PEN American Center - Festival 2007

An association of writers working to advance literature, defend free expression, and to foster international literary fellowship.

Home > World Voices 2007

HOME & AWAY

For this year's Festival, PEN World Voices brings together writers from around the world to discuss their relationships to their own and each others’ homes; the political and social implications of concepts like homelands; and how literature helps us negotiate the divide between the familiar and the strange, the mundane and the exotic.

Read impressions of Home & Away from the following World Voices participants.

Dorothea Dieckmann on Home & Away

When home is where you come from, aren’t you always away? On all your ways you want to come home again, trying to find a way. Always away on all ways home. A way away, a road abroad. What leads you on your way is memories, memories of yourself, remembering your self to be a member of something, a part of something you are apart from. You don’t know who it was, you don’t know the place. But it must be somebody somewhere in the way you talk, you think, you dream. So the way home is the way of words. My way of words is the German way, but thinking about an English way to express my thoughts about home and away I find another direction home. The German way contains the words Heim and Heimat, which is not home and at home, although Heimat seems to be a mix-up of at and home, heim and at. But Heimat leads me into a homemade confusion. It leads me to the Fatherland, it leads me to nostalgia, it makes me homesick in a sick way. It is a word made in Germany which always makes me mad in Germany. So, writing in English I find myself on a way that shows me where my self comes from. You must be away from home to find a way home.

Copyright © 2007 Dorothea Dieckmann. All rights reserved.

Pico Iyer on Home & Away

The beauty, which is the challenge, of the modern moment is that the very terms “home” and “away” have become as mongrel, as mobile, even as interchangeable as those old standbys, “East” and “West” (or “high” and “low”). Home exists somewhere in the future for many of us—an idea, a vision, a language or set of values that we carry around inside ourselves and that has more to do with where we’re going than with where we came from. And “away” therefore becomes equally slippery, as some of us suspect that in fact it’s the place where we were born, the land whose passport we carry, the culture we embody in our faces and voices that is the truly foreign place.

Traveling across the world today, you find the very MTV video or McDonald’s outlet or overfriendly neighbor you’ve journeyed 6,000 miles to get away from; yet waking up in the place that you think of as home, you find yourself surrounded by the rhythms and stories, the histories and costumes of cultures that not long ago belonged to the far corners of the earth. The new century is asking us to redefine “citizen” and “community” and “tradition,” to expand our notions of “travel” and “exile” and “exoticism.” But most of all it’s asking us to create for ourselves, each one of us, a new and living sense of “home” and “away.” The Other is on our doorstep, and home is less a place we inhabit than one we devise, as we move around a world that is moving around us, faster than ever before.

Copyright © 2007 Pico Iyer. All rights reserved.

Lee Stringer on Home & Away

Funny, my first book Grand Central Winter being centered on the years I lived on the street, I have been exhaustively asked to speak on home-LESS-ness. Now, being asked to consider it the other way around, it occurs to me that the word homeless is something of a misnomer.

You may be without a roof over your head but there is always some bench, some alleyway, some patch of earth, some part of the city to which, when all else of the day is said and done, you return. Living inside of a constructed box is, after all, a rather recent event in human history—an anomaly in the way of things, if the carbon dating that puts us on this earth a billion years ago is to be believed.

Given this, what more fundamental definition of the word "home" is there than "the place to which you always return"?

Copyright © 2007 Lee Stringer. All rights reserved.

Jo Tatchell on Home & Away

Home. The very word smells of clichéd biscuits, still warm from the oven, of comforting food, goose down pillows, scented hugs, even the harsh, boundary setting tones of a parental dress down. The reality is invariably somewhat less rose tinted but, for me, it is still the place where I used to pull my shoes off, drop my coat on the floor and eat with elbows on the table, where people accepted me even when I was obnoxious enough to paint every wall in my room black in a moment of misguided homage to Nietzsche.

But home, full of acceptance, also represents the ordinary. And perhaps because of that it is the place from which I yearned to flee. It took years to see that, despite settling in other places entirely I have only gone on to recreate much of my original home in another little corner of the world. For home is not so much a place, but a memory, a set of ideas that travel with us, as mine did, while my family moved from the lush humidity of Kerala to the plains of Africa and the deserts of Arabia. And those memories, with their rituals and habits, ease us into whatever present we find ourselves in.

And it is our memories that play the greatest trick of all, pulling the poles together, so that we are able to exist in both the past and the present at once, always far away in our memories of old homes and perfectly at home in the grand, exotic away.

Copyright © 2007 Jo Tatchell. All rights reserved.

Nabeel Yasin on Home & Away

The exile was a poetic idea in the poetry I wrote in Iraq, an existential sensation about expatriation in time and other people. I explored the complexity, the mix of feelings about birth and death, love and departure, pain and pleasure, the maze and the horizon.

Later, exile became reality, my daily fate. And the experience of being an exile permeated everything, excluding me from language, making me a stranger in train stations, airports, motorways and winding forest roads. It changed the way I looked at everything and everybody from the faces of policemen to the visa stamps in my passport.

And my wife and son were victims of my exile: like two trees I tried to plant them, without success. And this failure confused me. The further away I moved from my homeland the more I began to imagine I was perhaps on my way home once again. Talking about home and reading about home replaced being there.

Now I am on the threshold of returning to my homeland for the first time in twenty-seven years. When I left, for strange, unknown lands, I did not expect anyone to welcome me. Always, I told myself that one day I would return home and there receive a warm welcome. Now that my return is approaching I wonder, with so many of my family and friends dead or gone, who will open the door when I knock at it, and who will be there to welcome me.

Copyright © 2007 Nabeel Yasin. All rights reserved.

Saadi Youssef on Home & Away

The seventh of January 1992. Another Paris morning: rain and leaden sky. It is 8:30 and darkness is still total. Only the windows light the jet-black morning in this working class suburb where I live. The roar of the cars and the buses penetrates the double glass. People are going to their factories and businesses while my papers, waiting, remain blank.

Why am I in Paris? Why am I here and there, there and here, in migrations that started thirty-five years ago? Moscow-Damascus-Kuwait, Beirut-Algiers-Damascus.

Beirut-Cyprus-Beirut-Damascus...Aden, Cyprus, Belgrade, Tunis, and at last: Paris.

What am I doing in Paris?

What am I doing in non-Arab land?

Exile includes the idea of abrogation—abrogating the relationship of the individual with heaven, earth and society. There is a vertical line connecting heaven—where the worshipped is—with earth—where the ancestors lie in the long repose of death. And then is a horizontal line ordering the village or the town where homes, memories and childhood playgrounds are. At the point of intersection between those two lines stands the individual.

The horror of exile is in the uprooting of the individual from this point of intersection and transplanting him in another spot, which is not a point of intersection, where neither heaven is the primordial one nor the ancestors are ancestors; where there are no homes, no memories and no childhood playgrounds.

What remains therefore?

Hardship only: toil and pain in order to preserve the primordial composition, the stock that is threatened by extinction, and the root that is drying up.

But the rules of the artistic process make such preservation an extremely laborious task. The more someone makes an advance in art’s way the more his need for deeper roots increases—deeper roots at the point of intersection, not in the soil of exile.

Copyright © 2007 Saadi Youssef. All rights reserved.

HIGHLIGHTS

Green Thoughts: Writers on the Environment

April 24, 2007 | The Great Hall at Cooper Union | New York City

With Billy Collins, Jonathan Franzen, Moses Isegawa, Pico Iyer, Geert Mak, Marilynne Robinson, Roxana Robinson, Salman Rushdie, Gary Shteyngart, Janne Teller, Colson Whitehead

>> All Tuesday programs

Town Hall Readings: Writing Home

April 25, 2007 | The Town Hall | New York City

With Don DeLillo, Kiran Desai, Neil Gaiman, Nadine Gordimer, Alain Mabanckou, Steve Martin, Salman Rushdie, Pia Tafdrup, Tatyana Tolstaya, Saadi Youssef

>> All Wednesday programs

An Evening with The Moth

April 26, 2007 | 37 Arts | New York City

With Neil Gaiman, Pico Iyer, Laila Lalami; and Jonathan Ames as your MC

>> All Thursday programs

Conversation: Kiran Desai & Vikram Chandra, with Rachel Donadio

April 27, 2007 | Gilder Lehrman Hall, The Morgan Library | New York City

>> All Friday programs

The PEN Cabaret

April 29, 2007 | The Bowery Ballroom | New York City

With Oliver Lake, Victoria Roberts, Sam Shepard, Patti Smith, Saul Williams, Huang Xiang, and surprise guests

>> All Saturday programs

The Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture with David Grossman

April 29, 2007 | The Great Hall at Cooper Union | New York City

With Nadine Gordimer

>> All Sunday programs

PRESS

Interview with Neil Gaiman
From The Wild River Review

I think that freedom of speech is purely and simply the most important thing we have. The freedom to have ideas, the freedom to express those ideas in honest writing, whether writing fiction or non-fiction. And I think the fight that PEN has and the fight that individual writers and journalists around the planet have, day after day, to express themselves—to write, to talk honestly about things that have happened is in every sense of the word—vital.

>> Read more

Interview with Pico Iyer
From The Wild River Review

I am not rooted in a place, I think, so much as in certain values and affiliations and friendships that I carry everywhere I go; my home is both invisible and portable. But I would gladly stay in this physical location for the rest of my life, and there is nothing that I want in life that it doesn’t have. To me rootedness is mostly just a matter of deciding what you need, preferably as limited as possible, and finding a situation that answers that — I call that man rich, as Henry James has it, who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.

>> Read more

Interview with Alain de Botton
From The Wild River Review

The idea of free speech can be taken for granted in the prosperous, developed and so-called free world. But, I think that recent events have shown the inhabitants there that free speech is not something they can necessarily take for granted. There is a constant impulse to censor and to repress ideas that are uncomfortable. And people do want to lock others up for their ideas and beat them up and maybe even kill them. So there is a really constant threat that’s still there. Even though we might have thought in the West that this is something Voltaire fought for in the 18th century, and that we are somehow over that. Well, I think we’re absolutely not over that and it’s a continuing battle and that’s why I think an organization like PEN will always have its work to do.

>> Read more