The Kazakh poet Aron Atabek has been in prison since 2007. He has been placed in solitary confinement for two years as punishment for writing a book that criticises President Nursultan Nazarbayev, and is due for return to the general prison population at the end of 2014. He has previously spent two years in solitary confinement for refusing to wear a prison uniform: one third of his incarceration so far has been spent in isolation. Both the UN Human Rights Committee and the UN Committee against Torture have concluded that prolonged solitary confinement is tantamount to torture. Atabek describes his confinement as ‘a prison within a prison.’
Atabek has been involved in publishing, writing and political activism since the mid-1980s. He is the founder of two newspapers and author of nine books. For more than two decades his writing and activism have focused on political and social issues, and on the corruption that he believes has kept President Nazarbayev in power for the last 23 years. He is a blunt and very vocal critic of the president.
Any of our readers who wish to know more about this imprisoned writer please consult the web link of Ambit magazine underneath the poem ‘My throat will die’.
International PEN Writers in Prison Committee is running a campaign for Aron Atabek. Those interested in helping could consult the weblinks to Cathal Sheerin’s campaign through the links at the end of the poetry citations.
We fell in love, brought together
By the opposition slogan “Down with CPSS!”*
In our youth thirsting for cocktails
Of politics and sex.
O, how we relished those nights!
The feral perfume of our own bodies,
The obsidian circles of your eyes
And the groan of shooting stars.
We elected to live our lives
As dissidents, chasing freedom,
Lightning-rods for a truth, fused
With our nation’s story.
We wandered through hemispheres
In search of the way, the logos,
Disseminating ideas in journals
To seed-bomb the peoples’ conscience.
Among children in desert outposts,
Massed squadrons of strangers,
Fate threw us under rolling tanks
As artillery ricocheted overhead:
Thus we won a worldly omniscience
While losing family, friends.
Our words were flame-tempered.
Blind at first, we were becoming seers
Traversing firewheels of hell
But revolving at last
To the place of sweetest silence,
A clairaudience of heartbeats;
And so, we are forever dissidents.
The fire of opposition flares for all,
And our youth is still longing
For poetry –
And love!
*CPSS – The Communist Party of the Soviet
(Translated from the Russian by Alfia Nakipbekova and co-translated by Niall McDevitt)
For background on Atabek’s case, see Cathal Sheerin’s research/campaign: http://pen-international.org/newsitems/call-to-action-kazakh-poet-aron-atabek-a-prison-within-a-prison/
Atabek was recently moved out of solitary confinement, but still has no contact with his family: http://pen-international.org/newsitems/kazakh-poet-aron-atabek-out-of-solitary-confinement-still-no-contact-with-family/