Translation and the vexed issue of the relationship between writing and politics are not unfamiliar subjects in the pages of this magazine. This third issue of our thirty-fifth anniversary year is no exception. As will be evident, many essays, interviews, poems and reviews speak directly to the politics of our times and foreground the challenges facing writers, however different their backgrounds, in confronting the ethics of representing the legacies of past and present histories of suffering, violence and loss. The writing collected here spans a number of different regional geographies and periods: it ranges from a discussion of privilege, mourning and melancholia following the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South African fiction (Danyela Demir) to the traumatic legacies of the Sri Lankan civil war, a conflict that ended ten years ago, but which serves ‘as a microcosm of the ethno-nationalisms and identity liberalisms that are fighting for power across the world’ and where ‘myths of national belonging and origin stories are increasingly and falsely historicised as truth’ (Sharma). Reflecting on the composition of A Little Dust on the Eyes (2014), her first novel, Minoli Salgado explains how writing and testimony can connect and perhaps heal communities broken by the brutality of violence and unexplained disappearances. By way of a contrast, in ‘Of Braids, Blades and the Djinns of Winters Past’, we are taken inside the politically divided Indian state of Kashmir, its complexities of local resistances, censorship and surveillance. As in the Salgado interview, the authors of this piece reflect on how histories get written and in whose voices, pointing to how issues of gender combined with an official government silencing have created a ‘laboratory’ for ‘hyper-masculine discourses of nationalism and religion’ and generated alternative myths and powerful djinn-like stories.
As several others here demonstrate, stories written within repressive and unpalatable political contexts often shift into myth and fantasy. Exposing the challenges of excavating a lost family history, one straddling several countries and languages – including present-day Russia, Poland, Ukraine and Austria – Katja Petrowskaja explains how ‘not writing in your own language’ and not using your ‘mother tongue’ can be a form of managing and mediating the writing of loss: if ‘you write’ for example, as a Jewish Ukrainian Russian-speaker,
about World War II … with your ‘kit’ of Soviet war-prisoners and Holocaust victims … you have moral right on your side … you are among victors and victims. By changing the language, I wanted to liberate myself.
The performative power of the imagination to transform and extend the borders of established traditions and histories recurs across the issue in different contexts. We see it in the writings reproduced here of the great avant-garde Iranian poet, Bijan Elahi, who saw translation as a ‘dance in chains’; also in Sam Selvon’s experimentations with language in his comic subversion of British history at ‘Hamdon Court’ in The Housing Lark (1965), introduced by Caryl Phillips. Joshua Cohen also opens up the question of how literary and artistic canons are created in his fascinating exposure of early South Asian networks and twentieth-century internationalist influences that impacted on the well-known African-American aesthetics of the ‘Harlem Renaissance’.
Featuring several new stories and poems from around the world, this issue is proud to introduce readers to the winning entries of the 2018 Wasafiri New Writing Prize — Deirdre Shanahan (Fiction), Len Lukowski (Life-Writing) and Danie Shokoohi (Poetry). Open each year to international writers who have not yet published a full collection or book, the prize is awarded in all of the three genres. The year 2019 is an important year as it celebrates ten years of the prize which coincides with the magazine’s thirty-fifth birthday. It will be renamed as the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize, to reflect additional sponsorship. In 2009, when we first launched the award, it was announced as part of our twenty-five-year celebrations. In keeping with this tradition, the 2019 prize will be announced at our Wasafiri festival celebrating thirty-five years of publishing and the launch of our 100th issue entitled, An Island Full of Voices: Writing Britain Now (British Library, London, 9 November).