What a rich collaboration
this is: International PEN and 26. Every day I read fifty new words written in
freedom by a 26 writer here and now. We’ve each been inspired by the life and
work of an oppressed writer whose case study – somewhere in the world these
last five decades – appears in a list on the PEN website.
Many of us find ourselves
addressing this writer directly as ‘you’. It’s how we talk to the dead, the
missed or the missing. It’s how we voice odes or letters. We invoke you.
Fifty writers, fifty
years. And there are more of you, before, during, and after. Some of you
survived.
So many of your
life-breaths in a cell. Eyes deprived of light. Tortures and humiliations
designed to cut you down to the raw stump of your existence. And yet you write.
You write in your mind, with blood or juice, on scraps or skins, when you get out, when you can shout, you keep on writing, publishing, provoking – until the authorities get you again. Then they take up where they left off, hacking at whatever’s left of you. And you must finish your sentence.
Why do you do it? Are you
mad as a martyr, delusional, gifted, grand? How can you be so convinced of your
truth?
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