The festival guide blurb read:
Moves to stifle debate and limit free speech seem to be increasingly popular with democratic governments playing the 'terrorist threat' card. PEN presents a forum about public discourse and freedom of expression from an international panel: Emha Ainun Nadjib, Tom Keneally and George Szirtes.
As it turned out, Keneally pulled out (ill?) so it was just the other two, speaking separately and then fielding questions at the end, chaired by Arnold Zable. Szirtes went first, giving a potted history of government and censorship in Hungary and grounding his reading of four Hungarian poems in that context, briefly commenting on the modes of commentary and resistance that each piece embodied and represented. And after him was Nadjib, speaking (through a translator) about his experiences as a writer and activist in Indonesia, including as the organiser of a group of Indonesian intellectuals and artists who had presented a letter to Soeharto and persuaded him to sign it in order to set in train his stepping aside in the name of democratic elections.
It wasn't quite what I'd expected, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one feeling that way - Zable alluded to something similar in his closing comments, saying that it had been 'a subtle panel' - but it was good. Szirtes was either very self-effacing or very private, or both, not reading any of his own original work (I think one or two of the poems of others' that he read were in his translation) - quite the Eastern European intellectual (though he's spent the last 15 [?] years of his life in England, though one or two of the questions drew him out. (Because of the background and the themes, I was thinking about The Unbearable Lightness of Being throughout.) Didn't inspire me - as it did Swee Leng - to go out and read Hungarian poetry but very much did remind me of how much is out there, and something about Szirtes inspired the feeling that he had the right to speak of the 'moral authority' of the writer and of the experience of state tyranny and censorship. And Nadjib was great to listen to - a very charismatic man, telling stories, he and his interpreter sometimes slightly talking over each other (that in itself was enjoyable and interesting to watch) - with a strong theme regarding the insidiousness of the censorship he faces in Indonesia and provided probably the highlight of the session with his response to a question in which he spoke about his faith (as a Muslim) in today's international context.
(I'd had hopes of seeing most of the Lisa Miller set before - memories of the last time still quite strong - but, as these things go, everything ran late and we were only able to stay for a couple of songs before ducking across to "Speaking out, shutting up".)
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[*] Vegjie was our organiser - also there were a friend of hers[**] (one Sarah M), and I rang in Swee Leng (who turned out to be second cousins with Sarah...these things long ago ceased to be surprising, but it's nice to feel that the right people still all seem to be in the process of meeting each other) and David; Kelly (+ friend - Damien?) also around for other events.
[**] A word which I now know not to be apostrophised thanks to Fowler's, hurray.
