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- [00:09]
A
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. The free speech advocacy organization PEN America has announced its new president, the novelist and former get lit author, Danao Mingestu. PEN America is one of the world's leading activist group for writers fighting book bans and unlawful imprisonment. It's the largest chapter of a network that advocates for novelists, poets and journalists in the United States and around the world. This announcement comes following a tumultuous couple of years for the century old organization. In 2024, it canceled its annual World Voices Festival after a number of writers dropped out in protest of the organization's response to the war in Gaza. Some have called for a boycott of the organization. Earlier this year, Manguestu wrote a letter on PEN America's commitment to free speech in which he writes. I'm going to read to you. Every day we see what happens when a government under the banner of protecting free speech or in the supposed defense against the very real threat of anti Semitism, chooses to curate which voices have the right to speak and which ones don't. The brutal repre. Sorry. The brutal representation is a reminder that PEN America's defense and advocacy must be rendered vigorously and equitably, regardless of who sits in power. Danao Mangestu joins me now. It is nice to see you again.
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B
Wonderful to see you as well, Alison. Thank you.
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A
What do you see as the role of the president of PEN America?
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B
Oh, oh, that's a question I'm still trying to answer. You know, I think first and foremost it's to be, you know, the most outward facing advocate for the organization. To be the person who will promote and talk about and kind of sing its praises as loudly as possible. And at the same time, I also believe that the organization is structured in a way that the president of PAN America always has to be a writer. And I think there's a reason for that, which is that we understand that the relationship between the free expression work that we do and the literary community. Community, it's really integrated. Right. These two things exist in conversation and in partnership with each other. And I think some greets the writers who kind of help give an ethical framework to the work that we do. And so I think as the board president, part of my responsibility, I think, is to hopefully reflect and kind of, you know, echo what I hear is happening inside of the literary community and to be a kind of advocate and voice for them inside of the organization. While, of course, you know, advocating and defending for the organization and all of the other work that it does.
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A
You've been on the board for a few years.
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B
Yes, for a while, yeah.
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A
So what have you learned about the organization while serving on the board?
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B
You know, I think people sometimes aren't aware of just how many different things that we do. You know, it's great that we support and we advocate and we defend writers. And I think that's certainly what the organization has. It's most sort of like. That's our calling card. Right. Like writers who are imprisoned, we are out there defending them and calling for their release. But. But alongside of that, though, we also understand that there are so many other ways in which our free expression is threatened. And that's where PEN America's work, I think, is kind of really critical and essential because we're out there documenting and recording all of the more subtle ways in which government or in sometimes non state actors can kind of limit or restrict how we speak or what we think we're able to say. So book bans, for example, are a very obvious form of government repression and censorship. But there's something also lost when we begin to lose newspapers. You know, when you live in a community where you no longer have access to local news, it's not necessarily that your free expression is being threatened, but you are losing a kind of accountability to your own body politics. And I think we are, you know, at the forefront of documenting that. And we also do a lot of work supporting writers at risk. We do a lot of work on campus free speech issues and promoting and fostering a culture of really engaged dialogue across differences.
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A
Long time ago, when you were an aspiring writer, you said that Penn looked like an elite club where you went to the banquet and everybody knew everybody else. When did that image of Penn start to change for you and why?
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B
You know, I think it changed pretty quickly as soon as I began to actually. I mean, I think it took even more than just joining the board. I think it became required, actually getting closer to the actual staff and seeing what they do and understanding that when you look at our free expression work, that you have a whole team of experts who are documenting and charting and reaching out to writers and politicians and lobbying for writers all around the world. And that there is an enormous amount of work that goes into the human rights work that PEN does. And that work requires a kind of collaborative partnership with not only Penn International, but with other nonprofits around the world. And there are a lot of people who are doing that. So before we can kind of bring forward the cause of an individual writer, we do so much background work in terms of understanding obviously, not only that person's history, but also the political context in which they're. In which they live, in which they've been imprisoned, and making sure that we have a real sense of what the stakes are before going out there with it. So I think you have to almost kind of get inside of the organization and you realize there's a whole kind of incredible network of people working together to promote our work.
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A
As you've seen in recent years, it's not easy to lead an organization like PEN America. Why did you want to take on this role?
- [06:03]
B
You know, one. I mean, I think I feel so fortunate with everything that literature and the literary community and reading has brought to my life. Like, my life is very much a product of having been kind of gifted and surrounded by books my whole life life. And to some degree, this feels like a kind of. Like a way to pay that back. Like, there's a debt that I think you feel like you've accumulated as a result of that. So there's certainly that. And I also think that there's, you know, the number of writers who are actually out there in the world doing things. It's pretty amazing, right? There's a whole world of literary service that happens that sometimes we fail to recognize, or sometimes we still tend to imagine the writer as a kind of somewhat isolated or hermited figure on the sidelines of society, when, in fact, you know, there's just a fantastic body of writers out there, like, really advocating and doing incredibly important work, from running bookstores to fighting book bans, to actually, in some cases, really supporting Penn's work in fighting those book bans. So being on the board for as long as I was, this just actually felt like joining that community and being. Continuing to act in service the same way other writers have been doing for a very long time.
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A
I'm speaking to Danael Magestu, who has just been elected as the new president of the free speech advocacy organization PEN America. At the moment. What do you think is the most urgent issue for PEN America?
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B
I think. I mean, we've never had this kind of government censorship in our recent history, and it's hard to even sort of catalog all the ways in which it has already altered and changed the way we communicate. You know, there's some things that are very obvious there, the book bans, but then there are also the kind of relationship between government and corporations and the obvious silencing that is happening there. When I look at what's happening with people who are immigrants in this country, they have lost a lot of their free expression rights under this administration. And they are. They know they cannot speak about certain issues. They know that they are unable to talk about sometimes the most important, pressing political issues of this moment. Right. And that includes, you know, trans rights, Palestinian lives, those are topics of conversation that have been kind of walled off by this administration. And because so much is happening, it's sometimes easy to forget and kind of realize that for a certain. For a large segment of our communities, the silencing has already happened. And how do we get that voice back? And what do we do to ensure that, you know, that when this ends, that those people actually feel like they will be able to speak again? Right. I think you. You take away that ab. There's a kind of, you know, there's a lasting damage unless we sort of fiercely fight back and kind of recognize that this is not only temporary, but the power really resides within our communities, and it resides within us.
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A
Your predecessor is the writer and trans activist Jennifer Finley Boylan. And she said she told the New York Times when she took this role, she began to think of herself more as an activist. Do you think of yourself as an activist?
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B
No, I always think of myself as a writer who's deeply engaged, and I think of the writing that I'm most interested in as writing that tries to look out at the world as it is and tries to understand it, knowing that it will never get it right. But you want to try to see it in all of its strange complexity, which means you want to see it from the sides that you agree with and the sides that you disagree with, which means you want to see it in its totality. And I think that idea is very much not only a literary idea, but it's very much kind of at the core of our free expression value. Right. That we understand that in order for this right to exist, it has to be shared and universally kind of transmuted. Everybody has to have access to it. If we begin to allow one group or one body of people to have a greater ability to speak than others, then suddenly we are in a very sort of dangerous place. So I think this sen. Of wanting to feel like, as a writer, you really see and engage with all parts of our society kind of leads directly, I think, into the work that I do at PEN America.
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A
What is PEN America's responsibilities to writers outside of the United States?
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B
Well, fortunately, we have an incredible. We are a chapter. Right. So there is Penn International. We have all of these wonderful PEN chapters around the world, and a lot of the Work that we do would be really impossible without either those other chapters or without our partners at PEN International in particular. And I think, obviously, because of US Foreign policy and the influence our government has, I think we know that for us to remain silent in certain areas and in certain moments is a problem because we actually are implicated in what's happening around the world. And I think it's a challenge that we always have to kind of go back to and reassess, like, where we want to make sure that we're not just kind of pointing fingers at other countries, but that we are acting ethically and responsibly, that we are aware not only of what's happening in those countries, but, of course, what our countries, what our relationship is in terms of our own politics to those places.
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A
How do you plan to handle criticism from members when they express concern that the organization isn't doing enough or has certain blind spots?
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B
I can only say thank you for that, because not only is criticism obviously kind of fundamental to what we imagine a free society to be capable of, not only sustaining, but also nurturing, but I also think when you think of the work that we do and the advocacy that we do, that advocacy kind of demands that we hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards at all times. And the only way we can do that is if we also have people who are willing to challenge and critique us. It doesn't mean we always have to agree with it. But those challenges and those critiques are not only another form of free expression that I think we are obviously obligated to defend and protect the same way we would everything else, but they are also the ways in which I think we hold ourselves accountable to it. You know, and I think when writers in particular look at the organization and they ask for it to do more, they ask for it to. To engage in ways that perhaps it hasn't. I always take that and believe that to be an expression of, you know, one of fundamental concern for the world and a desire for us to do something to make it better. Whether we can or whether we are able to do so might be something else. But that actual challenge, I think, is always given and sort of delivered with, you know, I think the most important intent. Right. Which is, are we treating everybody equally and are we doing the best that we can to protect other people's rights?
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A
We're speaking with Danau Mengestu, who is now the new president of PEN America. You're a professor at Bard.
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B
Yes.
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A
Will you keep your position there?
- [13:34]
B
Yeah, I hope so. And, you know, the Two, they go hand in hand. You know, Bard's been a fantastic institution that really. We work with PEN America to create this new platform to protect independent news, independent news under totalitarian regimes, because it's quite easy to actually erase an entire country's history of independent media. So we've worked Pan America and Bard to create a new platform that actually archives a lot of these independent news media, so that way they can't be erased when there's a new regime in power.
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A
Are you going to have time to still write novels? We love reading your book for get.
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B
Lit and that was maybe my favorite book event. Yeah, without a doubt. It was phenomenal. You know, when you're surrounded by other writers, I have to say, nothing makes you want to do more than write. I don't know if it's because of the competitiveness of it, but because you're always in dialogue with writers and you're always asking each other, what are you working on or what have you been doing? And when you hear all of the things that people are creating, especially creating in a time where it'd be so easy not to do that, you do feel like, oh, yeah, this is why I'm here to, you know, and this is why all of this is here to begin with. Right? We live in a world made by writers and we are all readers at the same time. So you want to be a part of that dialogue again.
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A
I'm speaking to the new president of PEN America, Danao Mengestu. Best of luck to you.
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B
Thank you so much, Alison.
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C
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A
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