Whosoever reads too many novels will despair at the sameness of novels, I’ve often thought – at the excess of conflict / action / resolution, for instance, at the figurative language straining to elicit images of Stirring Novelist, at the tiresome stagecrafting of suffering, at the pantomimes of poetic diction and so on, and so yes, in order to avoid despair – ha! – I’ve tried to empty the novel of everything I hate about novels. How transgressive, some readers have pointed out, we get it, you write outside the rules, blah blah blah, and although most of the time I prefer to join them in their mockery – because it’s more festive that way – sometimes I want to say to them, but I don’t want to die of boredom, or, if I’m in a more transcendental mood – run! – I don’t write these performance-of-an-impulse sentences to be transgressive or experimental or to sour your Mai Tai, no, I write them to attempt a representation of life that doesn’t replicate the recycled murmurs of our lives. How exciting to read outside predramatised forms, those readers never say, thank you, at last we understand.

There are many writers in Aphasia, some dead, some alive, and some – like László Krasznahorkai – who you have met and interviewed in the real world. I’m interested in the process of rendering in fiction a character’s thoughts on a writer whom you have spoken to at length. Is that an uncanny process?

When you spend so much time thinking about imaginary situations, the distinction between memories, imaginary memories, dreams, films, and what you imagine while you’re reading becomes irrelevant while you’re writing, so despite my fondness for my memories of László Krasznahorkai’s monologues about monologues in San Francisco – a monologue is someone trying to convince you of something, László Krasznahorkai said, but in my books no one listens – they exist in my mind alongside Korin’s monologues in War & War, Antonio’s monologue in Aphasia about Korin’s monologues in War & War, and everything else directly or indirectly related to them. What I’ve come to find uncanny is remembering: to be in San Francisco and see myself in my bedroom in Guayaquil, for instance, listening to ‘Sweet Child of Mine’ by Guns N’ Roses on the radio for the first time – and me recording the radio on cassettes – thirty-three years ago.

So much force is derived from your style in Aphasia. I’m thinking particularly of the interesting things you do with speech – using multiple comma splices to mean the reader is unclear who, precisely, is speaking, until after the fact of having read a few clauses (your answers here are good examples too!). Could you talk to me a little about why and how you deploy this grammar in your long (all 1,000-plus-word) sentences?

If a neuroscientist were to place electrodes on my head, trying to determine what happens to my mind when I read The History of the Siege of Lisbon by Jose Saramago, which contains those long sentences whereas the Proofreader says Yes, this symbol is called deleatur and it reminds me of a snake that changes its minds just as it is about to bite its tail, and someone responds Well observed, sir, for however much we cling to life, even a snake would hesitate before eternity, the neuroscientist might be surprised by the spikes in my neuroelectronic representation of elation, especially if he’s a strict grammarian, and I might try to explain and say But without style it’s just ledgers of life on a page, doctor, and as long the author’s somewhat consistent on whatever rules she chooses for her style, we her readers will follow elatedly, Well observed, sir, for however much we cling to other people’s rules, we shouldn’t ask our writers to do so lest they resign and become accountants.

In an attempt to make sense of a fragmentary, perhaps traumatic life, Antonio reads and writes a lot. Do you think reading or writing can indeed make sense of our world? Is one better than the other, for that?

The answers are no and neither, but that isn’t any fun so let’s focus on Antonio’s mind, which is devoid of an active imagination due to his altered state ever since his sister’s altered state occasioned her escape from her trial proceedings, and since Antonio needs his active imagination to read and write fiction, he can’t do either, rereading instead of reading – rereading being a less taxing process of reconstitution – and transcribing audio recordings of his mother and former wife instead of writing fiction. Let’s take a turn toward self-help just to aggravate the ghost of Cioran. In Aphasia, there are three chapters titled after three so-called realist American short stories, which rely on a traditional Aristotelian reversal for their emotional effect – in other words the kind of stories Antonio claims to detest – and which he rereads to reconstitute the fantasy that he possesses the emotional range to care for his sister – those reversals acting as microscopic shocks – and it is perhaps his reconstitution of this fantasy that allows him to care for his sister, and in one sense that is the sense he’s after.  

Aphasia is, of course, deeply concerned with language, and how language is both produced by and produces identity. There are a few moments in the book where Spanish is left untranslated, and where the choice to speak/write in either Spanish or English is of personal significance. Could you talk to me about whether that’s also significant for you?

When I was asked about my inclusion of Spanish in The Revolutionaries Try Again, my first novel, I spoke at length about how, in a country like the United States, where some of the non-Latin American natives might flash their guns if you speak Spanish in public, including Spanish in a novel in English has a political dimension, and yet now, upon further reflection, I think those comments of mine could be categorised as Latin American kitsch – that is, emphasising what the non-Latin Americans in USA want to hear, which is that Latin Americans in the USA are the victims of outsized injustices, which allows the non-Latin Americans in the USA to feel superior to the Latin Americans in the USA – other examples of Latin American kitsch include those dreadful essays about the agony of losing mi español or about reclaiming California from Joan Rivers, or those book covers full of Virgens de Guadalupes, or those novels filled with melodramas of tíos and mamis – and so I’ve lost interest in including Spanish in my novels in English beyond a joke or two, like when Antonio is asked why he doesn’t write in Spanish or why he writes sentences that seem to contain more than one story at the same time and in his mind he responds pues ya ve que no he cambiado en nada, profe. None of the above is meant to discount the unconscionable injustices some of my fellow Latin Americans have to endure in the USA. I just think it’s too facile to include an abuelita or two in a novel in English and then make a big stink about it being political just to receive the patronising acclaim of the non-Latin American natives in the USA.

My final question is about being an Ecuadorean in the US. Obama is mentioned in Aphasia (I won’t ruin things by going into the complexities of that); during your writing of the book, there was another president; and the book was first published in the US on the very day that the US voted for a third. How much of the tumult of the political landscape of the country you have now lived in for years is in this book – in your writing at large?

My favourite American literary performance of the last four years goes as follows: a wealthy American writer who’s married to a Republican Ivy Leaguer publicly claims to be afraid of the president, which results in wide acclaim instead of wide derision since no one wants to point out – because that would be so mean – that the only impact the lazily nefarious American president has on this writer’s household is less taxes. I share this 2019 American classic because I’ve been trying to clarify for myself what the tumult of American politics means to me outside of these performances of virtue. Most American writers categorised as sophisticated aren’t directly impacted by the tumult of American politics, and the ones that are directly impacted – because they don’t have the right papers, sufficient funds, the right shade of pale – are patronisingly subcategorised as POCs.

And now – at last – to answer your question: I seem to prefer writing about characters in an altered state of mind, and what can be more mind altering than the American government tailing your family on your way to school and apprehending your dear father simply because he doesn’t have the right papers and you having to record it on your phone so that someone out there will take pity on you and demand that he be returned to you?

Mauro Javier Cárdenas was born and brought up in Guayaquil, Ecuador and studied Economics at Stanford University. His debut novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again, was published in 2016. He was awarded the 2016 Joseph Henry Jackson Award and in 2017 was included in the Hay Festival anthology Bogotá39, a selection of the best young Latin American novelists working today. 

Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

Photo credit: Victoria Smith.

The post Lest Writers Become Accountants: An Interview with Mauro Javier Cárdenas appeared first on English PEN.

I think the book pushed me to throw myself, body and soul, to the reflections and preoccupations that I had, for many years, most of the time, on my own. If an author should always try and accompany their book, I felt that Dead Girls in particular demanded more of me than any of my previous ones. It also coincided with those vibrant years when different feminisms began to emerge in Argentina. We – as women – started to come out onto the street to express in public our ideas, our position vis-à-vis male violence, our condemnation. Two years ago, there was also a very strong debate in Argentina regarding the legalisation of abortion. We, as women writers, participated actively in the campaign. It was a very intense period, in which people began bringing taboo issues like abortion and (naturalised) male violence out of the closet. People started to understand that the killing of a woman at the hands of a man is a crime that is more closely related to cultural than criminal issues. These have been highly educational years. Unfortunately, misogyny is a problem affecting almost all societies in the world –  in some more exposed or more vicious than in others. Is the advance of the Right in Europe not proof of this? I don’t think it’s crazy to say that these phenomena go hand in hand: misogyny and the Right.  

Could you talk to me a little about the intersections of violence, gender and capitalism that Dead Girls examines?

The cases narrated in the book are the cases of very young, working-class women. One of them is going to college, in a period in which, in Argentina, this represented an aspiration and an opportunity to move up the social ladder. But she nevertheless comes from a working-class family: her father works in a meat-packing depot, and her mother is a housewife. In the other two cases, they are even poorer – one of them is a maid, and the other a sex worker. Added to the vulnerability inherent in being a woman and being young is the vulnerability also of being poor. The abuse they suffer is related to a class issue: the cruel games they are subject to, like the one they call ‘calving’. However poor and deprived a man is, when he gets home, there is always someone lower than him: a woman.

Dead Girls is one of several recent and extremely powerful novels from Latin America that render violence through lyrical writing – that arrest, and prompt deep searching, by bringing gender-based violence and art together. Could you talk a little about your mode of writing here, which is urgent and spare and honest, whilst also lyrical and artful and beautiful?

When I started to think about this book, and once I had finished the research and collated the fieldwork, the key question was how I was going to write it. I drafted a few versions, but it was very hard to arrive at the voice of the text. What would the narrator be like? How much would she have in common with me? What kind of distance would she take? A distance similar to the one I’d taken as a journalist? I wasn’t convinced by any of those drafts. The writing seemed foreign, lifeless, to me. I talked to my about it, and we came to the conclusion that I didn’t have to go looking for new tools to write the book – that I already had them in me, that they were the same I had used for all my other books. I was going to write a book of non-fiction using the narrative tools of fiction. That’s why this book has several points of contact with the rest of my work: the construction of the characters and the landscape, the territory of the language of provincial Argentina, far from the city; the lack of an intention to be just a testimony, but rather to work as a poetic form.

Exploring that a little further, Dead Girls doesn’t settle neatly into one genre – it is personal but public, journalistic but novelistic. You’ve spoken elsewhere about the factual and the fictional both being deployed out of respect for Andrea Danne, María Luisa Quevedo, Sarita Mundín, and their families and friends – in order not to hide the truth of these stories behind reinvention, but also not to claim to offer complete accounts through reportage. The modulation – and its rendering through interview and conversation – results in a deeply intimate text. Could you speak about intimacy, and the role it plays in the book?

When I decided that the narrator (the reporter) was going to be closely linked to me (the author), the possibility of something intimate, something personal, appeared. These stories, these tragedies that had happened to these girls, could have happened to me or my friends. And although we hadn’t traversed the limit of horror that is death, femicide, we had experienced first-hand hundreds of other types of abuse. Abuse that had become normalised. Forms of abuse that we were told to get used to, and were brought up to accept, because that’s how we were brought up as women – to accept the norms of machismo behaviour. This meant that the public and the private couldn’t be separate in the book.

One always cautions against reading biography into the novels of women writers, but you place yourself firmly within this narrative. In the slow moments – when the narrator is travelling between interviews, waiting to speak to relatives – the context of Dead Girls means readers can’t help but fear, in a way, for you. Did you feel a heightened sense of risk whilst researching and writing this book? What effects did proximity to such traumatic but tragically prolific events – ones that you, early in the book, frame as perpetually close-to-home – have on you?

No, I can’t say I felt I was in danger, but I did feel I was about to write a book that would be different to all my previous books. In this one, I would be particularly exposed. And I was going to write the stories of women I didn’t know, which was a responsibility. I suppose all those feelings do permeate the text.

Though your research and writing of this book took place some years ago, its urgency is still of course – and damningly – urgent. With Dead Girls coming out in English in 2020, its look at gendered violence in small towns and domestic settings speaks arrestingly to the much-documented rise in femicide and violence against women during COVID-19 lockdowns. What connections between the stories of the book and this recent context do you see?

This was – and is – a big concern among feminists in Argentina: What happens with women who are victims of gender violence and are obliged to live under the same roof as their aggressors during lockdown? What happens to them when the ties – always weak – that they can establish with the outside, on the other side of the door that leads to hell, are shut by an order from the State and by a situation that goes beyond the needs of the individual? The government took some measures, yet the statistics for femicides in recent months obviously show that these were not enough.

Something that comes out in the discursive nature of the book is intergenerationalism (particularly between women of different generations), and the differences in perspectives that attend it – shame, blame, survival, anger, activism, speaking, hope. It reminds of the collective, cross-generation women’s narratives of books like Alia Trabucco Zerán and Sophie Hughes’s The Remainder, and Sema Kaygusuz and Nicholas Glastonbury’s Every Fire You Tend. What did those intergenerational perspectives reveal to you?

I wanted the book to tell the story of women who’d been my contemporaries because, although I didn’t know them, I was able to know how they thought, how they lived, how they’d been brought up as women, since, surely, we would have shared a very similar upbringing. Stemming from how my generation was at that point – in which violence was still pretty much accepted – stories emerged from my mother, my female neighbours, women from previous generations. And the truth was that not much had changed. I think the big changes have only begun taking place in the generation of those who today are teenagers – who are growing up within feminism, who go to the Ni Una Menos demonstrations, and who take part in the debate for the legalisation of abortion. In twenty-five years, not much had changed. But in the last five, there’s been quite a radical shift, also among women of my generation: there’s been a collective awakening.

Dead Girls rightly damns patriarchy, but men’s voices – friends and family of Andrea, María Luisa, and Sarita – also appear in the book. That struck me, and I wonder if you could speak on that?

In María Luisa’s case, her brother acted as a spokesman for the family. I am not sure how that happened, but, ever since the body was found, he was the one that became the visible face of the family’s quest for truth. Twenty-five years later, he was still the one in charge of demanding justice. That is how he expressed it to me, and I respected his role. His mother had already passed away.

In the case of Andrea, her sister didn’t want to take part in the book or give her testimony, apart from a brief email reproduced in the text. Many years had gone by, so it was very difficult to find people willing to talk about the cases. It so happened that most of them were men. Sarita’s case is different: the ones providing testimony are the women of the family. I did not see it as something that stands in contradiction with the book, to be honest. I needed to talk to someone and, if the voices came mostly from men, I would do something with that anyway.

Finally, I want to ask about the words femicide and feminicidio – words that weren’t in common usage in the anglophone or hispanophone at the time of the murders explored in Dead Girls, and words that are today used with different frequency in different national and linguistic contexts. How useful are these terms in bespeaking the terrible truth of the murder of women for being women – of its horror, and at once its horrific prevalence?

In the book, the term ‘femicide’ is mentioned only a few times. At the beginning, it’s used to clarify that the murder of a woman at the hands of a man is not a ‘crime of passion’ or a ‘domestic crime’, as it used to be called. Once that’s explained, I think it sets the political tone of the book, and the narration of the cases: it is not a book about crimes, nor is it a police chronicle; it is a book about femicide and how femicide is part of a culture that enables men to make use of the bodies, and even the lives, of women. A word may sometimes not be a grand thing, but I think that today in Argentina no one can ignore the fact that this type of crime has a specific name, and a very particular weight. Even those who deny it and insist that more men than women are killed every year – even those deniers know that we are talking about different things. That is the real weight that a word, a concept, can have once it gets internalised by an entire society. And this is a huge step that we have taken in recent years.

Compared to Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Sara Gallardo and Juan Carlos Onetti, Selva Almada (Entre Ríos, Argentina, 1973) is considered one of the most powerful voices of contemporary Argentinian and Latin American literature and one of the most influential feminist intellectuals of the region. Including her début The Wind that Lays Waste, she has published two novels, a book of short stories, a book of journalistic fiction and a kind of film diary (written in the set of Lucrecia Martel’s most recent film Zama, based on Antonio di Benedetto’s novel). She has been finalist of the Rodolfo Walsh Award and of the Tigre Juan Award (both in Spain). Her work has been translated into French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Swedish and Turkish.

Attend the launch of Dead Girls here.

Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

Translated from the Spanish by Carolina Orloff.

The post On the Other Side of the Door that Leads to Hell: An Interview with Selva Almada appeared first on English PEN.

At the time of that interview, my technical ability to communicate emotion in poetry came very easily in Spanish, and less so in English. But since starting to write in English ‘full-time’, this has changed. That said, I often use Spanish or Spanglish words in my poetry to signal my linguistic duality – to make the language complexity that is very real to my life in England more explicit. I write literary reviews in English, political articles in Spanish; I translate poetry from Spanish into English. And although I mostly speak Spanish at home with my partner, the artist Pablo Bronstein – who was born in Argentina but came here to the UK with his family when he was four – my poetic life happens increasingly in an English landscape with a consciously Latin American/Latinx bent. I am aware that my poetry might appear odd, but that’s a result of my lived experience – my experience as a poet living within and between two of the multiple languages spoken in the UK.

I am currently working on my debut English collection, out in 2021 with Chatto & Windus, which will focus on this idea of writing and living between two languages, cultures, and traditions. What I’m trying to say is: this duality is as British as any other.

There is, rightly, a growing literary consciousness around British Latinx writing – and perhaps particularly poetry. What has caused that?

It is true that, in the last few years, there has been a growing number of Latinx writers publishing in the UK, which is of course a direct result of our standing up and making ourselves heard. This has in turn resulted in a greater awareness and interest in the Latinx experience from those outside it. Within the poetry world, the activist and director of The Complete Works Nathalie Teitler has been instrumental in mentoring, promoting and publishing British Latinx poets. She has been a pioneer and a visionary. In 2017, Nathalie and I established ‘Invisible Presence’, an Arts Council England national scheme to nurture and promote the work of ten young British Latinx voices,. That project, which included the publication of an anthology and a series of live events at The Roundhouse, led two years later to the launch of Un Nuevo Sol, the first major anthology of work by UK-based writers of Latin-American heritage. It’s amazing that it took so long for this to happen, despite the presence of many writers and poets and literary groups. British Latinx is the fastest growing and eighth-largest ethnic group in London, with more and more second- and third-generation members, and yet it has taken this long for our presence to begin to change the UK literary. The move from the margins is fragile, however, and needs constant work.

You’ve been active as a poetry educator, and in community-based initiatives (like SLAP and ‘Invisible Presence’) that are fostering British Latinx writing. This is part of a wider question around diversity, inclusion and representation, but what more needs to be done within publishing, reviewing and reading cultures for Latin American and Latinx writers?

We need more acceptance from the British poetry establishment that there is a diversity of languages within the British experience – and that this is not to the detriment of the English language, but, on the contrary, enriches the poetry scene.

Unfortunately, in this country, there is very poor awareness of and ability with foreign languages, as a result of lacking government priorities. And this has resulted in many people in Britain finding foreign-language words shocking and unacceptable within English-language contexts. I find that lack of ambition and understanding – and challenge – very sad. This is not the case in other countries, where more people can speak more languages than just the one with which they were born. We definitely need more British Latinx mentors and schemes working with young writers and poets, and we also need more grassroots work in schools and community centres (around the country) nurturing and promoting young Latinx voices.

But, at once, resistance within the exclusively English-language poetry world needs to be addressed. It’s not only that we as British Latinx need to be more vocal, but also that British non-Latinx need to be interested in the fact that there are many British people, friends and neighbours, who have grown up with a Latin language background, and that this doesn’t make them any less British. The British experience cannot be seen exclusively as a monolingual and monocultural experience.

Your column in the Morning Star, ‘Letters from Latin America’, is a wonderful thing. In some ways, Latin American lit and the Star are obvious bedfellows. But it’s also quite remarkable to have that sort of dedicated, industrious focus on a region’s literature in a UK newspaper. Could you speak a little about how that came to be?

The Morning Star is the only UK national newspaper with a monthly dedicated column to Latin American/ Latinx literature and poetry. It’s not a coincidence that the Star would take an interest in Latin America: it has historically stood against the cultural, political and economic dominance of the United States in Latin America and elsewhere, and for left-wing social movements in Latin America during and after the dictatorships that marred so many of its countries. Many Latin Americans that came to the UK in the last decades did so escaping the violence of repressive regimes supported by the US. Still more came escaping the unfathomable poverty of Latin America, often the result of factors that the Morning Star challenges.

Has your literary relationship to Argentina changed (waned?) over the years?

In many ways, yes. I published two poetry collections in Spanish with an independent Argentinean publishing house several years ago, but since have always been on the move towards writing in English. Now, I do so almost exclusively, and tend to publish my poetry mostly in English-speaking literary journals and magazines. In any case, I see this as a very fluid relationship – one that may change in future. I keep close contact with Argentinean and Latin American poets and writers, who I often translate into English for British audiences. I hope similarly that my new collection in English will reach Argentina and Latin American audiences, perhaps in translation.

I’d like to talk about Black Lives Matter, and racism and anti-racism in Latinx literature. I’ve read some extraordinary literature from black and Indigenous Latinx and Latin American writers recently – Geovani Martins’s The Sun on My Head, translated by Julia Sanches, springs to mind – but there remains a paucity. Is a growing right-wing populism further marginalising black and Indigenous Latinx and Latin American writers? And, conversely, how vital is literature as a means of resistance to this populism?

Yes, it does exist. But a lot more needs to be done to bring black Latin American writers to the fore. When Un Nuevo Sol was published a few months ago, the editors included as many varied voices as they could find in the UK, but acknowledged that more needed to be done to foster Afro-Latinx poets here.

In Latin America, the debate on race and racism includes issues around African-heritage voices in countries with deep histories of slavery – Brazil being probably the most prominent example, as the last country in the world to abolish the slave trade. But the debate around race in most other Latin American countries, many of which have had negligible relationships to that particular form of slavery, centres on the complex and often difficult relationships between Indigenous peoples and the descendants of European colonialists. This relationship is too complex for the space we have here, but it arises social, cultural and literary imperatives different to those in Britain.

Does the Latin American literary world have a problem with race?

Generally, yes – mostly due to related socio-economic inequalities, and a disproportionate lack of possibilities in terms of publishing resources. Yet in the last few years there have been some moves to rectify this, with the publication of books by indigenous and Afro-Latinx poets and writers such as Junot Diaz, Paulino Lins, Rayen Kvyeh, Luz Argentina Chiriboga, Willie Perdomo, Elizabeth Acevedo, Mayra Santos Febres, Rita Indiana and Manuel Zapata Olivella.

It is important to remember that Latin America is a vast continent made up of many countries, where the majority of the population are pueblos originarios, and where languages such as Quechua, Guaraní, Aymara and Wayuu still thrive. There are vibrant literary scenes happening there, and we should not assume that we can paint all of Latin America with the same brush. A high-end literary agency in Mexico City is an entirely different world to a small community publishing house in Asunción.

Finally: a couple of weeks ago, Arts Council England committed to adding ‘Latinx’ to diversity and equal opportunities monitoring forms. How important is that?

This is huge. We have been fighting for this for years. I remember working for a community newspaper in London for the Latin American diaspora in the late 90s, and back then we were campaigning to be recognised in official forms. But it seemed such a long way off. It is of great importance because, from now on, it obliges all cultural institutions in the UK to account for the Latinx experience and to make further attempts at including us. We should – we must – remember that there are many of us out there.

Leo Boix is a Latinx bilingual poet, translator and educator born in Argentina who lives and works in the UK. Boix has published two poetry collections in Spanish and has been included in many anthologies, such as Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe), Why Poetry (Verve Poetry Press), Islands Are But Mountains: Contemporary Poetry from Great Britain (Platypus Press), The Best New British and Irish Poets Anthology 2019-2020 (Eyewear Publishing) and Un Nuevo Sol: British Latinx Writers (flipped eye) . His poems have appeared in POETRY, PN Review, The Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Manchester Review, The White Review, Letras Libres, Ambit, Magma Poetry, The Rialto, The Morning Star, SouthBank Poetry, Prism International, The Laurel Review, and elsewhere. Boix is a fellow of The Complete Works Program and co-director of Invisible Presence, an Arts Council England national scheme to nurture new voices of Latinx writers in the UK. He is a board member of Magma Poetry, co-editor of its Resistencia issue showcasing the best Latin American and Latinx writing, and an advisory board member of the Poetry Translation Centre in London. Boix is the recipient of the Keats-Shelley Prize 2019. His debut English collection will be out in 2021 with Chatto & Windus (Penguin/Random House).

Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

The post Latinx Letters: An Interview with Leo Boix appeared first on English PEN.

‘I’m alive because I know who’s in charge. People follow the orders of the Gulf Cartel around here,’ says Francisco, a journalist from the city of Matamoros in Tamaulipas, which is considered to be one of Mexico’s ‘narco-states’.

Francisco does not only receive instructions from his editor. He also takes calls from the ‘boss of the plaza’, who orders him to put in or take out images of shootings and dead bodies: ‘If you care about your family, keep that shooting yesterday out of the papers. Otherwise, you’re fucked.’ And Francisco obeys – to save his life, to keep his job.

Francisco, like so many others, suffers from ‘self-censorship’. This is an increasingly common phenomenon in Mexico, the most dangerous country in Latin America for journalists, and one whose citizens’ right to information is being severely violated by attacks on the press: more than 120 journalists have been killed in recent years, and 22 have disappeared. In this country, journalists are murdered because of what they publish and because of what they refuse to publish. Every 26 hours, a journalist will be the victim of an act of violence. Last year alone, 326 attacks on communicators were recorded, five of which were murders. And it isn’t only organised crime that’s killing journalists. Most of the attackers are officials or agents of the Mexican state.

The murders are getting bloodier and crueller, and they involve every kind of torture. The violence against female journalists is particularly terrible, and often gender-specific: the majority of those killed were also raped or mutilated, and some were even decapitated. We’re tired of watching the bodies of our colleagues and friends being taken away, and the pain and suffering their spilt blood leaves in its wake.

The relentless assault on freedom of expression is getting worse. By choosing not to guarantee the safety of journalists, Enrique Peña Nieto’s government has succeeded in silencing important independent critical voices. Bullets, censorship, self-censorship and government control of advertising and TV and radio concessions have led to a serious lack of correct and timely information, and a dearth of news about key issues such as state crimes committed by the army, the navy and the various police forces. There is not enough coverage of the phenomenon of narcopolitics, the collusion of corrupt authorities with the powerful drug cartels that dominate the Mexican territory, or the smuggling and piracy that have, with the cooperation of the police, passed into the hands of organised crime. State violence – forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and torture – hardly receives any attention in the televised media. There are parts of the press under the thumb of the government or the drug cartels. There are forbidden topics and forbidden journalists. The idea is to instil fear, horror and silence.

Those of us who dare to break the barrier of silence have to confront all kinds of threats. We work in conditions of war, but without the protection that reporters covering armed conflicts would normally receive. Here there are no bullet-proof vests or helmets. Press signs on vehicles mean nothing, and neither do the press cards that are supposed to ensure your personal safety in neutral territory.

Faced with the drug barons’ Kalashnikovs, we have only our pens. Among the mighty rifles of the army or the police, there are only our notebooks and computers. We are an easy target. It doesn’t cost much to kill journalists in Mexico, and the murderers know that it’s highly unlikely anything will happen to them afterwards. Impunity is the only constant. Over 90% of murders go unpunished, despite the existence of the Office of the Special Prosecutor for Attention to Crimes Against Freedom of Expression, which last year recorded a backlog of 120 pending cases. The Public Prosecutor’s Office is a smokescreen. The Mexican state would rather carry on pretending than actually take action to protect the country’s journalists.

This is an unequal war. As journalists, we have words. The people attacking us have bullets. Mexican journalism is wounded; information is mutilated.

Why do we stay here, why do we carry on? Out of dignity and a commitment to the truth. Our mission is to search for that truth in spite of everything. Mexican journalists have learnt to work under hostile conditions, completely undefended. We live with persecution and harassment. But we don’t let fear paralyse us – on the contrary, it helps us to measure the risks and stay alive, to continue giving a voice to the voiceless and shining a light on dark secrets that are normally kept silent.

Staying here and carrying on, that’s the mission, although we can smell the predator’s rotten breath, although we can hear the bullets, although we know that words cost lives. Freedom has a high price in Mexico, but it’s the only way we have of reaching the truth.

Read this piece in the original Spanish.

Read ARTICLE 19 Mexico’s annual report ‘State of Censorship’, which examines freedom of expression in Mexico.

Sanjuana Martínez is a featured writer in English PEN’s 2015 Mexico focus. Read about her case and take action here.

To find out more about Sanjuana Martinez and her work, visit her Facebook page: Sanjuana Martinez

The post Self-censorship and silence appeared first on English PEN.

‘Estoy vivo porque se quien manda. Aquí se hace lo que ordena el Cártel del Golfo,’ dice Francisco, un periodista de la ciudad de Matamoros, Tamaulipas, considerado un narcoestado de México.

Las órdenes de trabajo para Francisco no vienen solamente del jefe de redacción, también atiende las llamadas del ‘jefe de la plaza’ quien le ordena quitar o poner imágenes de balaceras o cadáveres: ‘Si quieres cuidar a tu familia, no publiques nada de la balacera de ayer, si no, te va a llevar la chingada,’ le dice quien se ostenta solo como ‘jefe de plaza’. Y Francisco obedece para salvar la vida, para conservar su trabajo.

Francisco como muchos, padece la ‘autocensura’, un fenómeno cada vez más común en México, el país más peligroso en América Latina, para ejercer el periodismo y donde el derecho a la información de los ciudadanos está siendo vulnerado severamente por la violencia contra la prensa: más de 120 periodistas han muerto en los últimos años y 22 permanecen desaparecidos. En este país, los periodistas son asesinados por lo que publican o por lo que se niegan a publicar. Cada 26 horas, un periodista será víctima de un hecho violento. Tan solo el año pasado, se registraron 326 ataques contra comunicadores y cinco fueron asesinados. A los periodistas no los asesina solamente el crimen organizado. La mayor parte de los agresores son funcionarios o agentes del estado mexicano.

Los asesinatos son cada vez más sanguinarios y más crueles. Incluyen torturas de todo tipo. La violencia contra las periodistas es terrible, el componente de género está incluido, la mayoría de las ejecutadas fueron violadas, o mutiladas; algunas incluso decapitadas. Estamos cansados de ver pasar los cadáveres de nuestros colegas, de nuestros amigos. La estela de dolor y sufrimiento que va dejando la sangre derramada de nuestros compañeros.

La guerra sin cuartel contra la libertad de expresión se intensifica. El gobierno de Enrique Peña Nieto prefiere no garantizar la seguridad de los periodistas y de esta manera, ha conseguido acallar importantes voces independientes y críticas. Las balas, la censura, la autocensura o el control gubernamental sobre publicidad y concesiones de radio y televisión, han ido provocando un alto déficit de información veraz y oportuna, una ausencia de noticias y cobertura informativa sobre temas importantes como los crímenes de Estado cometidos por el Ejército, la Marina o las distintas policías. Tampoco hay suficientes noticias sobre el fenómeno de la narcopolítica, la connivencia de autoridades corruptas con los poderosos cárteles de la droga que dominan el territorio mexicano o el contrabando y la piratería que ha pasado a manos del crimen organizado en connivencia con los policías. Las desapariciones forzadas, ejecuciones extrajudiciales; la tortura, son parte de la violencia del Estado que difícilmente encuentra un espacio digno en los medios de comunicación televisivos. Una parte de la prensa está arrodillada ante el poder gubernamental o el poder del narcotráfico. Hay temas prohibidos y periodistas prohibidos. Se trata de instaurar el miedo, el terror y el silencio.

Quienes nos atrevemos a romper el cerco de silencio, tenemos que enfrentarnos a todo tipo de amenazas. Trabajamos en condiciones de guerra, pero sin la protección que debe ser brindada a los informadores en  la típica cobertura de conflictos bélicos. Aquí no hay chaleco antibalas ni cascos. Tampoco funciona el aviso el aviso de ‘prensa’ colocado en los vehículos, o la acreditación que salvaguarda tu integridad física en territorio neutral.

Frente a los Kalashnikov de los capos de la droga solo tenemos nuestras plumas. Entre los rifles de alto poder del Ejército o las policías, solo están nuestras libretas y computadoras. Somos un blanco fácil. Matar periodistas en México sale barato. Los asesinos saben que hay una gran probabilidad de que no les pase nada. La impunidad es la constante. Más del 90 por ciento de los asesinatos sigue impune a pesar de que existe la Fiscalía Especial para la Atención de Delitos cometidos contra la Libertad de Expresión, la cual, el año pasado, registró un rezago 120 casos. La fiscalía es una cortina de humo. El estado mexicano prefiere simular que actuar y proteger a los periodistas.

Esta es una guerra desigual. Los periodistas tenemos la palabra. Ellos – los depredadores de la prensa – tienen las balas. El periodismo mexicano está herido. La información mutilada.

¿Por qué seguimos aquí? Por dignidad, por compromiso con la verdad. Nuestra misión es la búsqueda de esa verdad por encima de cualquier obstáculo. Los periodistas mexicanos hemos aprendido a trabajar en condiciones adversas de absoluta indefensión. Convivimos con la persecución, el hostigamiento y el acoso. Pero el miedo no nos paraliza, al contrario, nos ayuda a medir los riesgos para seguir con vida, para continuar dando voz a los sin voz y lanzar luz sobre las zonas oscuras de la información sometidas al silencio.

Seguir aquí, es la misión, aunque el fétido aliento del depredador este cerca, aunque se escuche el sonido de las balas y las palabras cuesten la vida. La libertad, tiene un alto precio en México, pero es el único camino para llegar a la verdad.

Read Annie McDermott’s English translation of this piece.

Read ARTICLE 19 Mexico’s annual report ‘Estado de Censura’, which examines freedom of expression in Mexico.

Sanjuana Martínez is a featured writer in English PEN’s 2015 Mexico focus. Read about her case and take action here.

To find out more about Sanjuana Martinez and her work, visit her Facebook page: Sanjuana Martinez

The post Autocensura y silencio appeared first on English PEN.

The life of a literary translator is thankfully a lot less gory. Nevertheless, we are occasionally called upon to offer our authors a lifeline. This week, news reached me that Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, an Equatorial Guinean author whose novel By Night the Mountain Burns I translated for And Other Stories, was being pursued by his country’s dictatorial regime. Ávila Laurel and five others, including Salvador Ebang Ela, founder of Elefante y la Palmera, the Elephant and Palm Tree, a political party known for conducting peaceful protests against police brutality, had requested permission from the Provincial Government of Bioko Norte to hold a demonstration in Plaza Ewaiso E’pola on 23 February. The request was refused and followed by an announcement that Ebang El and his sympathisers were to be rounded up.

When writers come under threat in their own countries, translators can act as a bridge to the outside world. Sometimes publicising what’s happening can make a real difference, letting writer and tormentor know that the rest of the world is watching. When Orhan Pamuk was formally charged with insulting Turkishness, Maureen Freely, his English-language translator, published as many articles as she could about the case in the international press.Shirley Lee translates from Korean and has focused her attention on exiled North Korean writers. She provides them with a lifeline simply by being interested in what they have to say, but she also has to coax and encourage them: it’s not easy expressing yourself freely if you’ve been conditioned to writing under the scrutiny of a repressive regime.

Becoming a translator is not a political act in itself – Lee says she was drawn to North Korea by the peculiarities of the country’s language and literature, not its politics – but it’s hard not to be politicised by such exposure to tyrannical regimes.

Pietro Zveteremich was political. He withdrew his membership from the Italian Communist Party after translating Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, which was published in translation before it was ever published in Russian. The Soviet Union went to great lengths to try and prevent publication, even forcing Pasternak to sign a telegram sent to Zveteremich, asking him to withhold his translation. But Pasternak also sent Zveteremich a handwritten note saying precisely the opposite; Zveteremich licensed publication of his translation and the book was launched to great fanfare and acclaim.Pasternak and Pamuk were both given the Nobel Prize and the international prestige that goes with such awards can be vital in protecting writers from persecution at home. In the UK, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize provides prestige and some media coverage, while doing a sterling job in recognising the contribution of translators and championing translated works from distant lands.

They don’t come much more distant than Annóbon Island, the setting for By Night the Mountain Burns. Annóbon is a remote island off the west coast of Africa, administered by Equatorial Guinea but periodically cut-off by the regime, for reasons of power and control.

I first met Ávila Laurel in 2012 in Barcelona, where he’d fled after going on hunger strike in Equatorial Guinea, a protest against government oppression. We went for a drink in a bar in the Raval area that was run by another Guinean exile. It was a friendly place, but there was a sadness to it. As Ávila Laurel explained: ‘Barcelona’s a lovely city, but we’re not here out of choice.’ Critics of President Obiang’s regime are bullied into leaving as a matter of course, and Ávila Laurel had been proud of the fact that he’d stuck it out, that he was an outspoken writer living in Equatorial Guinea.I asked him whether he was working on anything in Barcelona and he said that he was: he was writing his memoirs, he said, to leave them in Barcelona when he flew back to Guinea, por si acaso… just in case.

It was a chilling thing to be told: here was a man calmly preparing for the worst, yet determined to go home.

And go home he did. He’s at home now in fact, literally so, for although he’s been advised to go into hiding, he refuses to do so: he’s done nothing wrong, so why should he hide? All the same, he’s been forced into keeping a low profile, to being confined to the neighbourhood and suspending his public work. He’s safe for now, but there’s no telling whether the danger has passed: Equatorial Guinea’s regime creates a climate of fear by making threats, real and veiled, and by following up on some of them.So it’s left to myself and David Shook, Ávila Laurel’s poetry translator, to stay alert and watch our author’s back: to act as his bridge and keep the world informed, por si acaso.

About the author
Jethro Soutar is a translator of Spanish and Portuguese. His translation of Hotel Brasil by Frei Betto will be published by Bitter Lemon Press, while By Night the Mountain Burns by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel will be published by And Other Stories in the autumn. Both books were awarded a PEN Writers in Translation award. Soutar is currently editing a book of translated football-themed writing from Latin America, The Football Crónicas.

About Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel
Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel was born in 1966 in Equatorial Guinea, Africa’s only Spanish-speaking country. His parents were from the remote Annobón Island, off the African coast. His books include the novel Avión de Ricos, Ladrón De Cerdos(The Pig Thief And The Rich Man’s Aeroplane) and the short story collection Cuentos Crudos (Raw Tales). Ávila Laurel has been a constant thorn in the side of his country’s long-standing dictatorial government. A nurse by profession, for many years he was one of the best known Equatorial Guinean writers not to have opted to live in exile. But, in 2011, after a week-long hunger strike in protest against Obiang’s regime, timed to coincide with the President of Spain’s visit to Equatorial Guinea, Ávila Laurel moved to Barcelona. He writes across all media, in particular as a blogger, essayist and novelist.

Additional information
By Night the Mountain Burns was awarded an English PEN translation grant. To further support the book’s publication, visit the And Other Stories website.

Set on Annobón, a remote island off the West African coast governed by Equatorial Guinea but completely neglected by the government, By Night The Mountain Burns recounts the narrator’s childhood, growing up among countless siblings, several mothers, ever absent fathers and an unusual grandfather. We learn of the dark realities of island life: bush fires that destroy crops and threaten homesteads, cholera outbreaks, the sometimes uneasy marriage between folklore and religion and the imposition of an official language that is not their own and, which has very little context within their isolated world.

By Night the Mountain Burns by Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel is translated from Spanish by Jethro Soutar and will be published in November 2014. To support the publication of this book, subscribe by 5 March.

Jethro Soutar wrote about Juan Tomás for the Guardian Books blog.

David Shook, Juan Tomás’s poetry translator, writes about the current situation in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

A panel of translators and human rights activists will be considering the role of the translator as ‘literary activist’ at this year’s London Book Fair. The discussion will take place on 10 April at 1pm.

The post The translator as literary activist appeared first on English PEN.