Olive Senior - PEN International

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WORDS ... EDITOR’S NOTE
Editor’s Note
TROILUS: Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart:
The effect doth operate another way.
Troilus and Cressida, Act V, Sc. III
Welcome to the 2010 spring/summer issue, which shares its theme with International
PEN’s Free the Word! festivals in Linz, Austria (October 2009) and London (April 2010),
playing on Troilus’s cynical dismissal of his errant lover’s letter in Shakespeare’s
tragedy. Free the Word! London gathered dozens of writers from as many countries,
and here we present works by many festival participants including Sujata Bhatt,
James Kelman, John Mateer, Pauline Melville, Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, Amruta Patil,
Nawal El Saadawi, Olive Senior and Michela Wrong. The festival’s inaugural event,
a discussion about the re-shaping of English to express different cultural identities,
is transcribed on page 71.
Elsewhere, Kelman gives us the music of Glaswegian Scots through a conflicted
pub-goer; one of Melville’s mysterious Gypsies obsesses over his final destination;
Patil reflects on the proliferation of ‘scribes’; Senior experiences language as legacy;
Walerian Domanski recalls a Stalinist fiction made policy; Lucio Lami remembers a
haunting cry from a war zone; Susana Medina’s sculptress discovers el placer complejo
del lenguaje; Patrice Nganang pronounces francophone literature ‘dead’; Rafik Schami
chronicles the history of Arabic script; and Christopher L. Silzer learns his true name.
This issue also commemorates fifty years of International PEN’s Writers in Prison
Committee (WiPC), which has campaigned tirelessly on behalf of endangered
minds, voices and words the world over. International PEN and the WiPC have
launched ‘Because Writers Speak Their Minds’, a yearlong campaign of anniversary
events, writing, petitions, special projects, case studies and much more (visit
www.internationalpen.org.uk for details).
Marking the occasion in these pages, we present six poems from 26:50, a creative
collaboration between the WiPC and the writers’ association 26, conceived in
conjunction with the WiPC’s own selection of fifty emblematic cases to illustrate the
sad continuum of oppression as well as happy instances of reinstatement in cultural
life.
Words, words, nothing but … words? Indeed. Nothing but words, and the whole of life
expressed though them: we hope you enjoy this issue, dedicated to the possibilities
and limitations of language, and to the men and women shut up for exploring them.
Mitchell Albert, Editor
mitchell.albert@internationalpen.org.uk
WiPC 50 Years, 50 Cases