Spiros Vergos Prize

Peter Matthiessen will receive the Spiros Vergos Prize for Freedom of Expression at the Festival’s Gala Evening on 6 June.

Spiros Vergos—poet, diplomat, journalist—was a great friend of the Festival, and the director of PWF 2005. Forced to flee Greece by the dictatorship in 1967, he went through exile—and resistance. He died in Prague in May 2007.

To honor his memory the Prize was established in 2008, and given to Natalia Gorbanevskaya. Adonis received the award last year.

Peter Matthiessen writes:

I am honored indeed to be awarded the Spiros Vergos Prize for Freedom of Expression, but having worked for thirty years in vain to win freedom for my country’s unjustly imprisoned American Indian activist Leonard Peltier—one of many young Indians involved in a shoot out near Wounded Knee on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, where two agents and a young Indian did not survive—I’m not sure at all I deserve it.

With the appearance of my book about this case—In the Spirit of Crazy Horse—the authors and his publisher were sued for libel: for $25 million dollars by the Governor of South Dakota and another $24 million by an FBI agent. After eight years of what is said to have been the longest libel suit in U.S. history, both suits were dismissed—a great victory for freedom of speech but not for Peltier, who entered prison at age 27 and has rotted there for thirty-three years despite heavy criticism of our Justice Department and its FBI and international demands for a new trial; unless clemency can be won under President Obama, as is hoped, this ill old man will die there, thanks mainly to the unrelenting vindictiveness of the FBI.

Nor can I claim that half a century of advocacy for social justice for minorities and in defense of wildlife and our human habitat has made much difference, either. Though some progress has been made, racisim still casts its shadow almost everywhere, and the world environment remains sorely stressed by over-population and its inevitable pollutions together with the accelerating diminishment of resources, in particular clean fresh water.

Yes,  there  is  wonderful   technical  progress  in  almost  every  realm  of life, but darkness and folly  have  relentlessly  kept pace  and sometimes,  as  now,   seem to  have  seized  control.   How can one  feel secure  about  the  future   when  nuclear  weaponry  may  soon  be acquired  by diseased regimes  and  desperate  failed states: what if  this plague  of terrorism   should   mutate  and metastisize  and  spread  like medieval plague, epidemic  and  beyond control?   What  sort of   toxic  existence  will  humanity endure  in  a  new  Dark  Ages  when  all  of us  are  doomed  not  to live  but  merely  to subsist under the constant  threat  of   fanatic  cold  mass  murder?

Horrible.  And  it  is  pitifully   naive to  imagine—as  our  political and military leaders   seem to imagine—that  assassinating   a  few  terrorist leaders  will  stamp  this  fire  out. It can only  slow it , temporarily  at that. Nothing  will  stop  this  rage and  violence  until our  industrial societies,  Christian  and Hebraic—and  most  Muslim societies, for that matter—confront  the  intrenched   greed   and  injustice   that   continue  to feed   this  eruption  of  rage and  violence.

Our crudely  materialist societies—led  these  days, I  am sorry  to say,  by  my own country—must acknowledge  the  great  guilt  we share  with  repressive Islamic  societies (almost all societies, perhaps?) for causing  millions of poverty-diminished  people—the great majority  of   our fellow  human  beings  on  this once beautiful  earth—to  feel  humiliated,  dehumanized, despised.  In  a  world where  the  few    obscenely  rich  look  down with equanimity  on  the   hordes   imprisoned  in  poverty,  in  a  stunted  hand-to-mouth existence in  which  their children  have  lost hope  of  hope  itself—do  we   really  wonder  why   such  gross  inequities   breed  rage  and  unholy   violence?

These days my countrymen are very angry,  rightly so, as we  watch our  bankers and industrialists  and  insurance  brokers  celebrate their  massive  profits  and  the  enormous  bonuses  they award themselves   at the  expense of   millions  of  their  countrymen  who have  lost  jobs  and  homes  and  the assurance  of   good  educations for  their children and  a decent  future. And  they—and we—will plunge ahead  toward  disaster  with scarcely  a  backward look,  for that is our human nature and has always been our human nature;  we  cannot help ourselves, so it appears.

And  so  we  will  take small inadequate  steps  to  take responsibility  for others,  and  to insure  nuclear  sanity, and  to  prepare  for  the oncoming catastrophe of  climate change, and meanwhile we  will cause  water wars by commercializing  the  last  fresh  water  with an eye,  perhaps, to the last  regions  of  fresh air, because  that has always been our human nature, the nature  of the species, and  it  isn’t  going to change.  (‘Your planet’s immune system is trying to get rid of  you’  reads  the  sticker pasted  by  my late friend  the American writer  Kurt Vonnegut on  the back  of my truck.)

Do you recall the old fable  of the  scorpion  and frog? The scorpion asks the frog  politely  to ferry  him across  the  river and the  frog  protests, Certainly not! You scorpions are known  for your  fatal  sting!  And  the scorpion says,  I would  never sting a friend who helps me in a time of  need. So finally the frog is persuaded, and the two set out, and halfway across  the scorpion stings him for no  reason  whatever. Unable  to swim  further, the dying  frog cries  out,  You lied  to me  and  stung me  and  now both of us will drown!  And the scorpion says, I could not help  myself;  that is  my scorpion nature.

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Peter Matthiessen’s latest novel Shadow Country has been awarded  the  prestigious Howells Medal  by the American Academy  of Arts and Letters. According to the citation, “this award is given  once  every five years  in recognition of  the most distinguished work of fiction published in that period.”