PEN SA board member Bongani Kona interviews Claire Schwartz and Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon.
They address issues of state violence, complicity, the role of the law, migration, the influence of Black studies and the possibilities of poetry, relations of care and imagining new ways of living alongside one another.
Bongani Kona is a writer, editor and lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape. Claire Schwartz is the author of the poetry collection Civil Service published by Graywolf Press in 2022 and the culture editor of Jewish Currents. Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon has worked as a lecturer and researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand over the past decade. The Blinded City: 10 Years in Inner-City Johannesburg (Pan Macmillan, 2022) is his first sole-authored book.
In this episode we stand in solidarity with Perhat Tursun, a Uyghur author who was forcibly disappeared in Xinjiang in 2018. You can read more about his case here: https://www.uyghurpen.org/free-perhat-tursun/ and here: https://pen-international.org/creative-witnesses-take-action-for-writers-at-risk-in-the-asia-pacific-region
This podcast series is funded by a grant from the U.S. Embassy in South Africa.
