26:50 - Controlling flippancy?

Rob Williams blogs about his 26:50 piece on Sihem Bensedrine

 

I agonised over my fifty words on Sihem Bensedrine.  But probably not in the same way as many of the writers in this project.  That is, not in the writing of them. That actually came very easily after the initial idea. The agonizing started after I’d sent them to Tom.  Would people think I’m being flippant?  I’m guilty of flippancy far too often yet even I recognize that this is not the ideal forum for such a dubious gift.  Sihem Bensedrine is, after all, a journalist and human rights activist whose fight for freedom of the press in Tunisia has resulted in her creative and physical persecution over many years; she has been falsely imprisoned and assaulted by the police on countless occasions.  And here I sit, in my book-lined office, changing a single character of this woman’s surname and doing as much research on a controlled substance as a repressed writer (I will never tell how far I went with the former, other than to say I think research is all-important…). 

 

In my defence, however, I can assure you that I have taken both 26:50 and my subject very seriously indeed.  The absolute beauty of this project is that every participant would almost certainly have taken a different approach to me given the same source material.  But I suppose what I was struck by more than anything as I found out more about Sihem’s struggles was the very thing that seems to keep her fighting: the power of even a single letter let alone a whole word to change the context of everything.

Comments

[John Simmons]

Absolutely right, Rob. The great joy and strength of 26:50 is that everyone approaches it in a different way. Whereas all these PEN writers have been persecuted for not writing in the uniform way dictated by repressive thinking. No need for us to side with repressive thinking.