[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index ][Thread Index ]

They will not be silenced -- San S



They will not be silenced 

(excerpts)

The Independent
in cooperation with The Yomiuri Shimbun
Friday 15, 1998

As Salman Rushdie enters the tenth year of the fatwa against him, what of
the hundreds of other writers around the world who are living in danger or
forced into exile, far from the international spotlight?  Paul Vallely reports.

Many writers are silenced by the ultimate sanction. During the years of the
Rushdie fatwa perhaps the most famous author to die was killed by a
government.  The potency of the stance of Ken Saro-Wiwa, writer of Nigeria's
most popular soap, and defender of the rights of the Ogoni people against
the uncontrolled despoliation of their land by transnational oil extractors
like Shell, is such that even after his execution in 1995 the Nigerian
military regime continues to forbid anyone in his birthland to mention his
name in public.

Saro-Wiwa's hanging had a traumatic effect on Pen, which was founded in 1921
as an authors' club but which in 1960 set up a Writers in Prison committee
to speak up for authors silenced in their own countries.  "We pulled out all
the stops and we still failed.  It brought home our powerlessness," says one
of Pen's officials, Siobhan Dowd.  "It also underlined that multinationals
re the new power in the post-Cold War world and that those corporations and
businesses must be persuaded to play a larger part in promoting democratic
reforms."

Yet, even among those oppressors who wish to still the pens of those who
seek to record their wrongdoing, execution or assassination is not the first
option. The world's jails are full of those who have used their position as
writers to speak out against intolerance and injustice.

Fragments
We cannot hold, linger
Parings of intuition
Footsteps
passing and repassing the door of recognition.

The words are those of another Nigerian, Wole Soyinka, the first black
African to win a Nobel Prize for literature.  For 30 years he has teased,
satirised and confronted various military regimes in his native land.  Early
on he was jailed for two years.  Like so many writers before and after him
he made use of what another Nobel laureate, the poet Joseph Brodsky, who
served his time in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, called "a shortage of
space made up for by the surplus of time" to produce something creative from
his prison experiences.  Even so, it was not an experience he relished
repeating and he slipped across the border into exile via Benin when his
passport was confiscated by the current regime which has arraigned him, in
absentia, for treason.

Long-term imprisonment is the hallmark of countries where the political
process has stagnated: China (which holds more writers in prison than any
other country), Burma, South Korea, Syria and Vietnam all specialise in
jailing writers.  Sometimes they make use of laws which on the surface sound
reasonable enough.  "Betraying state secrets" was the charge laid against
Alexander Nitikin, who has recently become Russia's first post-Soviet
political prisoner.  A former senior inspector at Soviet Inspectorate for
Nuclear Installations, Nitikin was arrested in 1996 after contributing a
chapter to a book produced by a group of Norwegian environmentalists.  He
was charged with passing on secrets? even though all the information it
contained came, according to Amnesty International, from material previously
published in Russian newspapers.  Nitikin was detained for 10 months in a
secret police prison without trial before being charged with offences for
which the penalty could be 15 years in a penal colony, or death.

But where reasonable laws cannot be made to fit, repressive governments have
no compunction about creating catch-all legislation to silence opposition.
The military regime in Burma has a law which even prohibits "descriptions
that, though factually correct, are unsuitable because of the time or
circumstance of their writing" Burma's most popular woman writer, San San
Nue, a novelist and short-story writer, is currently jailed for 10 years for
distributing "false news that could jeopardise the security of the state"
and giving "one-sided opposite views" in interviews with foreign
journalists.  She also made the mistake of contacting the UN Human Rights
Rapporteur on Burma.  It is her second time inside: during the first she was
kept for 10 months in solitary confinement with no outside contact at all in
a cell 9 ft long by 7 ft wide in Rangoon's notorious Insein Prison.  Today,
other writers are forbidden to refer to her works or even to mention her name.

You took away all the oceans and all the room
You gave me my shoe-size with bars around it
Where did it get you?  Nowhere.
You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.

So wrote Osip Mandelstam, the prisoner poet who served time in Stalin's
Russia, and died en route to a Siberian prison camp....


http://www2.gol.com/users/brelief/Index.htm