Iranian cartoonist and editor Nikahang Kowsar

Nikahang Kowsar is an Iranian journalist and cartoonist who was forced to flee his country in 2003 for trying to sketch too realistic a portrait of the society fashioned by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Now living in Canada, Nikahang launched Khodnevis.org, a collective news website, in December 2009 in order to continue the fight for freely reported news and information and “to give a voice to the voiceless.” He regards exile as a way to independence and believes that a free and critical press is the best way to “keep [politicians] humble.”

This interview first appeared in Reporters Without Borders.

Chinese Writer Yu Kwang-chung. Photo: Clare Gates

I met Yu Kwang-chung (余光中), one of the Chinese-speaking world’s best-known and best-loved poets, authors and translators, near Mount Chai in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, not far from a palm tree-lined seashore. The serene gentleman, who sported leather shoes, slacks, and a long-sleeved dress shirt despite the scorching heat, welcomed me into his office, which was overflowing with Chinese and English books. We were at Sun Yat-Sen University where the poet, now Professor Emeritus, was once Dean of the College of the Liberal Arts. Yu was born in Nanjing, China, in 1928, but he and his family fled to Taiwan via Hong Kong in 1950 after the Kuomintang, Taiwan’s oldest and current ruling party, was defeated during the Chinese Civil War. His poetry critiques Communist China’s destruction of free speech and culture but also the Kuomintang’s “White Terror,” Taiwan’s 38-year period of martial law (1949-1987).

Yu is currently the author of 50 books, 18 in verse, the rest in criticism, prose, and translation. He has earned praise for his versatile, lyrical essays, and The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature has called him “one of the most prolific and acclaimed writers in Taiwan.” Yu has also received honorary doctorates and won half a dozen major literary awards in Taiwan and China including the National Literary Award in Poetry and the Wu San-lian Literary Award in Prose.

Yu, who has traveled widely, has taught in Hong Kong, studied in the United States where he was a Fulbright visiting professor twice, and frequently visits China. While his past work is nostalgic for mainland China, Yu has chosen to make his permanent home in voluntary exile in Taiwan.

In this interview Yu Kwang-chung talks about the tradition of Chinese literature, immortality, the joys and complications of sourcing multiple languages, and the contradiction of being known as a “patriotic” poet in China.

In your essay “Translation and Creative Writing” you said that you wanted to avoid “translationese,” or sounding translated. What else makes a successful translation in your opinion?

In that case, a good translator must have full mastery of the target language and must have full understanding of the source language. So my work in translation is more from English into Chinese than vice versa because, of course, I have a better mastery of Chinese.

What themes do you consider particularly Chinese in The Night Watchman? I know that one of the reasons your poems are famous is because they have a wistfulness for mainland China, particularly “Nostalgia.” Do you consider nostalgia a particularly Chinese theme?

The theme of nostalgia, like the more general theme of diaspora, has come down a long way in literary history. It’s in the human nature to miss one’s home, even only two hundred miles away. Even our students here on campus miss their homes in the north of the island. Not to mention that China is such a big country, and there have been so many wars. Officials were often demoted and put in exile and things like that. There are many occasions for one to miss home. I think that’s universal. You must be acquainted with Robert Browning’s poem “Home Thoughts From Abroad”: “Oh to be in England / now that April’s there.” This is of course sometimes not the case with the young romantics. For instance, Shelley and Byron, they hated their home! They were rebels! They felt quite at home in Europe rather than back in England. But as a rule this theme of nostalgia is quite universal.

Many of your poems address the themes of time and immortality. What do you think is the relationship between the poet and immortality? On one hand, you say in the forward to The Night Watchman that “To remain a poet is to remain young, which gives one the illusion of immortality.” But then in “Green Bristlegrass” you write: “None ends up taller than the bristle grass unless his name soars to the stars.”

Of course our physical lives are quite limited. Religion is helpful to let one imagine that there is a future life after this corporeal existence. But literature as well as the arts can give us some consolation that we may be immortal because our works will survive us. This is evident in Shakespeare’s sonnets. One naturally tends to think that his works are immortal, eternal. But one cannot be sure. You see, so many artists and poets have died young. Van Gogh wasn’t so sure of himself. When he died, he was thirty-seven and he had only sold one piece of his oil paintings. And so the same happened with Raphael, Mozart, and so many of them. But one of our major poets in classic China, Du Fu, was quite sure of himself. He has two lines: writing is for eternity. One knows it oneself in the few inches of the heart. That is intuition. But one can be mistakenly self-sure in such matters. Thousands of artists struggled in Paris, and even do now. Only a few of them became Picasso and Matisse.

“The White Jade Bitter Gourd” and “The Emerald White Cabbage” are examples of your ekphrastic poetry. What is the purpose of your poetry in this genre?

This is quite an important genre in Chinese classical poetry. A poem is descriptive, expressive of artifacts like those in the Palace Museum, or of natural things like butterflies, swans, or trees—that is, things that are not human. Behind the description of things, your understanding of the thing can be something more than merely physical; often such poems involve metaphor. Robert Frost says, “A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” We begin such descriptive poems in delight. I can spend a few lines on how beautiful, how attractive a thing is, and then come to something like an implied conclusion. I may compare the object to something else, something spiritual, and thus end in wisdom as Robert Frost says.

In your ekphrastic poem “the Sunflowers” you mix English and Chinese together. Why?

That isn’t my usual practice, but I think it is eligible in such a case because I am making use of montage. And I imagine there is actually an auctioneer: “Going, going gone.” I can’t translate it into Chinese—it would sound foolish. It must be in such words: going, going, gone. And so while I was in the United Kingdom, I often read my works to an audience. I included this one in my selections many times, and the response was quite immediate and very warm. The scene in this poem is international. It is not national.

You said in New Chinese Poetry in 1960: “The problem still remains to be solved whether traditional Chinese poetry or Western poetry should be the guiding influence [for new Chinese poetry], or whether they should be harmonized into dual inspiration.” How do you think things have turned out today? Do you think this problem still remains?

Now for poets like myself, English literature is a lifelong study. English literature has exerted a very great influence on my writings. At the same time, I am very much at home in Chinese, mostly classical Chinese. But I would think that I’ve been under the influence of three traditions: one is the tradition of classic Chinese language as well as the Chinese literary canon. The second is English and American literature. The third, the least influential, is the New Tradition of Chinese literature, beginning from the May 4^th Movement, almost a hundred years ago.

Yu Kwang-chung. Photo: Clare Gates

One of your criticisms of ancient Chinese poetry is that it has “a narrow thematic scope” and should look to Western poetry to expand its horizons. How have you taken your own advice?

Well, the attitudes towards life are quite different. In Chinese literature we are not obsessed with the idea of sin like Christian writers. Also, our sense of immortality is different from the Christian sense in that our immortality involves the succession of the second generation from the first, the grandchildren from the children and so on. The Christian sense of immortality is a relationship between oneself and God, but our sense of immortality is more collective in the passage from generation to generation.

How do you see poetry’s, and the poet’s, role in political resistance? Does society still need a poet who will serve as a cultural guardian, or protector of arts?

In my poem, “The Night Watchman,” which I wrote during the Cultural Revolution, I compare poetry to my last resource. Of course, poetry can be used for many purposes, one of which is as a weapon. Since a writer is aspiring for immortality, poetry can also be a defense against mortality. The communists, especially during the Cultural Revolution, were quite destructive of traditional Chinese culture. As a defender of such, I wield my weapon against them. For many years I was attacked by the leftists as anti-revolutionary or something like that, but in recent years, the tables have turned. The press there, the media in mainland China, has been calling me a patriotic poet for quite a few years. This is quite ironic. Of course, Chinese communism has changed a lot. Not to our expectations, but it isn’t so harsh on the intellectuals anymore.

So you don’t think that China oppresses intellectuals so much anymore, but what about those who are in prison?

If you don’t speak out in the newspaper or over the T.V., the Party can be more tolerant. I know the Chinese are quite critical of the party in private conversations, but during the Cultural Revolution even such was impossible.

I’ve noticed that 19 of your 68 poems in The Night Watchman mention wings or birds. Do these poems, such as “There was a Dead Bird” and “All that Have Wings,” address the freedom of artistic expression?

“All that Have Wings” was a direct response to the Cultural Revolution. The other one was against the KMT. Originally the second one was written in defense of Li Ao, but later I came to dislike him so much that I usually don’t tell others what the original meaning is about!

In “Music Percussive” you strongly lament both your separation from China and your quarrels with the country, which has been “deserted, betrayed, insulted, raped again and again.” What was the climate in which you wrote this poem?

At that time, the name China was actually directed at Taiwan. A very influential magazine was closed under the pressure of Kuomintang. I was against Kuomintang, but my father was a Kuomintang member, so my family background is KMT. In a broader sense, I disliked Kuomintang as I disliked my father. But then, compared to the Communist Party, I would say Kuomintang was much more lenient. As Hu Shi, the May 4^th Movement leader once said, “In China, especially during the Cultural Revolution, one not only didn’t have the freedom to speak up, one also didn’t have the freedom to keep silent.” You had to keep praising Mao Zedong and the party.

You have described yourself as walking a tightrope, striking a balance between the Western prodigal son and the Eastern filial son. Is this what you see as the future of Taiwanese poetry?

The situation now is quite complicated. As far as language is concerned, a writer like myself is under three pressures: One is the global onslaught of English becoming the language of the global village, while behind me is the local language and dialect. And then my own upbringing, my own education, is in the vernacular Chinese language now spoken by millions of Chinese people. In Taiwan if you can’t or if you don’t speak the Taiwanese dialect, you will be represented as though you don’t love this island. But actually the so-called “Taiwanese” dialect is a derivative handed down by the early immigrants from southern Fujian Province just across the Taiwan Strait.

Do you consider yourself Chinese or Taiwanese?

At present, 70% of the young people here, the college students, consider themselves Taiwanese, and at the most, only 30% consider themselves Chinese.

So what about you?

My answer is always: This is beyond question. You can consider the situation as a system of smaller and bigger rings, like a tree trunk. The Taiwanese identity is a smaller ring that is surrounded by the comprehensive ring of China, the outermost ring behind the tree’s bark.

Activist Shehla Masood. Photo: Daily.Bhaskar.com

“The heart aches[sic] is unimaginable.” This August 14th post was the last written by activist Shehla Masood on her blog “Letz Change D Rulz.” Masood was referencing the death of her mother; however, two days later she was shot and killed, leading to an outpouring of grief by her supporters and colleagues.

Masood was an activist promoting India’s Right to Information Act of 2005, an environmental conservationist, and the president of the Progressive Muslim Women’s Association. Though it is not certain why she was killed, it is widely assumed that it was due to her promotion of the Right to Information Act, which is designed to give Indian citizens access to any document created by a public authority. The act also requires public authorities to proactively publish certain categories of information.

Since the law was passed, several activists have tried to use this law to obtain evidence of government corruption. However, RTI activists are harassed and sometimes killed by corrupt officials protecting their own interests. In 2010 alone at least ten Right to Information activists were killed. Several of them, like Masood, were also environmental activists against illegal mining and the poaching of tigers. Indian police claim “vested interests” connected to these businesses are responsible for Masood’s murder.

Activist Mukta Shrivasta said “We don’t know who is behind her killing. She was very much part of the anti-corruption movement. Her killing has once again raised the issue of safety of activists. In Maharashtra farmers protesting silently have been killed. It’s an emergency-like situation and democracy is at stake. Such acts show the reality of state repression and the sorry state of affairs.”

Read more about repression and censorship in India:
Filmmaker Leena Manimekalai: “Censorship feels like it’s mutilating my organs”

Sofi Oksanen

Oksanen read an excerpt of her novel Purge, in which a young woman escaping the sex-slave trade ends up in the backyard of an Estonian woman who survived sexual assault at the hands of Soviet occupiers.

Purge was ranked No. 1 on the Finnish bestseller list when it was first published and it has been translated into 25 languages.

In this video, Oksanen answers audience questions on writing, human trafficking and violence.

Read Oksanen’s interview with Sampsonia Way

ျမန္မာကဗ်ာဆရာ ခင္ေအာင္ေအး

၂၀၁၂ မွာ Arc Publication ကေနထုတ္ေ၀မယ့္ ေခတ္ၿပိဳင္ျမန္မာကဗ်ာ ၁၆ ေယာက္ရဲ႕ Bone Will Crow (အရိုးတြန္လိမ့္မယ္) ကဗ်ာစုရဲ႕အယ္ဒီတာ James Byrne နဲ႔ ကိုကိုသက္တို႔ရဲ႕အင္တာဗ်ဴး ကိုမေန႔က ဆမ္ပ္ဆိုးနီးယားေ၀းမွာ တင္ဆက္ခဲ့ပါဆယ္။

ဒီကေန႔မွာေတာ့ ကဗ်ာဆရာခင္ေအာင္ေအးရဲ႕“ေပ်ာ့ကြက္” နဲ႔ ကဗ်ာဆရာမ ပန္ဒိုရာရဲ႕ “လက္ေျဖာင့္တပ္သား” ဆိုတဲ့ကဗ်ာေတြကိုတင္ဆက္လိုက္ပါတယ္။ ကဗ်ာႏွစ္ပုဒ္စလံုးကို ကိုကိုသက္ ကဘာသာျပန္ေပးထားပါတယ္။

Burmese poet Khin Aung Aye

Yesterday Sampsonia Way published an interview with James Byrne and Ko Ko Thett, editors of the upcoming Burmese anthology Bones Will Crow: 16 Contemporary Burmese Poets. Arc Publications will publish the book in 2012.

Today, we present two poems:  Achilles’ Heel by Khin Aung Aye and The Sniper by Pandora. Both poems are translated by Ko Ko Thett.

An Interview with the Editors

James Byrne

James Byrne is an editor and co-founder of The Wolf poetry magazine. He has worked for the Poetry Translation Centre in London and has translated poetry from the Middle-East and the Balkans. For The Wolf he has published the work of Burmese poets Zawgyi, Saw Wai, Hyma Ein, Manorhary and Phone Thet Paing. Byrne recently lived in New York City from 2009-2011, where he was an Extraordinary International Fellow at New York University. His most recent collection is Blood/Sugar, published by Arc in 2009.

In May 2011, Byrne called City of Asylum/Pittsburgh writer in residence Khet Mar to discuss the possibility of including some of Burmese female poets’ work in a Burmese poetry anthology that he was compiling with the help of Burmese poet Ko Ko Thett.

Ko Ko Thett Photo: © Timo Virtala

Ko Ko Thett, who calls himself a Burmese activist and analyst “by chance,” has lectured, written, and commented extensively on Burma since the late 1990s. He is a poet by choice, and has worked on the anthology with Byrne since January, collecting modern Burmese poetry and translating it into English.

Curious why they were interested in publishing a Burmese anthology in the UK, the United States, and Thailand, Khet Mar interviewed James Byrne and Ko Ko Thett together via skype on August 1st . In their conversation, presented below, they talked about how the idea for the anthology came to Byrne, the hard work behind assembling it, and the way in which languages, when placed side by side, can change each other. The anthology is to be published in 2012.

Why were you interested in publishing an anthology of Burmese poetry, James?

James Byrne: My inital point of contact with Burmese poetry was through a chance reading of Tin Moe—who still seems to be the main Burmese poet promoted outside of Burma during the early 21st Century. As an editor of an internationally-minded poetry magazine I am always wanting to broaden the terrain of The Wolf and it was in 2008 when I heard from my good friend, the Irish poet Niall McDevitt, about Saw Wai. The BBC and English PEN were running a human rights campaign involving Saw Wai back then—he had become a very popular poet because of his imprisonment for writing a love poem entitled February 14th which acrostically read along the lines of: ‘Power Mad General Than Shwe’. Niall organized protests outside the Burmese Embassy where many of the crowd would post Valentine Day cards through the Embassy letterbox asking for Saw Wai’s release (which eventually came). I liked Saw Wai’s poems that Niall was translating (and subsequently published a few in The Wolf), but of course, as I looked beyond the surface, I realized there was a lineage of other political (and non-political) poets that I did not know about. The literary tradition of Burma goes way back to pre-colonial times before the Thibaw. Since then there have been several tectonic shifts within that tradition which, like any, continues to evolve in order to survive.

After publishing Saw Wai, I was sitting in the library and discovered the importance of Burmese poets like Dagon Taya, Zawgyi, and Min Thu Win, and I tried in vain to call up a book that would give me a historical overview of Burmese poetry, ideally up to the present day. No such book was in the catalogue of the British Library, or any other library in England. I soon realized that, outside of Burma, never has an anthology of Burmese poetry been published. I was stunned by this, because even through my initial readings, I realized that the quality of poetry from Burma was high. This book needed to happen, and it seemed unjust to me that it wasn’t already available to readers.

Why is it important to publish a Burmese anthology outside of Burma?

Ko Ko Thett: One of the reasons is that Burma has been considered a very bad country in many respects, but we are not behind in poetry and literature. That is why I would like the world to read our poems. That’s my personal intention.

James Byrne: I totally agree with what Ko Ko said. This is a chance for Burma to be seen differently, hopefully in a positive light, because the poets have been able to prevail despite the country’s political conditions.

What have been the challenges of assembling this anthology?

James Byrne: The early challenge was to have the whole project up and running. I have been working on this steadily for over two years and the early progress was slow because it was hard to reach the poets and translators in Burma, for a number of reasons. Ko Ko Thett and I have been co-editing the anthology since January this year, often involved in everyday dialogue, with daily rounds of emails and frequent translations to check over to improve the quality of the selection. Recently we’ve been fortunate to have two weeks in the same country working on this full-time: now in Helsinki and another week this Summer in London.

Without a doubt the greatest obstacle for me personally is in that I don’t speak (or read) Burmese. Given this, it has been important to discover who are the best people to work with to get the anthology over the line. Naturally, given my non-bilingual impediments, I have endlessly asked Ko Ko ‘what does this mean in Burmese?’ and ‘let’s check the original’ to the point that he must have tinnitus! The dialogue we’ve shared (often over the translatability of a single line) has been extensive and very thorough, and I hope this is reflected in the anthology itself.

That apart, challenges have been various—one is that female Burmese poets are greatly underrepresented. Historically there have been significant women poets in Burma; Kyi Aye (now living in New York) and Ma Ei are obvious examples. But for many years women had been the object of poetry rather than the practitioners. This has of course happened for centuries but, sadly, it is still somewhat the case today in Burma today. We have simply tried to find the best work available, but we have considered at all times to have some kind of proportional gender balance in our selection. Out of the sixteen poets we hope at least four of will be women. Obviously the selection, and having the right ingredients for the book, is a key responsibility as much as a challenge.

Ko Ko Thett: As James said, the most difficult challenge in assembling this anthology may be the selection. I have had to read a lot of Burmese poems and then think which poems translate best. So translatability is very important. Some poems read really great in Burmese, but when we translate them into English, they don’t really translate well. It’s the selection process that’s killing me.

I think is very difficult to translate from Burmese to English. Ko Ko, What do you think?

Ko Ko Thett: Definitely. Sometimes we can carry the sense, but we cannot carry the sound. That’s the most challenging part of poetry translation. Take Maung Chaw News’s “Music” for example. In its brevity, simplicity and philosophy, it’s as compact as a haiku. It reads really well and sounds very poignant in Burmese. But when it is translated into English, it’s a different read.

Whenever possible I try to reach the poets I’m translating by email, Skype and so on, to nail the meanings behind their lines and to get their opinion on my translation. I’ve been in contact with Khin Aung Aye, Zeyar Lin, Moe Way, Pandora, Eaindra, Maung Yu Py for example. In the case of the late Maung Chaw Nwe, I just had to invite his ghost to possess me while working on his poems. My effort has put me back into contact with the Burmese poetic world I have been out of touch for almost fifteen years. Very rewarding indeed.

What was it like for you to work on a Burmese anthology with a British poet and editor?

Ko Ko Thett: Well, I now write my poems in English, so I learned a lot of poetics from a British poet. That’s one thing. Another thing is we share very similar tastes in poetry. If we didn’t, I don’t think we could really click this much.

How did you find each other?

James Byrne: Vicky Bowman, who is the former ambassador to Burma, and Htein Lin who is her husband, a famous Burmese painter, were very helpful to the project right from the beginning. They put me in touch with Ko Ko, and I’m very grateful to them for that.

James, in an interview with Valerio Cruciani you said “Any very good poet should not only be interested in extending their own creative practice, but extending the traditions of poetry.” But after the censorship, persecution, and diaspora they must face, can we still ask this of Burmese poets?

James Byrne: Essentially I was saying that if you can’t extend the literary tradition (how many poets are truly capable of doing this?), then perhaps(you should) try to honor the literary tradition in some way.

I think that despite what’s happening in Burma, and has happened for many years and continues to happen, progress is evident in the looking at developments in recent Burmese poetry. As poets, we’re dealing with language which (by its very definition) allows writers to redefine language. And I think that’s happening in Burmese poetry right now too. So yeah, I think it is possible despite extraordinary circumstances and it’s frequently said that during political oppression writers redefine the literary tradition. Certainly poets are constantly pushing language forward, despite politically turbulent times. One only has to go over the last decade to find examples of this in the work of poets like Mahmoud Darwish in Palestine, Bei Dao in China or, further back in time, with Mayakovsky in Russia, Lorca in Spain or Dagon Taya in Burma.

Would you agree with me if I said that poetry is a window to understanding the situation of the country a poet comes from?

Ko Ko Thett: Yes, definitely! When we select poems, we try to choose pieces that are reflective of Burma as well as those which are reflective of the current global situation. It’s a window into the world of the poets; not only into their country, but also into their hearts as well.

What about the window of language? Will the English speaker reader have the chance to discover some Burmese words?

James Byrne: In the book we’re going to include a glossary of terms which are key, in certain cases, to understanding the poems. The word dukkha, for example, is cropping up in many poems. Actually, some of these words are actually getting into the English dictionary now. Like metta (a person’s love for friends and family) for example.

Ko Ko Thett: Padauk (the flower associated with Burmese new year) and pongyi (Buddhist monk) are now English words too. What we are trying to do is to also retain Burmese words that deserve to be in the English lexicon. Some words like dukkha don’t really translate well. I mean, dukkha has a number of meanings: misery, suffering, angst, anger, or anguish, but it isn’t just one of them, it’s all of them. I think dukkha deserves to be entered into the English lexicon.

Ko Ko, you have lectured, written poetry, and commented extensively on Burma around Europe since the late 1990s. You have also translated into English the work of Burmese writers who often cannot write what they want because of the restrictive censorship in Burma. What does “freedom of speech” mean to you?

Ko Ko Thett: Freedom of expression is everything. It is democracy’s litmus test. It is tyranny’s most-feared weapon. It’s an artist’s blank canvas, a prisoner’s walls, a woman’s voice, a womb, a cross to bear.

Iranian writer, lawyer, and human rights activist Nasrin Sotoudeh has first-hand experience dealing with threats to freedom of expression. The 47-year-old mother currently waits in Evin Prison’s solitary confinement to hear the verdict of court appeals regarding her recent 11-year jail sentence. In protest of the poor treatment she’s experienced in jail, Sotoudeh has gone on hunger strikes and reportedly lost an unhealthy amount of weight. One strike lasted eleven days, during which she refused both food and water.

Why is Sotoudeh in jail? According to the Iranian government, she was arrested for “spreading lies against the state,” “cooperating with the Center for Human Rights Defenders,” and, the classic charge against dissidents, “conspiracy to disturb order.” Before her arrest however, Sotoudeh was a journalist and lawyer who actively defended writers, women’s rights activists, and prisoners sentenced to death for crimes they committed as minors.

Socially outspoken, Sotoudeh gave interviews to foreign media in which she defended many of her clients. These interviews got the attention of local authorities and in August 2010, Iranian security officers froze her assets and raided her home, confiscating many of her documents and files. Two months later she defended Heshmat Tabarzadi, head of Iran’s banned opposition group, the Democratic Front, in an appeal that brought his prison sentence of 9 years and 74 lashes down to a sentence of 8 years. Sotoudeh and two other members of the defense team were arrested and sentenced shortly after the trial.

When her jail sentence ends in 2022, Sotoudeh will be banned from traveling outside the country for another 20 years. Like many female writers in Iran, she is currently up against a government that takes extreme measures to suppress its creative voices.

This video, shown at the 2011 PEN American Center Literary Gala in New York City on April 26, 2011, introduces Nasrin Sotoudeh, recipient of the 2011 PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award.:

Help free Nasrin Sotoudeh by signing a letter on her behalf through the PEN American Center.

Read Shahla Talebi’s memories of imprisonment in Iran.

Photo: Oslo Mela Festival via Flickr

For the past seven months Tahrir Square has been packed with men, women, and children holding signs: “Egypt Says No to Injustice,” “Enough is Enough!” and “Who’s Afraid of Twitter?”

Egyptians knew that getting Former President Mubarak to step down was only the first step towards reforming their country. Now they are protesting to set solid democratic foundations, revitalize public institutions, and demand that Mubarak faces a real trial.

Among the protesters stands one person who has seen Egypt’s suffering up close: From treating abused and mutilated child-brides in rural areas to battling with former First Lady Suzanne Mubarak, Nawal El Saadawi has fought for change in Egypt for a long time. At seventy-nine years old, she sees this revolution as a chance for women to declare their rights—a chance that she has been waiting for since she was circumcised as a young girl. A feminist, writer, activist, physician, psychiatrist and the author of over forty works of fiction and nonfiction, El Saadawi has been called the Simone de Beauvoir of Egypt.

El Saadawi’s is also an outspoken opponent of female genital mutilation and the social restrictions placed on Egyptian women. Her first work of non-fiction, Women and Sex, evoked the anger of highly placed political and theological authorities, who not only banned her book but also fired her as the Director of Public Health. One of her most famous novels, Woman at Point Zero, was inspired by a female prisoner on death row who El Saadawi met. The novel follows a woman who is repeatedly abused by the patriarchal Egyptian society.

Photo: Clepsydrée via Flickr

Despite being imprisoned and forced into exile, El Saadawi has created the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, served as the UN advisor for the Women’s Program in Africa and the Middle East, and co-founded the Arab Association for Human Rights.

On August 12th I spoke with El Saadawi over the phone. Although I had many things to ask her, she only had 15 minutes to answer my questions. Despite the brevity of the interview, Nawal El Saadawi said much to be considered about the state of unrest in Egypt.

What differences are there between the protests going on now and the ones from earlier this year? Have your expectations/attitudes changed?

Mubarak, the head of the regime, was removed, but the body of the regime is still there, ruling and dominating the media and the government and everything. So the revolution is continuing. We asked for Mubarak to be on trial; he was on trial on the 3rd of August, but many people are not satisfied with the trial because they felt that Mubarak did not look like somebody who was accused. Many people feel that the counter-revolution is working to abort the revolution, and that they made this trial to absorb the anger of the people. People are not yet convinced by the trial,. Of course it was a step to put Mubarak and his people on trial, but still it’s not enough because many things can happen under the law.

Under a patriarchal capitalist system the world’s laws have double standards and many defects. Many people are not really confident in the result of the trial, but generally I can say that most of the people are optimistic—including myself— because hope is power. Hope is power, and if we lose hope we lose our power.

People are still struggling because many people were killed, many people lost their sight. But we cannot go back to a dictatorship and its corruption. We need democracy, real democracy, not false democracy. So the struggle will go on everywhere, not just in Egypt but in Syria, in Israel, in Britain, in the US, in Libya, in Bahrain, in Yemen—everywhere that people are fed up with the capitalist military patriarchal system.

My understanding is that people are actually dissatisfied with the economic situation. Recent protests were also due to a new budget which was approved with large social cuts, right?

Yes people are very angry because the Mubarak regime was corrupt and there was failure of development, and neocolonial American intervention in our economy and all that. People are fed up with the economic system, globally and locally.

You see what’s happening in the United States right now, capitalism is collapsing. It cannot go on like this with half of the people in the world going hungry. You see in the protests in Britain and in Israel and everywhere that people are angry with their governments because of the economic situation, and the corruption, and the poverty, and the collapse of social life, and reduction of social benefits. It’s not only in Egypt that the economy is bad and that social benefits are cut, it’s universal.

The whole capitalist system is collapsing because it’s very unfair to women and the poor. Now the poor, women, and young people who are unemployed, are revolting. I cannot discuss Egypt in isolation from America and Israel and Britain because we live in one world, not three worlds, and we are affected by each other. In Israel the demonstrators say “We are revolting like Egyptians” and in Wisconsin and Britain they say “Walk like an Egyptian,” so right now everybody is inspired by the Egyptian revolution.

Feminist Nawel el-Saadawi arguing in Tahrir Square that both sexes ought to be able to pray together in mosques EPA via Al Jazeera

Well it’s very inspiring!

Yes it is, because we live in one world so the percussion of the revolution in Egypt is transferred into Libya, into everywhere.

Could we talk about the efforts of women in this revolution?

Well in Egypt now we are reestablishing the Egyptian Women Union which was banned by Suzanne Mubarak and her ministers. We are now gathering together women and men—because women’s issues are not just for women anymore, there are many young men from Tahrir Square who have joined the Egyptian Women Union.

There is a backlash against women’s rights by the growing power of the most fanatical right-wing religious groups, so we are establishing our union in order to fight back.

What do you think of the role that international media has played in covering the uprisings?

Very bad. Really very bad. I was in London a few days ago, and I was interviewed by CNN or some international media. I don’t remember. The way they conducted the discussion, they tried to cut me, they tried to censor me. I was censored by the international media in Washington when I spoke to Christiane Amanpour.* She censored me; she cut my talk because every media has its own agenda according to its own interests.

The media is not interested in the revolution for Egyptians’ benefits but for its own interests. So the media is like the military; it’s like capitalism, and companies, and the free market. The media serves the military patriarchal system, and that’s why the media lies. The media is full of lies! You cannot know truth through the media. You have to live the situation for yourself. It’s not only the media, it’s everything. For so long power, not justice, has dominated the world. Everything is allowed—cheating, lying, deception—by the heads of states!

*Sampsonia Way contacted Ms. Amanpour for a response through the “This Week with Christiane Amanpour” website and did not receive a reply.

Photo: stormfront.org

Journalist Natalia Radzina, who was beaten and imprisoned following last year’s disputed election, explains why she fled Belarus seeking political asylum. Sampsonia Way presents the translation of her text, originally published by Index on Censorship on August 9.

After being forced to escape from Belarus, my journey to freedom in Europe lasted exactly four months.

Those months seemed endless to me, because there’s nothing more tedious than waiting, especially in isolation. It’s easy to explain my long journey: after a month and a half in a KGB prison, I wasn’t given my passport back. This is totally illegal — while released on bail before a trial, the defendant must be given back all their documents. But Belarus’s KGB is known to spit at such laws.

Even before the authorities called me in for questioning in Minsk, they made it clear that they had decided to shut the Charter97 website down once and for all. After my release from KGB jail, I was constantly threatened with being sent back to a cell in Americanka [a notorious KGB prison in central Minsk] when it became obvious that my arrest and the subsequent pressure on me was not having the desired effect: the site continued to be independent. My “guilt” was worsened by the fact that I was part of Andrei Sannikov’s election team when he ran for president. Lukashenko’s regime cracked down hardest on the Sannikov people.

In fact, I was not really scared by the jail itself. Other things were worse: it was clear that officials wouldn’t allow me to work in Belarus, no way. That became obvious in March 2010, after the pogrom on our office and the first criminal case. Then they launched the second criminal case, then the third and finally, the fourth — for the events of 19 December 2010.

A KGB colonel threatened me with five years in prison just for publishing the presidential candidates’ calls to protest peacefully in Independence Square against the falsification of election results. The fact that I refused to cooperate with the so-called “investigative body,” or, in other words, to inform on my colleagues and write petitions to Lukashenko, was another aggravating circumstance. As he said, I was “frostbitten.”

After my release from prison, it became clear the authorities would not leave me alone, even in exile in Kobrin [Radzina’s hometown]. After every critical article Charter 97 published, a police car used to come to my parents’ house and drive me to the local KGB office, where I was threatened with an immediate return to prison.

Hence, when an investigator called and ordered me to come for questioning in Minsk, I saw my chance to leave the territory of Kobrin. I notified the local policeman that I was leaving to go to the capital for questioning, I took the train Brest-Minsk. Early in the morning, around 1 am, I got off at Luninets station, where the train has the longest stop and passengers frequently visit a local buffet. At the station I was greeted by friends, and I went on to Moscow by car. By 1 April I was already beyond the territory of Belarus and I could congratulate Belarus’s KGB on April Fool’s Day for their professionalism.

I could not go public in Russia. Belarus’s authorities would demand my extradition immediately. Besides, there was another, even more unpleasant option. It has been an open secret for a long time that Belarusian secret services quietly work in Russia. The absence of formal borders between our two countries allows them to kidnap people from Moscow’s streets, and then they fill out the papers as if they were detained in Belarus. Human rights advocates claim this was the case with the anarchist Igor Olinevich, who later was sentenced to eight years in prison.

In Moscow, my main problem was obtaining documents, as without them I could not legally leave Russian territory.

I sought help from the Russian Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. I completed all the necessary formal procedures, and since my case was well documented, my relocation to a third country was examined on a priority basis. While these months have been the most difficult of my life, I have nothing to complain about. Usually, the asylum procedure takes up to two years.

Only a small number of human rights activists and politicians knew I was in Russia, and they gave me all possible support. The person who helped me the most in Moscow, Gannushkina Svetlana Aleskeevna, was a member of the President of the Russian Federation’s Human Rights Council, a founding member of Human Rights Centre Memorial and she’s chairwoman of Civic Assistance. This organisation is hugely effective, they really save people. I saw it when I used to go to a small basement on Dolgorukovskaya street to visit the office of Civic Assistance. Huge numbers of refugees from Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and other dysfunctional countries come to the office. Even though the refugees outnumber the members of this human rights organisation hundreds of times over, each of them gets support.

I am very grateful to the readers of Charter97, who stayed with us during us all this difficult time. Your comments supported me a lot during this time of isolation. During these months I lived at my friend’s apartment in Moscow, I continued my work as the editor of Charter97.org website and tried not to appear in public places.

Once I was recognised as a refugee by the UN, the first nation that gave me international support was the Netherlands. On 28 July, after I got my travel documents, I flew from Moscow to Amsterdam. I am very grateful to the Netherlands for my salvation, but three days later I went to Lithuania. After the presidential elections the Charter97.org website was registered in this country; it’s where my team is based and I can carry out my work as editor. On 4 August, I claimed political asylum in Lithuania.

During all these months, I experienced the hardship of life as a refugee. And I can say directly — there is nothing to envy. I would never have left Belarus, if, as Vysotsky sang, they had not “surrounded me from all sides.” I reacted as I considered appropriate. I don’t intend to play by the rules defined by the Belarusian KGB. To “rush hunted to the shot” is not in my nature, and therefore I tried “to jump through.” I am sure I’ll be back home soon, and the new democratic government of the country will hand me back my Belarusian passport.

Natalia Radzina was nominated for the Bindmans Law and Campaigning Award at the 2010 Index on Censorship awards. This piece was originally published on Nikolai Khalezin’s blog. This article was translated and edited by Olga Birukova.