Defend Expression

From September 2-5, PEN Canada Executive Director Brendan de Caires and I attended the PEN International Conference in Krakow, Poland. Since the first Congress was held in London in 1923, these annual events, hosted around the world, have offered national PEN centres a chance to hold elections, vote on new centres, pass resolutions, and assess the global state of free expression.

Even to this first-time attendee, it was clear that this year’s meeting was far from business as usual. A resolution from PEN America condemned “the escalating assault on freedom of expression in the United States,” citing the rapid rise in book bans and educational gag orders, threats to press freedom, and the targeting of noncitizens for deportation on the basis of their speech. Another resolution, on the “Present International Disorder and Breakdown of Peace,” observed: “Not since the fall of the Berlin Wall has the world faced such a fragile and disordered global landscape.”

Institutional statements are one thing; quite another are the personal, often harrowing stories of writers forced to flee their homelands. One Uyghur writer described being cut off from family members sent to “re-education camps” in China. Another spoke of the plight of the Druze in Syria and the pain of seeing children imprisoned because of their parents’ religion. It was impossible not to be moved by psychic torment these writers have endured, and by their determination to transform that pain into testimony: to bear witness, and to give shape and meaning to their experience.

Krakow is just a 2.5 hour drive from the Ukrainian border, and that proximity lent urgency to discussions of international crises. On one panel, Volodymyr Yermolenko, the president of PEN Ukraine, spoke movingly of literature’s role amid the full-scale Russian invasion. War, he said, is not only about territory—it is also about language, identity, and a sense of cultural imagination. Improbably, new literary festivals have been cropping up around the country since the full-scale invasion; poetry readings have been packed, drawing young crowds. Ukraine, Yermolenko said, exists not only in cities and borders, but also in the shared literary culture that is sustaining people through the current struggle.

The Congress could not be described as a feel-good event. Yet I left with a renewed sense of connection between the work of PEN Canada—the work that you make possible—and an extraordinary international community committed to literature’s power to build bridges across national and ideological divides. We remain committed to the power of words to anchor ourselves in the world and translate experience, even in an age of disorder and conflict.

Ira Wells