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Writing for an age of migration, diaspora, exile, part 2 Video, 700k
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| Title | Writing for an age of migration, diaspora, exile, part 2, Iowa City Public Library, October 5, 2007 |
| Creator |
Nambisan, Kavery Stanišić, Saša, 1978- Andronikova, Hana Kimani, Peter, 1971- |
| Creator - Nationality |
Indian Bosnian Czech Kenyan |
| Contributor | Merrill, Christopher |
| Date Original | 2007-10-05 |
| Description | Kavery Nambisan describes the migrant writer's thought-space, not losing rootedness whether traveling in the real or in the imagination. Saša Stanišić's talk is titled, "How You See Us: on Three Myths about Migrant Writing" and covers the myth of difference between migrant and national literature, the myth that migrant literature deals solely with migration and multicultural issues, and the myth that a non-native writer using the national language enriches it. Hana Andronikova considers migration from the perspective of her grandmother, who was born in the Austro-Hungarian empire and has lived in seven different states without relocating herself, living instead in the migration of stories. Peter Kimani's presentation is titled "Out of Africa" a reference he uses to juxtapose the migratory experiences of the book's author, Karen Blixen, with those whose migration was imposed by the slave trade, going on to discuss subsequent generations of African Americans in the diaspora. |
| Venue |
Iowa City Public Library |
| Geographic Subject | United States -- Iowa -- Iowa City |
| Chronological Subject | 2000-2010 |
| Transcription | Nambisan Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 5, 2007 Hana Andronikova (Czech Republic), Peter Kimani (Kenya), Kavery Nambisan (India), Saša Stanišić (Germany) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events“ 1 Kavery Nambisan Migration, Diaspora and Exile: The Writer Survives All those who worship that which is not knowledge enter into darkness Those who delight only in knowledge enter greater darkness. - The Upanishads (800-400 B.C.) Our ancestors knew how to bend the meaning of words so you could ponder over them long after they were uttered or read. Coming from India, where we have 22 major languages, hundreds of dialects, nine religions and 400 million who are illiterate, where the population of 1.2 billion makes it necessary for people of all classes to be migrant laborers within their own country, I see this topic quite differently. I have been a migrant laborer through my entire medical career. A major portion of what I am is defined by this privileged status. Can Migration and Exile shape and define the way we write? In India, most young girls migrate when barely out of their teens, or still in their teens. It is common practice for a girl’s marriage to be arranged to a man she has not seen. In the process, she gives up her home, and her name. Not just the surname but in some communities like mine, even the first name. Just like that, overnight, she is a different person with different people in a different place. Normally, an Indian woman does not lose her composure or fret about this dislocation. She adjusts. In India, we are very used to ‘adjusting.’ Shift a little…adjust. The young girl who, until her marriage, is controlled by her father will now be controlled by her husband. A little adjustment. This life of dislocation and adjustment has produced some very good literature in India. In Mahabharata, which is perhaps our best-loved epic, Gandhari, a young girl of noble birth marries Prince Dhritharashtra. Traveling in a palanquin for several days to reach the palace of her groom, the bride is eager with excitement. During the wedding ceremony she learns that her groom is a blind man. Gandhari picks up a scarf, blindfolds herself and remains blind for the rest of her life. This royal couple raised a hundred sons who became the main perpetrators of the battle of Mahabharata. Gandhari was regarded as a woman of virtue and self-sacrifice for foregoing the gift of Nambisan Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 5, 2007 Hana Andronikova (Czech Republic), Peter Kimani (Kenya), Kavery Nambisan (India), Saša Stanišić (Germany) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events“ 2 sight in sympathy to her husband. But just before her death she reveals the truth: her blindfolding was a statement of anger and rage at being cheated. I tell this story to demonstrate how the emotional scale of the human heart oscillates. Our actions are not always what they seem. Our lives and the lives of those around us are not always what they appear to be. On this fertile ground of illusions, unrealized truths and tensions of everyday life, literature is built. I belong to a small tribal community in southern India, a martial race of hunters and ancestor worshippers. Our people have retained their unique methods of worship and festivity in spite of being Hinduized in the 17th century as a result of invasions. We speak a local dialect. In school we learn Kannada, one of the major south Indian languages. As a child, I read avidly in Kannada. The back issues of a children’s magazine, which an uncle brought home in stacks, were my first introduction to the Arabian nights, the Greek Legends and parables from the Old Testament. It is believed in our part of the world that if a pregnant woman reads good texts, the child will be blessed with wisdom. I don’t know what my mother read when she carried me. When she was carrying my younger brother, she had to read seven cloth-bound volumes of The Ramayana. I read them along with her and tasted literature for the first time. Then my father moved to Delhi on work and I had to learn English and Hindi at the age of twelve. Deprived of Kannada, I turned to these new tongues. My library was the single bookshelf of my politician father, but there too I found books, autobiographies, military tales and some fiction. One of the earliest adult books I read was the English translation of Doctor Zhivago. I don’t know how much I understood then, but remember being fascinated by a single phrase in the novel: “flying shirts and pink bottoms.” I wanted to know more about flying shirts and pink bottoms and therefore I read. After my medical degree and then my surgical training in England, I went back to India and worked in different parts of the country. I had to learn the language or the dialect of my patients in order to communicate. So that was another three languages. I married, and wow – my husband spoke yet another language. Nambisan Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 5, 2007 Hana Andronikova (Czech Republic), Peter Kimani (Kenya), Kavery Nambisan (India), Saša Stanišić (Germany) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events“ 3 Which language should I write in? Thanks to my migratory tendencies, I have many tongues swirling in my brain. I think and dream in many languages and dialects. I must choose my medium, just as I choose my profession or vocation or husband. I want that decision to be mine. My method is to think in the language of the character I’m writing about and then translate it in my head into English, which, since it isn’t my Mother Tongue, is perhaps my Father Tongue, the tongue which enables me to communicate with more readers while retaining my very Indian thoughts. I am skeptical about the very concept of nationhood, which, like religion, like the color of my skin, is a mere accident of birth. Here’s what Buddha said 2600 years ago: In the sky there is no distinction between East and West; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true. So it is with nations. It is not a writer’s business to bad-mouth his country or to showcase it to the world. His only business is to showcase truth. We live in difficult times, when the purity of prose is hijacked by ad-men with jargon and by politicians with more jargon and platitudes. This is serious, because through jargon and platitudes, truth is distorted, so much so that on one extreme we have terror being waged in the name of God and on the other, countries being invaded in the name of peace. In both cases, the innocent become victims. E.M. Forster refers to the contamination of language in his essay about George Orwell. (Recall the double-speak in Animal Farm or 1984 and you can see how it happens): If prose decays, thought decays and all the finer roads of communication are broken. Liberty is connected with prose, and bureaucrats who want to destroy liberty tend to write and speak badly, and to use pompous or woolly or portmanteau phrases in which their true meaning or any meaning disappears. (It is the duty of the citizen, particularly writer, to be on the lookout for such phrases or words and to rend them to pieces.) Nambisan Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 5, 2007 Hana Andronikova (Czech Republic), Peter Kimani (Kenya), Kavery Nambisan (India), Saša Stanišić (Germany) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events“ 4 For the writer in me, two aspects of migration are important. There are two types of migrants. One is the group of educated individuals, myself included, who leave their place of origin and move elsewhere, not because our survival is threatened but because we’re confident that our attributes will be recognized and appreciated elsewhere. But a much larger number are forced to uproot for survival and move to unknown places. Hungry stomachs can travel great distances and withstand extreme privation. Their reality is harsh. A contractor or an agent takes them to the Promised Land of work and livelihood. Trustingly they go, and then find themselves in a place where they do not understand the language or the customs, where they must work excruciatingly long hours and accept whatever money the contractor gives them. There is no healthcare, no education, no shelter except what they can pull over their heads from littered scrap, the residue of the houses they build for us to live in, the roads, the bridges, the drains and sewers. They are the powerless and the voiceless. Who will speak for them? For a writer, the physical pains of migration are very real, but they may or may not be crucial to writing. Last month, at a reading in Pittsburgh, I met the Chinese poet Huang Xiang, who escaped from his country following imprisonment and torture. Pittsburgh gave him a home, a Pittsburgh surgeon operated on the wounds on his face inflicted in prisons so he could speak normally again. Huang Xiang speaks no English, not a word. He may not even be able to return to his country. But he continues to write. James Joyce famously said that the three essentials for a writer are Silence, Exile and Cunning. We know what he means by exile, that self-imposed exile, the flight of thought which allows men and women to produce literature and art even when they are shackled, whether by custom, tradition, law, tyranny, or a well-meaning society. For every writer there has to be a self-imposed exile from the tug and pull of living, but not from life. According to the Indian tradition, there is a very interesting journey between the mind and the soul (the man and the athman). The mind/man is that with which we perceive the outer world through our senses: through touch, sound, sight, taste and smell. When we are able to understand and use the knowledge received in this way, we gain intellect or budhi. If this intellect/budhi is used in the best possible way, we reach a higher sense of awareness or consciousness, called chith, which is Nambisan Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 5, 2007 Hana Andronikova (Czech Republic), Peter Kimani (Kenya), Kavery Nambisan (India), Saša Stanišić (Germany) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events“ 5 akin to wisdom. A wise being can, with practice, gain spirituality – that is, can be in touch with the innermost, the soul or athman. The athman is a part of the Universal and Eternal: the Paramathman. When that ultimate is reached, God and Man become one continuous whole. Human emotions move like a wave across this distance between mind and spirit. Many great writers have a sense of the spiritual. A self-imposed exile which reaches inward is a way of communicating with oneself, in order to better communicate with the world. But even having distilled every migratory experience, a writer does not lose rootedness. The problem is that, for some, it can be confusing to know where this rootedness is. The mind of a writer imbibes, chews, digests and discards experience. A writer travels in her imagination. Can there be a greater freedom than this? As long as the heart has a fixed point of departure and arrival, no matter where one’s physical presence is, the writer survives. Stanisic Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 5, 2007 Hana Andronikova (Czech Republic), Peter Kimani (Kenya), Kevery Nambisan (India), Saša Stanišić (Germany) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and cluck on “News & Events“ 1 Saša Stanišić How You See Us: on Three Myths about Migrant Writing Migrant, immigrant, intercultural or multicultural literature today (in Germany and elsewhere) is considered a category of literature from authors who write from an aspect coined by at least two cultures, national identities or languages. An “immigrant background” has become a symptom of today’s world, a world suffering from ADHD and a persistent pattern of hyperactivity, as well as from impulsiveness and anger. Wars, social erosion and even environmental issues are creating a chronic condition of permanent diaspora and migration for which no political cure is available, for it can be delivered neither in the cough syrup called fundamentalism nor in the pill called democracy. In Germany, I carry my ominous immigrant background in my name and my passport, in the little bump on my nose, in my sympathies for food with lots of garlic, but most of all in my past, having fled a civil war and escaped to another country, a different cultural environment, as well as a different educational and political system. I also fled to different aromatic and culinary qualities, to trains that for some delightful reason are named for lakes or scientists or castles, and even to a different way a hair stylist holds the scissors. After all this, I wrote a novel in a language different from the one I learned as I grew my first teeth, and have come across many thoughts on my “migrant” writing in particular and many views on so-called “migrant literature” in general. While reading works by my fellow migrant authors, I have discovered a number of prejudices about what and how (and what not and how not) fiction written by foreigners is supposed to function. So, for example, my “migrant colleagues” and I don’t appear to have as much in common as some critics and philologists wish we did, making it difficult for them to place us neatly next to one another on a bookshelf (I would argue the color of the novel’s cover has stronger literary quality than our biographical backgrounds). Also, in placing value in the enrichment of literary language, myths are made: an odd urge exists to simplify disturbingly the exoticism of style and technique migrant authors are “brave enough” to “experiment with,” as if this quality is a talent one brings from his homeland. Finally, the most unsettling reflection is granting the migrant worldview (if such a worldview truly exists) too much credit, based only on their having experienced multiculturalism in more depth than having eaten Thai food every second Tuesday. I will focus on three above-mentioned discrepancies between how media, readers and literary critics would like to view migrant literature, and how I see it from inside this “kind” of writing (remembering that I’ve said already that I don’t believe this “kind” of writing can or should be separated from today’s mainstream national literature or traditions). Myth 1: Migrant literature is a philological category which stands on its own and thus creates a fruitful anomaly in relation to national literatures Stanisic Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 5, 2007 Hana Andronikova (Czech Republic), Peter Kimani (Kenya), Kevery Nambisan (India), Saša Stanišić (Germany) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and cluck on “News & Events“ 2 To speak of a single “migrant literature” is simply wrong, because it is wrongly simple. The nature of migration and the level of foreign writers’ integration vary too much to be unified in one category, not to mention their unique biographical backgrounds and differing cultural, religious or social habits. Even these merely outer literary characteristics point to the great diversity of experiences, possible subjects and intellectual influences which in many cases become a part of the text or even make up the text as a whole. The goal of objective judgment is to overcome the fixation on an author’s biography and move to a thematically-oriented view of the work. A Russian girl of Jewish ancestry comes to Germany, falls in love with a German student, and writes a book about a Russian girl of Jewish ancestry who comes to Germany and falls in love with a German student – a funny, stylistically and structurally “clean” book full of harmless ironic stings mingled with Russian and German clichés. A Bulgarian, born in Sofia and raised in Kenya, studies at a university in Germany and writes a novel about the nineteenth-century British colonial officer Sir Richard Burton – a vivid, manyvoiced portrait of an eccentric traveler and adventurer. These two examples from current German writing – by authors Lena Gorelik and Ilija Trojanow – (though one could, of course, go backward namedropping endlessly: Heine, Nabokov, Mann, etc.) illustrate that the expression “migrant literature” places a far too clear-cut frame around manifold books linked only by the loose and minor relevant facts of author’s background and social status. If one must think in categories, one may speak instead in plural, of migrant literatures, and describe new, smaller categories, e.g.: “Literature of Foreign Workers in the 60s”, “German- Turkish Literature” and “Literature of Second-Generation Polish Immigrants of Germanic Origin who in the Late 80s were Bored to Death with being Housewives and Wrote a Novel about their Neighbor’s Chest Hair.” But even that would not suit one of the literature’s major roles: literature as an act of preferably borderless creativity and invention on one side and a game of reference and relation on the other. One must also consider authors who have immigrated or belong to a minority but choose, nonetheless, not to write about migration issues. That said, I believe that migrant literature can only be effectively discussed by subject and in relation to the literary premises of genre, style, tradition, etc. Discourses about the aesthetic approach to theme or point of view, particularly in the context of national literatures, are much more crucial to the quality of the work and its understanding than the private life of the author can ever be. In some countries with high immigration rates, like Germany, the minority culture became a constitutive element of the society long ago. Immigrant authors are no longer a marginal phenomenon, but a significant reference point with almost-mainstream qualities (a good thing, because it rids the work of the exotic-bonus). Migrant literatures are not an isle in the sea of Stanisic Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series �� October 5, 2007 Hana Andronikova (Czech Republic), Peter Kimani (Kenya), Kevery Nambisan (India), Saša Stanišić (Germany) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and cluck on “News & Events“ 3 national literature, but a component, both in the depths, where the archaic squids of tradition live, and on the surface, where pop-cultural waves hit the shore. Myth 2: Migrant literature deals monothematically with migration and multicultural issues. Migrant authors have a closer and thus more interesting perspective on related questions. Short before coming to Iowa I spoke with a Polish-German author Artur Becker, who just finished his eighth novel. He told me that he circles exclusively around one aesthetic and metaphysical topic: stories set between two cultures. One could easily refer to his OEuvre as the literature of culture syntheses. Other “characteristic” topics for migrant authors are questions of identity, home and crossing cultural boundaries, producing such interesting plots as: “Holy Cow! My daughter wants to marry a German! I’ll first live in denial, then teach him that cows are holy and, in the end, after he’s learned to say ‘How are you?’ in Hindu and saved my life on the German Autobahn, I’ll accept him as my son in law.” As a matter of fact, most works of migrant authors I have read deal in one way or another with a single (often biographical) experience of migration. This basic statistical observation speaks for itself. But these percentages lead, in my opinion, to overhasty and deficient assumptions about subjects “reserved” for an author with a certain background. Any “good” author should, at any time, be able to write “good” fiction about a child suffering from cancer, a dog with three legs or a dogleg telling a story about a migrant author, all without ever having even talked to a child sick with cancer, without ever owning a dog, or without personally being friends with me. Writing fiction also means inventing worlds which are not part of writer’s own world. Through research, travels, interviews and other methods of approaching the unknown, these experiences are within the reach of any author. Though he can choose not to, any writer can become aware of new aspects of life and, from it, construct the “tellable” by choosing a perspective or a voice that even a writer who stands in middle of the topic might even have overlooked. Personally, I find non-migrant authors trying to get behind the questions “reserved” for migrants equally remarkable. I’m always keen on reading the second or third book from a migrant author – the one coming after he has told his exile-story. I find it more provocative to witness how someone from one cultural sphere sees his new environment without focusing on the “new.” It is worth every effort to tell an everyday story in the voice of a local German clerk, a love story without the exotic flair of an intercultural embrace, or to tell of a war not being fought in the country from which the author fled. In order for an author’s work of literary fiction to be significant, being a migrant is as essential as it is to be a guy named Jeff living in a 3000-person town in South Carolina with a 1967 Ford Mustang Coupe parked in your garage. That is to say, it is entirely irrelevant. It doesn’t make a work any more special or any more deserving of a careful reviewed. The quality of the writing Stanisic Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 5, 2007 Hana Andronikova (Czech Republic), Peter Kimani (Kenya), Kevery Nambisan (India), Saša Stanišić (Germany) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and cluck on “News & Events“ 4 does not automatically increase because a migrant author survived five wars and tells the world about it. Biographic facts and legends will always appeal to both audiences and critics. I deem them, exciting as they may be, notable only in discussions of biographical non-fiction. Myth 3 An author who doesn't write in his mother tongue enriches the language he has chosen to write in Asked, if it's hard to write in a language I learned so late (I was 14), I answer no. It's never late to learn a language, I say, it just eats up more time that would otherwise be spent on fishing trips as you get older. And then I say: There is nothing special about writing in a foreign language as long as you think you can use it in a sufficient and productive way. For me, writing itself is a foreign language. For every story, for every play, for every new creation, I have to learn a new language: I have to find the narrator's voice, I have to decide on my figure's specific verbal characteristics and I have to learn and keep the rhythm and flow of the whole. Many authors now writing through that filter of a foreign language had to make, at some point in their career, a choice of which language to use. Never as smart as Nabokov or Kundera, I never even considered the possibility of becoming literarily bilingual. For me, it was merely a pragmatic matter. I picked my "better" language - German. In one review of my novel, a well-known critic wrote: "Stanišić puts our old German under the oxygen tent!" I, of course, took that as a compliment and bragged a lot about it, as I do now. Still, I am very suspicious when, in terms of literary quality, the fact that an author writes in his second or even third language leads to a more favorable critical judgment, even when the "uncommon" use of linguistic constructs is highlighted, the "exotic" figures and the "rich" vocabulary. Giving a migrant author credit for every little language-game he tries, is (to exaggerate slightly) nothing more than another way to say "Oh, look how well that foreigner learned German." Of course, moving without caution into a second language can lead to beautiful results, through direct translations of phrases and sayings, through structural transformations and rhythmical imitations and even neologisms inspired by the first language. This is a good writing strategy, but only if done in a meaningful and logical way, not just to create a "sound" or a "feeling." Though critics may find it inconvenient when an author working in a native language (or in his native artistic traditions) exhibits words and images are unusual, fruitful or unique, it is neither impossible nor forbidden for a domestic author to experiment, to produce uncommon linguistic structures or to connect to another folklore. A language is the only country without borders. Anyone can (and should) use the privilege to make a language bigger, better and more beautiful by planting a wordtree there, one never grown before. Andronikova Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 5, 2007 Hana Andronikova (Czech Republic), Peter Kimani (Kenya), Kevery Nambisan (India), Saša Stanišić (Germany) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and cluck on “News & Events“ 1 Hana Andronikova Wings of Migration: Looking for a Rainbow Migration is a catalyst for change and development, and in a world that is changing at a lightning pace, not harnessing the power of migration is shortsighted. - Brunson McKinley, International Organization for Migration Migration is an intriguing topic. Some animals travel enormous distances with startling precision. They travel at night, in the daytime, in the skies, in the depths of the sea, using the stars, the sun or the Earth’s magnetic field for guidance, in order to find territory that is best for the survival of their species, places that provide them with food, water and shelter, and space for their breeding. Animals that have learned to move to optimal environments are the ones who have survived. Humans are only one of many migratory species. The word migration has a different ring to an ornithologist than to a human rights activist, or to a programmer who would imagine data or system migration, or an astronomer to whom a planetary migration would inevitably come first to mind. Human migration is as old as the mankind, we just keep inventing new terms to describe its various aspects: illegal migration, trafficking, migrant smuggling. Migration is imbedded in our cells, it is our birthright. Cell migration is a central process in the development and maintenance of multi-cellular organisms. Tissue formation during embryonic development, wound healing and immune responses all require the orchestrated movement of cells in a particular direction to a specific location. I’m sure you know what I’m saying. Here I’m going to talk about my grandmother. She is 99 years old and is a living proof of one amazing paradox. You don’t have to migrate to live in different countries. She has lived in seven different states, yet she has never moved. Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, she saw its bitter end while celebrating the birth of Czechoslovakia, the First Republic. After Hitler rolled over the country only twenty years later, my grandmother found herself in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Slovaks having their own state. With the end of the World War Two, Czechoslovakia became Czechoslovakia again, the so-called Third Republic. In 1960 the victory of socialism was officially declared and the country got another name: Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. The Velvet Revolution ended the long haul of the communist rule and my grandmother had to change her documents again, this time to the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic. The happy marriage lasted three years only, till our civilized Velvet Divorce, when she finally became a citizen of the Czech Republic. Andronikova Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 5, 2007 Hana Andronikova (Czech Republic), Peter Kimani (Kenya), Kevery Nambisan (India), Saša Stanišić (Germany) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and cluck on “News & Events“ 2 This phenomenon could be described as the regime migration. There is one more thing about my grandmother and migration: her favorite film, the Winged Migration. She loves documentaries and films about nature, and when we talk, we talk of bees and butterflies, of songbirds flying north to breed, autumn passages, flyways spanning over continents, routes following mountain ranges and coastlines, crossing large bodies of water, marshes, wind drawing patterns over the land. We talk of fish traveling between fresh water and the sea, eel larvae drifting on the open ocean, sometimes for months or years, before moving thousands of kilometers back to their home streams. The advantages of new territories offset the high stress, energetic costs, and other risks of the migration. This is true of humans, too. But why is my grandmother so intrigued by the winged migration? Perhaps it’s because she lived most of her adult life behind the Iron Curtain and the only way she could travel was with birds, as a shadow of their wings, each morning waking up with tired limbs after the long night’s journey. Our country, right in the heart of Europe, saw whole processions of migratory species: regimes, kings and dictators, armies and traders crossing it back and forth in short succession. Over the centuries, we learned that the best way to cope with our position was to bow our heads and make cryptic jokes behind the backs of the oppressors, no matter from which side they came. Bitter laughter. Culture and art became a retreat, a way of revolt, a path to greater freedom. Nowadays, we have immigrants coming to our land and we call it a new phenomenon. It’s not really true. We just paused for forty years, when the regime didn’t let anyone in, anyone out. Today I would like to talk about the migration of stories, the old new phenomenon of people immigrating to the Czech Republic. Refugees flee from Chechnya, Sudan, Burma, filling the camps, making our authorities dizzy. Five of them tell their stories in a play that I have been working on, a project of Archa Theatre in Prague. Let me introduce my friends. This is Khuppi from Burma, showing us his wedding photograph, telling us of his wife, remembering her slender hands, her quiet, and how he had to leave her, running for his life, when she was nine months pregnant. Khuppi tells us of the time he arrived in Prague, of three years of waiting. He tells us how he feels. Not dead, not alive. Stuck in between the wires of laws and mountains of papers, reduced to a number, scrutinized by blind justice, put on hold, his life a chain of waiting rooms and letters. In between the lines he tells us of the speed with which we pass judgment on someone like him, on our new neighbors, those weird people from dangerous parts of the world. He shows us how we avoid his eyes, how we ask questions without wanting to hear any answer, how he’s tired of telling his story again and again, a parody on Kafka’s Trial. Khuppi keeps running, the belt of the treadmill under his feet, moving faster and faster, but the landscape remains the same. A waiting room. He smiles at his own story, noting that all Burmese refugees were awarded asylum without any difficulty, except for him. There are things he doesn’t Andronikova Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 5, 2007 Hana Andronikova (Czech Republic), Peter Kimani (Kenya), Kevery Nambisan (India), Saša Stanišić (Germany) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and cluck on “News & Events“ 3 talk about. He wouldn’t talk about his three year old daughter that he’s never seen. I wouldn’t ask. I do enquire though, at different places, the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I ask questions and hear the other side of the story. But that’s not important here. Some great news arrived in Iowa only two weeks ago: Khuppi got asylum. How wonderful. The next act of his drama, the escapade of getting his wife and child out of Burma to the Czech Republic, has begun. But for now, let’s just celebrate. There is one more friend of mine I want you to meet. Gugar, an Armenian from Georgia. A musician and hairdresser. A true artist. He plays the piano and accordion on stage. He will sing for you and for his family, once brutally attacked because of their religion. Five years ago they fled to the Czech Republic, for years they waited and waited, moving from one refugee camp to another. Now he can sing, the permanent-resident-song, settled in Prague with his wife and three children, working as a hairdresser in a Russian beauty salon. You can ask him if he misses anything. His face breaks into a smile, a blush of hope and vanity. I miss my carrier pigeons. I would love to bring them here. That would solve all my problems. His flock of pigeons is stuck in Armenia with Gugar’s mother-in-law. She has to trim their wings regularly, otherwise they would fly back home, to the place they were born, to Georgia. They don’t know that their master lives in another land. And maybe they don’t care. That’s the trouble with pigeons. They always return home, to their native dovecote. Gugar knows. And he knows what he needs to do. With his new home, he needs to get a new flock of birds, leaving his old ones behind. Gugar smiles. Not ready yet. My grandmother loves this story. People vary. So do birds and bees, she says. Pigeons return home, all the time, no matter what. On the other hand, some species of locusts and dragonflies migrate in one direction, do not return, and only the next generation may migrate in the opposite direction. Salmon hatch in freshwater streams, go down to the sea and live there for years, then return to the same streams, where they were born, and die shortly after. They return home to die. Hundreds of people living in exile do the same, they come back to the place of their birth to rest, their last wish to be buried in their motherland. For some reason it matters to them. My grandmother knows a lot about people and animals. She also knows about the way they die. Birds, for some reason, are still on the top of her list. She tells me a secret no one knows. In her past life she was a nightingale. That’s why she can sing so well. My grandmother believes that it is in a bird’s nature to know when they are to die. When their time comes, they rise up, fly over a rainbow and disintegrate in the upper air. This obviously flies in the face of the laws of gravity. But I wouldn’t argue with my grandmother. Her only wish now is to fly over a rainbow and die like those birds. I hope she will. But that’s her poetic self speaking. When her more pragmatic side emerges, she taps her stick on the ground on Andronikova Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 5, 2007 Hana Andronikova (Czech Republic), Peter Kimani (Kenya), Kevery Nambisan (India), Saša Stanišić (Germany) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and cluck on “News & Events“ 4 which she stands and nods her head. I want my bones to be buried right here, in this land – no matter what any fool decides to call it! At her age, no one can take her for a ride. Kimani Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 5, 2007 Hana Andronikova (Czech Republic), Peter Kimani (Kenya), Kevery Nambisan (India), Saša Stanišić (Germany) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and cluck on “News & Events“ 1 Peter Kimani Out of Africa The title of my presentation, Out of Africa, evokes the popular novel by the same title by the Danish writer, Karen Blixen, also known as Isak Dinesen, who made a home in Kenya at the beginning of the last century. Blixen spent her youthful days attempting to harness – without much success, it should be clarified – the volcanic fertile soils in Kenya to grow coffee. The circumstances of Blixen’s sojourn to what was then British East Africa remain unclear, although the rumors of war in Europe and the lure of cheap or free labor in the “virgin lands” was enough motivation to lead a young European just starting life to explore, as it would the British colonizers who arrived there only two decades earlier. Blixen’s long sojourn in Kenya – lasting seventeen years in all – yielded little, her agricultural enterprise failed and she ultimately closed shop and returned to Denmark where she wrote Out of Africa, which recorded her memories of Kenya. The book made her famous and wealthy and, over time, Out of Africa has evolved from a simple tale of wanderlust to a classic travelogue – its prejudices notwithstanding. But that’s beside the point. This Out of Africa exhortation is largely accidental. After all, Karen Blixen was exiled in Kenya between 1914 and 1931, and her work falls within the realm of the writing I am exploring today: writing in an age of migration, Diaspora and exile. It would be a good thing to start by exploring another migration, possibly the world’s largest, which entailed a forcible removal of millions of African people from their homeland and their shipping away to the United States, the Americas and Europe, where they worked as slaves. One of the most eloquent articulators of that “Out of Africa” experience was Olaudah Equiano, who was kidnapped with his sister at the age of 11, sold by local slave traders and shipped across the Atlantic to Barbados and then to Virginia in the United States. Equiano was later sold to a number of masters and ended up as a deckhand, valet and barber in London, where he traded on the side while serving his master. In three short years, he saved enough money to buy his own freedom. His autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, came out in 1789, and was possibly the earliest book by an African. Equiano then spent much of the next 20 years traveling the world promoting the book and campaigning for the abolition of slave trade, the ills of which he exposed in the engaging autobiography. Kimani Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 5, 2007 Hana Andronikova (Czech Republic), Peter Kimani (Kenya), Kevery Nambisan (India), Saša Stanišić (Germany) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and cluck on “News & Events“ 2 There are no parallels, of course, between Blixen and Equiano. One was free, the other, a serf. Yet their stories dramatize a yearning to capture memory of place. Blixen sought to explain her affection for her environment, which included the people within it, of whom she wrote condescendingly. Equiano recounted memories of beauty and terror and of the pain of dislocation, having been plucked from his roots. Nearly 100 years after Equiano’s book, the British would set foot in Kenya and redefine slavery once again. Since slavery had been abolished, the next great thing, they reasoned, was to reintroduce slavery by taking away the people’s land so they could sell their labor. The people tilled the land but never owned its produce. Those who resisted were rounded up and put in concentration camps while the leaders were exiled to harsh terrains in faraway corners of the country. The heroine of the Giriama people, Me Katilili, who led the revolt against the British at the Kenyan coast, was among the first casualties, as were trade unionists Harry Thuku, and Makhan Singh, and publisher and freedom veteran Gakaara wa Wanjau. Prison and detention, therefore, are forms of exile, and the growing body of literature in this genre confirms that the human spirit, even in the most dehumanizing of circumstances, can never cease to be creative. There are two consequences of such confinement, the most immediate being that the people are deprived of figure-heads who serve as their inspiration, and eventually lose morale and give up; for the leaders, the experience of separation from the people denies them what one of Africa’s leading authors, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, calls “the everyday.” He should know. In 1977, Ngugi was detained without trial for one year. In 1982, Ngugi undertook what he thought was a month-long tour of London to promote his two new books, Devil on the Cross and his prison memoir, Detained, both written on toilet paper at the Kamiti Maximum Prison. Ngugi’s brief trip to London would extend to 22 years in exile, after receiving a coded message that hinted at his impending arrest upon return. Part of his exile has been spent in England and the United States, which is his present base. This is not to suggest, however, that American writers have found their land hospitable, a paradox that James Baldwin explained succinctly: “Any writer,” he says, “feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent – which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it." Kimani Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 5, 2007 Hana Andronikova (Czech Republic), Peter Kimani (Kenya), Kevery Nambisan (India), Saša Stanišić (Germany) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and cluck on “News & Events“ 3 Baldwin’s first flight out of America was in 1948 when he headed to Paris, the city that his mentor, Richard Wright, called “the city of refuge.” Wright preceded Baldwin there, and lived there until his death in 1960. Baldwin recognized, as the Jamaican reggae singer Bob Marley sings in that sardonic song called Running Away, that one cannot run away from oneself. Although Baldwin was physically absent from the United States, he followed the events in his homeland, which were veering dangerously towards the precipice as the black-white struggles in the South hit fever pitch. In 1957, Baldwin would return and join the roiling swirls of masses demonstrating to desegregate the South, much in same style as Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo, who had taken up a gun and headed to the frontline in the Biafran secessionist war of 1960. Okigbo would not survive; Baldwin would live to tell his story of defeat, after returning to the “city of refuge” two years later. “I doubted my ability to survive the fury of the color problem,” he would write in 1959. “I wanted to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or even merely a Negro writer.” Baldwin was raising an important question that still plagues humanity to date: the question of identity and belonging. His sojourns abroad had confirmed to him that America, with all its deformities, was the only place he would ever belong. The finality of that verdict was horrifying and, in 1970, he concluded: “To save myself, I finally had to leave for good...” And so it came to pass that at the time of his death in 1987, James Baldwin was still living in the “city of refuge.” But Baldwin happened to be in the right place at the right time, although he possibly never realized it. His city of birth, New York, also gave birth to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s; Paris, the city that gave him refuge, would deliver Negritude; both were intellectual experimentations of an African Diasporic identity. The Harlem experience triggered a sudden burst of interest in African-American artistic and cultural production. Most of the writing from this period decried displacement from Africa and contemplated the artistes’ relationship with the land of their forebears. What is Africa to me? Copper sun or scarlet sea, Jungle star or jungle track, Strong bronzed men, or regal black Women from whose loins I sprang When the birds of Eden sang? One three centuries removed From the scenes his fathers loved Spicy grove, cinnamon tree Kimani Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 5, 2007 Hana Andronikova (Czech Republic), Peter Kimani (Kenya), Kevery Nambisan (India), Saša Stanišić (Germany) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and cluck on “News & Events“ 4 What is Africa to me? Countee Cullen’s poem, “Heritage,” published in 1925, explores a question that Barack Obama, the American presidential candidate with Kenyan roots, has to face in 2007. How can Americans who claim African descent, Americans whose forebears were forced into exile under arms, reconnect with their forsaken land? Langston Hughes, one of the great poets to emerge from the Harlem experience, appears to contemplate this complex heritage in “Afro-American Fragment,” which was first published in 1959: Subdued and time-lost Are the drums — and yet Through some vast mist of race There comes this song I do not understand, This song of atavistic land, Of bitter yearnings lost Without a place— So long, So far away Is Africa’s Dark face. Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican nationalist and publisher, appeared to have a permanent solution to this dicey question of identity and belonging: the only emancipation possible for Africa’s Diaspora, Garvey said, would be a physical return to Africa. Garvey’s Black Star Line, the shipping company he hoped to use to ferry all the sons and daughters of Africa back to their homeland, floundered before he set sail, frustrating what appeared a practical if problematic endeavor. But there were some exceptions, such as the hundreds of Jamaicans who settled in Shashamane, near the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, and the return of individuals like the great African- American thinker W.E.B. Du Bois who, in the sunset of his life, migrated to Ghana and took up Ghanaian citizenship. Du Bois was at the centre of the intellectual movement, Negritude, which forged a collective identity for the African Diaspora by drawing from the African continent’s glorious past as a source of pride and joy. The future Senegalese president Leopold Sedar Sengor was part of this initiative, as were Richard Wright and Leon Gontran-Damas, among others. These intellectual and cultural stirrings, from Harlem to Paris, had one thing in common: they were spurred by a historical and political consciousness, which have merged into what the South African President Thabo Mbeki calls the African Renaissance. Kimani Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 5, 2007 Hana Andronikova (Czech Republic), Peter Kimani (Kenya), Kevery Nambisan (India), Saša Stanišić (Germany) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and cluck on “News & Events“ 5 Mbeki’s memorable speech, “I Am an African,” delivered in 1994, appeared to acknowledge his country’s complicated historical heritage, but also situated his unmistakable identity as an African, drawing from the wells of history to find strength to endure the challenges of the day. How then can narratives of the African struggles be conveyed to the world in this new dispensation? How can Africa draw from the taproot of its culture and convey this triumphant tale to the world? These stories have to be told in African languages, and South Africa has led the way by endorsing 11 local languages for official use, restoring the legitimacy of these languages and cultures after centuries of subjugation and oppression. To use Mbeki’s words, “we must assume that the Roman, Pliny the Elder, was familiar with the Latin saying, ‘Ex Africa semper aliquid novi!’ which means, ‘something new always comes out of Africa.’ ” |
| Type (DCMIType) | Moving image |
| Type (AAT) |
Presentations (Communicative events) |
| Language | English |
| Digital Collection | Virtual Writing University Archive |
| Contributing Institution | Iowa City Public Library |
| Subcollection |
International Writing Program Collection |
| Rights Management | Educational use only, no other rights given. U.S. and international copyright laws may protect this digital object. Commercial use or distribution of the object is not permitted without prior permission of the copyright holder. |
| Contact Information | Contact the VWU Webmaster: http://www.writinguniversity.org/index.php/main/info/25/ |
| Date Digital | 2007-10-05 |
Description
| Title | Writing for an age of migration, diaspora, exile, part 2 Video, 700k |
| Type (DCMIType) |
Moving image |
| Type (IMT) |
mp4 |
| Duration | 01:26:51 |
| Digitization Specifications | Received as MPEG2 and converted to mp4 for streaming. |
| Date Digital | 2007-10-05 |
| File Name | iwp-icpl_10-5-07.mp4 |
| Original File Name | iwp_10-5-07.mpg |
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