English PEN campaigns for the freedom to read and the freedom to write; for these truly to be freedoms, they must be equal freedoms for all. In order for the ideal of equity of expression to be advanced, individuals, platforms and organisations must use what faculty they have to combat inequity wherever it exists. I hope for PEN Transmissions to be a space of free and equitable expression, and a space for the frank exploration of urgent, charged, evolving conversations. I hope readers will enjoy these pieces, and join our continuing interrogation of the ideal of literary freedom and equity.

– Will Forrester, Editor.

The post Editorial: Black Voices appeared first on English PEN.

The PEN family, across the world, has always proceeded from the value of international fellowship – from the belief that the transmission of literature across borders is a sustaining force, and a right. In 1928, Galsworthy’s appeal centred the conveyance of literature to a space in need of it, from a space outside the causal crisis. In 2020, there are no such differentiations: whilst differing in our severity of experience, the international community is sharing in a crisis.

It is amidst this crisis that we today announce that PEN Transmissions will be increasing our output, publishing new work by international writers every week.

Coronavirus – a word that one senses will become short-hand for an era – grips all spaces. It drives us indoors, towards screens, away from convention; it deprives us of normality, of hard-won freedoms. Such deprivation, however, is in the service of good: this deprivation protects the most vulnerable, and those marginalised in myriad ways who are disproportionately affected by pandemic. One hopes the virtues it is forging – of community, compassion, intergenerational support, kindness to ecology – might even prevail when some version of normality returns. But in pursuit of good, a further level of necessary concerns emerges: of livelihood, particularly that of the self-employed, as many writers and literary professionals are; of loneliness, and how we might continue digitally to meet and converse; of joy, and by what means we might still be able to find it.

The need for ‘eloquence’, now, is manifold: as a palliative to isolation, when its self-imposition is vital; as an outlet for experience, and a way of sharing it; as an imaginative escape from confinement; as a liberty, when liberties must be curtailed. This is why, for the duration of quarantine, lock-down, self-isolation – all those metonyms for our moment – PEN Transmissions is doubling its efforts. Last week, we shared Dima Mikhayel Matta’s extraordinary ‘How to Quarantine a Revolution’, an essay on how pandemic, revolution, and queer identity relate in Lebanon. Tomorrow, we publish an interview with Jason Ng and Joshua Wong, authors of Unfree Speech and pioneers in the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement.

Alongside more regular interviews and personal essays from international writers, PEN Transmissions will also feature digital discussions that English PEN had hoped to hold through our live events programme. We will also be publishing more work related to our advocacy for writers-at-risk, whose circumstances we particularly consider at this time. Alongside other new initiatives across our areas of work, we hope these dispatches do something to sustain you, and to sustain the importance of the transmission of words and ideas across borders.

Crises breed weighty literature – and often it’s more humane and benevolent than we might presume. From the literature of the Trojan war, we learnt not about conflict, but about the human condition – a discourse of compassion. Catherine Amy Dawson Scott, PEN’s pioneering founder, believed that ‘out of social intercourse comes understanding; and that if the great writers of the world met in friendship and exchanged ideas, a nascent kindliness would deepen’. Social, cultural, and literary intercourse are more difficult in this time, but there are ways, and they are vital. We hope PEN Transmissions can be one.

– Will Forrester, Editor.

The post Editorial: Transmissions in the Time of Coronavirus appeared first on English PEN.

From this month, PEN Transmissions will be publishing pieces every other week, starting on Tuesday 13 August with a powerful personal essay from Cherrie Kandie, who was shortlisted for the 2019 Caine Prize for a story about a queer relationship in Kenya. At a time when the urgency of transmitting art and ideas across borders is acute, we’re excited to bring you more regular work from both emerging and established international voices. PEN Transmissions will continue as a freely accessible platform; to receive new pieces, you can sign up to the English PEN mailing-list and select a special interest in translation.

In the coming months, we will also be holding a series of PEN Transmissions events with accompanying magazine pieces. Around International Translation Day on 30 September, a special PEN Transmissions x Granta magazine collaboration will bring you new writing on, and in, translation.

I take over from Theodora Danek’s excellent editorship at a moment when the PEN Charter’s avowal of ‘unhampered transmission of thought within each nation and between all nations’ is vital but threatened. PEN Transmissions will continue to foster it, unimpeded.

– Will Forrester, International and Translation Manager, English PEN.

The post Editorial: Transmitting the Future appeared first on English PEN.

Harassment and assault happens in creative spaces not because of the nature of those particular spaces, but because they happen everywhere, in every workplace, in the street, in public places, in homes, on campuses. It happens because we live in a patriarchal society, and misogyny and discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community are at pandemic levels. Time and time again, anecdotal and statistical evidence, as well as media reporting, shows us that this is a vast – and often minimised – problem.

So, if the problem is so enormous, how could literary spaces help to end it? What would be the point in even trying?

Five years ago I felt hopeless about the state of things and my – or anyone’s – power to change how they were. On top of having been harassed in different places and situations since childhood, I had also been groped while playing and attending gigs, been forcibly kissed at literary events and even during a meeting with another translator, and been creeped out to the point of deep discomfort by messages and with people in person – that is, I had been made to feel objectified, dehumanised, gaslighted and disrespected in spaces I wanted to be in the most. And I had witnessed or heard from close friends who were experiencing the same or other vile things.

These instances made me feel a nagging shame and permanently changed my behaviour in spaces I’d previously felt were both a sanctuary and where I could thrive. It made and can still make me feel numbing anger, nausea and depression, and I am always on high alert. But something has helped me channel some of this fury and hopelessness into something positive and productive – the Good Night Out Campaign.

Good Night Out is a grassroots organisation founded in London in 2014 by sexual violence activists and training facilitators Bryony Beynon and Julia Gray. Through their work as the voluntary co-directors of the London chapter of anti-street harassment organisation Hollaback!, they established that many people experienced harassment and assault in licensed premises, and that as it wasn’t a legal requirement for these spaces to have specialist training in how to handle reports, this often resulted in poor responses from staff. At around the same time, they were contacted by the club Fabric asking if Hollaback! would offer training for their staff in how to respond to disclosures. They decided that a dedicated organisation was needed. Though the street was still a somewhat difficult place to wrangle, physical night-time spaces had infrastructures, and existing policies and legislation that could be worked with. This is how Good Night Out came to be.

Good Night Out trains all staff in licensed venues like bars, clubs and pubs how to respond to and deal with disclosures of sexual harassment and assault through a one-and-a-half-hour workshop and pre- and post-training consultancy. Once trained, the space will put up Good Night Out posters and receive accreditation, as well as promotion via GNO social media channels and the website’s map of trained spaces. The workshop entails open conversations about what harassment and assault is, how these intersect with other forms of harassment like racism, ableism, homophobia and transphobia, and includes practical ways for staff to respond in the first instance.

The ultimate takeaways intended are to promote a culture of belief and to encourage venues to respond empathetically, professionally and consistently to disclosures moving forward.

Once a venue has been trained it doesn’t mean that harassment won’t happen there ever again – but it does mean that staff will know what to do and perpetrators will be discouraged and dealt with appropriately.

I knew both Julia and Bryony from the DIY music scene in London, and admired their proactive and DIY approach to trying to raise awareness about and help end harassment. Though the prospect of getting involved directly terrified me – how could I, an introverted writer-translator with no experience in facilitation, be useful? –, they were both incredibly encouraging and empowered me enough that I trained as a workshop trainer. I’ve gone on to train dozens of venues and represent GNO at council and pub watch meetings, in print media, and in radio and TV interviews. This direct involvement, though at times challenging, has made my personal wellbeing and my sense of hope skyrocket.

I truly believe we have improved things, including changing people’s attitudes – or at least planted a seed of change. I’ve seen it with my own eyes; that flash of potential transformation on someone’s face.

We’d trained student unions, music festivals, club venues – but what about the literary scene? The spaces where literary events happen can be disparate. Bookshops, arts spaces, galleries, literary festivals, someone’s house, all these pleasant, polite spaces – they’re rarely as raucous as clubs, but harassment and assault aren’t about losing control, or sex, or flirting, or alcohol, or how dark the place is, or how seemingly wild; it’s about power and intimidation. And it absolutely happens in these spaces.

The GNO training has recently been adapted for event organisers like promoters and other individuals or groups who often move around and put on events in different venues and spaces. With this training, they can take Good Night Out wherever they go. Having experienced what I have, and knowing others’ experiences, I was keen to bring this training into scenes other than music that I care about and participate in.

I contacted the London-based literary journal The White Review to see if they would be interested in taking part in a pilot form of this training and help open up this discussion. I felt like they were a likeminded group of people, and would share our impulse to challenge discriminatory behaviour and support change in the literary scene from their dedication to diverse voices and intersectional feminist art and writing. Along with a co-facilitator, I trained The White Review’s and publishing house Fitzcarraldo Editions’ editorial teams a couple of months ago.

We opened up the workshop by discussing how they would like people attending their events to feel, and ways to create spaces that are welcoming and accessible to all. We discussed the unique challenges of running literary events, such as the blurring of the social and the work space, how certain behaviours had become normalised, what was appropriate and inappropriate behaviour, and the different reasons people might not speak up about harassment. We covered a range of scenarios and suggested ways of dealing with them, and offered advice on challenging someone’s behaviour safely, as well as how to follow-up with those involved.

The White Review write a code of best practice. The workshops are always intended as an initial beginning to longer and more detailed conversations that have to take place internally within organisations, and we hope that these initial steps in the literary scene will be the start of wider skill-sharing, networking and organising among journals and literary promoters around these issues. We’ve already had interest from book shops and festivals who also want to receive training and accreditation, and hope that word will spread as much as it has in music and nightlife spaces.

Though it might seem extreme and conversely even pessimistic to prepare for these eventualities, the reality is that these incidents are already happening and have been happening for a very long time.

Instead of hoping we might not have to deal with them, it’s so much more positive to create an environment where no one has to worry they won’t be believed or taken seriously or that there will be dire ramifications when reporting an incident – which can all be just as traumatic as the harassment itself. No one on the receiving end of harassment or assault should have to feel that they are the ones who have to leave an event, or any event where a harasser is present, or that they are being made to leave literary circles all together and for good.

Initially run solely by Bryony and Julia, then alongside a small group of volunteers, Good Night Out became a community interest company just over a year ago, and I was proud to be one of the five founding directors. After being awarded ninety-nine thousand pounds funding to cover the next three years from ROSA – The UK Fund For Women and Girls, GNO is now run by three part-time staff, a small team of freelance trainers, and additionally by volunteers. One of the most exciting things I’ve been part of with GNO is also one of the most promising things for the future: co-writing this toolkit with the Mayor of London’s Office based on the GNO training, so organisations and spaces in London can proactively transform themselves into welcoming and safer spaces.

If we want things to change, everyone has to make it happen. At times it can seem impossible to change the world, but we do have the power to change the little slice of it we have, and to set an utopian example that could become the new normal. We just have to have hope, and act.

Jen Calleja is a writer, literary translator and senior trainer for the Good Night Out Campaign. Follow her on Twitter.

The post When Utopia Becomes Tangible appeared first on English PEN.

The longer I have been working on Transmissions, the more I have thought about Kafka. From the start, the idea behind PEN Transmissions was to showcase writers as thinkers. Literature is a form of entertainment, sure, and yes, it can and perhaps should make us happy (even if Kafka wasn’t a fan). But it is also a tool for challenging our thinking, for waking us up. Good literature makes us think about more than just ourselves, and how we see ourselves reflected in the pages of a book; it gets us out of the relatability trap and holds a mirror up to society.

These are very PEN-ish thoughts. A large part of what English PEN, along with its sister organisations around the world, does, it to campaign for writers who are being persecuted for their art, and to highlight and celebrate an international community of writers. As a PEN project, PEN Transmissions reflects these values: of showcasing international writing, of giving a platform to writers from different countries, languages and backgrounds, and of foregrounding their thinking about and their engagement with the world at large. Looking back on the last fourteen months of Transmissions, what becomes apparent is that the idea that art could not be political is born out of immense privilege.

This is the last issue of Transmissions in its current form, and in it we return one last time to a theme that has haunted this zine since its inception: how the past shapes the present, and how we ourselves can shape the future. The four contributions in this issue range from concrete steps to achieve a utopia without sexual harassment and assault, to dystopian visions that are anchored in the more nightmarish aspects of our present, to reflections on how past ideologies have an impact – even when we believe them to be mostly forgotten.

Ho Sok Fong and Zehra Doğan both imagine futures that are dystopian – yet clearly recognisable from things we see happen today. They invite us to linger over their texts for a little, to reflect whether what they describe is really the future, or rather a heightened aspect of the present, or even an aspect of the present we refuse to see.

Jen Calleja discusses how utopian hope can inspire and inform tactics for real change. In this case, the utopia is a world without sexual harassment and assault. As Jen points out, making practical changes, however small, can have a big, lasting impact.

Finally, I spoke to Kapka Kassabova, author of the acclaimed Border, about how versions of the past linger on and affect the present, about how to avoid clichés and othering when writing about the Balkans, and about psychogeography.

This is my final issue as commissioning editor of PEN Transmissions. I hope you dig through the archive to read pieces you might have missed, and I hope you subscribe to get updates on future pieces and news. It’s been a total pleasure to work with the 51 writers and translators who have contributed their words and thoughts during my time here. Here’s to them for keeping it real (and political, always). Here’s to the axe shattering the frozen sea.

– Theodora Danek, Commissioning Editor, PEN Transmissions

The post Editorial: past futures appeared first on English PEN.

When we don’t feel like talking, we look at the stars. We can relax a little like that. For a few moments, we can break away from our strange, tilted horizon.

Many years ago, my grandfather beat my grandmother. For decades after, he ate all his meals seated to her right, because from her right he could not see the hollow his fist had smashed into her left cheek. Seeing that hollow made him uneasy.

My grandmother does not remember how she got here. She thinks she might have fallen from a violently rocking house. The house flew past rubber plantations, raging fires, massacres; horrifying scenes like that. During the journey she lost a child. The child had been playing in the house but when the shaking started the child fell out of the window.

My grandmother, mother and I do not think our house will ever be good again. The house began as a rectangular pigeon loft, but over the years has warped into a funnel. Now, the floor is crooked. Living inside the funnel, we have had to adapt to feeling unbalanced. We have had to learn to stand and sit crooked, whether we are bathing or cooking dinner. Time has passed and our bones have twisted, pulled and folded over, re-organising themselves, and now we feel that living this way is fine. We’re used to it. I have to survive, and so do my mother and grandmother. So does everyone. In order to survive together, we made an agreement: forget the past. But it was when we made the agreement that the house began to change.

All things will be forgotten and we’ll all be more comfortable for it. In the air as things depart, jasmine is left to soothe us. In July, at seven o’clock every evening, the flowers on my grandmother’s jasmine plants open. The scent fills the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, piles of folded clothes. Everywhere the faintly tart scent of jasmine.

It’s not bad, living all together like this, because my grandmother, my mother, and everyone else are all good people. It’s not bad aside from the worry about the crookedness, which grows worse every year. The horizon tilts. Wherever I walk I feel unsteady. But most people claim they feel fine, and what can I say to that? Sometimes, on the bus, or clocking in at work, I have the strong sensation that my body is falling through the nothingness of the air, into a deep chasm. But I cannot confirm it. It’s as though, below the horizon, there’s a monster pulling out the ground and swallowing it up. It’s the kind of monster that only appears in dreams.

The monster doesn’t come out in daylight. Everyone is fine during the day, so long as everyone keeps their worries to themselves.

For example, worries about the strange horizon. ‘Tilted’ has become a taboo word. So have ‘crooked’ and ‘askew’. But you see them often on the backs of toilet doors. Sometimes I notice clocks, photos, paintings that are hung crookedly on other people’s walls. Then I think, Our house is just the same! There is not a single house without a skewed axis.

There’s no point in leaving. People who have left say that the horizon is strange in other places too, maybe even stranger than here.

Inside our house we have to hunch over to move and it keeps getting smaller. The sunken part of the floor dips more sharply, grows more fragile. Our beds stand on the crooked floor. The beds stand firm but for some reason I feel like all the furniture is collapsing and the floor is growing weaker. Sometimes my dreams conjure another conical shape, this one upside down, to balance out our increasingly challenging funnel. Sometimes my dreams conjure nothing at all. We open the door and there is nothing outside.

In our sharp cone of a house, each year flies by faster than the last. My grandmother no longer knows the names of things. She does not remember the place by the stove for salt, sugar and tea leaves, the smell of fruit, or the way to the local clinic and pasar. She can’t say brush teeth, climb stairs, comb hair. She has forgotten verbs.

Whenever Grandma tries to recall something and her words clump and stick, I feel unwell. It’s as if a snake is coiled inside my stomach, exhaling its icy, rancid breath to block my breathing.

I often see people gathered inside their houses, talking heatedly. What they say cannot be heard by the tenants in the house next door. A person can talk as loudly as they like, and not even the other people in the room will hear them. They may as well be speaking into holes in a tree. Or, maybe everyone can hear perfectly well but they don’t dare respond. They do not dare say, ‘I hear you’. They are scared that hearing will be like a needle in their open chests, and it will hurt them.

I’m scared too. Each sentence could be wrong and fall like a giant knife, sticking into the ground like a giant wall. No one will be able to cross it. The only way to heal all these wounds is with magic words. But what words are those?

When my heart aches for no discernible reason, I do what my grandmother and mother do, and look at the stars. My grandmother and mother rarely use calendars; they can tell the day by the moon.

My back has a moth face just like yours, says my mother.

She talks as if she has understood the face on her own back.

Right now the face on my back must mask a trembling child. All day long, I have been upset by what’s outside. I have understood that I am maybe just a weed, unworthy of nurture. All day, I leaned out of my tiny window and looked down at the street, where a crowd demonstrated against racial equality. They yelled a sea of slogans and it sounded like someone frantically whirling a sack of nightmares, words falling through the holes and smacking onto the ground like clods of cow shit. But at the back, behind the ranks of marchers, moth faces flickered and flapped, flowing silently beneath the window like a separate tide of panic. Then evening came and the state television channel said, At the end of the day, this is still a fine and harmonious country. We must all work to keep it that way.

I am used to feeling disappointed. There’s nothing strange about that. My mother and I lean back and look up and the night sky looks full of pinpricks. A bitter feeling has been collecting beneath my jaw and seeping into my cheeks; now it vanishes.

Ma, I say. If you’re tired, go to sleep.

But she says, The sky looks like a watermelon.

Eventually we will find the language to listen to the moth faces. Then the noise and silences will finally reach the monster beneath the horizon.

Beneath the stars, the moth eyes on my mother’s back gaze back at me, for a long, long time.

Ho Sok Fong is the author of two story collections, Maze Carpet and Lake Like a Mirror, a portrait of Malaysian society in nine stories. It won a PEN Presents and a PEN Translates award, and will be published in English by Granta Books in 2019, translated by Natascha Bruce. She is the 2016 recipient of a Taiwan National Culture & Arts Foundation grant, to support the completion of her first novel, The Forest in Full Bloom.

This text was translated by Natascha Bruce.

The post Moth Eyes appeared first on English PEN.

A foggy sky, hard to see; an unknown place, an unknown language, an unknown identity. No one understood one another. But everyone was speaking. Everyone way trying to impose their values on one another, even though they didn’t understand each other.

Some gave up, stopped being themselves and stepped into different bodies. Others rejected what was being imposed. But really, everyone was small, weak, controlled by an unknown force. Occasionally, one person dominated another and celebrated this victory in a bloody way but in reality, they were all just toys. Now and then they forgot that they were toys and dreamt of another life but soon enough those dreams were stopped with a click on the most cruel button of the control panel. Their rage grew each time their dreams were interrupted, and they attacked those weaker than them. So they could forget about reality.

The year is 3219. In an unknown country, the sun is high in the sky, scorching even in the winter time. Here, it is always very hot in winter, so that it is hard to even breathe. Like every other country, this one is known for its beautiful sights. With its bombed buildings, destroyed museums, imprisoned artists, mass graves and nonstop shelling, it looks particularly heavenly.

This particular country gets more beautiful every year by killing, and by being killed. Although it attracts many refugees – thanks to its unbearable living conditions –, it still manages to remain unsafe. Even as the smell of corpses on the ground burns people’s throats, the country attracts more tourists. More tourists bring more money. And thus the person who holds the controller becomes more powerful.

The footsteps don’t stop. Scorpions are hissing in every corner. A timid heart is beating under the rubble. It beats faster as the footsteps approach. She’s covered in sweat –  a result of fear. No one knows how long she’s been hiding there, in this dark well. A scorching sun above, sun on the ground, and scorpions, with their ugly feet, leave their marks on the snow. With every footstep she hears, she works faster: She is desperate to finish what’s in her hand before they arrive. She is a tiny woman; her hair sweeps over her breasts with every move. The fear of being caught is clear in her eyes. Blood is dripping from between her legs. This is how she paints: she rubs her hand against her vagina, drawing what’s born out of her onto paper and thus giving birth. Her life would be over if she was caught.

In this unknown world that she lives in, art is the biggest crime. It destroys the order of the world. It is annoying, it scares people, it kills tourism. People are afraid of going to places where there’s art; the ones who go there don’t ever come back. As a result, whenever there’s an art alarm somewhere, countries issue travel warnings for their citizens. The most dangerous country in this regard is a small country with unknown lands and unknown peoples. Although it has a high level of prosperity compared to many others, it just can’t get rid of art actions. It is frequently criticised for its wealth, it has lost many cases in the European Court of Human Rights for providing welfare to its citizens; the politicians who argue that their country is anti-democratic just continue  providing wealth to their citizens, they don’t feel any shame. But, for an unknown reason, the unknown people in this country revolt all the time and stubbornly make art whatever the price. The tiny scared women is one of them. She obtains illegal paints, and despite the home raids and her police record she keeps on painting, using turmeric, tomato paste, coffee, ash, fruits, vegetables and rubbish.

‘She fouls the world with every painting, someone must stop her. Look, she’s even using her menstrual blood. She puts her hand between her legs and paints with her fingers, nonstop. This woman tells us that we’re beautiful! Without shame! No, she’s beautiful, she’s doing the worst thing by making the world more beautiful, this must be stopped. Or else the world will become a more beautiful place.‘

It was an era when art was destroyed because it was dangerous. People didn’t recognise themselves or each other: they led the murky lives of people who don’t know themselves. No one wanted to hold a mirror up to one another. They were afraid of scaring each other. They were so much in the mud that if someone objected, that person would be regarded as criminals. The ones who protested reminded them of their own dirt. Because mirrors were the most dangerous invention of all times. If someone was found to have a mirror at home, they’d be killed on the spot. No one wanted to see themselves in the mirror; they had a dangerous magic, and the ones who looked went mad and started to protest against the system. That was why all the states regarded mirrors as the most dangerous weapons.

But one day, the tiny woman had found the only mirror in the world. She hid and started drawing what she saw with her blood. She gave birth from her blood and mirrored life. She painted her hope, so that maybe, one day, people would wake up.

Zehra Doğan (born 1989) is a Kurdish artist and journalist from Diyarbakir, Turkey. She is a founder and the editor of Jinha, a feminist Kurdish news agency with an all-female staff. In 2017, she was sentenced to 2 years, 9 months and 22 days in prison for ‘terrorist propaganda’ because of her news coverage, social media posts, and sharing a painting of hers on social media. Her imprisonment prompted international outcry, including a 2018 mural by street artist Banksy in New York. She was released from prison in Tarsus on 24 February 2019. She has recently taken part in exhibitions and performances in the Tate Modern, London, and the Pergamon Museum, Berlin. Follow her on Twitter.

This text was translated by Onur Erem.

The post Faces Afraid of the Mirror appeared first on English PEN.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author portrait by TD.

Interview by Theodora Danek.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview by Theodora Danek.

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

#PICTURE MY LIFE: a woman in a country where poverty has married unemployment and birthed a shrinking economy and hyper-inflation. Where the streets are filled with women with toddlers, selling goods on the side streets for their daily bread, playing cat and mouse with the authorities just to secure the few dimes they make. When the cat (always a man in power) catches the mouse, he will demand sexual favours from the mouse. If the mouse says no, she will either be forced to pay a bribe or get arrested – for they both know the undesignated trade, and the area the mouse was selling from, are illegal.

Now when we look at this picture let’s take note that this is not only the fate of the women vendors but also of women entrepreneurs, women in media, in the film and arts industry and other social sectors. They are all facing this abuse, complemented by the downturn of the economy.

In this chaotic misery, a breeding ground to abuse and take advantage of women is strategically created. These cases go unreported and ignored as if it’s all a fallacy.

We, a group of women filmmakers of Zimbabwe developed a project that will help to generate conversations about the magnitude of sexual violence perpetrated against women in the public space, with the aim of challenging all forms of sexual harassment. We call these films #PICTUREMYLIFE – ME TOO SPOTS. They are recorded and screened in different places.
There is a need to acknowledge and address the abuse of women rights and how it has been normalized in Zimbabwe. It is heart-wrenching that women and men of all ages still find it difficult to open up and actually start talking about sexual abuse… a depressing reality.

During one of the talks we organised, one woman pointed out that ‘it’s hard to report rape cases because at the police station they will probe you with questions like, what were you wearing, why were you there, are you sure you were raped because you do not look like the type that can be raped, and that in itself causes one to internalise these cases.’

The interrogations are taunting and dehumanising: as if to say that when someone is sexually abused, it’s something they go looking for.

This is what happened to Tabetha, who fell prey to the same perpetrator twice. Only now that her children are grown and only through this project has she found her voice. One wonders how many souls like Tabetha take their trauma to the grave, how many perpetrators walk scot-free. It is about time to build a community of advocates, driven by survivors, in order to create solutions which actually fight sexual violence in their communities and work spaces.

Whilst it’s important to create conversations and disrupt systems that allow for the global proliferation of sexual violence, we must not forget the survivors who are still finding their pathways to healing. Having gotten the stories straight from the horse’s mouth, I can say that it takes so much courage to speak out in such a challenging society. Imagine, having had to carry and suppress pain for a long time, to then have an opportunity present itself, a platform where one just unloads all that’s within. The feeling is therapeutic. Although most are reluctant to retell their story after the first release out of fear of stigma and discrimination, and also in order to avoid the ordeal of re-narrating the story which evokes the trauma all over again, still a profound impact on the victims mental health is evident from finally voicing their ordeal.

As Tarana Burke, the originator of #metoo, stated, ‘On one side, it’s a bold declarative statement that “I’m not ashamed” and “I’m not alone.” On the other side, it’s a statement from survivor to survivor that says, “I see you, I hear you, I understand you and I’m here for you or I get it.”‘

We have a rather oppressive proverb in African culture which says that a child is to be seen and not to be heard. In Zimbabwe, this also applies to the cases of women: in this patriarchal society women are still equated to children. The sacredness of rape culture is a notion that needs to be shattered. We need to stop beating about the bush and labelling it a female problem. Within our society we have a pride of lions known as the ‘gatekeepers’ who go to extreme lengths to bury the truth under the guise of social preservation. But what preservation is there when an 11-year-old gets raped and the system supposedly protecting her takes ages to deliver justice to her… if ever? What about the psychological scars on her and her mother which have no guarantee of healing? The whispers on every street wall spotlighting her as the ‘child raped in the year xxxx’? These are the walls we are working on breaking down.

We are in the process of creating a ripple effect where as Zimbabwean women our voices echo as one to STOP sexual abuse against women. We might not be at a place of privilege compared to the rest of the women in the world, but we have tolerated being victims long enough. Now I can confidently go back to my friend and say ‘I guess it’s not a bad thing being born an African female because we have the ability to create and influence change around us.’

Yandani Mlilo is an artist, creative writer, feminist and LGBT activist from Zimbabwe. She has published a number of articles of note. She published a short story anthology titled Family Portrait. She also holds a Diploma in Social Work from the Women’s University in Africa (WUA). Her journey has inspired her to form a trust known as VUTIVI (knowledge) initiative Trust which uses art as a human rights advocacy tool.

For more information on on Picture My Life – #metoo Zimbabwe, log on to
www.icapatrust.org and leave us a message.

The post #PICTURE MY LIFE appeared first on English PEN.