PEN World Voices: News from the Hub

This was an event for the Internet website Witness.org, the international human-rights organization that uses video to expose human rights abuses. A section of the site for Witness.org called "The Hub" is for allowing people to post videos. They give video cameras to people "on the ground" so that they can post human rights violations. (I once went to the site and saw a Japanese reporter being kicked to death!) Anyway, as horrible as this may seem, getting images of human rights violations out to the world is the key to stopping these violations from happening.

The participants in the panel were Yousef Al-Mohaimeed (author of "Wolves of the Crescent Moon"), Thant Myint-U (author of "The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma"), Uzodinma Iweala (author of "Beasts of No Nation"), and Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and member of the Elders, a group of political leaders gathered together by Nelson Mandela, Graça Machel, and Desmond Tutu to contribute their wisdom to world politics. It was exiting to see her at this event and a highlight of the PEN World Voices Festival. She was eloquent and added a touch of the power of possibilities that this festival can have to world politics. The moderator, Sameer Padania, is the webmaster for "The Hub." Each participant on the panel showed a video that they have on the "The Hub."

The video Yousef Al-Mohaimeed showed was of a woman in Saudi Arabia driving. What's the big deal you say? Women are not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia. The woman was driving on a back road on a special day. I personally don't know how to drive but that is MY CHOICE. We should work for the day when seeing a women drive in Saudi Arabia is as mundane as seeing one drive in other parts of the world.

Uzodinma Iweala should a video of people with HIV/AIDS in Africa. He said that he is using these interviews as a basis for his next book. He even went so far as to say that they are the ones writing his next book. It is a chance to "give people the opportunity to speak for themselves." He wasn't shy of speaking about sex in relation to HIV/AIDS. I thought that was refreshingly brave to say that people who are not letting people know their AIDS status is beacuse of the fear of loosing love and human contact. Who wants to loose that? It is deep and moving to think that he is spending time talking and speaking with these people. He is turning to a very interesting writer. He lets his insecurities hang off his sleeves and is never reluctant to let his audience know when he isn't sure about something. It quite refreshing.

Thant Myint-U redeemed himself from the Burma event with this event in my eyes. His video was of a Burmese Monk demonstration and crackdown. It was a video was taken by Al-Jazeera and was smuggled out. It was one of the very few images of the crackdown.

This was a powerful event and definitely one of my favorites of the festival. Visit the Hub. It is truly an amazing site.

PEN World Voices: Bookforum: Political Engagemen

The participants in this panel were Elias Khoury and Nurddin Farah (Asli Erdogan, a Turkish writer, couldn't make it to the festival because of illness) and the moderator was Albert Mobilio. The goal of the event was to consider questions of fiction's role in political life. The answers from the two authors on the panel were quite interesting. Nurddin Farah said, "Most human activities are political ... the point of [the novel] is to reach people" and Elias Khoury said, "novels must be novels. Literature is not only a statement...every novel is a struggle to widen the sense of humanity."

Essentially, this is the whole point of the work that I've been doing as a bookseller. I have a deep belief that politics and art cannot be separate. It was good to hear authors just coming out and saying this. I think the idea of the two disciplines need to be apart is an wholly American one. Part of the many attempts to dumb down the American public.

Khoury said, "[The] search for human dignity and human life is the struggle for freedom and liberty" and Farah said, "[The] writer gives power to people who cannot speak for themselves ... [the writer] imagines himself as the person ... [the writer] must take sides."

Gee, I don't know about the taking sides part but everything else I think I agree with. I think that as a writer if you take sides in a story you can sometimes end up with a one-sided tale that can loose sympathy for different characters. This is all very general, I know, and that this all depends on how a story is constructed. But even an evil character can have some areas open for empathy.

Anyway, this was a very interesting and stimulating event. It gave me much to think about in terms of literary writing and the political overtones both overt and subtle.

PEN World Voices: Burma: A Land at a Crossroads

Note that I wrote this before the horrible cyclones and devastation of the last few days in Burma. It breaks my heart to see this happen to Burma. My prayers go out to all its people...

This event was dubbed as a panel discussion on "the possibilities of peaceful change in the aftermath of last years bloody response to the protest by Buddhist monks." What else are you going to talk about in a discussion of this type. Well, it seemed like everything but the Monks uprising was discussed. It was more like a history lesson than a discussion on current events. What happened last October was only mentioned in passing.

The participants in the panel were Ian Burma author of "God's Dust: A Modern Asian History" and "Murder in Amsterdam" and Thant Myiut-U, a western educated author of "The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma," and it was moderated by Dedi Felman of World without Borders.

Going into this event, probably like most Americans, knew very little about Burma. I know the name Aung San Suu Kyi. I know that she's been under house arrest for a really long time. But what I didn't know is how long and violent the history of Burma is. How long the struggle has been to deal with being at the literal crossroads of Asia.

Burma is not like the other countries that Britain colonized. Burma was supposed to be a easy win for the British: go in with a few men, conquer the country and subdue its people, then take what was valuable from the counties coffers. Easy. Only not. The country launched a violent insurgency. (Gee, where have I heard a story like this before?)

So what am I to make of the abridged history lesson that has been downloaded into my brain in a single hour. Was I supposed to walk away empowered? Well, I wasn't. I walked away confused and discouraged. The problems presented seem so big and complicated and far away. I suppose that was my biggest problem with this presentation: distance. The information, the people, everything seemed too distance from the events. I know that something happened last October not just in 1988 and 1948. I know that the people need support today. I went to this event hoping to get a sense of what I can do. Literary people, it seems, are not adept at doing this. They sit on the armchair of time looking back to assess what should have been or could have been. Is that what literature feels so out of touch? Is it simply because it is by its nature "out of touch"?

Reporting from PEN

This is maybe my third or fourth year attending the PEN festival here in NYC. It is always exciting to see what writers from around the world are thinking and doing. We are so isolated here in the US. This year the festival is dedicated to the writers and journalist who have been imprisoned in China. In each panel discussion there is an empty chair to represent a writer who is imprisoned for their writing.

Bloggers have been targeted for imprisonment. When the most famous blogger in Saudi Arabia was arrested for essentially nothing, it sent shock waves through the Saudi blogging community -- as was intended. (He was recently released.) What we take for granted and is a right here in the US is not so in other parts of the world. What we do here is important even with a small audience. We are one voice of a chorus. Each voice adds to the power of praise to free speech.

I will also be cross posting to Metaxucafe.com

2008 Pen World Voices Festival

April 29th - May 4th, 2008
For more information

The festival will be held at venues around New York City. The theme this year is “Public Lives/Private Lives.” I had a wonderful time at the festival last year. I'm hoping to see more people of color in attendance this year. It seemed to be more a problem of marketing rather than a problem of the events themselves as there were events that I attended that had a stronger representation of people of color on the stage than in the audience.

Read my blog pieces on Pen World Voices Festival 2007.