Memory accelerates as I look at the wet London street through the window of Sticky Fingers restaurant. For six years Sticky Fingers was our family gathering place and adopted kitchen. We lived nearby, and I would often claim a booth by the window where I ate lunch, spread out my papers and wrote through the afternoon. At the end of the school day and sports practices and skateboarding excursions, my sons would appear and plop down on the other side of the booth and order burgers or fries or pecan pie, and we’d share our day then walk home together, often with a bit of takeout for dinner.
En route to work every Sunday morning I pass a house in the upstate New York town of Rotterdam where someone attaches large political banners and sometimes a U.S. flag to a fence that borders I-890. This past Sunday, next to the flag this person put up a white sheet imprinted with a machine gun.
The image stayed with me as I drove from Albany to the Museum of Jewish Heritage that day to see Ariel Dorfman in conversation with Tablet editor Gabriel Sanders. When Dorfman warned the audience not to assume that what happened in Chile on September 11, 1973 couldn’t happen here, I knew the machine gun and the flag needed to begin this essay.
Violent authoritarian rhetoric and imagery grows...
Playwright Lynn Nottage has received numerous awards for her groundbreaking work on the stage, including the MacArthur 'Genius' Award. A Brooklyn native, she regularly champions social justice issues in her plays. She was recently awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her play Ruined, a hard-hitting tale of a group of women set in a brothel in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The women flee the ravages of internecine war and the scars of brutal, mutilating rapes. Yet the characters -- even the men -- offer touching moments of real warmth, all while united by a lilting soundtrack of Congolese music. Ruined will be staged at the Almeida Theatre in London in March 2010.
Fela!
Written by Jim Lewis & Bill T. Jones
Music by Fela Anikupalo Kuti
Choreography by Bill T. Jones
Performed by Antibalas Afrobeat
With Sahr Ngaugha, Lillias White, Saycon Sengbloh, Ismael Kouyate Performing at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre in New York
The music icon Fela Anikupalo Kuti was the unlikely culmination of generations of talent and courage. His grandfather, Jay Jay, was a classical musician with an international reputation. His father was a devout man-of-the-cloth and the strict headmaster of a high school. His mother, Funmilayo, organized a successful women's movement in Nigeria, stood firm in the face of the colonial authorities, and traveled the world -- even meeting Mao Zedong in China during the height...
District 9
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
Written by Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell
Produced by Peter Jackson
Starring Sharlto Copley
Key Creatives, 2009. 112 minutes.
District 9 has taken the American box office by storm. The film depicts the arrival of aliens in the unlikely locale of Johannesburg, South Africa. Establishing contact with alien life forms in the movies is never as simple as we'd like it to be.
But this picture moves beyond a B sci-fi flick with some penetrating social commentary. At times satirical and other times allegorical, the story skillfully interweaves the history and culture of South Africa with mecha-robots and spaceships.
The vagaries of the film industry have resulted in the film being released in...
Incognegro
Written by Mat Johnson; Art by Warren Pleece
Vertigo, 2008. 136 pages.
Most people would prefer not talk about race. It makes them uncomfortable, and there isn't a lot of positive room to move in the conversation. Someone is frequently accused, someone else victimized. At its worst, people state that talking about racism helps perpetuate it; only by ceasing to talk about race will racism disappear. This is a conservative argument. It allows racism to exist by preventing the reporting of abuses, denying epidemiological differences, and ignoring economic disparities. If we deny race, we deny diversity. And we will allow history to repeat itself. According to the Dalai Lama, only the acceptance of diversity will...
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.
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...
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....
From China to Syria, repressive nations are cracking down hard on digital dissidents.
February 24, 2009
From the Christian Science Monitor
Washington - Eleanor Roosevelt never imagined the Internet.
Neither did the other framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 60 years ago when they enshrined the right to freedom of expression. Yet they wisely left room for just such a development by declaring in Article 19: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
Today, the Internet is both the vehicle and the battleground for freedom of expression around the world....
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...
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.
This morning’s panel at the Instituto Cervantes featured a stellar line-up of acclaimed authors whose narratives provide witness to the horrible human rights atrocities inflicted on children around the globe. The panel was hosted by Matisse Bustos Hawkes, who works for The Hub, a global platform for human rights media and action (http://hub.witness.org/).
The highlight of the event was when Uzodinma Iweala, a Nigerian American medical student and author of Beasts of No Nation, really engaged the students by asking them what experiences they had with their rights being violated. It was not surprising that in a room full of primarily African American and Latino NYC high school students almost everyone had a story. Most of these stories had to do with a bad...
The concept of rights is not firmly enough rooted in either culture or philosophy to provide a very stable foundation for all morality, and it could easily collapse entirely if too much of a burden is laid upon it. As a moral and legal philosophy, the idea of human rights is only a few centuries old. It does not appeal to any broadly accepted set of religions or philosophical beliefs. The theological arguments articulated by John Locke, who developed and popularized the ideas of human rights and human equality, are now virtually never invoked, even my human rights activists. For those of us, like me, who feel that the idea of human rights should be unassailable, find it frustratingly difficult to...
