pentransmissions
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Like every other country, this one is known for its beautiful sights. With its bombed buildings, destroyed museums, imprisoned artists, mass graves and nonstop shelling, it looks particularly heavenly.
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‘Often, we the natives of the Balkans or the Middle East, with our extraordinarily polyphonic histories and hurts, are narrated by others – usually others from the dominant colonising cultures.’
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‘I think that the creation of an equal, just society is impossible under capitalism, which is why we need to learn from the mistakes of the past and imagine other ways of living. I think understanding caste, class, race inequalities is fundamental to any understanding of women’s struggle.’
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In Zimbabwe, in this patriarchal society, women are still equated to children. The sacredness of rape culture is a notion that needs to be shattered. We need to stop beating about the bush and labelling it a female problem.
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What I can disobey now, what we all disobey in our tragic and inconsistent and collective logic, is patriarchy’s pact of silence. We can also disobey the rush of social media, which demands that we act quickly and sometimes in ways that are neglectful of ourselves and others.
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The writers in this issue aim to amplify the voices of those not heard within wider society. They call out power structures, whether they be sexist, racist, imperialist or – all of those things
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What would happen if, in a novel, a woman became a subject instead of a sexual object? What would happen if she was given the freedom to act without explanation, accorded the independence and power of action reserved for men for so long?
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I thought about conversations around white feminism, its myopia and elitism, about the weaponisation of white women’s tears, eliciting sympathy and avoiding accountability. I thought about May’s legacy.
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Over time, I’ve grown resentful of metaphors tying fascism to spectres. The ghosts of fascism. Il fantasma del fascismo. I hate the immateriality and elegance ghosts suggest, the haunted house charm.
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I see the blindness around me growing again, I notice how women’s rights are being taken away, how Ustasha and Chetnik crimes from WWII are being relativized, how history is distorted in the name of religion and patriotism.
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Do you ever feel that the things you used to believe in are disintegrating before your very eyes? That belief systems turn out to be fake, or flawed? Do you ever feel as if you are living in a world where people put blind faith into ideas that are bound to disappoint them?
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‘Charismatic and powerful men, at least in our societies, see their role as looking after their own interests rather than serving others. That’s how it is, and more and more so as neoliberalism takes hold of our governments.’
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In February, my Irish passport finally arrived. I opened it, read my name and beneath it, my nationality, or rather náisiúntacht. I was an Irish citizen now. I sat down on the stairs and cried.
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I became a mother when I was eighteen years old, and now I am twenty-one. I still feel like a child, one trapped in a strange and contradictory existence. I who can barely take care of myself – how could I have given birth to another life?
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I don’t want anyone to think that I’m an artist one day and an activist the next. When I get politically involved, I do so as an artist. That is important to me.
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It has become the motto of our age to say, ‘Oh I hate politics’ – without realising that that is the most political statement you can come up with.
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As the UK makes its way through the interminable Brexit process, it’s time for an issue on the radical political and personal changes that we see going on around us, and within us.
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I think fiction starts with something really unusual. We keep trying to be normal, day after day, but normality is a fiction. It is a space between you and me, but there is nobody who occupies that space.
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Much of the world around us wants to pretend that it is not pulsing with carnality. Outside of sanctioned times and spaces, we are asked to pretend this energy doesn’t exist. In this way, we are being asked to stem the natural flow of dialogue with ourselves, isolating a central aspect of our being.
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Nowhere in fiction does the found family, or family of choice, exist in such abundance as it does in superhero narratives.
PEN Transmissions 