Dear Dawit [Isaac],

I wonder if, sometimes, you feel that imagination is all you have left. And if you do, Dawit, if you even have the strength to let yourself dream for a moment, imagine there is a world beyond where you are not forgotten. You have a brother who canvasses for you tirelessly, friends and colleagues, a wife and children, a Swedish government very aware of your case, several human rights groups advocating on your behalf, you have the concern of writers like me, one of a community of writers who do not know you personally but feel passionately enraged, ferocious at times, at the injustice of silencing, the tyranny of censorship, the cruelty of suppression, the determination to erase.

We all share this fight, this need to defend what is fundamental and human – the right to speak our truths, to be heard, to write, to read, to exist. The silencing of one writer is the silencing of us all, and it is in that spirit, that I write to you. When fear and cowardice and the perversion of power attempt to prevent us from doing so, it becomes all the more important that we join our voices.

I have not shared your experience. But when I think of you, my imagination does what a writer’s imagination does. I think about a prisoner of conscience, a man who exists in confinement so solitary that he begins to forget himself. For fifteen minutes a day, he and his fellow inmates are afforded the privilege of stepping out of their excrement and crawling on all fours over a field of broken glass. This is the recreation – the torture is, of course, far worse.

We do imagine, Dawit, because no one can place limits on our imaginations. Not even yours.

You can dream of a world beyond, and in your mind, you have the freedom to write anything you want, without fear of reprisal. So write my friend, speak your truths, even if in silence, because we are listening here, attuned, even those of us who seem so remote to you, so far away and unknown to you. Your plight is not unknown to us. You do not disappear despite all attempts to keep you from view.

You are not forgotten, Dawit Isaac.

Your friend, far in distance, near in heart and mind,

Camilla Gibb