Jung Chang, famous to millions of readers for Wild Swans, the harrowing account of her family’s experience of China’s 20th century, presented three PEN awards on Thursday night in The Hague. None of the winners could attend – two are in prison, the other is theoretically at liberty but practically unable to leave Egypt. Chang said that although her writing life – beginning while Mao’s Cultural Revolution made persecution of writers a policy – had had its “misfortunes”, she felt very lucky in comparison to the circumstances of the three winners.
Two of the writers who were awarded the Oxfam Novib/PEN award for freedom of expression were unable to be at the event because they are currently imprisoned: Eritrean poet and journalist Amanuel Asrat, and Turkish writer and journalist Can Dündar.
The third, the Egyptian writer and librarian Omar Hazek, was on his way to The Hague to accept his prize when he is reported to have been refused permission to travel by Egyptian authorities. PEN International, which together with the PEN Emergency Fund and Oxfam Novib presents the awards, said that Hazek was “detained at Cairo airport, questioned, and later released after his passport was confiscated by airport authorities”.
The prize goes to writers “who have fought courageously for freedom of expression in the face of great adversity and despite the risk to their own lives”. Asrat, said PEN, was arrested at home on 23 September 2001 and his situation is “still unclear”, although he is believed to be detained in the maximum security prison Eiraeiro. Dündar was arrested on 26 November last year and charged with “espionage” and other national security offences, said PEN, and is also on trial for alleged defamation against President Erdoğan. Hazek, a former employee of the Library of Alexandria, spoke out about corruption related to the library and was arrested in December 2013, following a peaceful protest about the murder of Khaled Said. He was released in September 2015.
Speaking at the awards ceremony, Chang said that when she was a child, “under the tyranny of Mao, all writers were persecuted”, and that “to be a writer was to engage in the most dangerous profession of all: writers were denounced, sent to the gulag, driven to suicide or executed”.
“But, even when I was exiled to the edge of the Himalayas, the desire to write never left me … when I was working as an electrician, a barefoot doctor or spreading muck on the fields I was always writing in my head, with an invisible pen, without being able to put pen to paper,” said the author.
Later, when she came to England, she “finally realised … that I’d always wanted to be a writer”, and she “became a writer with Wild Swans”.
“But when I think on my misfortunes, I feel lucky compared with the three Oxfam/Novib PEN awardees we celebrate tonight, two of whom are imprisoned, and one who was barred from travelling here,” said Chang, going on to read one of Asrat’s poems, The Scourge of War, to The Hague audience.
In a letter sent from prison and read by his wife Dilek Dündar, who said he had now spent 50 days in prison, Can Dündar said that he had written his missive to the audience with a pen. “I realise now I haven’t used a pen in years. Computers are forbidden here, as are typewriters,” wrote the author. “From the time I was awarded a red ribbon in primary school, writing has rewarded me. I paid my mortgage through journalism and it was in journalism I met my wife, who’s now reading this to you. Receiving this PEN award for freedom of expression from prison may seem like a dark comedy, although knowledge of all the other writers who’ve been in jail provides me a little comfort.”
The Mexican-American writer Jennifer Clement, president of Pen International, said the prizes were intended to “declare to these writers – and to those who persecute them – that their voices are heard, that they are never forgotten”.
Clement also used the event to highlight the situation of Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh, who has been sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia.
“The great British novelist and poet Thomas Hardy said that if Galileo had written his scientific discoveries in poetry, the inquisition would have left him alone – as if poetry were not dangerous. We know Hardy was mistaken,” Clement said. “In our time, rhymed couplets, metaphors, free verse and sonnets can get a poet jailed and sentenced to death and can also mobilise the world’s literary and human rights community to rise up in protest.”
She and Chang joined other worldwide readings for Fayadh on Thursday, with Chang reading Fayadh’s Frida Kahlo’s Moustache, and Clement a Fayadh poem whose English translation opens: “Petroleum is harmless, except for the trace of poverty it leaves behind”.
