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Z.O.Z
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Lecture by Ariel Dorfman
P.E.N. conference, 10th May 1976
Changing the world, changing PEN? The case of a generation of young Latin American writers
Some years ago, in Santiago del Estero, an impoverished province in northern Argentina - a country which, compared to others on the Latin American continent is relatively prosperous - a modern painting exhibition was opened. Perhaps those who attend it were suprised to note that every minute and a half the lights flickered, diminishing their potential and intensity. What for? The organisers had used this method to remind the public that at that exact moment - and the statistics were there to prove the truth of the assertion - an Argentinian child of less than one year of age had just died of malnutrition or through lack of medical care. The interruption of the electricity was the physical, the dramatic translation of the disappearance of a human life.
It does not seem necessary to me, nor desirable, to recur to this sort of shock-tactics, this bland intellectual terrorism, in order to reveal to you the point of view from which I am speaking, to understand where I am situated. I do not intend to ask some friendly hand to switch off the lights every minute and a half. But if we had to register in this electric fashion the death by starvation of each Latin American child, if we were to add the adults, if we were to turn the lights off for each man and woman being tortured at this instant in Brazil, Chile, in Uruguay and Haiti, if we were to commemorate the constellations of beggars, the jobless, the illiterate, the workers with their hands and souls ransacked, if from this room in Holland we had to confront and reflect that immense and almost infinite pain, then undoubtedly we would spend the thirty of forty minutes of my talk in total darkness, not once would the light be switched on.
I have begun in this way simply so that you may know that inside my head, all the length of my skin, in my heart, in my sex, there is a bulb which is always flickering, there is a world which I cannot, shall not, forget. It is good way of comprehending my reaction when I first thought of the theme which we are debating at this conference: Changing the world, Changing PEN?
The first thing that came into my head automatically, spontaneously - and these primary attitudes generally contain a substance of truth which it is not wise to ignore - was: how can this theme be presented with a question mark at the end of the phrase? Is there anybody who can propose the change of the world as something elective or optative, as a dilemma to be resolved, as a doubt which must be quieted down?
Because, let me confess that for us - and it is already significant that when I speak tend to think in first person, plural, it is already symbolic of the world to which I belong to that it is difficult to imagine myself speaking only for myself instead of inevitable including my brothers and sisters as a reference frame and loudspeaker (amplifier) - for us it cannot be a theoretical problem if an intellectual must or must not change the world. Of course, there is much to say about the forms of such an engagement. But it is almost inconceivable to consider participating in any institution, in any action, in any esthetic act, be it individual or collective, which does not at the same time bring with it - in some degree - a change in the world we live in. And it is not only the fact that we participate as men, as acting and more than often political entities, in the everyday struggle to alter an intolerable situation.
It is the fact that we collaborate with our works, as writers, as people who think and discover and are moved and wish to communicate to others their thoughts, their discoveries, their emotions. We collaborate by exploring the deep contradictions of our reality, by disclosing the difficulties and sufferings and magic of life seen from this far shore of the world, by assuming responsibility for the hope we continue to engender in the midst of despair, by opening up the roads of language and transforming it into a weapon of knowledge and contract, by giving a voice to those who have not learned how to sing.
This act of rebellion, whether in personal life, whether in literary life, has its main, but not exclusive origin, in the condition of being born and growing into Latin American citizenship, a citizenship which we share with other Latin American men and women who have never written a word.
We all suffer, and perceive together, the same continental reality: our earth has been politically and economically raped from our beginnings, first by the Spanish empire, then by the English and today by the United States and the multinational companies.
But the obstinate and insubordinate nature of so many intellectuals of our America does not only have moral roots. It can be said that it is almost unavoidable for anybody who wants to change his sorrow and eagerness into words, rhythm, intelligence, for those who believe in the dignity of language.
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Because we write among people who are illiterate or semi-illiterate in their great majority. Creations are often censored or prohibited by the local authorities, all too frequently obtuse military officers. And of course there exists the subtle stultification of selfcensorship. We can add to this situation the economic control put into practice by many publishing houses which do not edit books which could bring them problems. Our educational system is old, discriminatory, retardatory, insufficient, repressive and does not insure instruction for most of the people. We are invaded from abroad by images, models, conventions, dreams, which the mass media expand and which compete among themselves to see which is more mediocre, false and dependent: their proposition of the solution for the underdeveloped world is the middle-class home in suburbia, with two cars and rivers of Coca Cola. Many of our writers have been jailed and even murdered. Exile is a permanent pang and condition of those who would think in our continent. A desolate panorama indeed. Allow me only to refer to my own case: I have seen, on television, how soldiers on a street burnt a book I had written. (It is worthwhile to open a parenthesis here. If they acted in such a way with books, we can legitimately ask how they acted with the readers with all those who had dared to read and assimilate books which were to be forbidden. And more than that: how have they acted with all those who have gone beyond reading, with those who are not consumers of beauty and enlightment, with those who intend to become creators themselves, producers of culture? Or to put it into other words: if those who govern do that to the written word, imagine how they shall burn the live word, our people, the peasants, workers, students, imagine how they are treating the vital, incarnated word of our land?)
So nobody should be astonished that the history of Latin America has been built with the active and exemplary participation of the intellectuals in all the liberating epics, in all the great emancipatory movements. These ethical attitudes surge from what we should call the political context, the urgent human panorama, of our continent: who dares to think in Latin America feels required to act upon that which he understands: he who perceives an aching world is frequently compelled - even if he knows that to reflect reality is already a form of combat, a way of voicing that which has been suffocated and left unsaid - to change that world and that ache; he who is dedicated to beauty and truth cannot accept that his works should circulate only among small minorities due to extra-literary reasons.
But our indocility, our attitude towards change, is not only the consequence of inhabitating such a social and economical jungle. The Latin American writer's insubordination also has cultural motives, and they are very important indeed. Our continent's subjection in the economic, political, military and technological terrains is evident. That dependence also exists - although its nature is of another order - in the ideological and cultural area. Years after our struggle for emancipation from Spain, since we ceased to be colonies in the early nineteenth century, we have continued to import from abroad the latest literary fashions and fads, we have taken as guides and examples the cultural forms which are dominant in the Western World. This importation does not always have paralysing effects upon us. We have learnt and received from outside our continent fertile seeds and visions. Cultural historians even think that our originality stems from the mixing of races and horizons that converge from within and without. But the importation of models can also have the opposite effect, giving as a result a series of servile imitations, second rate copies of that which Europeans or North Americans have done already in a perfect way. And too often, even when our production is different, it has been judged according to literary canons and values which exist in the dominant societies. Naturally this problem - that of sources and influences, that or originality in the face of tradition - is central in the evolution of each creator of no matter which nationality. But a Latin American's situation is twice as complex because that uncertainty, that manoevre in search of his own insufficiently defined identity, is forever with him. It is the main factor that he must answer every day in his art.
This special Latin American crossroads means that our thinkers, novelists, poets, playwrights, must confront their reality, must express it, with instruments partly forged from outside, and that never correspond totally to his everyday surroundings. Although our cultural history is also the slow creation of our own tradition and vision, which in the last thirty years has known a veritable coming of age, a real flourishing of our capacity to hold our own mirrors, Latin America continues to be a continent which has not been fully named yet. Each day, upon day, upon awakening, we must ask ourselves questions about the strange and yet familiar vocabulary with which we approach the wording of reality. The injustice of the world we inhabitate is clear; its expression is uncertain, ambiguous, of a trembling anguished violence. In order to transmit our face we must wear and tear thousands of masks. Therefore, in such a situation, to dare to think by oneself, to assert one's own perspective, is already a form of insurrection.
The authentic literature of our continent has been in general a declaration of war against the official, falsified, versions of reality. Many of our great works of art have been outposts of our Latin American conciencia (in Spanish conciencia means conscience as well as consciousness), an inner and communitary earth which we have had to liberate from the forces of ignorance, stupidity, intolerance, which we have had to dispute with the prevalent public positions about the world and man in our society. With which, of course, we do not proclaim that those who rebel using their literary works must always coincide with those who simultaneously struggle politically in their personal lives. At times the combatant of literature and the battlers for justice, liberty, true democracty, socialism, are the same person. On other occasions, it is not so, and polemics and controversies rage wildly. It is inevitable that this sort of discussion should be the fundamental one in a continent so tragically pressed with the need to survive, to
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finish with misery and oppression. The terms in which a creator can participate pertinently in the struggle for national liberation are not easy to define, especially inasmuch as we categorically reject any possibility of solving the problem through administrative or supra-cultural methods, believing in a responsible and multifacetic integration of the artist in all the levels of the life and needs of his people.
This attitude, which emphasises above all the social responsibility of the writer, and which has marked almost all the creators of the emerging continents and especially those of us who are under 40 - allow us to glimpse, our eventual contribution to the second term in debate. Changing the world, yes, certainly. We cannot conceive of life without such an imperative. Well, but what about PEN? Should it be changed too? Can it participate by our side in our struggles for liberty and justice in the Third World without destroying its own organisation?
Before we go on, a clarification seems in order. There appear to be two different arguments for justifying an alteration of PEN. One of them suggests that, in view of the fact that the world has changed, PEN must also do so, adapting itself to a new panorama. In other words, what would be needed is a moderisation of PEN, bringing it up-to-date. The other argument is different: changing PEN is indispensable, because the world - as it is now constructed - is unjust, cruel and oppressive to a degree where it endangers those values - tolerance, freedom of expression, creativety, peace, dialogue among men of letters - which PEN has vouched to defend. This argument sustains that the world must be, indeed shall be, changed and that PEN cannot survive significantly if it does not actively commit itself to the transformation of our human scenery.
It is this second argument which interests me. However, I would like to confess that at this point I begin to feel real shyness. I never belonged to the Chilean PEN-Centre, although diverse great literary figures were indeed members in our country and in other Latin American republics. Nevertheless, perhaps the value of my presence resides precisely in profiting from this situation, inasmuch as I may transmit to you - with loyalty and frankness - the reasons why we were not especially interested in the PEN-Club, the reasons why a whole generation of young Chilean and Latin American authors found the PEN-Club although admirable as a meetingplace for writers and the defense of criticism, to be organisation in general far from our most immediate and urgent everyday requirements, and also why we found the institutions as such vaguely suspicious.
The progressive irruption on the world scene of the poor and marginal countries has meant a challenge which is not only economic but also moral and cultural, probing the conscience, until yesterday relatively intact, of vast sectors of the contemporary capitalist cosmos, of the very world responsible for our backward and exploited condition. Any change in PEN must take this new state of things into account. Perhaps our experience can help PEN to face that accounting.
What were the principal reasons for that distance and lack of confidence?
In the first place, the proclaimed a-political character of PEN. It is not that we did not or don't understand that this sort of neutrality seems essential to any institution which wants to remain united and functional in a world so full of antagonism and splits. You must simply try and put yourself in our place. Since the day we are taught to write our first words, afterwards when we stand up to read a poem, even since we have worked in the theatre, in stories, in essays, the dominant political and economic groups of our society have tried to inject into us the idea that the writer must not defile his sacred spirit by engaging in the struggles to change his circumstances. What they do to us is not brainwashing. It should be called braindirtying or brainsoiling. They tell us that we shall be better artists if we stay out of politics. And we are powerfully stimulated to continue seeing things in this manner. If we behave, our books will be published. We shall have scholarships, jobs, we shall travel abundantly.
In Latin America we have always had to contest the notion of art's immaculate purity, because behind that notion all to often have we seen the writer manipulated, trying to separate him from his people.
With which I do not want to declare that it is necessary or sufficient that a literary work be political for it to be good. Some of the best books have been written by people whose political ideas fill me with repulsion. And others, whom I admire politically, have no literary talent whatsoever, no matter how well intentioned, art loses its character when it becomes mere pedagogy. I simply want to retain the fact that when PEN defines itself as beyond or above politics, many of us, submerged in the quest for cultural liberation for and with the people, judged this conduct as reinforcing the dominant criteria about the role of a writer in an underdeveloped society, as another way of neutralising or subduing our voice.
Secondly, PEN International is born fundamentally as a need of Europe and the States, in the twenties. I have already mentioned that much of our literature and our life has been harvested in opposition to what may be called Western Civilisation - no matter how fertile the relations and roots have been. Of course, although we could have felt identified with the words of the Charter which refer to the need to interchange literatures and experiences irrespective of religion, race or nationality, it is equally evident to us - and I remind you that so far we have inhabited the shores of history, not to speak of its basements and sewers - that eurocentrism has been an ideological tendency imposed from abroad which can create in our intellectuals an excessive subjugation to outside models or orientations. A dialogue with other nations can only be fruitful if our own points of view have advanced sufficiently. Only if we are aware of the deep differences can we understand the even deeper brotherhood. To put it in other words: although encountering our colleagues from other countries and walking and talking together to- | |
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wards one peaceful humanity was an imperative which we tried not to forget and which we shared with the Club, we were, subconsciously I suppose, afraid that behind PEN's internationalism there might be hidden an integration into an already constituted supranational cultural hierarchy, anchored in the old continent, in which our presence, more than a modification or requestioning of that order, would mean an acceptance of structures and myths which pre-existed.
In the third place, although the themes of a mulilated press, the opposition to censureship, the jailing of writers, were essential to us, and especially so because we suffer from these evils constantly, we had the blurred impression that PEN International's interest in these problems was developed primarily in the context of the Cold War confrontation and with only a marginal preoccupation with what was happening in our submerged and forgotten hinterland. We felt that PEN would probably not understand the inevitable difficulties of deep cultural change which accompanies any revolutionary process, any real structural modification of one of our countries' economy. Let me remind you that, during the sixties, our touchstone and fundamental passion was the Cuban Revolution, where for the first time in history a piece of Latin American territory was being liberated and the bases for social, economical and intellectual independence were being laid.
Last of all, the same long years of existence that are the pride of PEN for us denoted another meaning: it was obvious that many of those who were interested in PEN were extraordinary creators, but they were also - especially in Latin America - people of a certain age and disposition, belonging to older generations, with a life-style which we did not feel inclined to imitate. Upon PEN descended the undefined sin of cocktail parties and chitchat, of the writer navigating like a small Pharaoh, deified, in the midst of the literary salons, of the gossip world of editors eager to sell a lot of books. We had the impression - I believe it was erronous - that PEN was of restricted or limited membership, precisely the worst, and not the best, sense of the world club.
Perhaps this X-ray of what passed and probably continues to pass through the heads of many Latin American and Third World creators can help to widen the horizon of our questions: what possibilities exist of dissolving this distance, of finding a common ground of interests between this sort of writers and the PEN club? Is what I have described a series of prejudices and misunderstandings or have I displayed deep structural contradictions, so profound that they cannot be meaningfully overcome?
Of course I do not know the answer to these interrogations. A certain image of PEN was generated in wide intellectual circles in our countries. We have learnt to distrust these images, because they seem distorted and do not always correspond to reality, and naturally enough just as the world changes so do we, maturing into adulthood, inderstanding better the complexities of the human situation past and present, putting aside a certain impassioned and intolerant lack of patience. And of course, PEN itself may also change. Nor is PEN a cohensive entity, but has minorities and majorities within its borders.
FOTO: PETER CAMPING.
However, in order to not continue in a discussion on generalities, I prefer putting forward a case which can help us to measure PEN today, that will put PEN in front of its proclaimed objectives, its historical responsibility, which will put it in face of the limits and the perspectives of eventual change. The case is that of Chile. And I am not referring to it because it is my country, but because I believe that it can be a lamp and guide in this kind of debate, due to the fact that our people have lived in the last six years two radically opposite experiences, two models of society and therefore of culture which represent two antagonistic extremes of the human condition, we have lived two situations which can be esteemed proto-typical or at least symbolic of the possibilities - positive or negative - open to an underdeveloped country. One of these possibilities is that of liberation: the other is that of fascism. In the invisible war that the dispossessed peoples of our planet suffer today, Chile is a good yardstick. Although I do not want to deny other forms of gauging PEN, I firmly believe that its reaction towards the frontier case of Chile is one of the best ways of sizing up its present day evolution, the future towards which it flows, the image which it engenders at this moment.
First let us take our experience between 1970 and 1973 under the constitutional government of Salvador Allende. I shall not refer to the vast process of economic and social liberation which we put into motion. I only wish to call your attention to the very reduced field of literature.
Before anything else, tolerance, freedom to criticise, freedom of press. Never was anybody jailed because of his ideas during the Popular Unity regime, never was a newspaper or magazine censured, never was a book forbidden. I would even say that we were excessively liberal in this field, not having repressed the illegal and fascistic insinuations of groups who called for the overthrowing of the government and who prepared the climate for the blootbath which we have been witnessing for the last two and a half years.
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But the Popular Unity government was not only this, was not only tolerance. It was also construction. A building with many defects, and there was practically no cultural policy on the part of the government. And yet, we had some spectacular successes.
When we nationalised the largest publishing house in the country, Quimantú, which has been bankrupt, we unleashed a real revolution in the book industry, proceeding to edit 12 million copies in 22 months, and without interfering with private publishing houses which also produced more volumes than before. We put into practise that which the PEN Charter states as an objective, but which can only be really done in countries with a government that cares: spreading among our people the works of other nations. In extremely cheap pocket editions, sold on the newsstand, in editions between 80 and 150 thousand, we published the literature of all humanity. At the same, this meant an astonishing stimulant to our own writers, who had to ask themselves if the sort of work they were producing could be published in those editions, could reach so many people. To make sure that production for large audiences did not become the only criterion, we opened a collection for more difficult, intimate, complex works by Chilean authors of all tendencies and styles. Along with this some libraries were opened in the country-side, where the peasants had never before seen a book except through the window of their master's faraway mansion. Some popular reader's clubs were also created in the neighbourhoods and trade-unions, although in a far lesser number than necessary.
On the other hand, when a whole nation is on the march, when a man feels that he has his own destiny in his hands and that it is no mere rhethoric to assert our capacity for transformation, when we break the strangleholds of misery and despair, when thousands of new experiences not only happen continually but are deemed valuable and expressable, when these things explode, than an enormous spiritual energy is generated. Because to change the world, one must acknowledge it, interrogate it, disinter it. It is necessary to aks the right questions, to doubt, to study, to find the exact words for the newest emotions. It becomes pressing to find a communal language to substitute the false pattern of speech which men use everyday but which do not really join them together. The need to dominate and well-employ the language which has been denied to the people during centuries is urgent: language is indispensable in order to unite, to educate, to experiment, to convince those who do not understand, to isolate and answer those who are the enemies of the people.
This does not mean that the literary production during the Popular Unity government was particularly satisfying. There were important pieces written, and there were mediocre ones. There were those which referred to the immediate experience we were living and those which spoke of other problems. But there is no doubt that when you are living a day-to-day emotional earthquake, when your whole way of life and organisation is being tested and revealed, the results in art are generally promising.
Of course, writers had other things to do, besides their individual work. There was the possibility of writing for television and radio, thereby changing the mass media through our participation. There was the film industry, which in reality only gave birth to masterworks after the coup d'état, and outside Chile. There was the requirement to gather the people's experiences, to act as transmitters of those new voices, of groups who were seeing the public light for the first time. A cultural magazine was founded, for the first time in Chile reaching five thousand copies. Literary workshops - not many - were opened in the trade-unions and in the slum areas. Traditional theatre was taken to these places, and new collective plays were created with the workers and slumdwellers which referred to their problems and the ways in which they could be overcome.
In other words, we were given the opportunity - which we only used halfway - to offer our talents and our lives to others. It is certainly the best gift that a community can bestow upon its intellectuals.
If I have not been brief enough about this short cultural experience it is because it is not really well known at all. On the other hand, it is less difficult to speak about the destruction that fascism has brought with it, because this is very well known indeed. That people who so generously opened itself and changed our heads and hearts and gave us another lung with which to write with, that people was the dictatorship's first victim.
And our instruments of expression were squashed. They bombarded the radios, closed down the left-wing newspapers, whitwashed the paintings on the walls, burnt the books. Cultural figures were assassinated, hundreds of others jailed, thousands went into exile. The universities were intervened by colonels and admirals, the word ‘companero’ was prohibited, the names which the slumdwellers had themselves put to their neighbourhoods were changed, children's textbooks were censured. Those who were thrown out of their jobs were numberless and among them, the men of letters, the educators, the musicians, the painters. Let us simply take the case of Quimantú, the state editing house which we mentioned some moments ago, the main promoter of the book-revolution in Chile. On September 11th, 1973, 1530 workers laboured there. Towards the end of that month, the enterprise, already under military intervention, now had 960. By November, the number was 800. In March, 1974, 450 manual and intellectual workers remained. Naturally production dropped catastrophically. The result is that in March 1976, the publishing house is being auctioned off to see if some private group is ready to take control.
This is, in synthesis, the Chilian case. As you can see, the principles and values which are most dear to PEN were given a real materialisation under the Popular Unity Government. During the present regime, the soldiers in power not only have dedicated their efforts to the destruction of our accomplishments, but have also systematically violated all the human rights and practically created a case of cultural genocide.
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Can PEN International be indifferent to these phenomena? Can neutrality be observed in the face of such events?
Chile is a sort of test for PEN. Therefore, when in November 1975 the Chilean is readmitted to PEN International, this action - whether we like it or not - appears in the eyes of the world and especially to the stupified eyes of the Chilean people, as a victory of the Pinochet government. The PEN Centre which once housed Neruda is defended by Lucia Gevert, a fascist journalist who has stood by and smiled while her collegues have been murdered and imprisoned. What do you think the reaction of the writers of the Third World can be? And the thousands of Chilean intellectuals who remain in the country and resist the dictatorship at the cost of their lives, how do you think they feel? Do you believe they want to join the Chilean PEN Club? Do you believe that they are interested in dialoguing with their fellow writers as if nothing had happened?
On the other hand, when the Dutch PEN Emergency Fund helps us to assist some writers who are still in Chile and would rather not emigrate, it is quite clear that we - and many like us in other parts of the world - have the conviction that we have many struggles in common, many battles to win and learn together, much active peace to be edified and discussed.
I would like to tell you that exile and the destruction of Chilean democracy has made me mature - and now I am really only speaking for myself, though I would hope that for others as well - and re-evaluate many of the objectives that PEN has proposed during its existence. The words tolerance, liberty of criticism, liberty of press, dialogue with other writers although we do not agree with everything, all these words have taken on an even larger significance than before. The catastrophe we have undergone has opened us to the points of view of others, it has taught us to find that which joins rather than that which separates. We have been learning that the world is not Chile and that there is an intellectual dimension to each local situation.
But we have also reasserted and reaffirmed that there is a limit to that learning, to that dialogue, to that opening. For us, that limit, the dividing line, is fascism. We separate the world into those who fight for a mankind where fascism cannot develop and those to whom the problem is indifferent. For us this division is not arbitrary: what is being decided is our survival as a people, as a nation, as a continent, as a form of humanity or inhumanity.
Perhaps this narration of our experience can help to show some of the ways and directions in which PEN can change in a world which, as it is now engineered, is intolerable for the human conscience. There are epochs in man's progress when the pulse of history accelerates. The PEN-Club has accumulated during years a moral reservoir, a fame for not intervening in political matters, a preoccupation with the liberty of the spirit. In this invisable war which is being waged against us and our children, is it possible for PEN to abstain? Or does PEN feel the irrepressible need to put its influence on one side of the balance, to practise a neutrality which must be active and combattant, a neutrality which does not run away from conflicts but which goes out to solve them, a neutrality which is a passion and not an excuse. Only in this way can PEN continue to be a place of encounter where different writers meet to join their efforts and learn from each other and change each other, rather than a meeting of waters which mix superficially and then go on their separate ways with the same colours as before.
At any rate, I would like to end this talk with some concrete suggestions as to ways in which PEN International can modify its attitude towards situations in the underdeveloped countries. I suppose that none of these actions means a tremendous alteration of its Charter or its Principles, but it does mean publicly choosing a certain concept of humanity, of the future, a certain new perspective for dialogue.
PEN can call for the creation of a charter of human cultural rights, and can protest and publicise the cases of widespread cultural genocide which especially affict our nations. PEN can suspend those national centres which applaud the fascist and repressive measures against literature and other arts. PEN can continue seeking the liberty of artists who are in prison for their beliefs and their writers, launching a specific worldwide campaign for writers in the Third World in this situation, PEN can send investigating missions to those countries, thereby helping intellectuals who are to exercise their liberty to criticise. Each centre in the developed world can try and adopt writers who remain inside our enslaved frontiers, each centre can give scholarships to those who are persecuted but are not ready to remain silent. PEN can help to diffuse the creations of those who have been marginal and outside the Mainstream, establishing an international fund for the translation of unknown but valuable authors of the Third World who may have no immediate commercial interest.
I believe that this sort of change in emphasis of PEN, of its priorities, without forgetting its original objectives, would have as a result not only that of relating the institution to some of mankind's most urgent problems, but would also open it to many writers from the Third World.
These writers have much to give to their colleagues, once they feel that they are accepted for what they are and what they are trying to do. Allow me to be a bit more poetical and emotional in this, the last part, of my talk, because we have contributions to give to you, just as you have things to give to us.
Because we have lived the deepest of humiliations, and yet we walk erect. Because we have been smashed with thousands of mass media messages which degrade us and teach us to compete and hate each other, and look at us, we are solidarious, we share between the many the little we have, and our hands are not afraid of inventing new colours. Because violence has been cast upon us, and in spite of torture, jail, uprooting, massacres, censure, police control of our education, we are like men and women in our concentration camps: we have not lost our faith in one another nor in the dignity that art confers, we continue to rehearse
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projects of humanity every day. Because we are as deafmutes whose vocal cords have been slit and yet we sing. Because we have cemetaries overflowing with dead bodies that refuse to accept the order to keep silent and exalt the living to rebellion.
Because if inside each of us every minute and a half that inarticulate light flickers reminding us of a child's starvation, of a man without a job, of a woman who's going to have a baby by her torturer who has raped her, at the same time inside each of us a light flames up, a horizon of lights fills us and we feel able to transform darkness into fire.
Our art and our literature has been produced in the mouth itself of death, and we have learned there and communicated there the way in which pain is converted into knowlegde.
We have been told to be quiet, and yet we fight for the word, and more than the word, the tongue, the teeth, the mouth, and we shall not be quiet.
I believe you will agree with me when I say that what we offer you is not an unsubstantial gift. Thank you.
FOTO'S: PETER CAMPING
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