Silence is death. If you speak, you die. If you are silent, you die. So speak, and die.
Anouar Benmalek, reading Tahar Djaout
This month, PEN honors Algerian poet and novelist Tahar Djaout. In 1993, the accomplished Algerian writer was murdered by a fundamentalist group as he was leaving his home because, according to one of the attackers, Djaout “wielded a fearsome pen that could have an effect on Islamic sectors.”
(via PEN.org » Blog Archive Case Histories: Tahar Djaout - PEN.org)
Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka honored Algerian writer Tahar Djaout (pictured) during a lecture he delivered at the 2011 PEN World Voices Festival. Here, Soyinka reads a chapter from Tahar Djaout’s The Last Summer of Reason.
To speak means, above all, to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.
These words were written by the French-Algerian theorist, philosopher, psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), who would be turning 87 today.
In his outstanding book Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon describes through a post-colonial lens the experiences of the black male in a state of exile or displacement. He also analyzes the complex relationship between language and identity, revealing that words are signs that express the complex underpinnings of a culture.
