal poetry but refuse to perform it. Digging into feelings again isn’t easy. It takes a lot to heal, and sometimes you have to question for whose benefit you’re unearthing it all. Who does it serve? When a performer is brave enough to give you even a fraction of insight into the personal, hold that, hold them. They could have left it on the page.

I want to leave you with an extract from a poem I wrote in 2019. I’d just shared an extremely personal piece on stage, one that I’ve not performed since. This poem made its way out of me soon afterwards:

And the audience clicks clicks clicks.
‘You’ve got this,’ they say,
offering words of comfort.
Clicking while they encourage you,
not trying to discourage you
eyes pleading you to carry on.
They think you’ve lost your place in your poem,
confused your lines,
but you’re lost in the moment,
confusing flashbacks with reality,
tripping over trauma,
until you’re back,
there,
again.

– ‘Healing and feeling’ by Simone Yasmin, unpublished but alive and well in the Notes app of her phone.

Simone Yasmin is a writer and spoken word artist born and based in Leeds. Her poetry has been published in Metal’s ‘In Other Words 2’, BALTIC’S ‘S.P.A.M Spreads #1’, ‘Exiled Writers Ink’s ‘RESISTANCE’ and Unicef Next Generation’s ‘Words By’. She is a former judge on the panel of the Leeds Poetry Festival competition and Simone recently worked with the National Literacy Trust to select West Yorkshire’s first young Poet Laureate’s. She is currently writing her debut collection of poetry.

Photo credit: Michael Godsall

The post Relishing In My Pain appeared first on English PEN.

The coherence comes from the depth of intention. I’ve been thinking about it a long time, pondering how best to write about this huge and troubling subject. It is a subject that awakens in us primal fears and evasions. It is daunting, nightmarish, and hard to make sense of, all at the same time. So I thought I would use all the powers of literature to try and tackle it. I wanted to use its diverse forms and the power intrinsic to each to take the reader on a cubistic journey round the issue of the climate crisis.

Seeing these pieces gathered together, their shortness is marked – structurally, but also on a line level. It’s particularly conspicuous in your poetry, with lines often only small handful of words long. Could you talk a little about form, and shortness of form? 

We don’t have much time. The climate crisis has done something to time. We have a short time gap to turn things around and get the environment back on an even keel. The shortness of the forms and lines reflect the shortness of the time we’ve got. What I need to convey is so urgent that the long form feels oddly inappropriate. The existential nature of the crisis has compelled me to question the way I write. In one of the essays, I talk about a writing without waste. The writing has to match what is needed: truth, simplicity, a kind of Spartan beauty, passion, love, vision.

Has climate crisis always been in your work, in a way?

Only to the degree that I have always been sensitive to nature, to the air we breathe, to pollution, to exploitation, to deforestation. Some critics claim that a short story of mine in a volume called Stars of the New Curfew, a story called ‘What the Tapster Saw’, initiated a genre called petro-fiction. But it’s only recently I felt the need to face the subject head on. And it is a tough subject to tackle. It strains the limits of aesthetics. Can one write about the environment and it to still be art? My answer is yes. Absolutely. It can be art and fire.

I remember discussing ‘What the Tapster Saw’ and ‘petro-magic-realism’ in my now very-out-of-date master’s thesis. The thesis is out of date, I suppose, for the same reasons of short time that you mention above; it was too interested in the aesthetics of writing about climate and not enough also in the material conditions of writing about climate; too bothered with the art, not enough with both art and fire.

Would you say that your “purpose” for writing (to use that limiting old way of asking a writer why the write, when the answer is of course “because I am a writer” – sorry!) has changed over the decades?

It changes as I change, but it remains the same as I remain the same. I write for truth, for beauty, for justice, for playfulness, for innovation, for pleasure, to change the world, to stop the breath, to reveal, to question, to discover…

You’ve spoken elsewhere of the need for ‘a radical act of mass consciousness’ that would jolt us from the numb, passive, unthinking path to climate disaster we’re on. What might that look like, for you? And what function might literature and storytelling have in it?

I don’t know what it would look like. But I know what it would do. It would be like the spirit of solidarity and courage and awareness that was there during the Blitz. It would be a world where we are all pulling together to cut down on our emissions and our waste. It would be the beginning of a new civilisation, where we no longer do things that contribute to the death of our species. We would be thoughtful and aware. Our commerce would be creative, our government would act not only for the national interest but that of humanity as a whole. We would love our lives and have our virtues and vices, but we would be conscious that what we do impacts beautifully on the world. We wouldn’t be so selfish and naïve. For we are naïve in thinking that we can go on polluting in individual and societal ways and the environmental equation will still come out alright. I believe we are at a crossroads. One road continues our suicidal relationship with the earth all the way to hell. The other road leads to a wider humanity, a new species. That’s the starkness of the choice. When we know what has to be done, we will do it. I think it takes a crisis to bring out the best in us. But we don’t want to wake up to the crisis too late, when there is nothing more we can do. That is what literature can make happen. It can take us there, to the edge, to the hell we don’t want. It can show us a new road. It can make these things real and so empower our imagination and our will.

I think Tiger Work points to how what we consider “freedoms” are all contingent on, and dwarfed by, the idea at the collection’s heart. As someone with long involvement in the PEN movement, can I ask how, for you, the totality of climate crisis intersects with the idea of free expression, of the freedoms to read and write, listen and tell?

The first loss of freedom of expression passed into law was in response to climate activism. We no longer have the right to really protest. There, straightaway, is the intersection. Turns out that to talk properly and truly about climate change you need freedom of expression. Climate crisis and liberty are linked.

It feels to me that much of your work explores what we leave behind (to the world, yes, but also of the world). What do you want to leave behind?

Creative celebrations of truth, of clarity, of possibilities. Dreams of greater realities. A measure of our freedom.

Ben Okri was born in Minna, Nigeria. His childhood was divided between Nigeria, where he saw first hand the consequences of war, and London. He has won many prizes over the years for his fiction, and is also an acclaimed essayist, playwright, and poet. In 2019 Astonishing the Gods was named as one of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels That Shaped Our World’.

Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

The post Art and Fire: An Interview with Ben Okri appeared first on English PEN.

I’ve known of the PEN Pinter Prize since its inauguration, and I have to say it had never crossed my mind that the work I do would ever be regarded as worthy for this honour. Lucky I wasn’t a judge, then. Well, no, as it’s me standing here, I wouldn’t have been, would I? I’ll try not to be overwhelmed by the company I’m keeping here: previous winners, and of course Harold Pinter himself, who we must thank for having created the prize.

Can I spend a few moments talking about Pinter? He was innovative, daring, outspoken and brave. I first came across his work when I was a teenager going along to the Questors Theatre in Ealing, as part of being in the Young Questors Club. This was December 1959. I was 13. I sat in the old converted church on my own, watching a matinee of The Birthday Party. You must remember that Pinter was a new voice in theatre at this time. The word ‘Pinteresque’ hadn’t been invented – not quite. The OED gives its first appearance as being a year later.

So there I am on my own in a draughty old church watching this play with a mix of amazement, horror and mystery. The words being spoken – were they real? Ironic? Or were they, in effect, what I might call ‘shadow’ words – the words that people would speak if they dared or could?

And there’s the word ‘dared’. Even as a 13-year-old, I had a sense that there was something daring about a play that revealed what people secretly thought, desired, and feared. And, for those of you who know the play, you’ll know that it conjures up the image of arbitrary menace, control and punishment. When asked about the play 30 years later, Pinter said, ‘The character of the old man, Petey, says one of the most important lines I’ve ever written. As Stanley is taken away, Petey says, “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do.” I’ve lived that line all my damn life. Never more than now.’

And then, talking about three of his plays, Pinter added: ‘It’s the destruction of an individual, the independent voice of an individual. I believe that is precisely what the United States is doing in Nicaragua.’

The critic Michael Billington wrote of The Birthday Party that it’s ‘a deeply political play about the individual’s imperative need for resistance.’ Now, even though I’ve written screeds about the matter, I don’t fully know what we mean when we say a play, a film, a poem – any work of art – has an ‘effect’ on us. Even so, I’m pretty sure something was cooking in 13-year-old Rosen’s head watching The Birthday Party, and some of that was to do with Harold Pinter’s conscious or unconscious mind.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

Writing is often – but not always – very individualistic. Being a reader, a viewer or even a theatre-goer can be individual at the very moment of reception. The thing that is written – play, poem, novel – might be about individuals, but both Pinter and Billington were keen to locate that individualism in something social, something political and, in Pinter’s case, something to do with resistance. I can honestly say that I’ve struggled with this for most of my writing life.

Let me put my cards on the table: there’s a lot about the world I live in, the world that my contemporaries have created, that I find profoundly unsatisfactory, unfair, or utterly horrifying. As the PEN Pinter Prize records, all over the world there are people being silenced, incarcerated, persecuted and killed. The world is unjustly, absurdly, grotesquely unequal. And incredibly, after hundreds of years of this unjust, absurd, grotesque inequality, it hasn’t got any better. If anything, it’s got worse. The twin powers of exploitation and oppression seem to be as strong – if not stronger – than they have ever been. As I speak, there are several wars going on, in which civilians are being killed in their thousands – or is it tens of thousands?

In the midst of this, I write. I look around the room: the previous winners, the judges, many of you – perhaps most of you – write too. I know that many of us hover over our bits of paper and keyboards wondering whether what we do makes any difference whatsoever to the wicked way of the world. Or we might wonder: should it?

A few years after I was sitting in that church watching The Birthday Party, I read Jean-Paul Sartre’s What is Literature? Sartre, as you may know, is a hard taskmaster, demanding of us in the Republic of Letters to be committed – ‘engagé’. I confess, I did wonder at the time, But, Jean-Paul, what about jokes? Sometimes they’re important and necessary too, aren’t they?

But don’t let me get distracted.

Let me stay with this concern with writers writing on their own, about individuals, while being perturbed, worried, or, like Pinter, furious with the socio-political torments. What did Michael Billington mean when he said The Birthday Party was deeply political? Ah, yes, he located it in, ‘the individual’s imperative need for resistance’. So let me tease this out a bit: are both Pinter and Billington saying that, through these spectacles we create in writing, it’s possible to show unjust power, or plain injustice, in such a way as to invite readers and watchers to feel a need to resist?

The first winner of this prize was Tony Harrison. Many of you here will know his poems and plays. In one poem he focusses on just one word, a word that I say as ‘us’ but that he, as a boy, pronounced ‘uz’. As a boy at Leeds Grammar School, this was noted and commented on. Socially aspirant Leeds Grammar School boys of the 1950s weren’t supposed to say ‘uz’. It’s as if we are looking through a keyhole – or an even smaller chink or crack than that – into the workings of social class, regionalism, oppression by looking at the use of one word. Or, in the words of modern linguists, ‘at the level of the signifier’.

Despite my doubts as to whether I merit it, I have accepted this award. Nay, been delighted to accept it, if a little overawed by it. I’m no Harold Pinter, no Tony Harrison. Both of them, I think, overcame that problem of how to foster a social reaction – social resistance, even – through individualistic forms.

So can I put it like this: I think this award throws me a challenge; it invites me to ask myself, ‘What have you done, Rosen, to make you think you can accept this award?’

By the way, saying ‘Rosen’ like that to myself conjures up streams of grammar school teachers from the 1950s and 60s – from the benign to the boring, from the encouraging to the crushing, many of them full of the contradictions that stay with you for the rest of your life. For example, imagine this: one teacher once said to me, ‘If we’d had any sense, Rosen, we would have been on the side of the Germans in the Second World War’. Not the most tactful thing to say to a Jewish kid in the 1950s. However, he was the very same teacher who said, as I left the school, ‘Don’t get rubbed out, will you, Rosen?’

Another voice echoing in my head as I say ‘Rosen’ to myself is that of Christopher Hitchens. For some reason, he always called me ‘Rosen’. Perhaps not the Hitchens many of you knew from TV but the earlier version (we all have one of them) who I knew at university. That Hitchens was, I guess, a pub Jean-Paul Sartre. While I drank my orange juice mixed with sparkling water, eating rollmops, Hitchens spent many hours telling me how I ought to sharpen up my act and spend less time pissing about. Well, I say to the late Christopher Hitchens, I like doing both. And, to tell the truth, I rate both. In fact, to complicate matters, sometimes I sharpen up my pissing about. As Shakespeare suggests with the character of Fool in King Lear, there are times when absurdism is a legitimate answer to hate and cruelty.

So, yes, Jean-Paul; yes, Hitchens: there have been times when I’ve been polemical. This may have come out that way because matters seemed to be so pressing – or because Michael Gove was running education – that you couldn’t have stopped me. At other times, it’s been because people have asked me. For ten years or so, the Guardian asked me to write about education from the point of view of curious parent. In fact, more often than not, it was as a furious parent.

Only a couple of weeks ago we read in the Guardian’s sister paper that people who have spoken out against the government’s education policies have been noted, documented and cancelled.  What is it about education that seems to invite people at the top to be so totalitarian even as they insist that education is one of the duties and virtues of democracy? Anyone might think that right-wing libertarianism imposes limits on its libertarianism.

Unless I’ve misunderstood him, I think Sartre rather thought that poetry had its place alongside music, and so didn’t have to obey his demands for commitment. His gaze was fixed on prose writing. By the way, to even things up as regards teachers, a big shoutout for my A-level French teachers, Mr and Mrs Emmans, who taught me Sartre’s Les Mains sales and Voltaire’s Candide.

Isn’t it interesting how preparing a talk like this, starts to throw up connections and disruptions? The Birthday Party, Tony Harrison, Voltaire, and Michael Gove.

Another pressure on my writing – a welcome one – has come from Professor Helen Weinstein, as you’ve heard. Pressures and needs. We could say a lot about that aspect of writing. We often focus on what we call ‘influence’, in the sense of artistic precursors, and not so much on the social circumstances that create pressure, need, and indeed necessity.

What were the pressures that came to bear on Pinter that led him to write The Birthday Party? What hidden forces lay behind the two men who take Stanley away at the end of the play? Less mysterious, perhaps, but no less potent are the ones expressed through the fault lines in Tony Harrison’s poem ‘Uz’.

But again, fixing that gaze on what I’ve been on about, I come to a good deal of work that slots into the category we call ‘children’s literature’. I fell into it by mistake. In my late teens and early 20s, I experimented with writing in a voice that was meant to be something like my own from when I was about 10. For some reason that I am not fully conscious of, I wanted to be an archaeologist of my childhood, and the most suitable form seemed to me then (and still is) a kind of oral writing – a spoken-word narrative, a form of memorable speech, a kind of free verse monologue.

Alongside these, I inherited the wordplay and nonsense of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Spike Milligan – which was, in a way, the unconscious wordplay that that 10-year-old me liked or would have liked.

Thanks to the BBC School Radio producer Joan Griffiths, the great educator Margaret Meek Spencer, and the editor Pam Royds, I was discovered and reframed as a writer for children, and I’ve been doing this for 60 years!

That sentence has an exclamation mark on it.

And what a far cry this is from all that Pinteresque, Sartrean stuff. Or is it? Let me put it this way: if, as an adult, you imagine the world as a 10-year-old might see it, or the way that you saw it when you were 10, it may not be the most subversive thing in the known world, but it sure does bring you up against many of the strange power trips that we as adults go in for.

Right up until this week, I am delighted and amazed to stand in front of 200, 500, on occasions 1500 children, relating stories that happened to me when I was a child in the 1950s in north London to school students and children living lives that are, in many ways, eons away from mine.

I’m very lucky: right from 1974, when my first book came out, teachers, librarians and teacher trainers have asked me to read and perform my poems, even as I’m relating the grossly hyperbolic saga of the teacher who wouldn’t let us breathe in her lessons and who strung us up on the wall bars in the school prison for three weeks with the rats nibbling our toenails. You’ll note, here, that I always believe in telling children the truth.

What’s the laughter doing when I perform this stuff? Is it what the great Russian critic, Mikhail Bakhtin called subversive laughter and the carnivalesque? Bakhtin answers my plea to Sartre – what about jokes? He asked, what happens when we writers turn the world upside down? That’s what my precursor Malorie Blackman did with her wonderful Noughts & Crosses series, inviting us to see the world we know through a new inverting prism, and so making us see the oppression in the known world.

And that nonsense and word-play stuff? Well, remember what I said about the signifier, the words, the signs we make in order to express meaning? I say, to children, ‘I’ve got a new way to spell the word “everybody”: take one letter at a time off the front of the word, and say what you’ve got left. And you get: everybody, verybody, erybody, rybody, ybody, body, ody, dy, y.’

Is this a disruption at the level of the signifier?

By the way, one of the great mysteries about Lewis Carroll is that he created some of the most disruptive writing ever but was himself a desperately conformist person – not that we have to bother too much about that. I mean, apart from the fun of being nosy, don’t we say let the work stand for itself? Well, the fun of being nosy is such a lot of fun that not many of us stick to that principle. I remember the great subversive poet Adrian Mitchell ticking me off once because I said that I liked the Daniel Craig and Gwyneth Paltrow movie about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. ‘Leave them alone,’ he cried out to me on a night-time car journey. Well, in the nicest possible way, you haven’t left me alone. Thanks very much indeed.

Finally, a brief word about Covid. Well, it’s needs and pressures again, isn’t it? You may have noticed that there is an inquiry going on. I don’t know how long it’ll take. I hope it will tell us that happened. I hope it’ll help us do things better next time. But I couldn’t wait. I did my own enquiry. Well, that’s partly (or perhaps mostly) what writing is. It enquires, investigates, interprets, unearths. It goes somewhere (inside our heads or outside) and reports back. When something is as immense and awful as the pandemic was, I want to be a witness. Because I couldn’t wait, I’ve been my own statutory enquiry.

Before I go, I must thank some people who’ve nurtured and supported me: my parents and brother were (and, in my brother’s case, still is) among the greatest questioners, jokers, probers, wordsmiths I have ever known. My children have done their best to bring me up. They’ve found it to be quite a hard job. Emma took up the pieces of a fragmented person back in 2000 and has done the best she could with challenging material – me. Talking of challenging circumstances, it wasn’t my intention to lumber her and the family with 48 days in intensive care. Her solid stoicism, down to earth realism, is a wonder.

And that reminds me of all those people in the NHS striving to mend and cure people in spite of what look like efforts to hinder them through cuts and privatisation.  The people who looked after me – men and women, many of them with origins from all over the world, working together for the good of humankind – offered a glimpse of something of how we could live if we had the resolve and solidarity to make it happen.

Each year, the PEN Pinter Prize is shared with a Writer of Courage, who is chosen by the winner from a shortlist of PEN’s current cases of concern. This half of the prize is awarded to someone who has been persecuted for speaking out about their beliefs.

This year’s winner is an acclaimed academic, anthropologist, and a leading expert on Uyghur folklore and cultural traditions, recognised internationally for her unique contribution to the study and cataloguing of Uyghur cultural heritage. She disappeared in late 2017, shortly after making plans to travel to Beijing to participate in an academic conference. She never reached her destination, and it was widely believed that she had been disappeared by the Chinese authorities. Despite international condemnation of her disappearance and a campaign calling for her release, more than three years passed before reports confirmed that the Chinese authorities had sentenced and imprisoned her. Last month, it was widely reported that a sentence of life imprisonment on charges of endangering state security by promoting ‘splittism’, originally handed down in 2018, has now been upheld. Six years since she first disappeared, she continues to be held incommunicado, and her whereabouts remain unknown.

Standing here in the British library, I could not be more aware of the huge gulf between the kind of freedoms I have, or often take for granted, but are denied to many others in the world.

I have devoted many hours in my life to the enjoyment and study of folklore – story and song in particular – trying to understand the values, ideas and feelings that these express. I’ve learned a huge amount from this and applied it many times over in my life. My version of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt came out of this interest.

But my passion for what the American poet Carl Sandburg once called The People, Yes is pushed towards sorrow and anger on hearing that someone could be imprisoned for precisely the kind of interest that I have. This is why I have chosen Rahile Dawut to be this year’s Writer of Courage.

I should note here that I’ve sometimes moved in circles in my life where people have argued furiously over whether folk music was mired in nostalgia or it was the voice of the exploited, the oppressed and the suppressed. Here, with Rahile Dawut, we can see that the Chinese authorities have in effect decided that argument: simply to record, study and catalogue a people’s culture has been, and continues to be, an act of resistance.

I must wish her well, fervently hope that whatever we are doing here today helps her case. I want to express admiration for what she has done, and I wish her all the mental and physical strength she needs. Or, as my parents would say: ‘sh’koyech’ a Hebraic Yiddish saying meaning something like a mix of appreciation and wishing strength to someone.

Michael Rosen is one of Britain’s best loved writers and performance poets for children and adults. His first degree in English Literature and Language was from Wadham College, Oxford and he went on to study for an MA at the University of Reading and a PhD at the former University of North London, now London Metropolitan. He is currently Professor of Children’s Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London where he teaches critical approaches to reading on an MA in Children’s Literature. He has taught on MA courses in universities since 1994. He was the Children’s Laureate from 2007–2009 and has published over 200 books for children and adults, including the recent bestseller Many Different Kinds of Love and On the Move: Poems about Migration.

Photo credit: George Torode

The post In the Midst of This, I Write appeared first on English PEN.

This lecture is about issues I’ve been exploring for many years – as a writer and poet, and as a human rights lawyer. But as we watch the destruction and horror of events in Ukraine, I am very aware of the moment in our history in which I’m sharing these words. There is a word in Hindi, sangam, which refers to the confluence of three rivers – a sacred place, a starting point, a location of rebirth. It feels very much as though, today, we stand soberly at the tip of the angle of the river’s edge.

I want to explore the texture of the idea of the migrant in 2022 – how we have got here, and what the framing of the migrant has meant for our culture, our literature, and our imaginations. Before I do, I’d like to thank two people who have helped me develop some of the thinking around these complex issues over the last few months. One is George Szirtes, a Hungarian poet who arrived in the UK as a child refugee in the 1950s. He was my teacher, and is a writer whose work keenly speaks to ideas of uprootedness and unbelonging – ‘I’ve always felt that my work is like a Budapest tenement on the edge of a British town’, he said once. The other is a lawyer, Raza Hussain QC, for his expertise and guidance on law relating to the Nationality and Borders Bill, which I will discuss in the hope of illuminating the idea of the migrant.

But this is not a lesson in law. It’s more of an enquiry – or, to borrow Ursula K. Le Guin’s phrase, an attempt ‘to learn which questions are unanswerable and not to answer them’, a skill ‘most needed in times of stress and darkness’.

How did we get here?

Some of the provisions in the Nationality and Borders Bill would dismantle refugee rights and erode principles that we have taken for granted for decades. The 1951 Refugee Convention replaced previous regimes with a new system. (It’s not difficult to understand why, of course. In May 1939, more than 900 Jewish refugees fled Germany on the SS St. Louis, heading to Cuba. They were refused entry there, and in the US and Canada, because that they didn’t have visas or prior authorisation. They sailed back to Europe, and some 250 people were later killed in concentration camps.) This new piece of legislation effectively reverses the principle that pre-authorisation visas are not necessary. And so I want to ask how we got here – to discuss migration in all its complexities and contradictions, to pick at what Edward Said called its ‘potent even enriching motif of modern culture’, to ask us as writers and poets about the role we play and to look back at that which we have played in the past.

This is not a lecture in law. But linking the law and literature forces us to think about our culture in a different way: if stories are important, then the legislation that is passed expresses the basic values of our nation and culture and it too gives us narratives through which we live our lives; if those legal narrations are out of step with social change, they still communicate a state’s values. A good example is Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, finally repealed in June 2000, which prohibited “promoting the teaching of homosexuality”. These egregious provisions were, in effect, state-sanctioned homophobia, which stigmatised and caused harm to communities. But let’s not forget the narratives that the state was consciously writing at the same time.

In 2003, I was involved in a case representing several refugee and child welfare NGOs. The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, had just passed the grizzliest piece of legislation I’d seen, the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002. Section 55 of the Act prevented any government organisation assisting people who had arrived in the UK by irregular means, effectively destituting asylum seekers who failed to claim asylum upon arrival. The Court of Appeal heard the evidence and quickly overturned the legislation, noting that the Secretary of State couldn’t possibly have intended ‘that genuine refugees should be faced with the bleak alternatives of returning to persecution or of destitution’. Blunkett clarified his position the next morning in an interview: ‘no’, he corrected the judgement, he did indeed intend to do so; in other words, the aim of the legislation was to starve out refugees, and the courts were attempting to subvert the will of Parliament. If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because we are in all-too-familiar territory.

History has taught us that language can be deployed to otherise people and groups; a poem is not a human rights instrument or the pleadings in a court case, nor should it seek to be, but one activity that the human rights lawyer and the poet share is the restless interrogation of language. So what happens as the language of politics becomes untethered from critical reason – from the facts? One thing is that alongside the degradation of language comes a further degradation: the rupture of empathy, which leads us to the bleak realisation that the inviolable dignity of the human is loosening ever more from the table.

And the other thing up for grabs – though it was never really securely fastened to the table in the first place – is migrant rights.

The 2002 Act was the grizzliest piece of legislation I’d seen at the time. But it has been displaced by the Nationality and Borders Bill, currently bouncing between the House of Commons and the House of Lords, as the most pernicious I’ve seen. The provisions in clause 11 will, for the first time, criminalise a refugee’s irregular entry into the UK; it will mean that anyone arriving in the UK by an illegal route, such as by a small boat across the Channel, will have their claim ruled as inadmissible. They will be liable to be prosecuted and receive a jail sentence of up to four years; they will have no recourse to public funds; they will no longer have access to family reunion. This legislation will effectively create a two-tier refugee system: “good” people who apply for asylum in the proper way will receive benefits and right to be joined by their family; those “bad” ones will be penalised, criminalised, and – even if they are allowed to stay – not permitted to have family join them. You will have been told that one of the reasons for the Act is to stem the flow of illegal immigration – to create safer passages, thus cutting the supply to people smugglers and those who exploit vulnerable displaced people. You will have also been told that it will be fairer for “genuine asylum seekers” who patiently wait for their turn. What you might not know is that there is no asylum queue. No such queue exists; no such plans for such a queue exist. You may also not know that 70% of asylum seekers are ultimately successful in their claims.

The other important point to make is that refugee status is a recognition, not a grant. Government lawyers are currently arguing that family reunion is not a fundamental part of the fabric of the UN Refugee Convention. Anyone working in the refugee sector will tell you that the reason this wasn’t explicitly articulated in that document is that the drafters could not contemplate any civilised nation not conferring this basic right to recognised refugees.

Movement is the basic condition of humanity. It’s how we’re fundamentally wired. We are human, therefore we move and migrate. We migrate on a cellular and molecular level, even; Dr Pontus Nordenfelt, an expert in infection biology, has observed that T cells are able to migrate to imperilled cells by attaching themselves to a surface, using their fronts to push to exert the force needed to release their rears from the surface, allowing themselves to roll forwards. And this microscopic movement is a part of the movements that are our condition, the condition and idea of movement with which we have been constantly fixated in our language, and which form the very backbone of our literature, the marrow of the bones of our ancient texts.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote the following passage on the condition of exile in which he found himself:

There is a sort of inborn restlessness in the human spirit and an urge to change one’s abode; for man is endowed with a mind which is changeable and unsettled: nowhere at rest, it darts about and directs its thoughts to all places known and unknown, a wanderer who cannot endure repose and delights.

Czesław Miłosz, in his Poetics, articulates the permeable boundaries in which we operate as poets:

The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person
For our house is open there are no keys in the doors and invisible guests come in and out at will

Every text we read has a journey inside it; every culture has stories that contain the motif of the stranger or the loneliest exile arriving and encountering the host. Our fairy tales and mythmaking are often used to communicate customs to the tribe. And how often they envisage a stranger’s entrance: Hansel and Gretel, starving kids crossing the threshold of the witch’s house; the Cyclops eating at Odysseus’s men when they seek respite from a storm. Will the host hoodwink the arrivant with his odd, tilted hat and that accent, or will they, like Telemachus, fail to recognise their father in rags but still offer comfort and food? The Mahabharata, too, is steeped in rituals of welcome. The Sikh texts are replete with the idea of giving hospitality to the stranger, and it’s manifested in the offer of warmth and food of the langar hall. Jews, strangers in the land of Egypt, the ‘world’s archetypal strangers’, employ the language of hospitality in the Torah and Talmud.

Edmond Jabès, a Jewish poet of Egyptian origin forced into exile by the Suez Crisis, was haunted by the question of place and its loss. In le livre de l’hospitalite,he says:

One day I recognise that what was more important to me than anything else was how I define myself to the degree that I was a stranger I then realised that in his vulnerability stranger could only count on the hospitality that others could offer him just at work just as words benefit in the hospitality the white page offers them all the birds from the unconditional space of the sky.

In many ways, the migrant represents everything that a right-wing ideology despises. It celebrates the ambiguous, a hyphenated identity that’s complex and subject to mutation. Migration cannot be simply reduced to a familiar, banal script of itineraries, maps and attendant tourism. Thought travels; thought leaps. When we empathise for the human we exercise a muscle, a movement. The old adage there but for the grace of God go I perhaps articulates something basic in us that can be triggered – a pull of the imagination that makes us put ourselves in the stranger’s shoes, sometimes heeded as a warning to our children, more often a recognition that we are vulnerable to fate and illness and sheer bad luck.

Looking back at what went before is an ethical position. And we also need to remind ourselves that most narratives prior to the Enlightenment were not linear. The Palestinian writer Adania Shibli elucidates this when she talks the linear narrative as ‘a dictatorship which causes blindness’. Shibli’s novel Minor Detail centres on an event that takes place in 1949: a young Bedouin girl is discovered by an Israeli officer, who brutally rapes and then murders her. The book is in two parts: the first leads us into the mind of the officer, its cool, restrained, sharp narration at counterpoint to the sheer horror of the events; in the second, we meet a modern-day researcher carefully attempting to excavate and make sense of this ‘minor detail’ in history. Why does linearity cause blindness? Because it is beholden to a forward progression that refuses to look back and historicise. But if the present is always haunted by the past, then surely we have an obligation to put that past in this present; if we seek to tell the truth in our poems and in our stories, the past should not be erased.

I thought about this when I was writing my novel Somebody Loves You. The narrator is a young mute girl, Ruby, who has lived under the weather of her mother’s severe mental illness, and who has developed strategies – her wry sense of humour, her sensitive antennae – to help her navigate the world around her. Her story had to be told truthfully, and I could only do so by using different forms of writing. Memories – particularly traumatic or unresolved ones – often act like tripwires in our days; they can be triggered by the smallest, most banal things, and can pursue us like dogs in alleyways. We are so used to writing tidily, with certainty, but life is not this, is it? And Ruby’s life was not this either. If, when we write, we are striving to tell the truth, we may need to leave untidier endings – leave the live cables on the floor for the reader to choose to inspect or leave undisturbed. The Eastern European poets knew this, of course – the poets who deliberately refused to earth the cables because what they had witnessed had made them be left there.

When movement and migration are not desired but imposed, traumatic estrangement haunts the psyche. When I was working as a lawyer, a young teenager came to see me. He was an unaccompanied minor from Iraq who had become separated from his family en route. However hard we tried, we could not trace his parents. ‘I exist here’, he had said. ‘Technically I am breathing and my heart, here, under my shirt, is beating. But I exist only, I do not live’. This almost poetic utterance echoes Said’s painful observations of how estrangement affected his friends exiled and adrift: ‘To see a poet in exile – as opposed to reading the poetry of exile – is to see exile’s antimonies embodied and endured with a unique intensity’. Moving can hurt. Home is a contested term; even if the home you’ve left behind is burning to the ground, even if you are cast off and rejected and exiled like Said’s friend, the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, that doesn’t mean it isn’t home. Perhaps, as we begin to criminalise the desperate, we should think about the costs of the stories that begin in the gap, or in the rip of a journey.

The writer Ian Chambers says that ‘the stranger is the ghost that shadows every discourse, is the disturbing interrogation, the estrangement, that potentially exists within us all. It is a presence that persists but cannot be effaced that draws me out of myself towards another’. The émigré, the nomad, the pilgrim, the traveller, the sojourner, the exiled, the refugee, the displaced, the migrant in all its configurations has always belonged, but these versions of stranger are in all of us, and necessarily arouse in us tensions between being at home and being at the point of departure .The stranger that is the ghost makes us plumb our own depths and look at the dark-blue matter in our souls. It also confirms that the migrant-stranger has always belonged somewhere.

All the terms I’ve referred to elicit a different response, and mirror our current narrations about who we allow on our shores for protection, and who we believe is here to benefit economically. The new narration of our so-called “migrant crises” doesn’t tell the truth of our histories – even our most recent ones. The term ‘refugee’ is under severe pressure from new tragedies that were never discussed in the 1950s, when the Refugee Convention was drafted. – environmental damage, the breakdown of regimes that trigger simultaneous political and economic collapse, and so on. Asylum visas are not possible; asylum queues do not exist; carriers will not fly travellers without visas: the whole complex maelstrom of human suffering is put through the tiny funnel named the ‘Refugee Process.’ The chilling reality is that nation-states have put people in impossible situations: in order to exercise a legal right, you must break the law. Persecution and hunger are a deadly cocktail. Would you want your children to drink it? Or, as Warsan Shire says in her poem ‘Home’:

no one leaves home unless
home is in the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

In August 2021, the government airlifted 15,000 Afghan citizens they described as friends of the UK: interpreters, teachers, army personnel, their families. It was genuinely moving watching these images. But six months later the window has jammed shut. The world and the language has moved on, and the same ‘friends’ we welcomed will be criminalised from May this year.

It’s easy for us to empathise with those people that resemble us and our children. How seamlessly we can extend our empathy and compassion to the suffering of Ukrainian families. It hasn’t surprised me that these families are within our orbit of empathy because they are ‘just like us’, ‘resemble us and could be us’ – phrases I’ve lifted from mainstream journalists and commentators. Fundamentally, a failure in our imagination is at stake: it’s a different type of work that’s necessary to empathise with the unknowable human, the stranger; a different sort of activity is required from us, to bring our imaginations to something that feels other. That’s why populations have looked away when rights are eroded from stigmatised communities – why Nuremburg Race Laws and Apartheid legislation are accepted in so-called “educated, civil populations” – because, when a state sets a narrative and passes the laws that criminalise, vilify and attempt to penalise human beings, half the work of rupturing empathy is already done.

What is happening in Ukraine is horrific. And the paucity of our government’s response in refugee assistance is depressingly inevitable: just look at the narrative that has been written by successive governments over the last 30 years.

‘History does not repeat, but it does instruct’, says Timothy Snyder. ‘History does not repeat, but it does rhyme’, say words attributed to Mark Twain. ‘We cannot understand [Fascism], but we can and must understand from where it springs. The difference between knowledge and understanding is key’, says Primo Levi. At the beginning The Book of Dialogue,Edmond Jabès also instructs:

‘The book does not begin’ he replied.
‘All beginnings are already in the book’.
A priori doubtful, interpretation of the book, because, at every turn, it is challenged by the opaque light of some word that might well be the key,
The text is rich where it shares this darkness.
‘To know that we can only penetrate the book after it has been taken from us.
‘That we inhabit only our losses’, he said

Language can do magic. We know this from history. If language can make people disappear, it can make citizenship and our claims to it disappear too. One minute we are citizens, the next our citizenship is conditional and contingent, strings attached. When she was Prime Minister, Theresa May gave a speech in which she threw down the gauntlet: there is no such thing as a citizen of the world, she said; ‘if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere’.

In my hands I hold three documents: the British passport I acquired at birth by the virtue of the fact that I was born in the UK before 1981; a document issued by the Indian High Commission that gives me overseas citizenship of India and allows me to travel into India without a visa, which I was able to obtain by virtue of the fact that my parents were born in India and were previously citizens of that country; a small pale-blue document called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the rights within which all of us are technically entitled to by virtue of our humanity. This last document is small but mighty.

Clause 9 of the Nationality and Borders Bill, though, which was slipped in as late amendment, has something else up its sleeve. This clause seeks to expand the Secretary of State’s powers under the British Nationality Act 1981 to make an order stripping a person of British citizenship. In effect, the clause confers upon the Secretary of State wide and ill-defined powers to make a deprivation order without notice. The Secretary of State would have to be satisfied that deprivation is ‘conducive to the public good’, provided they are satisfied that they have a reasonable belief that the person is able to become a national of another country. It’s been estimated that 6 million people in the UK could potentially be caught in the provisions. We have been told that “good citizens” need not worry, but these vague and wide powers will remain on the statute books. The people affected are people like me – second-generation British citizens whose parents arrived from on ships with names like Windrush Empire or, in my father’s case, Laureline; children of those immigrants who still remember the packed suitcases on tops of wardrobes ‘just in case’.

Just in case suitcases were in nearly all the immigrant houses I visited growing up. When Enoch Powell made speeches or when the National Front announced their intention to march a few streets away from us, I am sure my mother brought it down and repacked it, just in case. The government has told us that clause 9 will be used only in exceptional circumstances, but trust on issues relating to documentation and citizenship is at rightly low levels after the Windrush scandal, when 83 British citizens were wrongly deported and thousands more denied medical care. Now, in age of uncertainty, following Brexit and a pandemic that has widened and sharpened inequalities, the state has chosen to impose precarity that discriminates. All citizens are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Citizenship ‘is a right to have rights’, says Hannah Arendt, who so often spoke about the fragility of human rights documents. In world where over 4 million people are stateless, her scepticism of this little blue UN document is well-founded; these high-and-mighty rights are meaningless without them being underpinned by citizenship itself. Rights are simply abstract ideals unless they adhere to state backed-systems – how else can they be enforced?

For those without state protections, the future will be even more uncertain, because the government has pronounced their intention to repeal the Human Rights Act. Barely 20 years old, its protections to human beings irrespective of citizenship are vulnerable. The narrative we are told is that the Act, with its distinctly European provenance, is a charter for prisoners, asylum seekers and vagrants. It has nothing to do with you and I – “ordinary people”. There is a call to replace it with a homemade, British, ‘modern Bill of Rights’. But the Human Rights Act is precious and hard-won, giving us rights in step with the European Convention of Human Rights, which was born of the atrocities of World War Two, when it drafted by UK lawyers, with the UK as its first signatory.

In an age of reinvigorated nationalism, what do citizenship and belonging now mean? History’s mouth is dry from all its attempts to say that stories are a form of action, that they are, in Hannah Arendt’s words, the way ‘we insert ourselves in the human world’. Stories are the way we become historical because, as she says, ‘one man will always be left alive to tell the story’.

I was recently stood in front several Francis Bacon paintings in an exhibition called Man and Beast when it suddenly struck me that painters are attempting to do the same thing as poets. A constant tug and pull at the light veil that separates us from the animal; the contradictions that dwell in all of us. That thin flap is almost visible in Bacon’s paintings, but you can hear the rustle of its movement; that rustle is also found in the work of poets who show us that ‘art is spirit seeking flesh’, a phrase coined by the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, an exile. And just as the poets translate the world into language, the painters give us a rare gift of knowledge: human dignity is a value that we can’t take for granted; it must be something asserted on a daily basis, something we choose, a flap we smooth down that centres the dignity of the human; it requires movement, a form of commitment to that story.

Poetry needs to continue to strive to make space for itself, to think the unthinkable, put the unimaginable on the page. Poets who have witnessed the degradation of civil society can instruct us in these toxic waters because poems are capable of thinking for themselves.

Democracies are not inevitable. In many ways, we have only just begun to scratch the surface of what a democracy might be. It requires something from us; language requires from us an extra vigilance. The story of the migrant is an ancient story, and numbness and indifference to history are how democratic principles fall away. If our poems and stories reveal one singular pattern, it is this.

Mona Arshi worked as a human rights lawyer at Liberty before she started writing poetry. Her debut collection, Small Hands, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2015. Mona’s second collection, Dear Big Gods, was published in 2019 (both books appearing with Liverpool University Press’s Pavilion Poetry list). Her poems and interviews have been published in the Times, Guardian, Times of India and Granta, as well as on the London Underground. She was recently writer in residence at Cley Marshes in Norfolk. In 2020 she was appointed honorary professor at the University of Liverpool. Her debut novel Somebody Loves You was published by And Other Stories in autumn 2021, and is longlisted for the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize, Jhalak Prize and Desmond Elliot Prize.

StAnza is Scotland’s annual international poetry festival, bringing poetry in all its forms and many languages to Scottish audiences and worldwide. Since the festival was founded by three local poets in 1998, StAnza has gained an international reputation. In 2021, its achievements were recognised with the Saboteur Award for Best Literary Festival in the UK. 2023’s festival will be StAnza’s 25^th anniversary.

The title of this piece is taken from Ingeborg Bachman’s poem ‘Departure from England’.

Photo credit: Karolina Heller

The post When a Country’s Soul Succumbs: Laws, Migration and Culture appeared first on English PEN.

It’s an interesting exercise, writing about someone living. You have to think twice about what you do or don’t say (which is always the case with poetry, but it’s a different kind of responsibility when you’re celebrating someone’s achievements). I am hardly the celebratory type – I tend towards the anxious and the funereal – but one way in was to look at what Johnson did himself: he wrote reggaes. And so, I thought, why not begin with this very specific bit of South London, where the poets sleep, and make it a metaphor for Britain? ‘Linton Street”’ seemed weird as a title, because it was too reverent – why not ‘England Street?’ And have the subtitle, ‘Reggae fi Linton”’, as a reference to what Johnson himself did on Bass Culture (1980) for Blair Peach, and on More Time (1999) for May Ayim and Bernard – made them an indelible part of British social history. I wanted to write something that was more about looking at how Britain had been changed – ‘re-said’ – but to also look at what it means to be a poet; to be both part of that change and apart from it.

I chose to write in alternate lines of iambic pentametre and hexametre; I used nine lines as Spenser did when writing The Faerie Queene, and chose to extend his use of iambic hexametre (he only uses it in the last line of each stanza), mainly for fun. But there’s something weird about the alternation; iambic hexametre doesn’t really work in English, you have to break too soon – I found myself running out of steam after two or three feet, so that I had to think of each line with a certain regard to the centre. The middle of each line became this weird swamp where I was trying to fit descriptive polysyllables. I think I’ve ironed most of that out.

One of the observations made about poetry of resistance is that it is so often plaintive. Not only do I not see that in the work of LKJ, I also didn’t want to replicate it myself. So the reggae bit, the bit where I move into something more lyrical, was a way of moving into the infinite, the melodic, the proverbial – the private, necessary act of singing to oneself and revelling in it. This exact magic has been shown recently: Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series features one film called ‘Lover’s Rock’. The most remarkable scene is of a crowd of people at a house party who begin dancing to Janet Kay’s Silly Games, but about halfway through the DJ realises that everyone is singing along and turns the music off. What remains is a stunning acapella accompanied by the rhythm of people’s feet as they slow dance together.

It’s easy to see radical, violent energy as the only path to something new, but actually there’s a directness and understatement to LKJ’s work which puts me in mind of the aforementioned scene. Sure, in his work war is invoked, riots and uprisings are reimagined, and the pulse of dub animates everything with a dark, frenetic energy. But listen to LKJ’s voice: it’s level-headed, canny, observant, feeling, spacious. Like he’s advocating an atomic shift, a kind of respect for forms as opposed to units, for radical change at the pace of the everyday.

The reality is that we are at a stage in history in which our ideas cannot simply mirror the past – and we are in danger of doing that. Yet we must remember the past and catch hold of the roots in order to imagine something new. That’s what Johnson did, that’s why he’s being awarded. But even without awards (and let’s be honest, there was nothing inevitable or freely given about his success within British literature) there was the indisputable change that came from the music, the poetry and the cultural innovations of the day, and that collectively challenged the vestiges of empire, white supremacy, racism – the political death-mode that profits from the degradation and extermination of everything that is not itself.

You cannot ask a single poet to speak to all of that; a poet speaks for themself. But you can see how movements and ideas, actions and outcomes are born from a particular historical moment. There is no point trying to recreate it or expecting it to follow the same trajectory. LKJ’s work was about that time, and it bleeds into our own. So: what do we need to imagine next?

England Street (Reggae fi Linton)

The frontline in the eighties started here,
on Railton Road that leads up to Herne Hill – a bridge,
a skeleton that stands above the clouds,
deserted once, now demolished, now sold, the soul
of not so long ago remains if you
know poet’s corner, branching from the main
in back suburban roads, all sceptres stretched,
from Loughborough, to Effra, to Tulse Hill, were once
the scene of war, of lightning in the land.
Those voices, cold, now mingled with the mud
are conjured by their name, each street a tomb, and dub
is that same echo remixed then delayed
by slow filtration, one time through the smoke and sweat,
two times through the hostile, staring crowds
until somewhere the inspiration strikes:
night sweats and tradition mark the voice that
sings most clearly that which Chaucer wrote
and Shakespeare knew – what passes persists:

The drum beat and vocals vibrate through the dark
the spaces inside you where sound disembarks
and softly remixes the beat of your heart
     Oh the siren –

South London was a pasture once (and will
be once again), but in between the prioress
and dizzee rascal, England was re-said,
our voice collective like the black starling’s murmur,
red fire of the front line now embers,
the bleeding stanched, there is no riot here.
Now faceless, sightless virus offers
grim niceties where once they told it how it is.
The boys in blue, they hated you, MPs,
social workers too. Spat in the street, killed
students from the colonies and burned us,
put protestors in cells with psychopaths all night;
by morning all the evidence was lost.
Like a quarto known through works of other men
the coroner can archive every bruise
but rumour and the poet know the song:

The silence you keep in your heart every day
the ghosts of your conquests will keep peace away
the things that you know in your heart but don’t say
     Oh the siren –

No national restatement can disprove
what Milton and the others said direct,
what King Tubby started Johnson would perfect.
All history traversed, one beat to the next,
all England in a single street traversed,
the footwork of a shadow with a bomb thrown high
come to us in the tidemarks where brickwork
was restored, five nights of bleeding visible in stone.
Dread, Beat and Blood came pouring that same year
as Yorkshire’s Ripper, Thatcher’s Swamp, Altab Ali,
Viv Anderson breaks out and Caldwell’s shot.
Ford closes due to strikes and strikers ration bread.
The headlines then more striking than today’s,
today’s less striking than what is to come.
The paradox of history as time descends
is that it has been said, will be said again:

The voice of a friend that you don’t recognise
speaks only to that which supports all his lies
the turning of heaven’s a trick of the eyes
     Oh the siren –

© Jay Bernard 2020

‘England Street (Reggae fi Linton)’ was commissioned by English PEN, 2020, as part of the PEN Pinter Prize 2020.

Jay Bernard (FRSA, FRSL) is from London and the author of Surge (2019) a queer exploration of the archives surrounding the New Cross Fire in 1981. Jay won the Ted Hughes Award 2017, and Surge has been shortlisted for the Forward, Costa, Ondaatje and T.S Eliot prizes and the Dylan Thomas award.

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