International Literature Festival Prishtina
POLIP 2015

LET’S TALK ABOUT FREEDOM!

Literature post-Charlie Hebdo

22 – 24 May 2015

The start of 2015 was marked by a terrorist act in Paris. The terrorist attack on the editorial offices of the Parisien satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo marked a new era of instability and threats to our freedoms, above all to critical thinking, satire and humour. On that occasion 12 people were killed. A great wave of support for the satirical magazine followed, but also an outcry, primarily from clerical circles, as well as from the political right. The new edition of Charlie Hebdo had until-now unheard of circulation of 3 million copies and it was translated into dozens of European languages. Due to all this, has Europe come to realisation of the importance of critique of liberal democracy? Has literature come to self-awareness of the indispensability of the never ending fight for freedom? Has terrorism recoiled? After the terrorist act in Paris, debates on the limits of freedom spread through Europe. At one such gathering in the middle of February, held in the Kruttonden café in Copenhagen, two hundred bullets were fired. The main target was the organiser of the gathering, the Danish cartoonist Lars Vilks. This situation is not new and it brings us back to the beginning of European civilisation, to the ancient poetics. Already Plato expressed in his Republic the hostility towards literarture that is able to undermine our world view, the organisation of the state and representations of the Gods. Many centuries later, Umberto Ecco based his cult novel In the Name of the Rose on the fictional destiny of the lost second part of Aristotle’s Poetics, which surprisingly dealt with questions of comedy. The literature that circulates today between Kosovo and Serbia is still underground, like all real literature around the world is underground. What does it mean to write despite intolerance and the walls of misunderstanding that are still going up in Europe? There is no other world apart from the one in whose making we participate ourselves. Literature is its constituent part and freedom is the heart of existence. After the attack on Charlie Hebdo someone said that in Europe today we need laughter more than ever. We also need the freedom of literature the POLIP Festival promotes more than ever. Let’s talk about freedom!