Each month notices of writers under threat come across my desk. I find myself studying the pictures of the writers when there are pictures, writing down their names, and when available, reading some of their work to make them real in my own mind and imagination and later to share their work, which governments hope to silence. Along with other members of PEN I write appeals on their behalf with no definitive measure of how effective these are, but over time the accumulation of protests from writers and others around the world does push open consciousness and prison doors.
In the past month, writers have been imprisoned with long sentences in China,...
The sun glints off the waves of the Bosporus as the wind skims across the surface of the water, and power boats, tourist ships and ferries cruise between the shores of Europe and Asia on Istanbul’s great waterway. I’ve arrived to an Indian summer in this city at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and the Middle East after a PEN International Congress an hour and a half away in Belgrade where the theme was Literature—Language of the World.
I’m here with purpose and meetings, but for the afternoon I have a few hours to sit on the banks of the waterway and write and contemplate the bridges linking the two continents and consider...
We were five PEN members in Beijing,proceeding to Hong Kong where we’d been invited to celebrate Independent Chinese PEN Center’s (ICPC)tenth anniversary. It happened also to be the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party in China as large commemorative plaques proclaimed in Tiananmen Square. And it was the 90th anniversary of PEN International.
We were there to visit writers and book stores and any independent publishers we could find to gather information on the state of literature and freedom of expression in China and to show solidarity with threatened colleagues. Half the members of the Independent Chinese PEN Center lived in China, half outside. A number of ICPC’s membershad been sent...
It turned out that, indeed, there was another area of the exhibit that had more publishers of literary fiction than the area I’d previously visited.By the end of the day I had a bag full of so many goodies I had to ship them home.First, I stopped (again) by Europa Editions’s table because I’d been told that they would give books away.I had the unexpected luck of meeting the publisher himself, Kent Caroll, who let me choose two novels.I picked The...
It’s touching how diligently pundits and politicians of the non-fact-based reality persuasion try to rewrite the record of George W. Bush. For example: Tea Party Nation head Judson Phillips “said that the death of Osama bin Laden happened in spite of President Obama.” (Right Wing Watch 5/2/11) “Bush’s persistence was palpable and set the tone for the intelligence community tasked with bringing bin Laden to justice. (Dan Balz, Washington Post 5/2/11)
To make such statements one must ignore the opportunity before 9/11. “The Bush administration now had in its hands what one participant called ‘the holy grail’ of a three-year quest by the U.S. government – a tool that could kill bin Laden within minutes of finding him. The CIA planned and practiced the operation. But...
After defecting from the Festival for a day to attend a showing at the Tribeca Film Festival and a performance of an exiled theater troupe from Belarus that should have been part of the World Voices Festival [see boxes], I rode the Madison Ave. bus to the French Embassy’s Cultural Services department for the “Authors and Audiences” panel. On the panel were Bookforum editor and panel moderator Albert Mobilio, Spanish novelist Manuel de Lope, Israeli novelist and screenwriter Yael Hedaya, Israeli novelist and translator Asaf Schurr, French novelist Laurence Cosse, and Irish novelist and screenwriter Irvine Welsh. The empty chair at the beginning of this panel did not symbolize an imprisoned writer or even Mario Bellatin, who could not attend for other reasons, but was...
Thursday evening PEN World Voices spread out. As I sat in the front section of the Morgan Library auditorium, I knew there were whirlwinds of words circling over Manhattan and at least one other borough.
When you write a book, says Francine Prose, and you get a review, there's always that second or third paragraph where they give the plot summary. And you read it and say, How did anyone ever think this is what the book was about? So when a movie is made from your novel, it's like seeing that paragraph blown up really big.
There are five novelists on the stage, all with experience of having books turned into films.
When I wrote the book that became "Betty Blue," says Philippe Djian, I wanted to write about a kid who scribbles away in his corner, who fills notebook after notebook wityh his writing, and who feels no need to take it any further. Writing is enough for him. But...
So it's in a little room at the Maison Française, off Washington Square, well-attended. well-lit, video-recorded, photographed, remembered perhaps, blogged about certainly.
Djian is the guy in the black leather jacket with the three-day beard. The woman on his arm, it develops, is his interpreter. With them is A.M. Homes who will moderate/interview/jolly things along.
Not much is happening. Clearly we have a provocateur at the dais, but the fur is refusing to fly. The mechanics of the session are interesting. First A. M. Homes asks a question, but invariably someone starts to talk before she has made her point. The interpreter. She's translating into Philippe Djian's ear. Then Djian answers, elaborates, wings off on a tangential tack, loops back around, falls silent. Now it's the interpreter's...
I’m staring straight into the sun lighting up the sky in shades of pink before it sets. I watch it slowly losing altitude behind a building near the World Bank. The yellow globe is sinking into the river, into the trees of Virginia across the Potomac. I am typing without looking at the page, my eyes fixed on the sun which I want to keep in the sky. For some reason I feel frantic to keep staring at the sun, hoping it won’t disappear. But in the time it has taken to write these few sentences, it has already lost half its sphere and is now only a diameter on the horizon. Soon it will be dark. I keep writing. I...
I met Haitian writer Georges Anglade, a bear of a man with a curly gray beard, in the Arctic Circle, in Tromso, Norway in 2004. He spilled a glass of red wine on me. We were at the opening reception of International PEN’s Congress, and whether we were moving in the same or opposite directions around the hors d’oeuvres table or he was gesturing with enthusiasm with his wine glass in his hand, I no longer remember; but the flow of wine down my black suit we both remembered every time we saw each other in the years that followed. It bound us in a moment of surprise and laughter and a kind of instant friendship as if I had been christened by him.
“The Greatest Generation” is the title of a book about a great generation. Perhaps it is also the opinion of the author, although book titles are determined by many factors, including sales. No person has the right or the authority to appoint any person or generation “the greatest.” At best one can only nominate.
There have been many great generations of Americans. I was born and raised in the southwest. My ancestors fought on both sides of the Civil War but in school I studied “The War Between the States” and read textbooks about northern aggression and states rights. I never attended a school where blacks would have been allowed to enroll. Nevertheless, the patriots who fought so hard and sacrificed so much to preserve...
From the November/December 2009 Issue of World Literature Today as the Introduction to the Special Feature, "Voices Against the Darkness: Imprisoned Writers Who Could Not Be Silenced"
The prisoner Halil
closed his book.
He breathed on his glasses, wiped them clean,
gazed out at the orchards,
and said:
“I don’t know if you are like me,
Suleyman,
But coming down the Bosporus on the ferry, say
making the turn at Kandilli,
and suddenly seeing Istanbul there,
or one of those sparkling nights
of Kalamish Bay
filled with stars and the rustle of water,
or the boundless daylight
in the fields outside Topkapi
or a woman’s sweet face glimpsed on a streetcar,
or even the yellow geranium I grew in a tin can
in...
There's nothing more important than perseverance. It's what every PEN member knows. Without it none of us would be here.
On Thursday (9/24) I'll be interviewed on Queens Public Television (QPTV), 8-9 pm about my book, ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust.
While it's now in its third printing and has been translated into 13 languages, its beginning was decidedly ignominious: 83 publishers rejected it before it finally saw the light of day.
One night at a PEN gathering when I told some people about the lengths I had to go to find an agent, including putting together a 20-page marketing plan one of them demanded, the cartoonist Stan Mack was so amused he asked me if he...
A settlement has been reached today in the case Wiwa v Royal Dutch Shell. The amount has been announced as $15.5 million. The plaintiffs have stated that the possibility of appeals could have dragged the case on for much longer. $5 million of the funds will be held in trust to rebuild the devastated Ogoni community in the Niger delta region of Nigeria. Rights groups are hailing the settlement as a victory for the cause of human rights.
The PEN American Center was deeply involved in advocacy for Ken Saro-Wiwa's cause.
Sooner or later, a guy writing short stories in English is going to have to come up against Richard Ford, whose work from Rock Springs to A Multitude of Sins has proven him to be a master of the form, hence his 2001 PEN/Malamud award for excellence in short fiction. (Not to mention Ford’s novel Independence Day, which won the Pulitzer and the PEN/Faulkner award, and his novel The Lay of the Land, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in fiction.) For Nam Le, who was born in Vietnam, raised in Australia and completed Iowa’s notorious MFA program, that moment came Sunday afternoon at the
She appeared at three events. Wearing a brightly colored dress and beautiful silver hair, she would raise her hand. Each time she would ask a difficult, penetrating question in a spritely, musical voice that challenged an author on a PEN World Voices Panel. This time about the role of government, that time about writing and dreams. She always carried herself with dignity and smiled warmly at her neighbors. I kept wondering to myself, who is this woman?
I soon found out at the Freedom to Write Lecture at NYU's Cooper Union. For she was stepping onto the stage with the Ghanaian Kwame Anthony Appiah, President of PEN America and professor at Princeton. The woman was Nawal El Saadawi.
WRITERS AND POLITICS AT PEN WORLD VOICES
Featuring Nadeem Aslam, Norbert Gstrein, Mariken Jongman, Khet Mar, Domenico Starnone, and Larry Siems.
With politicians becoming writers (Obama, Nixon), and writers becoming politicians (Mario Vargas Llosa, Vaclav Havel, Shashi Tharoor), is it possible to draw a line between politics and literature, and declare that one should never include the other?
Art as neutral to and indifferent to and above politics: it is an appealing self-deception, a bit more prevalent in the West, with writers whose professed stance, “I am not my brother’s keeper; I’m an artist, and that is all I am” seemingly carries this subtext: "I’ve got to look out for Number One,...
60 million people can’t be nerds. If they are, they’ve probably come to terms with it.
The Japanese story form manga uses extended plotlines and a distinct pictorial style. It falls somewhere in between a graphic novel and a comic book. Widely read in Japan, where it is a $4 billion industry, Manga attracts a slightly more esoteric crowd in the U.S. Here such readers may be considered nerds. There, they are cool. But increased domestic sales suggest that manga may no longer be the stuff stashed in freshman lockers.
Manga depicts stories of everything from shogunate sword fights to the lives of ordinary salarymen. A typical issue may contain several shorter storylines and be between 200-400 pages in length. Most of...
Fifteen years after the death of author Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Niger Delta region of Nigeria remains embroiled in conflict. Kidnappings and murders are on the rise, and America is more dependent on Nigerian oil than ever. If there is hope, it may be found in Saro-Wiwa's legacy of non-violent activism. But the window of opportunity may soon be closing.
A Little Background: Why we care about Saro-Wiwa
A little background is in order. Ken Saro-Wiwa largely became known to people outside Nigeria for his activism against the degradation of his homeland in the Southern part of the country. Oil companies, particularly Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum, had destroyed this once fertile wetlands through a combination of mismanagement, gas flaring, and regular oil...
This panel was billed as a discussion about the discovery of 'unbearable truths', as mediated through the milieu of the former German Democratic Republic. It was much more about poetry, and that was fine with me.
Poetry is Better than Prose
The earlier panel Left/Right Literature uttered the profound question of whether literature is capable of truly reflecting the horror of war. The Austrian author Gstrein observed that novels often fall short of communicating war, because it is always more horrible than words can express. Combined with this is the fact that novels often present thematic linkages of characters and events that do not necessarily happen in real war. Rather, war is disjointed and unpredictable. So what could capture such an elusive...
A Spanish philosopher, a French graphic novelist, and an Iraqi performance artist meet in a bar...
Any number of amusing scenarios could have emerged from the illuminating panel, "Quiet Revolutions in Storytelling" at the PEN World Voices Festival. Three seemingly unrelated creators engaged in a lively discussion about revolution and technology. Not only was there a lack of slapstick antics that could make for jokes, there was a loose concurrence of opinion and broader confluence of bristling ideas. Sameer Padania of the human rights organization Witness.org moderated.
Trigger Happy
But I speak vaguely. Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi artist and professor who is perhaps best known for his project 'Shoot an Iraqi.' Bilal lost a brother in Iraq to an air-to-surface...
To get into the spirit of New York City my wife and I started at 62nd Street and walked down Broadway to Baruch College at Lexington and 25th. Some things never change. Taxi cabs filled the streets but none of the drivers made gestures or yelled curses at pedestrians crowding into the streets, crossing mid-block or crossing with a cautionary hand flashing in front of their faces. Nevertheless, pedestrians were as thoughtless as ever, perhaps more so.
There were messengers on bicycles but also bicycle lanes so they didn’t weave through both vehicle and pedestrian traffic. Rollerblade messengers were gone and so was dog poop that had made streets in the Big Apple messier than well-kept barnyards. I didn’t hear people talking loudly to themselves...
In August, 1993 in Myanmar, (Burma), Ma Thida, a 27-year old medical doctor and short story writer was arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison, charged with “endangering public tranquility, of having contact with unlawful associations, and distributing unlawful literature.” She had been an assistant to Aung San Suu Kyi and traveled with Suu Kyi during her political campaign.
The Cervantes Institute was the site of a love fest for Spanish independent publishing house Anagrama through the words of five of its authors. The event highlighted the crucial work of independent publishers, considered the marketplace as an enemy of freedom of expression, and celebrated the art of literary curation and the act of...
We do not like to talk about prison. We look the other way when we drive by the barbed wire, change the subject to something brighter (something more 'free'), or mutter a thanks to the system when certain kinds of criminals are incarcerated (the 'bad' kind).
Do not be alarmed: we are meant to fear prisons. They are supposed to serve as a deterrent against breaking the law. They are also meant to punish criminals, or restore them, and the state has taken full responsibility for accomplishing these aims. Right?
But it's more complicated. Some people are imprisoned for their political beliefs, others for crimes precipitated by structural inequalities, and some entirely by accident. Suddenly we're...
The festival has begun. But my contributions begin tomorrow. My beat will be human rights and fiction, and anything else that reveals itself in these action packed days. I will be double-posting at www.fictionthatmatters.org. Looking forward to joining you all...
BREAKING NEWS: The Statue of Liberty has swine flu. Evacuate New York. Punish the Mexicans. And let's all OVERREACT ... please!
Yes, here we go again. Fear is back. It never becomes unfashionable, does it? Fear sells newspapers, and now we're all supposed to stop traveling. Europeans should stay in Europe, Americans should stay in America, and nobody should travel to Mexico because swine flu is going to do us in!
I doubt it but maybe it will. Perhaps swine flu is going to b blamed for every death in the US the next twelve months. It might surpass our fear of terrorist attacks and erectile dysfunction. All You Need Is Fear - isn't that what John Lennon sang...
Maggie Cousins was born in Munday, Texas, population 400, but went to New York where she became managing editor of McCall’s, then senior editor at Doubleday.
When she retired she returned to Texas. When she was well into her 80s I heard Maggie tell some young children that they should pursue adventure. “When I came to San Antonio, I decided to have an adventure every day,” she said. “If I lived in Munday, I’d manage to have an adventure every day.”
And she did. You don’t have to be young, or beautiful, or travel to Morocco to have an adventure. You don’t even have to have a book. All you need is an adventurous mind. The best adventures are in the mind. No one can take...
Anyone who has ever invited a friend to come to the U.S. has bumped into the ruthless bureaucracy of the immigration system. The process often works something like this:
Consular officer: I regret that your visa application was denied, Mr. Jonathan. Jonathan: Why? Consular officer: Because I think you plan to stay in the U.S. Jonathan But I have a wife and two kids here in Djibouti, and plenty of money. Consular officer: The decision has been made. Next in line, please. Jonathan: Can't I appeal? Consular officer: You can submit another visa application. Next, please....
Grandstands are rising around Washington, DC. The U.S. is preparing for the Inauguration of a new President whose campaign mobilized a record number of citizens and focused on themes of hope and change.
Half way around the globe in the world’s most populous country, a relatively small group of citizens are proposing radical change for their nation, change which reflects in large part the ideals upon which the United States was founded. However, the proponents of this change have been interrogated and arrested.
On December 10, the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 300 leading mainland Chinese citizens—writers, economists, political scientists, retired party officials, former newspaper editors, members of the...
Xiaolu Guo's linguistic marriage of two tongues and their temperaments corresponds, in her novel, to the mating of a British man and a Chinese woman. Her book, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers, might be called mongrel, but is it promiscuous in the Johnsonian sense? Maybe not. Eventually, her lovers part, after Z. has an abortion and after her application for an extension of her visa to stay in England is denied by the Chinese government. This was never to be a sunnily post-romantic, twenty-first-century tale of girl-meets-boy, nor a serene account of language-meets-language. Instead, the mergers are difficult, fractious, violent, incomplete, short-term, as notable for their conflicts and contradictions as for anything shared harmoniously in common.
It is officially Midsummer, which means that I am becoming officially depressed. Or perhaps I will. I can't say yet. It's something I am fighting as I learn that summer does not have to be the "end" of something but that rather, it can be a beginning. Any ending is also likewise a beginning. When we are awake, our waking life, is no less rich than our dream life. In fact, I could argue that my dream life is far more valuable and true than my waking life these days. My waking life is full of fact and work and sometimes hurt (miscommunications, the sort of thing that has you yearning and bending your ear to Glenn Campbell's Wichita Lineman, a song I have always...
On June 4 China will face the 19th anniversary of the killing of citizens occupying Tiananmen Square. Nineteen years ago as president of PEN USA, I remember well sorting through dozens of unfamiliar Chinese names as we sought to untangle what writers had been arrested. Today there are at least 42 writers imprisoned in China.
I wake up 22 stories in the air. Most of Hong Kong is in the air with thousands of high rises shooting into the sky. I’m in a cubicle—two small beds pressed against each wall, a tiny shelf between, a TV mounted on the wall at the foot of one bed. At the head of...
One of the more creative and moving responses to the Olympics in China this year is a poem relay, initiated by writers and members of International PEN. The poem June, was written by Shi Tao, who is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for sending to pro democracy websites a government directive for Chinese media to downplay the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests.
You may recall in 2004 Shi Tao was identified when Yahoo! turned over his email account to the authorities.Charged with “illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities,” Shi Tao now faces the next decade in prison. His poem June is his memorial of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
Esta es la historia o la ficción de un evento singular. En el auditorio de la YMCA de la calle 92 de Nueva York (Y92, como dicen los neoyorquinos), se reencontraron Salman Rushdie, Humberto Eco y Mario Vargas Llosa, los “tres mosqueteros”, según...
De camino para escuchar las Voces del Mundo, en el Festival de Literatura Internacional, organizado por PEN en la ciudad de Nueva York, en la esquina de la 2da. Avenida y la calle 49 Este, allí en la calle, un hombre decidido, me da un papel que afirma “la empresa de construcción Rovini explota a trabajadores inmigrantes, de la minorías, sin preocuparse de su seguridad física, de su salud y de un sustento mínimo…” Pretendo desentenderme para concentrarme en las lecturas de Europa y México que me han asignado cubrir, impartidas por cinco autores de renombre mundial , acompañados de una silla vacía símbolo...
Last night I wanted to be Hungarian. When Péter Esterházy took the podium at Town Hall for PEN World Voices “Public Lives/Private Lives” along side fellow literary giants Michael Ondaatje, Annie Proulx, A.B. Yehoshua, Carol Bracho, Rian Malan, Evelyn Schlag, Ian McEwan, Francine Prose, and Salman Rushdie, he began by saying, “I don’t speak English, I speak Hungarian. You speak English, you don’t speak Hungarian. This is the problem.” Then he carefully removed his reading glasses from his pocket, and put them on, telling us, “I see either you or the text. This is the problem.” I laughed, my own reading glasses perched on the tip of my nose as I took notes in the semi-dark.
(The event was an evening of short, literary films. It was held Tuesday, April 29 at 6 pm at the Goethe Institut in New York and referred to as: The Rattapallax/PEN World Voices Literary Film Feast)
“It has always seemed to me a rare privilege this, of being an American,” Gertrude Stein wrote in her sweeping, beguiling epic, written in the 1920’s: “The Making of Americans” , “...a real American, one whose tradition it has taken scarcely sixty years to create. We need only realise our parents. remember our grandparents and know ourselves and our history is complete.” In “The Making of Americans”, Gertrude Stein also brought an odd and singular rhythm to these sentences and the ones that followed...
Tennessee Williams said, “There is a time in life for departure even when there is no place to go.”
It’s a slippery statement but at this juncture, I can relate in that I feel a need for departure – be it from a relationship or place – it is a departure all the same. The scary thing about departure is that you don’t know where it leads, as Williams says. You know where you were, or you think you know here you were or perhaps you did and now it has been changed, dare I say edited, revised, history rewritten? This happens: people can be conveniently revisionist when it suits, and this hurts. They will take years of a shared history and with one mark of...
It's still too cold for me to wear one of my wife-of-a-chicken-farmer dresses. That is lost on you, no doubt, for what does the wife of a chicken farmer wear? Probably nothing at all like I imagine myself to be should I run away and start a chicken farm with the man that I love and yet I tell myself one day, one day, I will do this. We will simply take off and go to somewhere in Sicily and start a small no-kill chicken farm where the chickens can run around free-range and we will simply sell the eggs and live a poor but sated life. We will love. We will have time for our writing, our editing, our...
It's hard to capture the moment of any given moment in a single snapshot, and yet this shot, to me, captures everything about my most recent foray to NYC. It was subtle, full of life, soft, scented, productive, proud, energetic yet mild, and always but always with friends both old and new and discovering new things about myself and about them as well. One can hardly say that this was by any means a 'wasted' trip; besides which, no trip is wasted unless you make it so.
Life, like anything (and I realize this is trite) is what you make it. It's like that song by the group "Talk Talk" (remember them?) "Baby... life's what you make it..."...
I have been thinking all week: what if the most important issue in a Hillary-Obama debate was.....head scarves! I've had more discussions about that question in these days in Turkey than any other. The place is obsessed with it. And the country is in chaos over it.
For many years in this 'secular republic' girls in schools and universities have not been allowed to cover their hair. It was the rule, the dress code (or no dress code). To do so was thought to be disruptive to education as a flaunting of a particular piety. Not sure if the ban covered turbans for the boys.
But in the past week the new Islamist government here passed a constitutional amendment to lift the ban. But girls with...
So I finally got cheated in Istanbul, but it was worth it.
Yesterday I was in Ankara, mainly to see Dr. Halil Inalcik, probably the foremost scholar of Ottoman history in the world. Now 92 years old, he is an inspiration. Having published many books before, he's still at it. He was described to be beforehand as a man still living in the 16th century. When I saw his cherubic face and reflective demeanor, I thought perhaps I'd like to go back to that time myself. It was a glorious conversation, full of many insights. The passion of his career, he said, has been to correct the biases of Western scholarship about the Eastern Mediterranean. He seemed to scratch at my attitudes right away to see...
Next week, I'll be attending several different events at this annual festival of international literature. I'll try to give a sense of what the events were like for those of you who won't be there, as well as my thoughts on the goings-on. I'd love to hear yours as well, on the festival, the authors, or writing in general, so please feel free to leave your comments!
All best,
Aaron Hamburger
