Transcriber: Maria Pericleous Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
When I was invited to speak here today, in Thessaloniki,
about the courage to create,
I thought immediately of all the writers
in the in the past decades, and even centuries,
who've actually been persecuted for their writing.
Those writers really needed courage.
Like most British writers,
I belong to an organization called PEN International,
and PEN International campaigns very vigorously
for all the writers who are currently imprisoned or persecuted around the world.
Every year it publishes a list of those people
and runs campaigns for specific individuals,
and with great success sometimes.
The most recent list
had approximately a thousand names,
so I kind of felt, in some ways, I had to mention those writers
because they are the really courageous people,
who are prepared to go to prison for what they put down on paper.
At the moment,
there's a very high-profile Chinese writer called Liu Xiaobo,
who is a Nobel Peace Prize winner,
and he's currently still in prison in China.
And perhaps a more famous recent example
of somebody who's not in prison but who was persecuted in Turkey
was Orhan Pamuk,
and in Britain, he's a very much, very highly-thought-of author,
and his crime, as probably you all know, he was insulting Turkishness
for writing about the Kurds and the Armenians.
But in the 20th century, in Greece,
there are many examples of writers who showed enormous courage.
Again, I haven't read some of these, because they haven't been translated,
so forgive me for not having read extensively their works.
Maybe somebody, after this talk,
can come up and translate a few of their poems for me.
Of course, there was Yiannis Ritsos,
who spent much of his life exiled
on those islands of exile,
and had his works burnt,
and was persecuted for many years.
And then, apparently, a man called Titos Patrikios.
I am told he had to bury some of his poems
to protect them from the authorities.
In Britain, we have pretty much complete freedom of speech,
and it's something that always needs protecting;
it's not something we should take for granted.
And I happened to notice on the PEN website
that there are these local branches of PEN all around the world,
and I couldn't find one that was actually based here, in Greece.
So that's maybe a challenge to the audience here,
that there really should be one set up in this country
to help writers in other countries.
So, for me, courage -
I only really need it when the book reviews come out.
You know, it's not a big factor in my own life,
and, of course, critics have complete freedom of speech,
and that's the only time
when I really feel terrified about being a writer -
apart from standing on this red circle, which is, frankly -
no one's yet mentioned it, I don't think -
it does require a little bit of courage,
maybe more than I've ever needed.
But I write about courage; I write about other people's courage.
It is the one single thing that really inspires me,
the courage of ordinary people.
Spinalonga.
This is a picture of an island
that I think some of you will be familiar with
from having watched the television series (Greek) "The Island".
When I first went there, as a tourist,
I knew absolutely nothing about the place.
I knew nothing about leprosy -
which was the reason people were sent to Spinalonga -
apart from the fact there was a huge stigma surrounding it.
And what I discovered, when I even went on that first visit,
was that the people there, apparently, from what I could see,
had lived relatively very normal lives.
These were people who were, as you can see from this picture,
living within - they could see their families, maybe their relatives,
living on the mainland opposite,
and yet many of them went there for decades,
and they showed huge courage in surviving the life that they had there.
The clues that sort of told me how courageous they'd been
and really how long suffering they'd been
were little things actually within the infrastructure of the island itself.
There were tiny pieces of curtain fluttering still from the window frames
and patches of wall still painted in this lovely bright blue
and pots of geraniums that had been there probably for a couple of decades,
and there was (Greek) a coffee shop,
a church and shops,
and all these things that showed what normal lives that they'd lived.
The stigma of leprosy is a strange one.
It actually goes back to biblical days, when people were told -
there's a whole chapter in the Old Testament -
people were told that leprosy was a punishment from God,
either a sin that you had committed
or even a sin, perhaps, that one of your ancestors had committed.
So it was based on a complete fallacy, in effect.
And, of course, leprosy tends to deform people.
That's what happens in the end
after many years of having the disease.
And we fear what is different, and we fear what is ugly.
In the television serial,
we portrayed actually many different ways in which leprosy affects the body.
Sometimes it's facial deformities
with lesions on the skin,
and other times, the nerve-endings,
which are destroyed by the leprosy bacteria,
lead to the loss of fingers, toes, arms, legs.
And it's actually a bacterial disease;
it's not, obviously, a curse from God.
The cure was actually found in the 1950s,
the bacteria having been identified about 50 years earlier,
and at that time, the stigma should have gone.
Everybody should have realised this isn't a curse from God;
it is just a disease like any other disease,
an illness like tuberculosis, that any one of us could catch,
whether we were a priest,
a child, a king, a man in the street -
at every level of society it's possible to contract this disease.
The people on Spinalonga
showed great courage
because when they came away from that island,
many of them bore the marks of that disease
and were still treated and shunned by society.
When (Greek) "The Island," "Το Νησί" was translated,
I had the huge privilege of meeting a man called Manolis Fountoulakis,
who was probably the most courageous person
I've ever met.
You'll see from the picture that Manolis suffered from leprosy himself,
and he shows many of the characteristic deformities
from the disease.
And yet, he was the wisest, funniest, kindest man I've ever met.
He never complained about anything at all,
and we became very good friends
for the period of his life.
He, sadly, died two years ago,
almost to the day.
But he was probably the man who inspired very much the television series.
As you can see, he played as an extra,
and that was an extraordinary moment in my own life,
of standing, playing next to him myself,
kind of being made up to have leprosy
but standing with Manoli, who really had suffered from the disease.
And he demonstrated
that leprosy changes the body,
but very much not the mind or the personality.
He inspired everybody who worked on (Greek) "The Island".
Most people spent hours every day
up at his house, having a raki that he made.
I don't know if you can see, probably quite clearly, actually,
he had very distended hands, very big hands,
which is something that can happen
when the leprosy bacteria attack the nerve-endings.
But with these huge, giant hands of his,
he used to make, somehow - I never actually saw him doing it -
but this magnificent cherry raki
that was his kind of specialty.
So I sometimes think that half the actors and the crew
were a little bit inebriated, having gone up to see Manoli.
But he was a truly courageous and inspirational man.
After writing "The Island",
I sort of stumbled across the story of civil war
and wrote a novel set in Spain,
and there, again, this was the courage of ordinary people in the street
that inspired me to write that story.
Probably everyone here knows about their own civil war,
but the Spanish Civil War
actually has a lot of similar characteristics to it
as the Greek Civil War,
except that the Spanish Civil War was quite short and sharp,
three years,
during which ordinary people -
teenagers, women, everyone who basically was anti-fascist -
took up a weapon and fought against a trained army.
Sadly, the Republic, i.e. the legally elected republic,
people who fought for that lost.
And until 1975 - so for nearly 40 years -
people who had fought against Franco,
the army general who had conducted the coup,
were persecuted, imprisoned, sent into exile.
Lots of children ended up away from their parents,
all around the world,
trying to escape from the evils of that fascist regime.
But it was an inspirational story for me,
again, reading about these ordinary people,
and then writing about what they tried to achieve.
And then, more latterly, Thessaloniki.
And my latest story
is so much a story of the courage of the people of this city
that my English readers
think that I've made up a lot of the catastrophes
that took place here.
They say, "Well, you know, how much of this is real?
Could there really have been a fire,
an influx of a huge number of refugees and departure of a huge number of Muslims,
occupation, civil war,
the loss of a third of the population of 60,000 Jewish people here,
and then many other things?"
And my book actually ends with the earthquake of 1978.
Readers at home almost find this impossible to believe,
that anyone could have actually survived.
Because some people did see each of those events
and live to tell the story.
Once I discovered
that there was this sequence of catastrophes
that happened in Thessaloniki,
I was sitting in a café one day,
out there, in the sunshine,
and I saw an elderly couple.
They were probably about 85, 90,
and they were smaller than me,
smaller than the average Greek,
definitely smaller than the average Greek teenager,
but very strong looking.
And in a slightly strange way.
Maybe they're sitting out here, somewhere,
those people.
They don't know who they are, but I followed them home.
They lived in a (Greek) block of flats like this,
and I watched them struggling home with their shopping,
and they were tough, and they were strong,
and they became, in my imagination, my heroes.
One of them, Katerina, is a refugee from Asia Minor,
and the elderly man, in my mad novelist imagination, Dimitris,
is the man she eventually marries.
And these people, in my head,
lived through those extraordinary events of the 20th century
that required,
from an outsider's point of view,
absolutely superhuman courage.
And again, maybe this is an image everybody here has seen.
It's an iconic picture of Papaioannou
that she took during the occupation,
showing a starving child.
When I think of what the Greek people lived through
during the war,
again, it's unbelievable for British people.
We think we suffered during the Second World War,
but we weren't occupied,
we always had food,
we always had shoes.
We lost a lot of people during that conflict,
but we didn't live through the pain and the conflict and the suffering
that the Greek people did.
And what I do try to communicate to people in the UK:
I'm lucky at the moment to have this opportunity,
with this book that I have written,
to go around the country and do lots of talks about it,
and I always end up really talking about the current situation
and explaining how there is a link
between these things that have happened in Greece
up to the present day,
that the current things you're going through
didn't just begin 10 years ago.
And 90 years ago, 60 years ago,
30 years ago, 10 years ago,
there have been these points in Greek history
where I think you have to have a lot of courage.
I'm very passionate about Greece,
but I have this, in some ways, great fortune, that I can come and go,
and I know here you have to stay
and not fight exactly, but be strong for what's happening.
My message, if I have one at all,
is that you need to continue to have that courage.
You have a huge number of friends outside
who are now beginning to see
that your situation is part of a bigger situation.
I didn't intend to talk about British politics at all,
but probably not in your newspapers,
because I know you're probably completely fixated on your own situation,
but a week ago, in England,
we had local elections all around the country,
and there was huge movement away from the Right to the Left.
We still have Cameron, because they weren't general elections,
but it really rocked our country,
that there is this shift
away from Conservatism towards the Left,
and the same, obviously, happened in France.
And there's a general shift,
and I think the whole of Europe
needs courage to face what's going to happen
in the next year or so.
So, from me,
I know in English, funnily enough, we use a French phrase -
very odd -
we have a strange relationship with the French,
but occasionally we break into French,
like "Bon voyage", we'll say.
We never say "Have a good journey", we say "Bon voyage",
and we say "Bon courage".
We say, I think to translate, it would be "Καλή δύναμη",
and I think everyone here maybe needs courage in the next few months
more than I do.
But (Greek) "stay strong" for all my Greek friends here.
(Applause)
Thank you.