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Faith, by Jacob Sam-La Rose

International PEN commissioned a poem to be read at the opening night of Free the Word! at Shakespeare's Globe. We enjoyed it so much that we wanted to share it with you here.

Faith
By Jacob Sam-La Rose

A girl in class opts out of speech. A teacher mouths
problems at home and who knows what too-large
or brutal vision stalled the engine of her voice.

In a photograph I pass round, a man reels from
a baton to the head and cameras bloom in every hand
to catch his perfect grimace. Today, we write about

the things that we believe in. The class comes up with
god, by all the usual names, and faith in numbers,
that the News at Ten's more often bad than good,

that some things never change, no matter what
you say, although there's so much to be said.
A girl carves out a space for her voice to return to.

Praise her fierce and stubborn silence. Somewhere,
rain will fall on dry land for the first time in months.
I wonder what her first words will be.

Jacob Sam-La Rose is a poet, editor, creative consultant, artistic director and sometime photographer. You can learn more about him (and hear him read some of his poetry) at his MySpace page. He also has a blog.

Beyond Faith and Reason: a review

A really enjoyable, thought-provoking event to kick off Free the Word on Thursday evening. Four writers - three of them readers, one of them a speaker. The readers read from their own work. It was the speaker - Tariq Ali - who really brought the evening to life. I guess I still think of him as the young protest leader of the 1960s, but here he was, recognisably that man, but matured into a thinker with knowledge that was both broad and deep, with a voice that was powerful and insistent.

He also adapted best to his environment, the open air stage of the Globe. He took to the stage like a natural performer. Alongside him, Nadine Gordimer was lovely, frail, grandmotherly and wise, but she could not fill the difficult open space that is the Globe like Tariq Ali. And I'm sure Tariq Ali would say that he could not fill the open space that is a page like Nadine.

PEN is rightly preoccupied with books. So are its members who are all writers. But the evening brought out another truth - that words are treasured and safeguarded in the pages of books, but they also need to spring to life outside those pages to bring about change. PEN needs to use the whole range of media to get across its messages without ever forgetting that its reason for being remains the book.

- John Simmons

What matters more than reading books

At last night's Free the Word! opening event, 'Beyond Faith and Reason', the novelist, historian and political campaigner Tariq Ali stood on the open-air stage at Shakespeare's Globe with three other distinguished authors and fired the festival's proverbial starting shot.

It came at the end of a rousing, extemporaneous speech, which included a lament for Europe's withering voices of dissent ("In the US, the dissident culture is far, far more vigorous"... "there's a deathliness to English culture at the moment"...), which concluded with this:

"Reading novels is important, but thinking for yourself, doubting, being sceptical, is even more important. And no one has a right to question others unless one does it oneself."

The festival begins

London weather update: lashings of rain mixed with occasional bursts of blinding sunlight. In other words, a perfect day (figuratively at least) for the start of a festival with the theme of Heaven and Earth. Come to think of it, almost any day in London is the perfect day for such a theme. Well chosen, PEN programmers!

Free the Word! gets underway at 7.30pm this evening at Shakespeare's Globe. Some tickets are still available for the opening event, 'Beyond Faith and Reason' which features Nadine Gordimer, Tariq Ali, Samir El-youssef and Tahmina Anam reading from and discussing their work. 

You can find out more about this event, and purchase tickets, here.

"Metaphysically homeless..."

“I don’t know what home is,” says Palestinian writer Samir El-youssef. “I was born in a refugee camp, and once you are, you don’t know the meaning of the word ‘home’.” His books explore issues around identity and ideology, with The Illusion of Return focusing particularly on the need we all have to identify with and lay claim to a place we can call home. He asks: “To what can we return? A piece of land? To places we have never been or which have changed beyond recognition? Is ‘return’ just about escaping the inhospitality of the world?”

El-youssef is taking part in the Beyond Faith and Reason event at the festival on 16 April. You can hear him discuss rhetoric, the power of literature (“you discover your humanity”) and events in the Middle East here, in an interview from August 2006 with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, the American National Public Radio show.

Writers' excerpts - Places and beliefs

Alyssa Moxley, currently looking after all things podcasting and social media at International PEN for the Free The Word festival, writes:

Heaven and Earth seems especially appropriate as a theme for a literature festival, writing being the medium that so directly represents thoughts as they make their way from ethereal perception to manifest communication. These events are chance to witness first hand, and off the cuff, the embodied and human reactions/discussions of these far-flung correspondents of the human story, where one would normally encounter only their disembodied words. 

I thought I would post a few links to the creative output of the writers for the first event, Beyond Faith and Reason.  It's food for thought and gets the mind hungry to hear what they will discuss.  What has struck me about these writers' works is how they describe the interaction of place with society altering beliefs and personal emotional responses.

Nadine Gordimer’s Loot, plays with language and emotional responses to history in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa.  It comes from the eponymous short story collection.

The introduction to Tariq Ali’s Clash of Fundamentalisms discusses the history of beliefs and what is considered rational argument in relation to current global conflicts (physical and ideological) between and within America, Europe and the Middle East. 

Samir El-Youssef explores issues of identity and locality in this travel piece.

Tahmima Anam poetically ponders the effects global warming on Bangladesh.