International Pen: history and background

 

PEN (poets, playwrights, essayists, editors, and novelists) is the world’s only truly international association of writers. Its members include literary critics and translators, historians, journalists, and non-fiction writers. Founded in 1921, it now has 130 centers in 90 countries.

 

A British novelist, Amy Dawson Scott, founded PEN in 1921. After the appalling blood-letting of the First World War, national hatreds were still rife, and fears of renewed war led to the founding of institutions dedicated to promoting mutual understanding between nations. Early members include Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, John Galsworthy (the first president) and H.G. Wells (the second).

 

The Charter

 

“Literature, national though it be in origin, knows no frontiers, and should remain common currency between nations in spite of political or international upheavals. In all circumstances, and particularly in times of war, works of art, the patrimony of humanity at large, should be left untouched by national or political passion.

 

PEN stands for the principle of unhampered transmission of thought within each nation and between all nations, and members pledge themselves to oppose any form of suppression of freedom of expression in the country and community to which they belong, as well as throughout the world wherever this is possible. And since freedom implies voluntary restraint, members pledge themselves to oppose evils of a free press such as mendacious publication, deliberate falsehood, and distortion of facts for political and personal ends.”

 

PEN is a non-governmental organization. It holds consultative status with the United Nations as well as Category A status with UNESCO. PEN’s sovereign body is its Assembly of Delegates. Delegates from all its centers are invited each year to an International PEN Congress. It is likely that its executive will be expanded to include more members from different regions.

 

Today, PEN has found that, while long-term detention of writers persists in some areas, elsewhere, new and frightening forms of censorship, often extra judicial in nature, have emerged. Increasingly, writers face assassination, threats, and attack. At any one time, the Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC) staff in London has some 900 cases of writers and journalists either in prison, facing imprisonment, or threatened in some other way, or murdered for the expression of their views.

 

The Curfew

- Sagun S. Lawoti

 

There’s calm in the city.

It haunts and agitates.

Baby next door is unable to sleep,

she is crying:

an unsure, scared mother

by her side.

 

There goes the whistle!

Boots march by.

Crack! Crack!

Gunshots, yells, cries of pain:

the baby is still crying.

 

The street is calm again,

dead and discreet.

In the distance, sirens sound.

Meantime, a smell of gunpowder,

the baby is still not sleeping.

 

Where are the stray dogs?

Their friendly barks and howls.

All vanished with disturbed peace.

 

Jindabad! Murdabad!

These remain, the kitchen’s empty,

except for a little basi bhat.

It’s nine-half at night,

Murdabad! Jidabad!

(one more time).

Bang! Bang!

Law and order follows suit

calm returns once more.

 

Next door

That baby is now wailing.

She wants candy.

Her mother is not in control

soft words make no reason

her lullaby soothes no more.

 

Because there’s calm in the city

that haunts and agitates

the child next door is unable to sleep,

she is crying:

an unsure, scared mother

by her side. 

 

Maicha

- Nagendra Raj Sharma

 

It is a holiday. Sit in the sun. Be lazy. Remember some. Forget some. Drink up the honey of dreams. That’s all. It’s a winter day. He is sitting in the sun. Nearby, in the garden, children are making noise, playing. He is listening to their noise without understanding what is going on. On the other side, he can hear Maicha complaining.

 

He also feels like complaining sometimes. Perhaps it is because he feels a lot lighter when he complains. Maicha is talking to herself, to the whole world, as if everyone is listening, or cares. She sweeps the lawn. Her hand, the broom, and her tongue are all moving. It is her responsibility to clean all the front lawns of their neighborhood. She comes to each house on alternate days and gets paid five rupees each month from each house. She gets the leftover food from festivals and other rituals.

 

He also hears his wife talking to herself. He feels that the third week of the month has begun. During the first week his wife has no time. She does not even have the time to complain. Shopping, meeting people, going to the cinema; she remains busy. The second week of the month, she is a little serious. During the third week, after the complaining, talking to herself, she starts arguing. The last week of the month she spends sulking. Sometimes she even falls ill. This has been the routine over the past forty years. Yes, forty years ago, on the first day of the month, he would put a hundred rupees in his wife’s hand. She would meet household expenses with this money and even have some savings at the end of the month. Now he gives her fifteen hundred rupees every month yet each month their loans increase.

 

“What happened? Why are you complaining?” he asks Maicha even though he does not care to know her answer. But Maicha does not understand this. She thinks he wants to hear her problems in detail. “My son-in law is a thief!” She begins to explain. “He has taken five tolas of gold. ‘It will be lost, someone will steal it,’ he said, ‘Let me keep it.’ I thought it was a good idea and gave him the gold. Now he says everything is lost, someone stole it. His father’s head! The gold is not stolen or lost. He is a bad man. He has no morals. My daughter is the bad one. She is very bad.” Maicha begins to weep. And she begins to drone on about the lost gold, her son-in-law and daughter. He lets his mind wander. Maicha is crying. The children are playing. His wife is complaining. He remembers his friends. He has had different friends, from the aged to the young. He remembers the story an unmarried friend told him. Husband and wife are the symbols of love. He told him of their conversations and their embraces. The kisses that the wife gave to the husband before he went to work.

 

He recalls his forty years of marriage. These moments never came in his life. Even though he tries, he cannot count a single time his wife came to him and kissed him. He remembers the early days of his marriage, he had been pulled into the details of the rice, lentils, salt, oil. He remembers taking care of her when she was ill and purchasing medicine. He remembers nursing her and the children she bore again and again. He remembers the rice-feeding rituals, the loans that he had to take for the children. He remembers that he has walked the same path at the same speed carrying the same weight like an old oxen. The same job, the same sleep, the same sex. His youth passed.

 

Today he is sixty-five years old. He sees no achievements in his life. What is happiness? Where does it come from? He feels he never found out.

 

“What are you doing?”

 

 He turns towards Maicha. She is not looking at him. She is looking at his son and his friends in the garden. The kids have been there for some time. He remembers the old hen that he found dying in the pen in the morning. He told his son to bury the hen when she was dead. His son was digging a hole beneath a tree, his friends were watching.

 

“We are burying her,” he shows her the dead hen.

 

“Why bury the hen? I will eat it,” Maicha says. His son does not reply. He looks at his father for an answer.

“You can’t eat that. It may have a disease.”

 

Maicha must be seventy or eighty now. She was born in Kathmandu, she grew up in the city. She has seen development taking place. Even then she looks upon a dead hen with greed.

 

“What do you mean you mustn’t eat it. I always eat animals that have died. It’s good meat.”

 

Maicha’s answer is hard to comprehend. He talks to her. She does not listen. She puts her broom away on to the basket, takes out two buffalo ribs she uses to pick up dirt, picks up the hen, and puts her in her kharpan.

 

She hobbles off, complaining.

 

Adapted by P.R.