| Thursday, April 26, 2007 4:21PM | | | | Young and Strong | Posted By: Martha Southgate
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| Tags: Ishmael Beah, Linda Sue Park, Uzodinma Iweala, Korea, youth, Sierra Leone, Nigeria | The “Youth on the Frontlines” panel was absolutely packed! So full, in fact, that I ended up sitting with my 12-year-old son upstairs watching the event on a grainy videotape (though the image was poor, the sound was good). The unfortunate conditions (for me anyway) didn’t rob the panel of any of its power.
I was sorry to be late but it couldn’t be helped—my 8-year-old daughter had a poetry reading of her own work along with her classmates first thing this morning (delightful!). But that made for a late departure from Brooklyn. I was feeling harried and annoyed when we got to the panel but once we got there, I was very glad to have gone.
The panelists were Ishmael Beah, Uzodinma Iweala, and Linda Sue Park. The audience was made up of more than 130 high school students from all over the city, most of them black and Hispanic (I was particularly glad to see an audience of color because the audience for many of the PEN events is predominantly white—it’s a self-selecting thing, but still, it’s a shame)
Park, winner of the Newbery Medal for her book A Single Shard, spoke movingly of learning a bit of Korean history that she hadn’t known from her Korean-born parents: during the Japanese occupation of WWII, all Koreans were forced to drop their Korean names and assume Japanese ones. From this awful symbolic fact, she spun her novel When My Name Was Keoko, the tale of a girl who lived through this little-discussed chapter of Korean history. Park said that the old adage “write what you know” doesn’t work for her: “Maybe because I know so little,” she said with a laugh. “I prefer write what you want to know.” This novel helped her do that. She also shared with the audience that the book is being translated into Japanese and published there and that that is one of her “proudest accomplishments.” Unfortunately, there is still a great silence in Japan about the country’s aggressive acts towards other nations during WWII—the publication of a book like Park’s there is a significant moment in world literature.
Iweala, author of the critically acclaimed and bestselling Beasts of No Nation, was careful to make it clear that his harrowing tale of a child soldier is carefully imagined and researched fiction and that he is the product of a privileged upbringing in Washington DC to prosperous Nigerian parents (I’m betting he’s had to spend a fair amount of time reminding people that he wasn’t a child soldier himself—so often people want to believe that you have to have lived through a thing to write about it). He told of being inspired to think about writing the book at the age of 16 (not so long ago—he’s 24 now!) when he came home from track practice and spotted a magazine article about child soldiers. He then pursued the idea through college (Beasts is his thesis), speaking to refugees from Sierra Leone that he met during trips to Nigeria and asking his parents for their memories of the Nigerian civil war of the 1960’s. He said that he wrote the book “out of a desire to find out what makes people kill, rape and destroy.”
Beah needs little introduction. His memoir, A Long Way Gone, is a number one New York Times bestseller. To look at his gentle face and hear his soft-spoken manner is to be astonished at the horrors that human beings can perpetrate on one another and the miracles that can sometimes be affected through love and continued support. Since he was rescued at the age of 14 from his life as a drugged killer, he has made a remarkable shift, working nonstop to help other children who are living through what he lived through—too many of them without getting the help he received. He urged the students (as did both other panelists) not to fall victim to the provincialism that Americans so often harbor. When he asked if any of the students knew where Sierra Leone was, he only got a few replies. And when he asked why they knew about the country they said, respectively, "A Kanye West song" and "Blood Diamond." He urged the young audience to inform themselves through reading his book and others about this issue but then to take action through UNICEF or the UN or other international organizations. He described himself as a children’s activist, not a writer. And while he writes beautifully, it’s easy to see that the next step, taking the work off the page, is crucial for him. As it is for us all.
After the event, I asked my son what he thought. In his 12 year old way, he said, "I thought it was okay." But he also asked me to be sure to get a copy of Park's book. And later when we went to Starbucks for a snack and saw Beah's book there, he smiled a little. When he's a little older, I'll make sure he reads it.
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4 Comments | Add a Comment |
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| 4-27-07 2:37PM: Martha Southgate said...
Linda--thank you so much for checking in. I very much look forward to reading your work (as does Nate). Thanks for an inspiring panel!
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| 4-27-07 12:25PM: Linda Sue Park said...
Martha--It was a pleasure to meet you, and then to read this blog entry. For me, the event was a very special one--I learned so much from the other panelists and from the audience, and I'm sure I could have gone another hour, easy, without feeling tired.
Regards to Nate and best wishes,
Linda Sue
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| 4-27-07 10:27AM: Martha Southgate said...
Well, thanks so much for the seat, regardless of who brought who (my son's only in 6th grade--he had the day off from school). Thanks for commenting as well. It was a very moving event
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| 4-27-07 7:42AM: youme landowne said...
I was particularly moved by Ishmael Beah's reminder that,"those who glamorize violence,have most likely not experienced it-
violence limits you from knowing yourself. It limits your capabilities."
(I was glad to see so many people there too, I thought that your son had brought you- that led me to offer up my seat:)
http://youme.landowne.org
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A little shout-out to my hometown friend Dan Chaon, a superb writer and teacher who was instrumental in helping Beah get his story written when he began it as a student at Oberlin College. Cleveland rocks!
I don't know if she'll ever see this but I want to offer a thank you to the kind woman whose name I didn't get, who bought my son a copy of A Long Way Gone. That was a very sweet gesture. We both appreciate it.
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