International PEN - Free the Word Festival

Experiences of Volunteering by Alain English

Wednesday 14th April 7:45 pm Purcell Room, Queen Elizabeth Hall - Opening Event The Ex-Empire Strikes Back with James Kelman, Olive Senior and Margaret Busby.  Chaired by Profile Writer Maya Jaggi.

Some weeks before this event, I registered to volunteer with the Free the Word Festival with International PEN, a group who promote international literature and writers in the UK and organised the Free the Word Festival every spring.  They brought writers from as far afield as India, South Africa and Israel together for workshops and discussions on their work.

I applied with them, had a meeting in the Free the Word centre near Holborn, Central London.  All the volunteers met at this event and we put down our availability and sort of thing we were were able or wanted to do (looking after authors, doing the bookstall, ticket collection and so forth).  They sent us a schedule a couple of days before the Festival started on the 14th April with all the details.  Although the festival started on the Wednesday, I wasn't due to work with them until the Thursday.

Nevertheless, I attended the opening event as I liked the writer James Kelman, who was appearing at it.  The event was in the Purcell Room in the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the Southbank.  The President of International PEN introduced the Festival and the writers.  The opening event was discussing how language was passed across cultures, and how different cultures relate to stories.  Each writer discussed this question from the context of their own background.  Each writer read from their latest work to accompany the discussion.

Margaret Busby talked about the iniquities of the publishing industry, pointing out that writers often don't connect to their editors and that a variety of editing styles are needed.  As cultures become more globalised, there is more acceptance of international literature that crosses language barriers.

Jamaican writer Olive Senior decided at an early age to become a writer, and she was heavily influenced by her background and introduced a lot of the local dialect into her writing, and it was out of the dialect that she developed the characters.  She read from her breakthrough novel "Ballad", which contained many examples of this and felt uplifting to listen to.  As well as prose, Olive talked of her poetry and insisted she did not have a specific market, saying she wrote her work for anyone who cared to read it.  Regarding the central question of the discussion, Olive said she had written the "Encyclopaedia of Jamaican Culture" to present her view alongside that of the Establishment's view of her country.  All artists were marginilised, and being a publisher put an extra burden on it.

James Kelman, a fellow Scotsman, was riven with deep feeling and a sense political injustice along with a line in spot-on humour.  He had difficulties getting his work recognised sometimes as people assumed the natural style with which he wrote was not creative.  The Glasgow dialect he used in his books and stories was dictated to him and then recorded, and thus had no literary merit as a work of creative art.  Yet good writing, he insisted, entraps the rhythms and syntax of the way people speak.  He always tried to write from his own background, but said that people were not allowed to be themselves in art and this was partly down to the fact that the people in charge of the arts world may know a lot about business but not enough about art.  He said writers work in different ways - his own way of starting a work is just to sit down and doodle it.

The issue of audiobooks were raised but James Kelman said (citing Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein as examples) that if you pay attention to the work, the right rhythms and syntax of writers come off the page.  You only need audiobooks with bad writers.  But technology is changing, in a positive way and that phone texting is a good way forward for writers to communicate across cultural barriers.

The talk ended and I sat in the foyer, making notes.  I spoke to James Kelman briefly and told him I liked his writing (I own a copy of his non-fiction work "And the Judges Said").  It was a fine and thought-provoking start to the festival and I looked forward to starting my volunteering the following morning.

Thursday 15th April Bloomberg Bites 12:30pm, Bloomberg Bank - Duncan Campbell interviewed fellow crime writer, Deon Meyer.

This event was at the Bloomberg Institute at Finsbury Square, Moorgate, in Central London.  I got there early and met with staff member Sarah who handed out our volunteer packs including a T-Shirt we had to wear at each event.  An eruption of volcanic ash in Iceland and it's disruption of British airspace, had disrupted some Free the Word events, as the closed airports meant many writers could reach the UK.  But this didn't matter too much on the Thursday as the event still went ahead.  As well as Lisa, a lovely blonde girl who worked for Foyles and was selling books the writers had for sale at the event.  She was a lively kind of young woman, with a habit of multitasking while staying continually, positively energised.

Duncan Campbell, a man in a suit with shoulder-length white hair, was the first writer to appear.  He spoke in a deep English gentleman's drawl and had travelled widely in his writing life, working for the Guardian as a correspondent and writing several crime books.  The writer he was interviewing, Deon Meyer, was from South Africa and they had both met and worked with each other before.

The Bloomberg Institute event was not actually in the event programme and when we got into the building it was obvious why.  As a financial centre, it was heavily guarded and all Free the Word staff and volunteers, as well as the two writers went through a couple of security checks and were given ID to be worn on the premises.  After a short wait, we were shown into a conference room, where we set up the Free the Word banners and bookstall.  I remarked to Duncan going in that the building interior reminded me of old Sixties science fiction films - we were living in the future we had dreamt of yesterday.

The audience came in and sat down.  The event not being advertised in the programme, I assumed they were invited.  Once everyone was settled, the interview began.  Deon kicked things off by reading from his book "Thirteen Hours".  He told Duncan he was always looking for conflict, as conflict is the mother of suspense.  He said that real crime, in his view, does not make for good crime fiction - real crime is too related to poverty.  Instead, Deon took big issues and extrapolated them.

He grew up in a house with lots of books and decided early on he wanted to be a writer.  He studied as a teacher, was an editor then a copywriter as well as a newspaper reporter.  All this stood him in good stead for writing.  Apartheid in South Africa banned crime fiction - post-apartheid has seen huge explosion in all art forms.  In the early years of post-apartheid, people dealt with the baggage the old system left behind.  Now they have moved on.

Deon said he didn't write about racist white Afrikaaners.  He had a story of a Tosa black man, researched it and realised in the writing he couldn't continue, so he focussed on the similarities between people rather than their differences.  Reaction to the book when it came out was positive and relaxed his nerves over how it might be received. South Africans are OK with how he has represented them, although some white Afrikaaners have objected in the past.

Statistics have shown high levels of crime but in this, there is no real perspective about South Africa.  Compare similar statistics in Los Angeles or Chicago and the figures are similar to each other.

Deon didn't write sequels or bring characters back too many times as he preferred an artistic freedom that way, although he would like to take characters he has created in the past into different places and situations.  Things were looking good for him, with five books optioned for movies so far and three will be developed.  There are no petty jealousies between himself and other writers.

He was heavily influenced as a writer between the ages of 14 - 24 and it was around then he found his own voice.  He liked versimilitude, having a texture of reality although what was written was 100% fiction.  He left the ethical messages to priests but only tried to create a compelling story.  Crime writing is not morbid - it relies on humour and human situations and this can be found in either fact or fiction.

I saw both of these writers again at the discussion Crime Writing/Is Writing a Crime event at the Foyles Bookshop, Charing Cross.  Duncan chaired the event and it had contributions from Moldovan writer Natalia Morari and Cuban author Leonardo Padura who spoke through a translator.  I laid the flyers out on the seats and erected the banners, also giving a hand to Sarah when she left her keys behind at Foyles and I was the only still left in the building when she doubled back to get them.  We laughed about this as the Festival went on.

Friday 16th April 1pm - The Writers in Prison Committee 50th Anniversary Celebration, Wolfson Theatre, London School of Economics

For this event, I was round by the Wolfson Theatre in the London School of Economics.  This was another 'high-tech' building and I waited for the others in the dining area outside on lead furniture.  The theatre itself was round the corner from the Old Curiosity Shop, made famous by the Charles Dickens book of the same name.

Sarah arrived, along with Lisa, and we soon got through reception and got settled in, setting up the theatre, which was basically a lecture hall.  Lisa set up her bookstall outside the theatre and there was some juice and nibbles provided for the guests.  I got the T-Shirt on, and directed guests into the hall.  Although there was some fear over the authors coming in late, eventually they did arrive and we watched the talk.

The event was hosted by a writer called Micheala Wrong, who was selling her own book "It's Our Turn to Eat".  There was a heavy introductory talk of writers in prison across the world, from Nigeria to Vietnam and then Afghanistan.  In all these cases the writers were imprisoned or persecuted by their governments:

"For prisoners, the thought they have been forgotten is a spiritual death."

As fitted with the title of the event, the two featured writers had been to prison and done time for what they had written.  Irkali Kakabadza was from Georgia and he was a writer and performance artist.  Among other things, he spoke of writers being abused and PEN has helped him create a piece called 'Natalie', which he has performed many times and which he then performed for us:

Pain is silly

Sane is silly

Chain is silly

So set us free

He talked about being taken to prison in Georgia and of a performance piece he actually took into a police station, performing poetry and using cameras to record the actions of the police.   The police took more than 15 minutes to respond to what he was doing.  This story, as you might expect, got a lot of laughs from the audience. 

Nawal El Saadawi discussed a piece of drama she had written called 'God Resigns', which challenged the divisions imposed on her and friends by the Holy Books as they were growing up.  Nawal studied the books for years and did something unheard in bringing God himself onstage to be challenged and made to resign.  She pointed out how God was divided between spirit and body and got love from women only to give them depravation and looked at the problems of living eternally without death.

The way she got the book published was bizarre as her publisher was illiterate and couldn't read it, hence he couldn't really know what it was about.  The book was published and Nawal was threatened with death and eventually locked up in prison.  She hated it but she tolerated it and made a decision to survive and not to be sick.  She said health was a decision, to live was a decision and to fight was a decision.  In a move that generated laughter, she advised us to go to prison - it's another world and going there taught her to survive.

Both writers were asked towards the end of the session how they coped with physical threats when in prison.  Nawal said she once scared off a prison guard by just giving him a scary look.  Irakali said he was less intimidated by the physical threats and more by the psychology behind it.  The psychological spin in terror is more frightening but you find a way to live with it.

The discussion closed with some talk on censorship and here their views differed.  Nawal said censorship, like oppression, is universal.  Irakali said we really needed to fight poverty and we had an obligation to speak for ourselves and our enemies as an antidote to the hatred that grips modern politics.

I was scrambling to take all of this stuff down, fighting off my own wavering attention span and the heat inside the theatre itself.  When the event was over, I nipped outside to help out with the staff and directed people to the bathroom or to the exits but my task was more or less done.  Nawal and Irkali were being interviewed for television in the theatre and when this was done, I grabbed my stuff and left for the day.

I did other events in the course of the week, but sadly did not record them as fully as the ones I have talked about above.  No matter, I enjoyed working with the people at the Festival and I hope I work with International PEN again soon.