Harold Pinter went to Turkey to protest the torture of jailed writers

Person: Harold Pinter
Lived: 1930–2008
Field: Playwriting, screenwriting
From: British

The story

Harold Pinter was born in Hackney, in London’s East End, in 1930, the son of a Jewish tailor. By the 1980s he was one of the most celebrated playwrights in the world, and he had become an officer of International PEN, the association of writers that defends freedom of expression and campaigns for authors imprisoned for what they write. The Swedish Academy later noted that from 1973 he had been recognised as a fighter for human rights alongside his writing.

In the mid-1980s many dissident writers in Turkey were in prison, and there were reports that some had been tortured. Pinter travelled there with the American playwright Arthur Miller on a mission co-sponsored by International PEN and a Helsinki Watch committee, to investigate and protest against the torture of imprisoned writers. According to Hürriyet, they were met at the airport by the Turkish writers Orhan Pamuk and Gündüz Vassaf, and visited both Istanbul and Ankara. They met victims of political oppression and their families and heard first-hand accounts of what had been done to them.

The two playwrights also went to the United States embassy in Ankara to register their complaints on behalf of PEN. Pinter spoke so bluntly about torture in Turkish prisons that, as he later recounted, he was asked to leave the embassy. The episode drew attention, in Turkey and abroad, to writers who otherwise had few voices outside their cells.

Pinter turned the experience into art. His knowledge of the Turkish suppression of the Kurdish language helped inspire Mountain Language, first performed at the National Theatre in London in October 1988. In about twenty minutes, it shows prisoners’ wives and mothers waiting outside a jail and being forbidden to speak their own language. Pinter insisted the play was not only about Turkey and the Kurds: throughout history, he said, many languages have been banned, including Irish and Welsh. Leaving the play without a named place or time made it a warning that applies anywhere.

Mountain Language has since been staged by companies around the world, including Kurdish actors in London. The trip also shaped the rest of Pinter’s life: he kept speaking up for persecuted writers until his death in 2008, and English PEN’s annual PEN Pinter Prize, created in his memory, is shared each year with a writer persecuted for speaking out.

Why it matters

Pinter’s mission and the play it inspired helped make the torture of jailed writers and the banning of languages visible to audiences everywhere, strengthening the worldwide defence of free expression.

About Harold Pinter

Hackney-born playwright whose “comedies of menace” showed how ordinary talk hides power and fear, and who campaigned with PEN for writers jailed for their words. Nobel Prize 2005.

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Harold Pinter

1930–2008 · Playwriting, screenwriting

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