These Truths: A World Voices Podcast

These Truths is a new, limited-run podcast from the PEN World Voices Festival, exploring literature and the deeper truths that connect us. In a moment that risks tearing our world apart, and when the factual basis of our daily lives is constantly undermined, this podcast explores how literature can help us arrive at the truth and a deeper understanding of what connects us.

Each week, authors wrestle with urgent questions about contested histories, foundational myths, and dangerous manipulations of language rampant in our daily lives. This podcast brings writers and artists of America’s premier international literary festival into homes everywhere while introducing listeners to new books, ideas, and authors on the vanguard of contemporary literature.

In this episode, writers from across the globe show solidarity with powerful messages of resistance, resilience, and hope in response to injustice in their parts of the world. From Russia, poet Tatiana Voltskaya and writer-translator Elina Alter give a reading that shines a light on the divide between the people and the state—and the perverse pleasure the latter seems to derive from exerting power over the former. Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut, in conversation with translator Joshua L. Freeman, reads a poem fraught with imagery of his distant homeland, from which he fled from persecution to America. In our final segment, Turkish writer Burhan Sönmez reflects on complicated feelings surrounding home as he confronts memories of a less-than-idyllic childhood in light of the harsh realities currently crumbling democracy in his native country.

CHIP ROLLEY: Welcome back to These Truths, a World Voices Podcast exploring literature and the deeper truths that connect us. I’m Chip Rolley, Director of the PEN World Voices Festival. Today we bring one of our favorite events from our annual festival called, “Cry, the Beloved Country.” This event features some of the most exciting writers from around the world, reflecting on what home means, and how one finds hope amidst political and social upheaval. We will hear from three writers whose work challenges the status quo: Russian poet and journalist Tatiana Voltskaya, Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut, and Turkish novelist Burhan Sönmez. Some of their reflections will be presented in their native languages.

So let’s get started. We will hear Tatiana’s poem entirely in Russian before hearing Elina’s English translation. The conversation is presented in translation.

ELINA ALTER: Today I’m speaking with Tatiana from my current location in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Where in Russia are you right now? And what is your situation like as a writer in Russia? 
TATIANA VOLTSKAYA: I’m in a village outside of Petersburg, where I bought a dacha, a house. I’ve been here for a month and a half with my two sons during self isolation. I can work here in the same way I would in St. Petersburg, but a lot more freely than my colleagues in the city. It’s physically more free here because in Petersburg, it’s forbidden to take a walk in the park.

There’s also freedom of speech, which has been under siege for us, not just during quarantine, but in general since about the start of the 2000s. The recently passed law about fake news is a very elastic law, so it can be used in relation to basically anything, and I’m being persecuted under this law, as are many journalists. I am in a kind of suspended situation. I could be searched at any time.


“It’s an image of autocracy pressing in upon a person. On the one hand, the stone city on the swamp; on the other hand, the stronghold weighing on you, and for many centuries now, chasing after your soul and your freedom.”
—Tatiana Voltskaya


ALTER: Well, what will you be sharing with us today? Can you tell us a little bit about it?
VOLTSKAYA: One of the poems is about the neighborhood of St. Petersburg, where I grew up and where I’ve been able to return. Our city has had a lot of experience with death. It was built on the bones of peasants who were brought here to build the city, and then there was the horrifying hunger in 1919 during the civil war. Then the siege and the repressions Petersburg intelligentsia were massively repressed during Stalin. It seems like all the walls here are bloodstained. Whatever apartment you buy or wherever you move, it’s like you’re in the place of people who should have been living there, if it weren’t for those events.

There’s a very strong sense that the leviathan who swallows people whole hasn’t really gone anywhere. And there are several layers to the stone swamp image in the poem. So obviously, the city is built out of stone, and it’s built on a swamp, which is the place our strange Peter chose for it. On the other hand, the line, “Do you really think you can bewitch this stone swamp”—it’s an image of autocracy pressing in upon a person. On the one hand, the stone city on the swamp; on the other hand, the stronghold weighing on you, and for many centuries now, chasing after your soul and your freedom.

Look at that, old bag, would you believe it
You still want to live, to love

You’re selling the apartment full of frozen cries
Of passion, sorrow, hate—all of them.

Here it is, life, breaking off in pieces
Of Ladoga ice, sailing down the Neva with a rustle
Spinning beneath the bridges, promising to return—the city’s tune
Stuck in the ear, scratching the throat. Don’t believe it!

So, you don’t want to sit, sifting the past
In your mother’s chair, blending with the wallpaper, but while
You sleep—the future, with its iron pea,
Jabs you in the side beneath the ragged covers.

Do you really think you can bewitch this stone swamp
Get around back of this writhing country,
With all her slippery necks, venomous teeth, unfashionable
Props for torture? We’ll see.

You think new walls won’t treat you harshly
Darkness won’t flood you from neighboring windows?
Every wall here is stained with undried blood,
Remember that, wherever you go.

This city is suffused with death—no time for idylls
And little sister, love is a beggar, a janitor, a seamstress:
Breaking embraces, they took someone out of every room here.
Who knows whose turn it is. Maybe yours now.

ROLLEY: Next we will hear from Tahir Hamut Izgil. Again, we will hear Tahir’s poem entirely in Uyghur before hearing Joshua L. Freeman’s English translation. The conversation is presented in translation.

JOSHUA L. FREEMAN: I want it to start by letting everyone know where we are. We’re speaking, of course, over the internet, but physically I’m in New Jersey at the moment. Where are you right now?
TAHIR HAMUT: I’m in Fairfax County in northern Virginia. Due to the pandemic, it’s been a couple months since I’ve gone out.

FREEMAN: When was the last time you were in the Uyghur region, and can you tell us about current circumstances there? 
HAMUT: The last time I was in the Uyghur region was August 22, 2017. That day, my family and I had to leave our homeland. We went by plane to Beijing, and on the 25th, we came to America.

The current situation in the Uyghur region is tragic. Starting about five months before my family and I left, innumerable Uyghurs, Cossacks, and other minority citizens began to be sent to internment camps. This is continuing today. According to current estimates between one and three million Uyghurs and others have been interned in the camp system.

In addition, we’ve confirmed that more than 400 prominent Uyghur intellectuals have been sent to the camps and the prison system. Some of them have been given long prison sentences. Among them are many writers and poets. They are my colleagues, my friends. So the situation in my homeland right now is still very grave.


“I want to continue my poetic work in Uyghur even here in the diaspora, and I believe I’ll be able to, because other than moving forward, there is no other option. Perhaps for me, this is both an obstacle and a new creative environment; and perhaps for me, it could open up an even better creative path.”
—Tahir Hamut


FREEMAN: Over the course of history, many writers and poets have lived in exile. Now, you’ve left the place and the linguistic environment you grew up in—the society you’re used to—and are now living abroad. How has all of this affected your poetic work? Has it been an obstacle to writing, or perhaps, in some ways, a source of inspiration? Could you speak about that? 
HAMUT: It’s true that for a poet or writer, leaving one’s own language and creative environment is a painful thing, because I’ve always written in Uyghur, and elements of the Uyghur environment and Uyghur life have always been a deep source of inspiration for my work.

Now, I’ve had no choice but to leave my homeland and live in the diaspora in America. To put it simply, this was never something I wanted, but there was no choice. Since arriving in America, my environment has changed completely. Adjusting to life here—continuing life here—has become the number one issue for me.

So, I’ve written some poems, but not as many as before. I’ve written a few, but sometimes, I have no choice. The reason is, since I left my homeland and came here, my heart has never been at peace, because so many things are affecting me—disturbing my heart and unsettling my mind. Of course, perhaps for a truly talented poet, all of these things might be a source of creativity.

Perhaps I don’t have that talent. I can say that I’ve encountered difficulties with my creativity. That is to say, as my daughter, Aséna, says, since I moved abroad, I’ve become a simple person. Someone who doesn’t have the same poetic inspiration as before, or can’t write good poems.

But I think this is probably a temporary situation. That’s my hope. I want to continue my poetic work in Uyghur even here in the diaspora, and I believe I’ll be able to, because other than moving forward, there is no other option. Perhaps for me, this is both an obstacle and a new creative environment; and perhaps for me, it could open up an even better creative path. This may turn out to offer something positive.

FREEMAN: Thank you very much. This brings us to the poem you want to read today. 
HAMUT: Before I read this poem, titled, “What is It?,” I wanted to say a bit about it. I wrote this poem November 7, 2017—that is, soon after I left my homeland. This poem recounts my inner emotional experience of the life of flight and exile that I experienced when I left my homeland and came to America. This poem expresses exile and pain. It expresses my precise feelings and mood from that time.

FREEMAN: I am Joshua L. Freeman and I’m going to read my translation of Tahir Hamut’s poem titled, “What is It?” | [READ THE POEM IN UYGHUR]

What is it
from far away, from behind the domed water,
that stayed with me, that came along with me?
A weak vow written in the yellowing fog,
audacity standing at an angle
or
the layered dimness passed from hand to hand?

These days
are crowded with shattered horizons,
shattered!

In the runaway season
if surrender hides deep in the suitcase
if noble doubts run over the weight limit
if dead ends continue onward
if the exodus stalls at the second floor
what is it
that keeps you from seeing I am still alive?

So simple are my inner soul and outer face,
oh dark-eyed one,
a tree that reddens from within
turns to stone beside me

A spray of sweet-smelling camel grass
grows quickly, blooms open
at the doorstep of the past

7 November 2017, Washington, D.C.

ROLLEY: Our last featured writer is Burhan Sönmez. He will be speaking with Nancy Vitale, producer of this podcast and of Literary Programs here at PEN America.


“When I was born, nobody asked me whether I wanted to be born. Maybe I wouldn’t like to. When I die, nobody will ask me whether I want to die. Maybe I wouldn’t like to. My country is like my life. I found myself in it, and I would not like to abandon it.”
—Burhan Sönmez 


NANCY VITALE: Burhan Sönmez, thank you for joining me today from thousands of miles away, where I am in the tiny New York city apartment that I share with my family. And where are you? 
BURHAN SÖNMEZ: I’m now in Istanbul in Turkey. When I look out the window, I see the rooftops of so many buildings and the sea in the distance. 

VITALE: Sounds lovely. So, could you tell us about what you’re going to share with us today? 
SÖNMEZ: When I read that title, “Cry the Beloved Country,” I wanted to say a few words about the feeling of home. When I was born, nobody asked me whether I wanted to be born. Maybe I wouldn’t like to. When I die, nobody will ask me whether I want to die. Maybe I wouldn’t like to. My country is like my life. I found myself in it, and I would not like to abandon it. I know that my country is not the best. It has many problems. It suffers. It gives me pain. 

I was born in a small village with no electricity, no tap water, no proper road to the city. Years later, when I went into exile for political reasons, living in a beautiful British city, every day, I longed for my little village more than any other place. It was far away—not only in distance, but also in time.

I knew that the village that I missed was the village of my childhood memories. Was it a paradox or the polyphonic nature of life to live in a modern city and miss an old village? When I hear these kinds of questions, I feel that literature is the best way of understanding life. I grew up in Turkey, where I have always fought for a better country.

I wanted to create a brighter future for myself and for everyone. After decades, now I see that the current situation of my country is much worse than it was years ago. When I was a child, we got a military coup. When I was a teenager, we got another military coup. It was normal to be arrested and tortured for my generation.

Today, we have another normality with the globally highest numbers of journalists and writers in prison. Even simple words are being treated like criminal weapons. 

Three years ago, when Turkish army started to destroy Kurdish cities in the Southern regions, we, as writers and academics, called for peace. Then authorities stated that the word “peace” was unlawful and forbidden. Last year, when the Turkish army went into northern Syria, we stated that it was an unjust war. Then it’s already said that it was an operation against terrorists, not a war. Using the word “war” was forbidden, too. All those writers and journalists—academics who used the words “war” or “peace”—were called “the enemy of the state” by the president.

In order to avoid the coronavirus pandemic in prisons, the government has recently declared amnesty for 90,000 prisoners, including mafia bosses, rapists, robbers, and excluding the journalists, writers, and politicians. 

If you are in favor of democracy here, you can find yourself in prison without mercy. If you are a worker, you have to find a second job to maintain your family’s livelihoods. If you don’t have money, you have to send your children to religious schools, because secular schools are payable since they are not supported by the government. Then you feel that if you have good memories of your country, you have to bring them to the surface. If you have good dreams for the future, you have to fight for them.

I know that no country is perfect. My country is my home that I have been constructing with my dreams and memories. Thank you.

VITALE: That’s lovely. Thank you. I wanted to ask, given that war and peace have been outlawed, how do you write about these concepts in your novels and in your journalistic writing? 
SÖNMEZ: We express it without fear. In Turkey, we’ve got kind of a strong resistance. People don’t care about the government’s threats or being at risk of, you know, going to jail. People write whatever they think. Of course, then the government picks up some of them to victimize them. Because people like me—I mean writers, journalists, academics, not only a few dozen, or a few hundreds of people—we are thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people, we are strongly against the government. 

Can you imagine a government that has been in power for 20 years and half of the society strongly against them? We are very much outspoken despite all these new laws against freedom of expression. 


“The truth is multidimensional. The truth is very easily changeable. Literature is the main tool to see the different angles of this truth.”
—Burhan Sönmez


VITALE: And my last question is inspired by the filmmaker Werner Herzog, who said, “The deeper truth is an invented one.” So, how does storytelling bring us to deeper truths? Or what are the deeper truths that literature  illuminates?
SÖNMEZ: That’s great. The truth is multidimensional. The truth is very easily changeable. Literature is the main tool to see the different angles of this truth. Because when I say I live in Istanbul, I can say, “Okay, I have one Istanbul that I write in my novels. But there are so many writers that write about Istanbul. So, which one is the ’true’ Istanbul? Which one is the right one?” I think—and I believe—all of them are true. All of them are right. Because we touch on the surface the different parts of reality. When we see all these different angles of the truth, then we start to understand at least some part of this reality.


Bonus Audio

 

 

 

Selected Poems
By Tatiana Voltskaya
Translated by Elina Alter

The Tale of the Investigative Committee Captain

Captain Chernetsov will never die,
Captain Chernetsov will never get sick.
Captain Chernetsov opens his mouth,
And his even teeth glisten whitely.
The captain’s mother will not fall ill,
His friends will not be hospitalized.
That’s why he’s so eager to capture me,
Captain Chernetsov of the investigative committee.
I have violated his peace:
He found out from me that it’s bad in the hospitals,
That death won’t ask him who he is,
That his superior thinks he’s an idiot.
The captain has faith in his amulet—
Against heart attack, scabies, seizure and spasm
He’s planning to live for a thousand years,
Only I’m dampening the mood.
He’s imagined the sheet, the doctor’s face
It’s cold, tubes are poking out of his nose—
And he jumps, rattling his chair:
He thought that there’d be no end to him.
The investigative committee captain gives chase,
Buttoning himself as he goes along.
I look behind—there isn’t a fire—
Only the sparkle of his shoulder marks.
Where he’s rushing—that’s beside the point,
It’s too bad I’m not much of a runner,—
This here is our own special path,
Little white bones by the roadside.
If the captain were to stop,
The world would lose its symmetry,
So he stays on my heels,
On his most important case,
Because I get in the way of the plan,
Infringing on his immortality.

* * *

Lord, why is it all so awful,
Why is something amiss, wherever you try,
And as soon as you sound out “epoch”—
From behind the corner crawls a tank.

Or a police van. And that is wrong at the root.
Sometimes I think there aren’t countries or races,
But only us and the people in military uniform—
And they’re catching up to us.

They chase after us like moths,
And torture us when caught, while we cry out.
It’s just that they like when we’re in pain—
The more we suffer, the higher the promotion.

Here’s one—grabbed someone, now running back,
Smashing with his baton, enraged.
I tell myself slowly: this is my brother.
Slowly. Brother. Through my teeth. Clearly.
Looking at the sated mug and the camouflage.

* * *

Look at that, old bag, would you believe it
You still want to live, to love
You’re selling the apartment full of frozen cries
Of passion, sorrow, hate—all of them.

Here it is, life, breaking off in pieces
Of Ladoga ice, sailing down the Neva with a rustle
Spinning beneath the bridges, promising to return—the city’s tune
Stuck in the ear, scratching the throat. Don’t believe it!

So, you don’t want to sit, sifting the past
In your mother’s chair, blending with the wallpaper, but while
You sleep—the future, with its iron pea,
Jabs you in the side beneath the ragged covers.

Do you really think you can bewitch this stone swamp
Get around back of this writhing country,
With all her slippery necks, venomous teeth, unfashionable
Props for torture? We’ll see.

You think new walls won’t treat you harshly
Darkness won’t flood you from neighboring windows?
Every wall here is stained with undried blood,
Remember that, wherever you go.

This city is suffused with death—no time for idylls
And little sister love is a beggar, a janitor, a seamstress:
Breaking embraces, they took someone out of every room here.
Who knows whose turn it is. Maybe yours now. 

* * *

Don’t get used to being without me—
Without the rain, the gray haze.
After all, you and I are—for the ages,
What’s a bit of cholera,

What’s a bit of quarantine—
You’re locked up, I’m under siege—
But we have eternity ahead,
And time, that’s galloping behind—

Forget it, disbelieve it, don’t measure out
Its leaps—that’s boring.
Separation—is a little death:
When we embrace—that’s resurrection.

* * *

For some the heat, for some the blizzard,
For some, a spring without an end.
While we are looking at each other—
Neither death nor age are frightening.

Keep looking right at me, keep looking,
Not hiding your bewilderment—
As though there were no Paris,
No Petersburg, but only me

And you—stopped in your blue shirt,
Trembling on the lashes, like a tear:
We’ll both burn and disappear
As soon as we turn our eyes away.

* * *

Lord, if you have a Heaven,
You shouldn’t take me there, of course,
Not to the righteous with their translucent wings.
I know it—I don’t measure up.
Just let me into the kitchen, through the back stair,
Into 1941,
To Yura Ryabinkin’s,
Where winds blow behind the paper crosses,
I’ll make him kasha, spoon it into his mouth,
And he won’t die.
Every day I’ll make kasha—
Fluffy, millet kasha—that’s right,
And when he raises his arm, that gesture
Will be the best of Your blessings.
Day after day I’ll make kasha—
And Yura won’t speak of death looking him in the face.
I’ll make kasha by night and by morning—
And Yura’s mother won’t leave him as she saves his sister.
And then I’ll see out of the corner of my eye—
With all its spires at once
Flowering, like the rye,
A celestial Petersburg, where You save all of us.

* * *

From grass, set dancing by the wind
From puddles, from damp clay
God made you the initial time
And I make you the next.

From darkness, from thawing snow, from tears
Caught on my lips, I sculpt:
A shoulder appears, a cheek, a nose,
And lips, meaning: I love.

From moss the mosquito veers above,
The damp beneath fir tree bark,
God made me the initial time
And you make me the next.

Showing already under your hand
A nape, a temple, a shoulder:
I never saw myself like this,
Not once. More, more!


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Credits

These Truths is a production of PEN World Voices Festival. Nancy Vitale produced and edited the series. Special thanks to Destry Sibley, Jared Jackson, Polina Sadovskaya, and Emily Folan.

Next time on These Truths, we hear from poet Reginald Dwayne Betts and folks from PEN America’s Prison & Justice Writing Program about how literature deepens our understanding of mass incarceration at a pivotal moment in time. 

Follow the PEN World Voices Festival on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to stay up-to-date on our digital Festival.


About Tatiana Voltskaya

Tatiana Voltskaya is a poet and essayist born in St. Petersburg, Russia. She is a member of the St. Petersburg Writers’ Union and St. Petersburg Union of Journalists, and has written critical essays and reviews for newspapers and journals of St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Paris. She served as a co-editor of the St. Petersburg literary journal Postscriptum alongside Samuil Lourie and Vladimir Alloy. She is a recipient of the Pushkin Award, among others. Voltskaya has published five books of poems, has been regularly anthologized and translated, and currently works as a journalist at Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe.

Order her newest book, Winged Orderly.

About Elina Alter 

Elina Alter is a writer and translator from St. Petersburg. Her work appears in BOMB, The Paris Review Daily, and Modern Poetry in Translation. She is a 2020 Oral History Field Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center, and the editor of Circumference, a journal of poetry in translation and international culture. 

Read her recent translation of Russian poet Alla Gorbunova’s poem, “the lilies of the valley,” in Poetry Magazine.

About Tahir Hamut

Tahir Hamut Izgil grew up in Kashgar, in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. He is recognized as one of the foremost poets writing in Uyghur. Additionally, he has directed numerous documentaries, music videos, advertisement campaigns, and feature films. Fearing persecution from Chinese authorities, he and his family sought asylum in the United States in 2017. His poetry has been translated into English, Japanese, Turkish, Swedish, and other languages. His poetry has appeared in English translation in Asymptote, Crazyhorse, Off the Coast, Words Without Borders, Berkeley Poetry Review, and The Southern Review. He currently works as a producer at Radio Free Asia.

Read his most recent poem, “Phone Call,” on Words Without Borders.

About Joshua L. Freeman

Joshua L. Freeman is a historian, translator, and currently a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard University, where his dissertation focused on Uyghur cultural history in twentieth-century China. His translations of contemporary Uyghur poetry have appeared in The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, and elsewhere. More of his translations can be found at his website.

Joshua and Tahir will be launching a video series spotlighting their collaborations. Subscribe to Tahir’s YouTube channel, and follow Joshua on Twitter at @jlfreeman6.

About Burhan Sönmez

Burhan Sönmez is the author of four novels, which have been published in more than thirty languages. He was born in Turkey and grew up speaking Turkish and Kurdish. Sönmez worked as a lawyer in Istanbul before moving to Britain as a political exile. Sönmez’s writing has appeared in various newspapers, such as The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, and La Repubblica. He now divides his time between Istanbul and Cambridge. He received the Vaclav Havel Award in 2017 and the EBRD Literature Prize in 2018.

Order his newest book, Labyrinth, on Bookshop or Amazon.