by Nicoletta Peddis
Current student Nicoletta Peddis reports on last week’s launch of the York Literature Festival at York St John University. Continue reading “york literature festival launch”
English Literature Research Showcase
Current student Tom Young reports and reflects on the English Literature Research Showcase from early February. Continue reading “English Literature Research Showcase”
‘beyond all imagination’. holocaust memorial day and writing the incomprehensible
By Charlotte Stevenson
Current student Charlotte Stevenson reflects on the recent screening of Night and Fog for Holocaust Memorial Day and on her reading of Rena’s Promise for the module Conflicting Words, commenting on the tension between the necessity of commemoration and impossibility of writing about the unimaginable. Continue reading “‘beyond all imagination’. holocaust memorial day and writing the incomprehensible”
world cancer day 2018 – 4th february
by Charlotte Stevenson
Current student Charlotte Stevenson reflects on the weekend’s 2018 World Cancer Day and what this means to her. She speaks of the importance of raising awareness.
An Interview with Andy Owen
On Friday the 24th of March, the day after his talk at York St John’s University, Andy Owen kindly allowed me to interview him about his novel “East of Coker” and about the importance of literature and storytelling in conflict writing and more generally in our society.
Q. I found it really interesting both as a reader and as creative writer the fact that you chose to write from the point of view of a woman. Why the choice of that point of view? How difficult was it?
A. My previous novel was written from the point of view of a young man and I think that was very much in my comfort zone, having been a young man. And it is about someone who is excited to go and trying to find adventure and explore the world and I have felt that way myself, so I was very much in my comfort zone. So, I have deliberately tried to challenge myself to see how I could write from someone else’s perspective and, as I said last night, for me a big part of literature is trying to increase empathy. As a writer, if you are not doing that yourself, how do you expect your readers or your audience to do it? So, it is kind of trying to do what you preach, in a way. And I have no idea if I succeeded in doing that but I have certainly learned from trying to put myself in other people’s shoes, trying to think differently, trying to think if I was I woman how would I feel about these issues, which are probably traditionally seen as very male issues although increasingly now that is not the case with female serving in the army forces, writing from the frontline etc.
Q. There is a sentence in the ending of “East of Coker”: “I must tell my story and I must encourage others to tell their stories”. I was wondering if you feel that there is a moral responsibility in storytelling, in sharing these stories?
A. Yes, I think there is. I think it is a really good question. When you are trying to increase empathy you are trying to capture people’s stories and share those stories for people to understand. And, as you are asking, there is secondary responsibility there which is recording those stories, especially trying to record stories and voices that perhaps aren’t heard that widely in society and also, as a writer, trying to find your voice but also trying to find other voices. I think it is in important thing to do, I don’t think it is something every writer needs to do or has to do but I think it is a good thing to do. If you have got that ability to tell a story, then perhaps you do have a duty as well. There has been a tradition in conflict writing of people trying to help each other tell their stories and I think with those they did feel they had to help people who couldn’t perhaps tell their stories
Q. I found very interesting how in your book you talk about how war is life-changing, how people wonder if they will still be the same ones when they come back from war. I was wondering if, even for people who do not suffer of very serious cases of PTSD, is war still life-changing? Do every soldier feel that he/she will never be the same when he/she comes back?
A. I think so, and I think it can be on different levels. I think if you experience an extreme environment and learn nothing from it that would have quite a poor reflection on you. I think everyone should be changed in some way and hopefully for the positive by learning through your experience and being able to share your experiences and maybe look at life in a different way. I think one of the biggest things I took away from the times when I have been to places where I have been to is how fragile life is in some places and how hard people have to work just to survive in some places and I have been trying not to take things for granted as I did before and it has changed my attitude towards life. In a negative way, with people being shaped by those experiences, suffering from things like PTSD, even with people not being diagnosed, how they are haunted by memories, all of that happens but I think one of the things that I am trying to do in the book is to challenge people to see that it is up to you in a way how these things affect you, it is your way of thinking about these things and you have the choice to think differently. There is a lot going on, certainly in the US military about teaching soldiers to focus on what they can control and become comfortable with what they can’t control and I think there is a lot of similarity between some of stoic thoughts and some eastern thoughts as well, about acceptance of the way things are, coming to a comfortable acceptance which is why in the end I turn to the myth of Sisyphus and I challenge us to imagine Sisyphus being happy and I think that is one of the points of the book: you can still move on, you can still be happy if you choose to be.
Q. In “ East of Coker” you wrote: “It has always struck me that what we do has changed so little over the centuries”. Is it for this reason, for the fact that we still have not learned enough from the past, that you feel that we have to tell these stories, so maybe we could one day reach the point of learning something from it?
“Now culture becomes moribund, so God returns.”@owen_andy reads from East of Coker at @YorkLitFest #YorkLitFest pic.twitter.com/8SV4yn8MnZ
— Dr Adam James Smith (@elementaladam) March 23, 2017
A. I am probably not overly optimistic that we will get to that point. I think that is the practical element of soldiering that hasn’t changed in centuries and probably millennia. The technology has, we have different technologies now, which has maybe changed the directness of it, because you lose that personal element, if you are not the person being there, seeing it, smelling and being in the context, you are perhaps a thousand of miles away doing almost a nine to five job, going home to see your family after it. There is a lot of interesting aspects about that and I know that they have put MRI scans on pilots when they are making these decisions and it is parts of their brains, compared to a soldier on the frontline, which are a lot more rational rather than emotional that control those decisions. In a way that is also a metaphor for the wider aspect: we are still doing as a society the same things that we have always done. Someone who has always influenced me is an English writer called John Grey who talks about this myth of progress that we have in which whilst we are making clear advances in technology we are still the same creatures and we still have the same emotions that we did have two hundred years ago, thousands of years ago. As creatures, we have not changed that much even though we use different technologies.
Q. There is an interesting part in the book about how civilians perceive soldiers, in a scene in which you describe the soldiers arriving in a house full of women and children and they looked at them as if they were rapists. I think it communicates very well the feeling of being hated for what you represent and not for who you are, of being hated by someone who doesn’t really know you. How do you feel about it?
A. Yes, definitely, I think the point is that the misunderstanding across cultural boundaries works both ways and I certainly felt as an individual going to the places I went to that I was incredibly naïve. We had some hours’ worth of cultural training which wasn’t in any way enough, we knew very little about the countries we were going to and the cultures we were going to encounter. And I think that people who were there knew very little about our culture and what we thought we were doing so the misunderstanding was from both sides and I think it is fascinating to try and find out more about how some of the people that live in the countries where we have been to have understood us and seen us and I think, certainly in Iraq and definitely in Afghanistan as well, we were often used as tools in local conflict which were completely unaware of. I think the idea of how cultures keep history alive and deal with history is really interesting looking at Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan people saw a direct continuum from last time we were there whilst we did not see that continuum at all, we were very unaware of what we had done in the country before. The average soldier on the ground had very little knowledge of the British role in Afghanistan, that was a lot of ignorance around it but of lot of Afghani people knew that and that was almost modern history to them because they saw history in a different way to how we saw it. There was not only a cross cultural confusion but also almost like a temporal confusion and you couldn’t help it, driving through some places in Iraq, but feel like you had gone back in time, in history.
Q. I feel like the most powerful message in war literature is that while wars are perhaps decided to change borders or keep borders, when you read about the human experience of war you realize that there are no borders because people who actually experience war they experience it in the same traumatic way. Would you agree with that?
A. Yes, definitely. And I think it is easier to get that in Second World War literature, it was times where soldiers from both sides felt that they had a lot more in common with each other than they did with the people back home that they were representing, those shared experiences they were having, the shared hardships. I think it has been less evident in some of the recent wars because the differences in cultural have been greater. If you look at differences in cultures between Russia, Germany, Italy, France back in that time, they were at pretty similar points in their developments and as European culture they had a lot more similarities I think. But I think definitely it has been interesting for the current book I am working at to look from a soldier’s point of view at what actually motivates them, what it is important to the soldier, how quickly any sort of ideology that you might have gone to war with because you believed in it and a lot of people do it becomes it is actually me surviving with this tiny group of people in this tiny bit of land and it becomes about a hill, a wood or a trench rather than a nation and a city and wars are fought for the most part in small bits of territories. In the current book, it has been interesting going through the official war diary that might have a one line entry describing an incident and yet in someone’s diary you find described in two chapters that one line because for that individual it was such a momentous happening in their life.
Q. Do you feel that the projects you support with your writing, like the war writers campaign, the fact that is about supporting people telling their stories, connects with what we have said before about the moral duty of storytelling?
A. Yes, I think so and I think it is in the concept of having associative duties so all of us, by being in a community or by being in an army unit, have duties to the people who we live with. And that sense of duty becomes really heightened in an army environment in which you have specific duties to your comrades and for most people those duties do not end when you leave that operational tour or even when you leave the forces, you maintain those duties. I think that for all of us in the wider society, we have duties to each other and I think we are all narrative beings, we need to tell our stories. In that way, putting all that together, we all have the duty to help each other tell our stories and I think that goes for each individual with their families and friends helping them telling their stories, keeping those stories alive, having those private conversations and what happened to people reach a wider audience.
I would like to thank Andy Owen for his availability, his kindness and for answering all of my questions and Dr. Fraser Mann for setting up the interview, for introducing me to Andy Owen and for having supported me during the interview.
Andy Owen – East of Coker “I must tell my story and I must encourage others to tell their stories”.
By Nicoletta Peddis
Andy Owen served in the Intelligence Corps of the British Army reaching the rank of Captain. He completed operational tours in Northern Ireland (2003), Iraq (2004 and 2005) and on intelligence duties in Helmand Province, Afghanistan in 2007. He published his first novel, “Invective”, in 2014.
On Thursday the 23rd of January, as part of the York Literature Festival, Andy Owen presented his second novel, “East of Coker” (2016), about the personal aftermath of conflict. Interviewed by Dr. Fraser Mann, he explored the themes of his novel, which uses TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land” as a structural and thematic starting point, asking challenging questions about our responsibilities to those that have seen and experienced war. He explained how Eliot’s poem has influenced him both for its use of language and for the way he uses myth to relate contemporary events to past events, showing the cyclic nature of history. Owen uses myth in own novel for the same reasons, and also uses references to a whole range of literary texts creating an intertextual layer that makes his novel fascinating and engaging. He believes that, has TS Eliot himself said, “good writers borrow, great writers steal” and that writer, when starting a book, finds himself in stream where all that is been written before washes upon him, making intertextuality in this sense an unconscious process of awareness.
.@FraserYSJ kicks off this evening’s @YorkLitFest event at @YorkStJohn with author @owen_andy #YorkLitFest pic.twitter.com/bEdzAM4p83
— Dr Adam James Smith (@elementaladam) March 23, 2017
Andy Owen also reflected on the importance of literature and storytelling in creating empathy. Sharing stories of people suffering of PTSD because of their war experiences can help people to better understand how it feels to suffer the aftermath of conflict, increasing understanding and helping to fight the stigma that surrounds mental health issues, especially in the military environment. Regarding the importance of storytelling in dealing with trauma, Andy Owen also spoke about his collaboration with the War Writers Campaign and their work with veterans and PTSD professionals. The aim of this charity association is, through written awareness, to change the social perception about veterans’ issues and to promote mental therapy through the literary world and through creative writing. It is possible to find out more about War Writers Campaign at
http://www.warwriterscampaign.org/ and more about Shoulder to Shoulder, another association that helps veterans with mental health issues in Glasgow and with which Andy Owen collaborates, at http://timebank.org.uk/shoulder-to-shoulder .
Read Nicoletta’s interview with Andy Owen tomorrow on Point Zero.
York Literature Festival: James Montgomery Performance. “For books, my friend, are charming brooms”.
By Nicoletta Peddis
On Wednesday the 22nd of March, as a part of York Literature Festival, Dr. Adam Smith guided the audience through the life and poetry of James Montgomery delivering an engaging performance combining readings of Montgomery’s poetry with interesting insight of the biography of this complex historical character.
Trailer for Adam Smith's performance on Montgomery at Sheffield's "Festival of the Mind" in 2016.
Montgomery was born in Scotland, the son of missionaries of the Moravian Brethren. He was sent to be trained for the ministry at the Moravian School at Fulneck, near Leeds. At Fulneck, secular studies were banned, but James nevertheless found means of borrowing and reading a good deal of poetry and made ambitious plans to write epics of his own. Failing school, he was apprenticed to a baker in Mirfield. After further adventures, including an unsuccessful attempt to launch himself into a literary career in London, he moved to Sheffield to work at the Sheffield Register, directed by Joseph Gales. At the Register, a newspaper of radical ideas, Montgomery rediscovered his passion for literature and started to write inflamed poems in the poetry section of the publication, the “Repository of Genius”, regarding themes such as the abolition of slavery and the conditions of the working class. In 1794, Gales left England to avoid political prosecution and Montgomery took the paper in hand, changing its name to the Sheffield Iris. These were times of political repression and Montgomery was charged with sedition and treason for the publication of a poem that he never wrote and imprisoned in 1975 at York Castle prison for three months. He continued to write poems that were sent to the Iris and to which readers responded. A pamphlet of poems written during his captivity will be published in 1796 as “Prison Amusements”. After his release, Montgomery is charged again in less than a year for criticizing a magistrate for forcibly dispersing a political protest in Sheffield. After this experiences James Montgomery’s life started to change. He turned away to politics and activism and turned to business. He carried on writing poems and started to write hymns. He later was decorated with the title of Poet Laureate and became a Tory MP.
Did James Montgomery become the establishment he was fighting against? Did he turn his back to his ideals? He was definitely a complex and fascinating character and, as Dr. Adam Smith reminded us, even though his political views changed the theme of slavery always remained extremely important to him and Montgomery definitely never turned his back to literature and poetry.
The performance that Dr. Adam Smith delivered at York St John’s University as part of the York Literature Festival is part of a wider research regarding the connection between poetry and radical protest in Sheffield between 1790 and 1810. The focus on James Montgomery is one of the results of this broader research ending in “The Wagtail Poet Prison Project”. It is possible to find out more about this project at https://yorkwagtailpoets.wordpress.com and it is also possible to respond to James Montgomery’s prison poems either creatively or critically getting in touch with Dr. Adam Smith at a.smith3@yorksj.ac.uk .
A Warning from History
by Nicoletta Peddis
“If understanding is impossible, however, knowledge is imperative, because what happened could happen again. Conscience can be seduced and obscured again: even our consciences” (Primo Levi, 1986, https://newrepublic.com/article/119959/interview-primo-levi-survival-auschwitz ).
In 1955, 10 years after his liberation from Auschwitz, Primo Levi wrote a preoccupied article, pointing his finger against the “silence of the civilized world”, which regarded any mention of Nazi extermination camps as in bad taste. Levi feared that the greatest crime imaginable, still so vivid in the minds of survivors, was in danger of being forgotten by the public. He rhetorically asked: “Is this silence justified?”
On Thursday the 9th of March Laurence Rees, historian and former head of BBC history programmes, presented at Waterstones York his latest book The Holocaust, claiming that books and talks about Holocaust are “a warning from history”, echoing Levi’s fear of people forgetting about such a terrible crime. Rees interest in the Holocaust history has been ongoing for 25 years, since he realized his first documentary for BBC on the subject. The Holocaust is the combination of those 25 years of research and interviews. It is a piece of work that speaks through the voices of victims, killers and bystanders. Rees draws on interviews collected over the years for his TV programmes, often previously unpublished. The book uses documentary techniques, frequently cutting from the narrator to eyewitnesses, adding immediacy and emotion.
Through the voices of people who experienced the holocaust Rees also approaches some persistent myths on the subject. To tackle the postwar claims that victims followed their killers “like sheep” and show that there was defiance and some even obtained weapons and turned them against Germans, Rees tells the story of Marek Edelman, who fought in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Edelman recalled: “the first few days were our victory. We were used to being the ones who ran away from the Germans. They had no expectation of Jews fighting like that.” Rees also fights the idea that the Nazi machinery of mass murder was impersonal or antiseptic, describing the sadistic violence of some killers – in some case through their accounts – the carnage in death camps overflowing with corpses, and the unspeakable suffering: when children were dragged away from their parents in the Łódź ghetto, one survivor remembered: “their screams reached the sky”.
The Holocaust it is not an original interpretation, but offers an interesting approach. Rees tells a complex story with compassion and clarity, but he also manages not to sacrifice the nuances of it. The voices of the victims are accompanied by the ones of ordinary Germans and sadistic killers who, interviewed decades after the destruction of the Third Reich, never regretted their role in the Holocaust and still believed that they had done the right thing. Erna Krantz from Bavaria recalled: “You saw the unemployed disappearing from the streets. There was order and discipline … It was, I thought, a better time”. Wolfgang Horn, a former soldier, explained his decision of burning down a Russian village: “because the locals were too primitive for us”. One of Goebbels personal assistants, interviewed in 1992, summed up his experience of the Holocaust in one word, “paradise”, and when asked if he ever felt guilty about the slaughtering of children he cited Groaning: “the enemy is not the children. The enemy is the blood of the children that will grow up to be Jew”. The Holocaust helps to recover the memory of those children whose only guilt was to be Jews, and the memory of the other victims, survivors of what Rees described “a crime of singular horror in the history of the human race”.
It is the duty of everyone to meditate on what happened. Everybody must know, or remember, that Hitler and Mussolini, when they spoke in public, were believed, applauded, admired, adored like gods. They were “charismatic leaders”; they possessed a secret power of seduction that did not proceed from the credibility or the soundness of the things they said, but from the suggestive way in which they said them. And we must remember that their faithful followers, among them the diligent executors of inhuman orders, were not born torturers, were not (with a few exceptions) monsters: they were ordinary men. Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous; more dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.
(Primo Levi, 1986, https://newrepublic.com/article/119959/interview-primo-levi-survival-auschwitz ).
Stay Human
by Nicoletta Peddis
On the 24th of June 2016 I woke up early to read the results of the referendum. I stared astonished at my laptop screen. I felt like I wanted to cry, but shock prevailed over everything else. I could not believe that the majority of people had preferred division over unity.
I am what Mr. Nigel Farage would describe as an “economic migrant”. I moved to the UK from Italy in 2008, after studying Politics and International Relation for three years, to find a job and to learn English. But more than anything else what led me to leave family, friends and sunshine behind was the excitement and the curiosity to experience life in a different country, to enjoy the beauty of communicating in a foreign language, the wonders of embracing different cultures, religions, cuisines, languages and everything multifaceted that this world has to offer us. I think of myself as a “cultural migrant”, as a person that enjoys freedom of movement and makes the most of the amazing opportunities it offers. The Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci wrote that “history teaches but it has no disciples” and I believe it is the perfect description of our times, of the way in which we have forgotten the mortal perils that lie in politically manipulating hate and fear to create division.
More and more often since the Brexit vote people I know or people I meet ask me, “what are you going to do now?” I still do not know what I will have to do in practical terms or if my legal status will change, and if so when. But I am sure that I will not change my nature, I will not give up hope, I will not stay silent. Over the last six months what has saddened and worried me the most about Brexit it is not that I will have to apply for a certificate of permanent residence that will basically state the rights that I already hold, but rather the ways in which people’s fears and hate have been opportunistically used. I was bitter and angry for days when a customer at work refused to be served by me because he did “not feel comfortable with foreigners”, and when another one complained because there was “not a British cashier in the whole store”. I controlled my reactions, and I decided that I did not want to answer fear with fear. It was time to put the anger to one side and make good use of my experience as a literature student.
I will not forget what studying literature at York St John is teaching me: that my opinion counts, and that my voice can be heard, and that hearing multiple and different voices is the most enriching feeling a human being could ever experience. I have always loved literature, but when I was younger I failed to see its potential. I did Politics at University because I believed that was the only way I could play a part in changing the world. Over ten years later, I married my love for literature with the knowledge that it is the strongest weapon of all. The ways in which literature enables us to understand the ways in which the world can be described, criticized, analyzed is not only stimulating for my mind but it also what gives me hope and strength and the will to live in a world where love, compassion and solidarity are stronger than fear and hate.
Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian solidarity worker and activist who lost his life in Palestine in 2011, wrote these words that I have taken as my own since the first time I read them: “We must remain human, even in the most difficult time. Because, despite everything, there must always be humanity within us. We have to bring it to others.” So, to answer to everybody who asked me what I was going to do after Brexit: I will stay human and I will speak up for humanity, and I will try to bring humanity to others.