With blood and indelible ink
Sax, Boria
THE LIBERATION OF POETIC POWER With blood & indelible ink BORIA SAX SENTENCED on December 15, 1980 to six years in a labor camp plus five years of internal exile for "anti-Soviet slander" because...
...We can't know...
...I would come home, exhausted and drained emotionally after eight to ten hours of hard labor, to devote the evening to the even more intense chore of writing...
...What will come next...
...The circumstances gave the task of writing poetry a special intensity...
...They do not concentrate on attacking the government...
...Owners are required to report all servicing and repairs...
...It might seem presumptuous to draw analogies from my own experience, since I have never known anything at all comparable to the prisons in which these men were confined...
...Iesmantis has been forbidden to practice his art and new legislation enacted in 1983 makes it possible for prison authorities to extend by up to five years the sentences of inmates whom they consider uncooperative...
...Even with this provision, permission was still denied...
...As a compromise, he offered to turn whatever he might write over to the guards...
...It was, in Kim's words: "Because a poem...
...Will people be required to register all pens and account for the expenditure of ink...
...Call it humanitarian or vain...
...The reason was not directly political...
...Solzhenitsyn would compose stories, word for word, in his head, then write them down later from memory...
...I do not know of any government that has gone to the extent of forbidding unimpris-oned citizens to write, though regulations mandated by some come close...
...Nevertheless, some comparisons do suggest themselves...
...And is Iesmantis a great poet...
...I sometimes wonder what the state of literature must be like in Romania under such restrictions...
...If I had written nothing during the day, I would postpone going to bed until that was accomplished...
...Writers also have to contend with a shortage of paper, most of which is allocated for purposes that meet with government approval...
...At the same time, the gesture of Iesmantis reassures us by affirming the worth and durability of the poetic vocation...
...One way or another, there is a good chance that some poems of Iesmantis will eventually find their way to the West...
...In Cambodia under Pol Pot a systematic liquidation of literate individuals was carried out...
...One can see the reason why poetry is found in virtually all cultures and under such a wide variety of circumstances...
...You look outside and remember a snowy, windblown childhood...
...In Romania legislation passed in 1982 restricts the ownership and use of typewriters to those specifically authorized by the local militia...
...There are several examples apart from that of Iesmantis of political prisoners who have defied prison authorities by continuing to write...
...It is even uplifting to note that people can still feel threatened by poetry enough to jail others for producing it...
...The journalist Eduardo Galeano has told of poems written on cigarette papers and anonymously smuggled out of Uruguay's notoriously brutal Penal de Libertad...
...These are not the work of intellectuals but of common people...
...After a few years of confinement, he took up poetry...
...A person is censored when he or she is forbidden from publishing certain works, usually on account of their content...
...But I feel more sorrow for the suffering of the writers than for the literature itself...
...On one occasion, he included a poem in one of his letters...
...He was to continue this pursuit in defiance of the guards throughout the rest of his twenty-one years of imprisonment, despite torture, solitary confinement, and other punishments...
...The Venezuelan poet Ali Lameda, after being deprived of writing implements, mentally composed several hundred sonnets while imprisoned in North Korea from 1967 to 1974...
...It is an act by which an author affirms his or her essential worth and thereby that of all human beings...
...It is an almost primordial impulse which one sees most clearly when all of the other motivations fame, money, political influence are stripped away...
...They do not document in detail the tortures that are practiced...
...In the United States today widespread fear has been expressed that the very existence of the arts in our society could be threatened by a few paltry cutbacks in federal aid...
...By doing this as well as by continuing to protest his detention he risks a possible prolongation of his sentence...
...As of yet, none of his literary work has reached the West...
...The prohibition here goes far beyond censorship...
...A person who is censored is prevented from publishing but is still able to produce art, still able to retain the sense of worth which the calling confers...
...they say there are many raspberries...
...At the very least, it will probably be shown to family or friends...
...For the most part, they are vignettes of everyday life, expressed with directness and simplicity, such as the following by an anonymous Uruguayan prisoner: To have a quick word with the bee in its buzzing flight to tell the ant to hurry with the bread for his lady wife to contemplate the spider and admire the beauty of its amazing feet and beg it to climb more slowly up its web all these are ways of resisting What drove the authors to take the risks involved in writing these poems and smuggling them out...
...Accustomed as we are to an extremely trivialized view of the arts, people in the West will respond to such defiance with a mixture of awe and bewilderment...
...During breaks on the job, I would jot down lines in a notebook...
...It is common for prisoners, most especially political prisoners, to be forbidden to write while in prison...
...Of course, prohibitions against writing and publishing go hand in hand...
...If one writes at all, the probability is that one will try to pass the literary work on...
...A few moving letters from him have been published as samizdat...
...is usually an expression of emotions . . . and it can influence others . . . how they think and feel...
...Of course, not for us...
...And circulation of samizdat is merely an extension of this natural gesture...
...The act of writing when conducted in circumstances like those of a prison camp is reduced to something elemental...
...Because of it I felt that I could encounter anyone regardless of social position on equal terms...
...His poem "The Best Ink" is a testament to fortitude and freedom: They have taken everything away from me pens pencils ink because they do not want me to write and they have buried me in this punishment cell but they will not stifle my rebellion this way they have taken everything away from me Well, almost everything for I still have my smile my pride in feeling a free man and in my soul a garden of small, undying flowers they do not want me to write They took away the pens the pencils but I still have life's ink my own blood and with it I can still write poems Valladares managed to smuggle several of his poems out of prison, a collection of which entitled From My Wheelchair was published in 1976...
...It might seem simple enough for Iesmantis to comply with Soviet authorities just for a while to win his release...
...It seems likely that the strict control imposed by the sonnet form may have given him the discipline necessary to survive...
...Call it foolish, stubborn, or heroic...
...Armando F. Valladares was arrested in 1960 for his nonviolent opposition to the Cuban revolution...
...I want to be very careful in distinguishing this prohibition from censorship...
...I can remember when I wrote poetry, supporting myself with any menial job that I could find...
...To prevent an author from writing is to attack his essential dignity as a human being...
...But there are others in comparable circumstances who have taken similar risks without even the hope of such remote and questionable rewards...
...The literature will continue...
...Even those allowed to possess typewriters may only use them for the purpose given at the time of authorization...
...Kim was, it is true, allowed to write one letter to his family every month...
...But what drives him to such a refusal is the poetic impulse something that serious authors will recognize...
...It always has...
...To make sure that any manuscript can be traced, owners must submit a file card every year with all of the letters and numbers it produces...
...The intensity of such a commitment suggests that perhaps he could be...
...It is a reproach to us, a reminder of how insignificant we have allowed poetry to become in our society...
...The censor returned the letter and he was forced to erase the poem...
...THE LIBERATION OF POETIC POWER With blood & indelible ink BORIA SAX SENTENCED on December 15, 1980 to six years in a labor camp plus five years of internal exile for "anti-Soviet slander" because of his poems and essays, the Lithuanian author Gintas Iesmantis continues to write poetry in prison...
...Then, despite being written in a comparatively obscure language, they will receive attention from the exile community and, most probably, the literary public at large...
...Many in fact, most governments exercise considerable control over what is published...
...He could stop writing poetry and protesting his confinement...
...We are surrounded by forests...
...Even today, it can inspire loyalty and fear...
...Whatever the reason, it would appear not to be fundamentally political...
...An individual is forbidden from writing at all, regardless of what the content might BORIA SAX, a poet, scholar, and human rights activist, is the author of several books including East German Love Poetry (Bouvier, Bonn, W. Germany) and, most recently, a collection of translations from East German poet Lutz Rathe now...
...17 May 1985: 301...
...Writing of the camp, he says: "The windows are half covered with snow...
...Perhaps they were merely intended to establish some human contact with the outside world...
...Commonweal: 300 Kim Dae Jung, for example, when imprisoned in South Korea, was not permitted to keep a journal or to take notes...
Vol. 112 • May 1985 • No. 10
