In 2010, the Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN celebrates 50 years of defending freedom of expression around the world with a year-long campaign - Because Writers Speak their Minds. In Frankfurt in June, Sara Whyatt of the WiPC spoke to the 5th General Assembly of ICORN, reflecting on the history of the committee, and the present situation for writers who dare speak up. Shahrazad - stories for life congratulates the WiPC, and now presents Sara Whyatt's speech to our audience. To learn more about WiPC's campaign, go here .

Because Writers speak Their Minds: 50 years of writers and exile

This year we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Writers in Prison Committee, set up in July 1960. As the anniversary neared, I found myself asking why was it that although PEN itself had already been in existence since 1921, did it take 39 years for the organisation to set up a formal committee, dedicated to gathering information on attacks on writers, and to galvanise and coordinate other writers world wide in their defence?

Sifting through PEN's archives, particularly the minutes of the congresses around the war years and up to the creation of the WiPC, I think I found the answer. 

In 1947 PEN's congress in Zurich was the first to be held since the outbreak of World War II. Photos taken by Time Life of those gathered in Zurich show writers who had not seen each other for years beaming, chatting, hugging each other. Friends re-united, relieved. There is even one of the poet Stephen Spender high up in the air on a seesaw, legs flying outwards. No doubt there were dark moments too not captured by the cameras. Many friends had died, many more had suffered, others were still living under repression. The talk would have been of exile. Many of those in the meeting would have lived as refugees, others would be wondering if they could ever return home. And there were those, such as David Carver and Storm Jameson, founder members of the WiPC, who could talk of their own efforts to help refugees find places of safety during the war years. But all will have been looking towards the future with hope. A year later, UN member states gathered to form the UN Declaration of Human Rights. All were looking towards "never again". 

Serbian Dejan Anastasijevic is the ICORN Guest Writer in Brussels. He is an investigative journalist and writer, and has freelanced for Time Magazine and The Guardian among others. Anastasijevic is the Featured Writer this spring, presented with an interview at icorn.org. At the same time Shahrazad - stories for life presents some of his writing.

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BRUSSELS FOR BEGINNERS

Who but Shrek, an ogre from the eponymous movie, would choose to live in Brussels, a city whose name, translated from Old Dutch, means „a home in the swamp"? Although half way between Amsterdam and Paris, Brussels lacks Parisian glitz or the Dutch tolerance towards commercial sex and substance abuse, it even lacks a river (they used to have one, but they buried it). It does, however, have an average of 200 rainy days each year, poor infrastructure, and one of the largest Islamic communities in Europe. It also has an army of Eurocrats, who might as well be Martians, spending their days in heavily guarded glass towers, and their nights in Irish pubs which the natives gracefully ignore.

Still this city has many hidden charms, easily overlooked by a casual visitor. Although many downtown old buildings were destroyed during the soulless modernization in the 60s - in architecture, this kind of vandalism is known as "brusselisation" - a short walk leads to intact art-noveau squares and green parks. Not to talk about the museums: there's something for everyone, from Flemish masters, through Magritte, to Tin Tin, and on top of that the Museum of Musical Instruments, of comics, and, naturally, the Museum of Beer, honoring the Belgian national beverage. 

Belgian beer is universally acclaimed thanks to the special kind of yeast, Brettanomyces bruxellensis, endemic to Brussels and it surroundings. An average café offers a choice of at least fifty brands, ranging from white beer (consumed with lemon) through Flemish Red, to powerful Trappist beers with the alcohol content of 8 percent or more. Maybe all this beer (an average Belgian consumes a few hundred liters each year), is linked to the fact that Brussels' most famous monument, Mannequin Pis, represents a boy who, according to the legend, extinguished the fire with his urine. During festivities, beer literally flows from the Mannequin's body, less often it's champagne or wine. 

Philo Ikonya is a Kenyan writer, journalist and human rights activist, and presently Oslo City of Refuge's ICORN Guest Writer. She was elected president of Kenyan PEN in 2007. Ikonya has written articles for journals, web magazines and blogs, often commenting on the social and political situation in Kenya. She has also written poetry and novels, and her novel "Kenya, will you marry me", has been translared and published in several countries. She has worked as a lecturer of Spanish at Tangaza College of the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, and as a a socio-political commentator in both radio and television. Philo Ikonya was threatened and harassed for her work and political activism, and can no longer work in Kenya. 

I turn into love

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Please continue to read more of Philo Ikonya's poetry!

Pegāh Ahmadi (Persian پگاه احمدی) is an Iranian poet, scholar, literary critic and translator of poetry. She is currently the ICORN Guest Writer in Frankfurt City of Refuge.

Ahmadi began writing poetry at the age of seven, and made her début as a poet at age seventeen by the publication of a poem in the literary magazine Takāpu, edited by Mansur Kushān. She has studied Persian literature at the University of Tehran, and regularly contributed to literary magazines on subject matters related to criticism of verse, theoretical issues pertaining to poetry and translation of poems. She is a member of Iranian Writers Association. In 2007 she was awarded the Celebrity of Poetry Award of the Iranian Journalists' Institute.

In the beginning of her literary career, Pegah Ahmadi's poems were associated with linguistic experimentation as was the case with many Iranian poets in the 1990s. But then she took up political and social themes because she considered them to be more relevant. She has especially taken up issues of the history and the changing role of women in society, reflecting also what consequences these changes have for writing as a woman.

Ahmadi has published several books of poetry, anthologies, literary reviews and translation of American poetry (like Sylvia Plath). Before coming to Germany, she worked as editor of the literary review Paperik and taught "Poetry in cinema" at the Film School Tehran.

She says of her own approach to her work:

"There comes a time in your life when sentimentalism can provide no answer to everyday questions. You are confronted by the blackness of your culture and the depth of your history and are compelled to devote attention to the responsibility that society brings with it. Personal experiences and abstract games can no longer match such entities."

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Please continue to read Pegah Ahamdi's poetry!

Georgian Zurab Rtveliashvili says of his poem:

"In August 2008 official Moscow invaded Georgian territory, and occupied important parts of it. This fact of violence is the personal tragedy of every Georgian citizen. One year before this fact, I wrote the poem Mission N (Бич Божий) which was translated in to Russian by the poet M. Amelin. It was published in a well-known Russian journal, and at the same time in many Georgian newspapers.

In this poem I show the scene of foreign airplanes bombing my hometown, which is what really happened one year after the poem was published. Much was written in the Georgian press about this poem after the August war in Georgia."

AKULA

Kogda kultura dremlet, eto kolaps stixa (poezii)
izdaiu golos s gortani kosaias raskolonnoi igloi grifa.
Kogda etot golos meniaiet vse i vse zakoni wokrug,
tembr kak prujinu, medleno sgibaet pokorennoe stixotvorenie,
kak sablia zvenit golos ishcha v gortani grif,
kultura --- okeaaan! na dne ee akula
dremlet, dremlet dremlet...

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Please continue to read poem in Russian and English! (Photo: Cato Lein)

A lecture given by Ilya Trojanow

Member of the ICORN Council of Writers and Experts

Every Saturday and Sunday, all over Europe, people from different walks of life come together to support their very own. They flock into the arenas, wearing the shirts of their heroes, eager to scream and shout for the better part of two hours. What do they sing in moments of joy and ecstasy? Which slogan unites them all, whether they are comfortably seated in the stadium of Anderlecht or quivering on their feet in Lüttich? Olé! Rhythmically repeated in a distinct, well-known cascade: olé ... olé olé olé. Probably most fans link this slogan with Spain. Maybe they associate it with toreros or with Don Juan. But how many of the fans that whip themselves into frenzy with unrelenting olés realize that they are actually repeating the Arab word for God. Time and again, every Saturday and Sunday, the soccer stadiums in Europe resonate with shouts of "Allah"!

In times of crisis the rhetoric of conflict blossoms. The ongoing, seemingly endless "War On Terror", powered by deliberately vague justifications, has metastasised into a clash of canons, cultures and civilizations. We are on the edge of disaster, we have to close ranks and defend our values and traditions. The foreign is an antagonistic force that has to be repelled. Thus we are asked, more often heatedly implored, to define our identity, to become aware of our own heritage, to defend our very own values.

But what if we are not defined by a homogenous, home-grown culture, because such a thing does not exist, has never existed? What if our identity is nothing but a snapshot of a dynamic process that we are caught up in, often without noticing? What if what we regard as alien is only the result of a momentary difference, a fleeting gesture of history? What if those that are claiming to defend the core of a certain nation, a certain tradition, a certain religion are fighting windmills while the reality of cultural dynamics is in the wind? For what if the values and cultural achievements of the so-called West were the result of awakenings and rebellions made possible by what we today regard as non-European sources, by movement and migration? What if core Western values, technologies and cultural expressions were decisively formed by confluences, by a intensive exchange between Islam, Christianity and Judaism, by a vibrant culture of debate amongst scholars working in Granada, Baghdad, Palermo, Damascus, Bologna, Paris, Venice and Cairo? What if all that we perceive as canonical and classical is a hybridity that we have forgotten? Or have been persuaded, encouraged, conditioned to forget?