Romaissaa Benzizoune
English PEN
London, England
When I finally landed in the UK, it was early July and the weather was beautiful. Which I quickly discovered was not the norm, that a UK summer is not in fact summer but a very confused fall. Boris Johnson had not yet been elected, Love Island (a very popular British reality show) was in full swing, and I discovered that British culture centered entirely on pubs being open really bizarrely early.
In an attempt to make up for lost time, I went into the office soon after arriving. As it turns out, the English PEN team only consists of 5 people: Hannah Trevarthen (interim director, who once wrote me a list of London recommendations in neat flourishes), Will Forrester (director of Pen Translates, editor of PEN Transmissions, and a Keira Knightley lookalike), Cat Lucas (director of Writers at Risk and now one of the people I most admire in the world), Deborah Bourne (the soft-spoken finance and governance manager), and Marion Rankine (administrative assistant, with tattoos like the solar system).
When I met them, I realized i was exceedingly lucky to work with such a team. For the first few weeks, I shadowed various members of the team and learned about their roles. I learned a lot about the functioning of small nonprofits, and the essentiality of each role (and how a lot of the positions are part-time, for budgeting reasons). I worked directly with Cat on the Writers at Risk program, but because the team is so small, I helped out wherever needed. My work felt supportive to their work, and I was really grateful to be in an environment where I could contribute in a meaningful way, rather than being relegated to the tedious administrative tasks that interns in larger work settings find themselves almost exclusively taxed with.
In this post, I will summarize some of the campaign-related work that I did this summer. A lot of nonprofit work, human rights based or otherwise, is about gathering funding, and during my time at English PEN, I helped Hannah look over a major grant she was putting together for a substantial part of the summer. Additionally, during my time at PEN, I helped publicize (via twitter) a crowdfunding campaign that sought to keep the original copy of an historically significant English novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in the UK. The book follows an “aristocratic woman embarking on a passionate relationship with a groundskeeper outside of her sexless marriage.” The subject of an obscenity trial in 1960, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a symbol of the free expression that PEN stands for. The triumph of the book, which was declared to be not obscene during the trial, shifted the English literary scene (as well as English sensibilities) significantly.
Something that reminds me of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover episode is an event from one of my favorite books, Reading Lolita in Tehran. In the book, The Great Gatsby was put on a mock trial as a classroom activity during Iran’s revolutionary period. Although I thought it was a charming idea, I questioned the choice to spend resources on the case of a physical book versus, say, a living imprisoned person. Then again, freedom of expression is nothing if not a carefully cultivated ideal, an abstracted symbol.