NAWE NEWS Director’s Report
When social media timelines fill up quickly with screenshots of poems, you know that something momentous has taken place. And so it was in late February 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Among the distressing scenes of people fleeing, there were screenshots of poems: Wisława Szymborska’s ’The End and the Beginning’, Czeslaw Milosz’s ‘A Song on the End of the World’, and a number of poems from Ilya Kaminsky’s ‘Deaf Republic’. In April, Kaminsky himself shared an image of people planting purple and yellow pansies in what looked like a roadside flowerbed in Kharkiv. The image had originally been posted on Twitter by a Ukrainian media organisation, with the caption (in Ukrainian) roughly translated as: ‘Kharkiv is heroic, that’s for sure but also surreal, as always.’ Kaminsky’s post numbered the bombardments and the dead, ‘Today: bombardments in Kharkiv,’ he said. ‘4 people died. And yet, these good folks are planting the flowers on the street corner.’ Luck and pansies. Heavy artillery and street corners. Someone will have to clean up, and someone will have to plant the flowers. In Kharkiv, such care of public spaces appears to be a sign of hope, of resistance. In the UK, where we are living mostly in safety, the coming of spring has jarred against these images of people running for their lives and handing their babies over crowds of people in crowded train stations. I can’t delete from my mind the images of women with children the same age as mine, handing them over the heads of passengers, writing addresses on their chests in black ink. But I am aware that our collective international attention and empathy seems to be accessed more readily by pictures of people fleeing Kyiv than Kabul. For once the whataboutery on Twitter had a point: what about refugees from Afghanistan who came to the UK last summer and were still in hotels? What about those left behind? What about the children starving in Yemen? What about the talk of pushing back refugee boats from our own shores? Why do some lives seem to be more valuable than others? The answers are both immediately obvious and deeply complex: there is great discomfort. Within that discomfort, if you are a writer, is a call to action: a need to write in response, to organise, to arrange letters and statements of solidarity. And if you are a writer educator, there is a responsibility around how to handle the subject in classrooms and community centres and lecture halls, spaces in which creative writing can be a means of processing complex emotions. How do we write about war? How do we help others give voice to what they’ve witnessed and felt? How can we write at all, in the face of such uncertainty and violence? What answers do we have for children and young people trying to make sense of what they’re seeing while still reeling from the pandemic? What is our role as writers and educators to help give voice to these things? This last question is one of the reasons why the work done by the NAWE membership is so valuable, and why I look forward each month to reading members’ accounts of creative writing teaching practice in so many different settings. I know many members have been setting up literary and fundraising initiatives, as well as offering practical support to groups and to individuals fleeing violence and repression. At NAWE, we’ve been thinking about our response both to the crisis in Ukraine, and to the wider refugee crisis. We would like our response to be long lasting, meaningful and practical. With this in mind, I would be really interested in hearing directly from any members who are involved in supporting refugees, from Ukraine or elsewhere, to think through useful steps that might assist either refugee writers in the UK, or those of you with established communities of practice on this topic. Please do email me at s.kennedy@nawe.co.uk. We’re also thinking deeply about the issues raised in several of our panels at the NAWE conference, especially those in the panel with Hannah Hodgson and Kim Moore in ‘Making 6 Writing in Education
