Oleg Sentsov © Sergei Venyavsky/Getty Images In a letter smuggled out of Labytnangi Penal Colony in September 2016, Crimean-born, Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov writes, “If we’re supposed to become nails in the coffin of a tyrant, I’d like to become one of those nails. Just know that this particular nail will not bend.” On . . .
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Editor’s note: The rapid rise of arrogant, authoritarian power across the globe today is evident for all to see. In his recent blog post, Erri De Luca reflects on the criminal behavior of European leaders who promote policies on immigration which condemn thousands of innocents to die each year in the Mediterranean . . .
Read MoreI am a Catalan writer, and have lived in the United Kingdom for the last three years. I was born in Barcelona, where I spent most of my previous life. When Franco died, I was thirteen. When I was a child, they used to tell us at school that Franco had led . . .
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“The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their only weapon against life, life is all that they have.” James Baldwin, a twentieth-century American writer, was forced to make racism his business—he was part of a people segregated at birth . . .
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“Borders were Made to be Crossed.” Marco Aime, Il Fatto quotidiano, 6 August 2017 He’d already said it in a poem from his collection Solo andata (“One-Way Ticket”): “Dry land in Italy is land locked down,/ We let them drown to drown them out.” And now, during a TV interview on Italy’s La7, he’s said it again. In . . .
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Aleppo, Syria from the WSJ (May 4, 2016).Photo: Karam Al-Masri/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images Some twenty years ago, during the war in Bosnia, I walked into cities made somber by hunger. We unloaded packages for families found on the trip before: we distributed them directly, without intermediaries, storage sites, or stockpiles. I saw hunger in the . . .
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Genoa, July 1, 2016, Address to the National Meeting of the Italian NGO Emergency In a letter to his brother, the French painter Eugène Delacroix writes: “I’m working on a modern subject, the barricade.” His reference is to the famous painting, Liberty Leading the People, a commemoration of the 1830 insurrection. What would be . . .
Read MoreIn 2015, more than one million refugees and migrants made the perilous trip to Europe via the Mediterranean Sea. In October alone, to beat the onset of winter and closing European borders, their number rose to nearly a quarter million, a record, and more than the total for all of 2014, as . . .
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To most people, the idea that lectures in literature classes have policy implications will seem laughable. Such people, I’m fairly sure, haven’t spent a good deal of time in Bosnia-Herzegovina. And they certainly don’t know its history. As for me, given recent headlines, well, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about a . . .
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Refugees under police escort to Brežice last October.(Jeff J Mitchell, Getty Images, from The Guardian) During the month of October 2015, Hungary closed its southern borders and refugees crossing Serbia were diverted through Croatia and Slovenia. Each day some eight thousand refugees began entering Slovenia, a country with a population of less than . . .
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