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Larry Siems is the Director of the PEN American Center’s Freedom to Write Project. He has worked to support writers facing persecution in Nigeria, China, Turkey, and the U.S. Siems is also an accomplished poet and author in his own right who received numerous accolades for his book Between the Lines: Letters between Undocumented Mexican and Latin American Immigrants and Their Families and Friends (Harper Collins). He offers the rare, inspiring combination of fervent advocacy and a passion for the creative arts.

Larry spoke to FictionthatMatters about his work. I decided to divide his interview into two parts because he speaks in depth about a variety of complex subjects. The first part was roughly dedicated to literature and letters. (Click on the link to read it.) This second half will focus on his work as an activist.

FTM: Let’s talk about some of your victories and the great work you’ve been doing at PEN. Can you speak about your work in Nigeria with Ken Saro-Wiwa and also your work with journalists?

Siems: The Saro-Wiwa case was one of the first things I dealt with when I came to PEN. I first joined PEN as a member and then began working at PEN in 1995. I walked into the office not long after Saro-Wiwa had been arrested on trumped up murder charges. Then he was executed in November 1995. It was as educational an experience as you could get. Saro-Wiwa was a PEN member who had actually been president of Nigerian PEN. He’d visited the London office of International PEN a year before to express his concerns and ask if PEN could watch his back. It was quite personal and extremely disheartening when the advocates of the entire world failed to stop his execution. But at the same time, there were a number of journalists in Nigeria — several of whom had been tried in kangaroo courts and sentenced to long prison terms — and we were also working for them. I began to meet people who were on the ground, fighting the fight in Nigeria. They were incredibly courageous and inspiring people. After the democratic transition in Nigeria in 1998, we brought some of these journalists to Los Angeles for medical care when they were released from prison.

They’re now working more comfortably in Nigeria and they invited me to come for a month to learn about the situation and meet some of the people we’d been helping. It was incredible. We even met Ken Saro-Wiwa’s father in the Niger Delta.

What this experience showed me is that every name on a case list is an individual with a family and friends who are also with them. There are incredibly strong people all over the world. That makes your job easier. You need to know you’re doing the easy work. All you’re doing is backing up the people who are amazing.

FTM: Have you had any other experiences that you’d like to share?

Siems: In 2001, after I’d come to PEN Freedom to Write in New York, we were visited by prominent Chinese poets who were living outside China. They wanted to form a PEN center in China with dissident writers. We helped them secure funding. They’ve grown into a remarkable body with about half of its members inside China doing incredible work with imprisoned writers. Their own members are under siege. Liu Xiaobo is now in prison. He was the early president of the Center and a long time board member. We recently worked with the current president of PEN China to gather support in the U.S. Congress for a resolution calling for Liu Xiaobo’s release, which passed the House of Representatives in September. It’s amazing. You’re side by side with people who have been jailed and tried and constantly harassed and they’re the most committed, unpretentious people that you would ever meet. I’ve had endless experiences like that. The international work is interesting but it is at a distance. It’s only when you can cross those distances and meet people that it is most rewarding.

I came to New York in 2001 and 9-11 hit. Suddenly, we were confronting a whole range of issues in the United States that PEN had been dealing with internationally but now was very local and very urgent. PEN had gone to the United Nations in 1998 and presented testimony to the Human Rights Commission about the threat that anti-terrorism and national security poses for freedom of expression. In Turkey, they were jailing journalists for writing about the Kurdish minority. In Peru, they were trying journalists before hooded military tribunals for reporting about the Shining Path. Then 9-11 hit and the U.S. passed the PATRIOT act a month later. Suddenly, many of the errors we committed in different countries were happening in the United States, not least of which were outrageous due process violations. People were being detained without trial and disappeared.

Our front line defense for writers in other countries is that countries need to abide by basic due process standards that are outlined under international law. It obviously undermines that to have Guantánamo. The story in America was that this was somehow a new experience that nobody had ever had. On the contrary, for PEN, now the United States was dealing with something that a lot of other countries had dealt with for some time.

To bring this full circle, I remember that I went to a conference in Turkey in 2004 or 2005 as it was emerging from a repressive period and moving towards integration into Europe. Someone had reported a story to the press about a local mayor receiving a letter from the military intelligence department, a form letter that was addressed to all local authorities and universities that asked them to surveil the usual suspects: students, activists, labor union leaders, leftists, members of certain political parties — and the Ku Klux Klan. It was like, what? What Ku Klux Klan? Pretty evidently, the military had just recycled something that it had gotten from the U.S. during the 50s or 60s or 70s. But the remarkable thing was that thousands of people around Turkey, who were presumably in many of these categories, came forward publicly and said ’surveil me’. You saw that the years of struggling against these things had made an impact, and that the tide was turning. People had been fighting these things all along and now they were winning.

FTM: You’d mentioned working on human rights issues here in the U.S. Related to that, what can people do to get involved either with PEN or other organizations?

Siems: We welcome everyone to get involved with PEN. As a professional writer, you may qualify for membership. If you’re an aspiring writer, you can join as an Associate Member, which is open to everybody. Follow our website for amazing literary content and discussions among U.S. and international writers, but also specific calls to action on international and domestic issues. We have an RSS feed and we’re on Twitter. There’s always something you can do, a letter that you can write, or a conversation that you can participate in. PEN has a growing number of public programs that highlight human rights and Freedom of Expression challenges that are available for writers in the New York area, but also online for writers around the world. As we’ve moved into domestic advocacy in the last five years — because we needed to — it’s become so clear to us that we’re an organization that isn’t just a writers organization. We’re an organization that draws on the energies and depends on the support of the whole community of writers and readers. We understand that this relationship is important. PEN’s influence is partly because it is a community of writers who have readers. Our reach and our power is derived from the fact that if you jail a writer, you’re depriving tens of thousands or millions of readers of something that they might want to hear. The Free Expression issue is truly universal. We’re always trying to engage anyone who cares about letters, literature, and human rights in what we’re doing.

–Deji Olukotun

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FIRST PART OF THE INTERVIEW.

Photo of Larry Siems by Beowulf Sheehan (c) 2009