Literature from where I stand, Iowa City Public Library, October 12, 2007 Video, 700k |
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Literature from where I stand, Iowa City Public Library, October 12, 2007 Video, 700k
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| Rating | |
| Title | Literature from where I stand, Iowa City Public Library, October 12, 2007 |
| Creator |
Inguanez, Simone, 1971- Yun, He Khalifa, Khaled Dewanto, Nirwan Miller, Kei |
| Creator - Nationality |
Maltese Chinese Syrian Indonesian Jamaican |
| Contributor | Merrill, Christopher |
| Date Original | 2007-10-12 |
| Description | Simone Inguanez chooses to stand in her poetry, a place that can neither be created nor destroyed. James Na divides his presentation into three topics: the hibernation of Phillippine-Chinese literature, the Phillippine-Chinese literature under the guidance of the mass media, and new avenues for development to stay with the times. Khaled Khalifa stands as a novelist, pondering how fiction can "resist all the ugliness of mankind." Nirwan Dewanto deconstructs world literature and puts it in its place. Kei Miller describes where he stands in relation to where he doesn't stand, or where he doesn't want to be seen standing. |
| Venue |
Iowa City Public Library |
| Geographic Subject | United States -- Iowa -- Iowa City |
| Chronological Subject | 2000-2010 |
| Transcription | Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 12, 2007 Nirwan Dewanto (Indonesia), Simone Inguanez (Malta) Khaled Khalifa (Syria), Kei Miller (Jamaica), James Na (Philippines) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” Inguanez 1 State of the Art: Literature from Where I Stand Simone Inguanez Ladies and Gentlemen, good afternoon and thanks for having me. I feel greatly honoured to be the very first writer representing Malta at the IWP. I would like to deeply thank: you and all the people involved with this program for your appreciation towards Maltese literature, and I congratulate you for your commitment to make this whole project work. One can say a lot about the theme selected for today’s panel; I did not know where to start. But chance had it that where I stood this week was amid a very interesting exercise of collective poetry with six brilliant poets (including Chris Merrill), which demanded much time and energy from me. That way my paper had to be, by force, a brief one, and this afternoon you won’t have to listen to me for long. Where I Stand … Oh, do I stand? I picture myself swimming or dancing. Each time I turn (to myself), I’ve just moved. Like the nymph in my poems, I won’t stay put. Really, defining where one stands is a major task. Yes, in ways, I am my old self – part woman part child – strolling round the coast, between the girl peeping and the old woman who sleeps sitting up. Whatever persona I take on, the identity from which I write will, naturally, always be that of a woman and eternal girl (I hope). Many of my earlier works portray a process of coming to terms with femininity. They reflect a transition from girl to woman and, at times, back to girl. Often, they are monologues and close-ups of a female voice, accounts of the man-woman dance. I find these poems very “human.” Yet, though clearly feminine, they are never too far from the masculine. I find a lot of “melting” of feminine and masculine elements, animus and anima, yin and yang. These poems are also characterised by melting of eros (life and love and creation) and thanatos (death and aggression and destruction); the coming close and the moving away. And, as a student ably pointed out at a presentation I gave last month (as part of the International Literature Today Workshop), there is also some sense of angst with regard to origins and fertility. My identity will also, always, be shaped by the Mediterranean – sea and land, and the whole legacy of the Mediterrranean. While I have travelled far and fallen in love with many places and their people (the unknown is, surely, very intriguing), my perception the unknown is bound to be fashioned by my own identity. I will, inevitably, always be in the way of its myth and its charm upon me. Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 12, 2007 Nirwan Dewanto (Indonesia), Simone Inguanez (Malta) Khaled Khalifa (Syria), Kei Miller (Jamaica), James Na (Philippines) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” Inguanez 2 Then, of course, there is personal baggage.: my roots, experiences, concerns. Where I first stood was among my people. And now, my people stand inside my writing – starring both as themselves, and as very productive metaphors. My parents, grandparents, siblings, would-be siblings – they all people my poetry. I also retell various cities and villages, ramparts, streets and alleys, bars. Again, where I once stood now stands inside me, and in my poetry. At the same time, I do not hold back from auto-criticism. On the other hand, otherness gives depth to one’s definition. More than that, it is actually what makes definition possible. Identity and otherness are really one whole continuum. So, when my poetry “stands” in Paris and Tunisia, in Lodève and Naples, in Iowa, in Sarajevo, I find that the ultimate effect is further depth to my identity – both as person and writer. And, once more, otherness and unity melt, particularly in poems about war, poverty and so on. I catch myself chanting the pictures I cannot paint, the melodies I cannot play, the affinities I cannot contain. I think this explains my fleeting images, my obsession with sounds and rhythm and my habit of switching tone and pitch from playful to intense, from bitter to sweet. Italian art sociologist Francesco Lampara describes my poetry as minimalist and intimist at the same time. He explains he finds it minimalist in that I focus on ordinary and everyday objects, like things around the house, the cracks in the wall, the wobbly wardrobe, the forgotten contents of a chest of drawers. He finds it intimist in the attention I give to expressions of states of mind and of my innermost feelings. This is evoked, among other things, by smell, the sniff of the slipper under the armchair, the fragrance of grandpa’s fields; and by colour, the floor-tiles in a shade of milk gone bad, the pale white of death on the young woman’s face, the purple colour of grapes which stains the fingers. Lampara goes on to describe my work as a poetry which searches, in resurrected memories, the traces left by the past. He speaks of a “here and now” immersed in some sort of temporal continuum where the past is brought back and the future is already partly concretized. I write in free verse. I find this helps me achieve the fluidity and versatility I like. And I play with occasional rhymes, internal rhymes and false rhymes, alliterations, and so on. I also retain my minimalism when it comes to punctuation. I am reluctant to restrict the poetic encounter. I’d rather look at poetry as an open-ended experience for the reader. I will say a few words about my literary backdrop. According to Maltese Professor Peter Serracino Inglott, it is my use of indirect illocution that he considers a development in the history of Maltese poetry. Namely, he finds in my poems the expression of an illocutionary force other than that expressed in my utterance, a force achieved by relying on shared background knowledge, principles of conversation, convention, and the ability of the addressee to make inferences.1 1 Definition adapted from http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryofLinguisticTerms/WhatIsIndirectIllocution.htm. Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 12, 2007 Nirwan Dewanto (Indonesia), Simone Inguanez (Malta) Khaled Khalifa (Syria), Kei Miller (Jamaica), James Na (Philippines) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” Inguanez 3 Professor Serracino Inglott remarks that while the traditional Maltese poet spoke with the voice of someone who knew well who they were��Catholic, patriotic, upright—the contemporary poet is immediately recognizable on the scene by doubts assailing them in those same regards. Speaking of contemporary literature, Maria Grech-Ganado, one of our foremost literary academics, herself a poet, who has also translated several writers of my generation and who in her seniority continues to have young blood pumping through her veins, comments: Never has there been so much literary ferment in the Maltese islands since the sixties. The sixties had broken with the themes and influence of the first wave of national, religious and sentimental love, to replace it with a political and existential one which addressed these themes from a confrontational perspective. Now, she adds: Many of [the major names of the 60s breakthrough] don’t write anymore or have moved to a different form of artistic expression. [In the meantime] there is a growing number of young Maltese who have already made a name for themselves, despite the fact that it is extremely difficult for new writers to have prose published, and virtually impossible when they write poetry.2 Oscar Wilde once said “Flaubert did not write French prose, but the prose of a great artist who happened to be French.” I am most confident that in Malta we have great artists who are producing great literature. It would be a real pity, not only for Malta itself, but also for the literary world, if we allowed language to be a barrier. Conclusion I like to believe that poetry can neither be created nor destroyed. It can be formed, informed, reformed (maybe). But, to me, it is in essence an energy. We simply choose the poems our poetry shall live in, picture the books where we would host our readers. 2 The Contemporary Writing Scene in Malta. (Feature.) Available on the internet: http://www.laurahird.com/newreview/malta.html. Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 12, 2007 Nirwan Dewanto (Indonesia), Simone Inguanez (Malta) Khaled Khalifa (Syria), Kei Miller (Jamaica), James Na (Philippines) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” Na 1 James Na Good afternoon everyone. I have submitted two articles, entitled “Chinese Poetry in Southeast Asia” and “Some Facts on Philippine-Chinese Literature.” Due to time limitations, I will only touch on some important points of the first report and concentrate more on the second report. As the title of the first report, “Chinese Poetry in Southeast Asia,” indicates, we must first know which countries belong to “Southeast Asia.” These countries are: Myanmar (Burma), Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines and Timor-Leste. Chinese literature in these nations began when the Chinese started immigrating to these countries, which was as early as the late-eighteenth century. For a more detailed discussion of the history of Chinese Literature in these countries, when it started, how it grew, what its influences were, and other historical details, please read my report posted on the IWP website. During the early years of immigration, the Chinese considered their stay in these Southeast Asian countries temporary. Naturally, events that happened in China during these times greatly influenced Chinese Literature in these countries. I enumerated six events in my report. They are: 1. The May Fourth Movement in China in 1919; 2. The Japanese Invasion of China and other Asian countries from 1937 to 1945; 3. The Rise of Contemporary Poetry Movement in Taiwan in 1956; 4. China’s Open Door Policy in 1978; 5. Regionalization of Chinese Literature in Southeast Asia, and 6. The Establishment of the Pen Club of Southeast Asia Chinese Poetry Writers. Details of the above events, as well, can be read on the IWP website. Let’s continue to a brief discussion of my second report, entitled “Some Facts On Philippine-Chinese Literature.” In my first report, I mentioned that there were two contemporary Chinese literary magazines published in the Philippines in 1934. If we use the appearance of these two magazines as a reference point for the development of Philippine-Chinese Literature, then we have more than seventy years of history to discuss. Although seventy years is not long, I am afraid we would Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 12, 2007 Nirwan Dewanto (Indonesia), Simone Inguanez (Malta) Khaled Khalifa (Syria), Kei Miller (Jamaica), James Na (Philippines) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” Na 2 have to work overtime if we were to discuss everything in detail. So my discussion will concentrate on “some facts,” as the title indicates. These facts include the hibernation of Philippine-Chinese Literature, Philippine-Chinese Literature under the guidance of the mass media, and new avenues for the development of Philippine-Chinese Literature. 1. The Hibernation of Philippine-Chinese Literature: There were two historical events that led to the hibernation of Phil-Chinese Literature: the invasion of the Philippines by Japan in 1941 that lasted through the liberation of Manila in 1945, a period of four years; and the declaration of martial law by then-President Ferdinand Marcos from 1972 to 1981, a period of nine years. In these two periods, Chinese literary activity in the Philippines was totally absent. Needless to say, during the Japanese occupation, no Chinese newspaper or magazine was allowed to circulate. During Marcos’ martial law, a single Chinese newspaper was selected and allowed to be published. In order to avoid any trouble, this Chinese newspaper did not have a Literary Page or any other sections that gave free expression to writers. The phenomenon that emerged after these two hibernation periods is what we are left to ponder: the reawakening of Philippine-Chinese Literature. The environment of oppression and struggle that characterized these two hibernation periods pushed the creativity of Philippine-Chinese literature writers to new heights. The outstanding literary works produced after these hibernation periods fully compensated for the deficiency caused by the silent intervals. Why? Generally speaking, during both hibernation periods, although many writers lost interest in writing, many of them still held on to their love for and devotion to the literary arts. The period of inactiveness enabled the writers to settle down and silently hone their skills, waiting for the moment when their talent could be unleashed. Particularly, in the first hibernation period during World War II, when Japan invaded China, many Chinese literati and writers immigrated to the Philippines. This was just a few years before Japan invaded the Philippines and other Asian countries. During this time, the standard of Chinese education in the Philippine was high. In the second hibernation, a long period of nine years under martial law, more complicated situations arose. During this period, the standard of Chinese education fell, due to defects in the system of Chinese education in the Philippines. The defects were that: Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 12, 2007 Nirwan Dewanto (Indonesia), Simone Inguanez (Malta) Khaled Khalifa (Syria), Kei Miller (Jamaica), James Na (Philippines) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” Na 3 a. The low salary of school teachers discouraged the younger generation from considering teaching as a profession, resulting in a lack of new teachers; b. Chinese schools were only allowed two to three hours a day to teach the Chinese language; c. The use of Chinese language in everyday life was limited; d. Parents’ attitudes toward the education of their children were wrong, their motive for sending their children to a Chinese school only being for them to “Speak and write a little Chinese so their roots won’t be forgotten”; e. The use of impractical and outdated text books, and rigid and inflexible methods of teaching in the Chinese schools in the Philippines. In light of these negative factors, why then was there an upsurge of Chinese Literature in the Philippines after nine long years of silence? One of the reasons is the presence of “immigrants.” Although some staunch supporters of Chinese literature belong to the 50s and 60s, many new immigrants from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong had arrived in the Philippines by the end of martial law. Among these immigrants were writers and scholars and, compared to the local Chinese, their level of education was very high! In this period, the Chinese literary circle was full of these “transplanted writers”! 2. Philippine-Chinese Literature under the guidance of the mass media. Since most of the works of Chinese writers are carried by Chinese newspapers, a brief analysis of the Chinese population and Chinese mass media in the Philippines is needed. a. The population of the Philippines is approximately eighty five million; b. The population of the Chinese, naturalized and of Chinese descent, is approximately 2% of the Philippine population – approximately one million, seven hundred thousand; c. Daily circulation of all Chinese newspapers combined is approximately forty thousand copies, presuming that every newspaper reaches three readers, a total of one hundred twenty thousand readers, or approximately 8% of the Chinese in the Philippines read the Chinese newspaper daily; d. Readers of the Chinese literary page hardly exceed 5% of the total number of newspaper readers, this means only around three thousand readers read literary works daily; e. At the same time, readers of Chinese literary works have their own literary biases and political convictions, thus discriminating against certain writers. If a literary work is read by five hundred readers a day, the writer is quite lucky! Dear friends, are you content to have your work read by a mere five hundred readers? I believe Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 12, 2007 Nirwan Dewanto (Indonesia), Simone Inguanez (Malta) Khaled Khalifa (Syria), Kei Miller (Jamaica), James Na (Philippines) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” Na 4 your answer is a definite “No.” In my second report, I state that: “Chinese literary writers should not confine themselves within the small circle of the Chinese community, they should take the initiative to schematically and systematically induct Philippine-Chinese literature into the mainstream of Philippine literature.” This leads us to the third fact: 3. Staying With the Times: New Avenues for Development. Advances in technology have led some Chinese writers in the Philippines to explore other channels of publication, such as the Internet. In my report, I gave two examples of how writers have taken advantage of the Internet by setting up a website: “Friends of World News Literary Page” and “Society of Contemporary Arts and Literature.” Both of them have fully utilized the power of the Internet in exploring new possibilities to have their literary works read by more readers around the world. The E-Book, too, deserves mention as an economical and very effective way of circulating a writer’s work. To summarize and conclude: the development of Philippine-Chinese literature in the Philippines is characterized by two periods of destructive, forced hibernation and a constructive movement in search of new methods of writing and publication. Although Chinese literature in the Philippine belongs only to an ethnic group, and in spite of its being forced to hibernate twice, it had the ability to bounce back and push its creativity to new heights, totally compensating for all the years lost. This reawakening is surely rooted in the resilience, determination and cultural background of the Chinese ethnic group as a whole. It is my sincere hope that Philippine-Chinese literature will steadily grow and develop in spite of the difficulties imposed on it by its environment. Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 12, 2007 Nirwan Dewanto (Indonesia), Simone Inguanez (Malta) Khaled Khalifa (Syria), Kei Miller (Jamaica), James Na (Philippines) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” Khalifa 1 Khaled Khalifa Today I will talk only about the novel and cut out any discussion of other forms, which I have trouble summarizing. I will put to you a question I frequently ask myself about fiction: What can the defenseless art do in the face of all accumulated human errors? What can the defenseless novel do amid the systematic destruction of life, love, truth and beauty? And can this wonderful art, with all its variations, resist all the ugliness of mankind? The day I discovered the novel I saw light at the end of the dark tunnel. Before that moment, my life had been merely a series of fragmented moments which could not be put together. Fiction was able to compile those moments, granting me the power to be able to assemble my own life. I still do not understand the source of this power in an art as fragile and tender as the novel, how it is able to strengthen a defenseless writer like me. What can the novel do for the fragile and isolated millions who die of starvation every day? What can it do for the desperate? What can it do in the face of dictators with armies, prisons and laws? And finally, what can it do in the face of certainties, ideologies and religions? Since that day of introduction, I have become more familiar with the powerful vengeance of this tender art, a vengeance that causes tyrants to fear their real image. Only art (and here I mean not only the novel, but all art) can grant the oppressed the power of revenge and make their tormentors at last accountable. The ancient question asked by all art may be death, but it is the question of life that continues to drive art forward with a constant momentum. As a writer, I gratefully recall moments in which fiction and the novel gave me hope again and restored to me the confidence that what we do as writers is not just gossip, but an act of power which no one should underestimate. The act frightens our enemies. It is no wonder that ideologies of darkness and backwardness cannot possess art, nor can they make art their servant. All literature written by “official writers,” writers defending tyrants, has been only a weak art unable to withstand the test of history. Only art which illustrates the hopes and sufferings of mankind remains in the golden registry of history, and is shared by people and given respect through the ages. Sometimes, I ask myself what I would have done if I were not a novelist. I can not answer this question. I feel, as a writer, like Ahab, Melville’s captain in Moby Dick, misunderstood by all, for no other sailor comprehended what all this challenge meant to him. Nor did they know do know the secret of the task’s authority and power, or of its tenderness. Literature and fiction are similarly difficult to comprehend. Fiction is an art which proves, day after day and page after page, its true capacity for development, richness and vastness. Nevertheless, it has remained a mysterious art, one that cannot be fully understood, and an art that is, after all else, irresistibly charming. Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 12, 2007 Nirwan Dewanto (Indonesia), Simone Inguanez (Malta) Khaled Khalifa (Syria), Kei Miller (Jamaica), James Na (Philippines) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” Khalifa 2 I believe that the novel is still able to record human suffering as it happens, and to record human hope as well. Fiction is not a weapon of blind revenge, but a useful tool, to be used to ask basic existential questions, even if these questions must be asked again and again, even if humanity has not yet found definitive answers to these questions. The novel and its surprising evolution still excite me and return me, once again, to the moment of our first meeting, which remains, for me, a memory of pleasure. It is as if it were just a few moments ago, and will linger forever with me. I am not sure who spoke first spoke the words. It may have been the great poet Mahmoud Darwish who said, before anyone else: "O death, all arts have defeated you." I conclude with his words, though now it is I who speak them. Yes, dear death, all arts have defeated you. Dewanto 1 Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 12, 2007 Nirwan Dewanto (Indonesia), Simone Inguanez (Malta) Khaled Khalifa (Syria), Kei Miller (Jamaica), James Na (Philippines) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” Periphery—Lost and Found Nirwan Dewanto Reading literature is very often like tasting wine: to evaluate which wine is good and which is not, you must blind yourself to the wine’s origin, age, brand, and price. If you still need to know these outside factors, you are a bad taster. But in the global literary market today you need only to pretend to be a good taster. We all read Borges, for instance, because the world has cast him as the literary model in this postmodern condition. If the language in which the Argentine wrote is the “right language,” it seems absurd that a good taster could find any modern master in “wronged” languages like Mongolian or Indonesian. Does true literature still need what is called “local genius” or “autochthonous aesthetics”? When you are deeply immersed in reading, what really interests you is the texture or, more deeply, the intricacy, the interconnection of the work’s elements. “There is nothing outside the text”: we recall a deconstructionist maxim. How do we recognize Argentinian things in Borges’ stories, like “Death and the Compass” or “The Garden of Forking Paths,” which are full of foreign names? Where is Serbo-Croatian form to be found in Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars, especially when we know that this “novel” is modelled after The Universal History of Infamy and Book of Imaginary Beings by Borges? How do you recognize the first-hand rhyme and prosody in some of the best Indonesian modern poems if, when they are translated into English, they are rendered in the form of Chinese poems from the T’ang era or of Anglo-American Imagist poetry? Could you imagine that something more than a Kafkaesque atmosphere is well-construed in 1970s Indonesian fiction? If you are a true close reader, local paraphernalia is not something you expect first from a literary work. What can be considered “local” is not something beyond language: it is nothing other than the language itself. To reach to what is called “world literature,” then, is to sway between bad taste and good taste, between cultural studies and literary criticism, between ethnographic inquiry and formalism, between “political passion” and literary enterprise, between distant reading and close reading. What is the use of world literature for those who writes in a “wrong” language like my own? When, in early 19th century, Goethe coined a phrase “world literature” (Weltliteratur), he transcended the provincialism of German literature. Sharply aware of the inferiority of his own national literature when compared with, for instance, French literature, or with Shakespeare, he saw the world as an extension of his homeland. From this extended homeland Goethe absorbed foreign forms, and he found his universal, humanist self in other nations. Goethean world literature is a path to literary creation: it is self-criticism as well as self-extension—or narcisism as well as imperial passion, if you like. Dewanto 2 Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 12, 2007 Nirwan Dewanto (Indonesia), Simone Inguanez (Malta) Khaled Khalifa (Syria), Kei Miller (Jamaica), James Na (Philippines) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” Two centuries after Goethe, world literature is more the calling card of literary scholars, comparatists more specifically, than of writers. Writers, national or otherwise, still retain literatures of the world as their source—notice, for example, how “fantastic literature” or detective stories lend the form across national borders—but they perceive the world as fragments, or a melange of works in which, to quote Emily Apter, “macro and micro literary units are awash, . . . with no obvious sorting device.” But perhaps there is such a device, namely English translation. We live in an Angloglobalized era. The restraints of literary aspiration once placed upon the great books of Western literature have been lifted, yet those writing outside the English language still must rely upon translation into English. To literary scholars nowadays, world literature is a systematic rendering, if not a system. According to Franco Moretti, interconnections between all (national) literatures make up the world literary system, in which literary forms, especially the novel, circulate from the center (i.e. Western Europe) to the periphery (i.e. colonial or postcolonial countries). As the superstructure is to the material base, the world literary system is to the world historical and economic systems. To put it simply: non- Western countries have imported the novel from the West and added to it local forms and local narrative voices. But there is always inequality, literary and economic as well, since, to quote Itamar Even-Zohar, “a target literature is, more often than not, interfered with by a source literature which completely ignores it.” The problem is how to depict the world literary system—or world literature—if any comparatist is only competent in two or three national literatures. The answer, according to Moretti, is distant reading: to read other people’s research. The trouble with close reading is that it depends on an extremely small canon; world literature must be a patchwork of other’s people research, without a single direct textual reading. Elsewhere, David Damrosch says, a comparatist has to practice a kind of amateurism when constructing world literature, as he relies on other comparatists’ readings of literatures he can’t read in the original. World literature is a collaborative work between comparatists and national literature specialists. Distant reading and amateurism. These two marvelous words alone signify the change in the nature of comparative literature. After poststructuralism shook the foundations of humanism and humanities, now the study of literature has to deconstruct itself too. According to the Bernheimer Report of 1993, subtitled “Comparative Literature at the Turn of the Century,” “literary texts are now being approached as one discursive practice among many others in a complex, shifting, and often contradictory field of cultural production.” The report suggests that “comparative literature departments play an active role in furthering the multicultural recontextualization of Anglo- American and European perspectives.” So, if our age is the age of multiculturalism, and if literary studies are more interested in culture than in literature itself, can the minority literatures—or any literatures written in “wrong languages”— ever be legitimized, even, perhaps, as the other world literature? Dewanto 3 Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 12, 2007 Nirwan Dewanto (Indonesia), Simone Inguanez (Malta) Khaled Khalifa (Syria), Kei Miller (Jamaica), James Na (Philippines) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” By “right languages,” I mean those of the long-established tradition of comparative literature – German, English, French, Spanish, and perhaps Italian and Portuguese; these imperial, core languages are the real languages of the global literary market today. Through all of these languages (though primarily through English) scholars and writers envision the literature of the world. If you write in one of these languages, even in a “pidginized” branch, even if you are from the tiniest, most remote postcolonial country, you could potentially write back to the center, leading world literature will “take your side.” Literatures from other parts of Europe, too, are still in the orbit of Weltliterature, for the languages and cultures have been firmly attached to the Enlightenment and humanist tradition. Meanwhile, the “remote” cultures of China and Japan are never farflung: their literature has long appealed to Western scholarship, which have provided us with self-criticism, close reading, and proper translation. Even through work confined to national literature departments, scholars-cumtranslators like Ivan Morris and Donald Keene have been able to elevate Japanese literary works to the ranks of world literature. Only by having this kind of close readers is a supercomparatist like Moretti able to rely on his distant reading. Then on the cryptic periphery are those that write in “wrong” languages, literatures, modern or otherwise, that have never been paired with Western literary scholarship. These literatures, appraised, at the moment, only as elements of a “social canon,” only draw interest from area studies departments. Will a firm comparatist weave this “ethnographic” reading into his “patchwork of other people’s research”? Moretti says, “The pressure from the Anglo-French core (center) tried to make the system uniform, but it could never fully erase the reality of difference. . . . The system was one, not uniform.” Once again, in my opinion, only literature written in the “right languages” will be welcomed in this system of variation—yes, variation, since the pressurized form from the core, is always to be indigenized, creating a compromise between “foreign form, local material, and local form,” or between “foreign plot, local characters, and local narrative voice.” The results are the formal features of the literary work itself, and only close reading can reveal whether or not the compromises resist the center’s hegemony. Theoretically speaking, a reader can’t easily extract local form or local narrative voice from this “triangle” without mastering the language, without immersion in its obscure literary tradition. The celebration of marginal(ized) literatures nowadays is motivated by political heroism disguised as theory. Some pretend to diffuse the boundaries of genre but, ironically, more often only encounter local materials and local characters (elements of great value to ethnographers) in distant reading. In today’s revised comparative literature, close reading is overshadowed by the dictates of the world Dewanto 4 Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 12, 2007 Nirwan Dewanto (Indonesia), Simone Inguanez (Malta) Khaled Khalifa (Syria), Kei Miller (Jamaica), James Na (Philippines) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” literary system; and the local form—or the foreign form localized—can hardly be unfolded. Local form, perhaps, will soon be considered only a variant of or a resentful reinterpretation of the socalled modernism. By way of theory, what we can have is worlded literature—or world literature being opened up with a kind of affirmative action. I would like to draw an analogy. In the early nineties there were some traveling exhibitions of modern Indonesian art (or Indonesian modern art?) in the United States and Western Europe. This “cultural diplomacy” attempts to say, “We too have modern art, which is art of the present, not revitalized indigenous art from the past.” While Indonesian critics promoted the exhibit as art with postmodern assumptions, the exhibition itself only visited small, unimportant museums, oftenly ethnographic museums. While many reviews claimed this art was no more than a belated, inferior carrying-out of high modernism, our critics argued that the reviewers had been persistently haunted by modernist principles. Thinking that affirmative action may only be for those who are begging for recognition and those who are deprived, I conclude that world literature is more ellipsis than all-inclusive. Though we have the picture of world literature, what is worth taking into account is something beneath it. World literature is, to borrow a phrase from Moretti again, a sort of slaughterhouse of literature, where the majority of works are to be “killed,” forgotten, and to disappear forever – only a very limited number of works can survive. I am not referring to the universalist principle that has obnoxiously obliterated what it calls “period pieces” and ��mediocrity.” But I do believe that any kind of criticism can change the course of literature, so long as it boldly makes value judgements. Without this boldness, the criticism will only fall victim to cultural relativism, a humanity-threatening malady of this democratic era. Without a certain degree of formalism, there can be no such judgement. Even true believers in cultural studies must choose a few particular works as the subject of their study; their political straining allows the the greater part be disregarded. Even if a literary canon is expanded to include the minority works of other literatures, it can never embrace all literatures. The acts of deconstruction, opening up, and reconstruction of literary history always begin with the question “What makes works literary?” We are never able to escape the notion of literature. The history of literature is always a dynamic of selection and restitution. Some obscure works from the recent past are worth elevating to canonical status, for example, those of Fernando Pessoa in Portugal; and some important authors might pass into oblivion, as will be the case, undoubtedly, of some Nobel Prize- and Goncourt Prize-winners. Dewanto 5 Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 12, 2007 Nirwan Dewanto (Indonesia), Simone Inguanez (Malta) Khaled Khalifa (Syria), Kei Miller (Jamaica), James Na (Philippines) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” From a writer’s point of view, world literature is antithetical to what has been formulated by literary scholars and critics. We prefer to follow the tenets of Goethe’s world literature: reading is an unsystematic, open-minded effort, rather than a method of constituting a system. The world’s literary sphere, then, is quite independent from its political-economic sphere. In this newly-formulated space, a literary revolution in a language, a region, or the world can be launched from a remote, almost unknown country, by an obscure writer. Such a revolution can even be accidental, if we endorse, for instance, the case of Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario and his modernismo: he asserted (perhaps only duplicated) French symbolism, the dominating poetic form, onto the Spanish language, yet he is considered a great innovator in Latin America and Spain. Yes, we know of great examples: the shifting of global literary gravity to Latin America in 1970s; the Indian writers, writing in English, writing themselves back to the center since the 1980s; or a minority’s works becoming a model in a dominant language, as was the case of Beckett and Kafka in recent past. Apart from the fact that these examples affirm, once again, the rightness of the core, imperial languages, I am sorry to say that such revolutions cannot simply be adopted by, or repeated by, any other literature, national or otherwise. Now, I believe that to develop a world perspective is not to grasp the whole globe. The insightful writer knows that world literature is a way to violate his own national literature; no longer tempted to be recognized in the Angloglobalized literary world, he loves to imagine a small circle of ideal, close readers. For him, literary comparatists are basically the great advertiser of so many national literatures; from this melange he can find what is unimportant in the world literary market. But that will transform him into “merely” a verbal artificer, no longer an heir to any definite culture. What he has stolen from, for instance, Paraguayan or Serbian literature might be brought to light by comparatists as a local genius replanted in his postmodern tropics. For this writer, world literature is a misreading of national literatures, a reading that makes him a global citizen, ethnographized. Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 12, 2007 Nirwan Dewanto (Indonesia), Simone Inguanez (Malta) Khaled Khalifa (Syria), Kei Miller (Jamaica), James Na (Philippines) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” Miller 1 Literature from Where I Stand, or Rather Sit, No – Make that Stand, No… Sit: An Introduction to My Schizophrenia Kei Miller Probably most of us �� writers here at the IWP – have won some literary award that we’re rather pleased about, that were you to ask about it, we would tell you the story of our accomplishment with that strange mix of pride and dismissal, like the woman complimented on her newly bought outfit -- oh, she says, this old thing? Today however, I want to tell you about a prize that I am actually not so proud of – a triumphant win whose triumph eroded quickly, because I wished the cameras hadn’t flashed, and that my picture hadn’t appeared in the papers the next day. It is an accomplishment that does not appear in any bio or on any of my constructed CVs. And yet, in what it did, it was probably the noblest literary prize I’ve ever won, because it paid for heat in a week when it was cold, and it provided food in a week when I was hungry. About 3 years ago I had recently arrived in Manchester, England. I arrived the way most students arrive – poor, and in my case without a scholarship or grant and as yet without the money from the sale of my car in Jamaica. Listen now to the mechanics of a miracle: in that first penniless fortnight. I saw posters put up around the city advertising its upcoming poetry festival. A £100 prize was going to be given out one Wednesday night to a lucky poet who went on stage and captured the judges’ hearts. I called immediately to book a spot but was disappointed to find out that several people already had their greedy eyes on my £100; all the official spots were gone. I could only give them my name. They would put it in a box from which they would randomly pick and call names on the night. So only if I was lucky… There was yet another complication. The event started at 7:00. My class on Wednesdays also started at 7:00. I would have to rush, arrive late, and see if I was STILL lucky. At best, it seemed, I would get to see the Manchester poetry scene. At 8:30 I took a bus into the city centre, consulted a map and found my way finally to the club. Things were already wrapping up. Three of the four finalists had already been chosen. The box was empty but for one name, and as I walked in they were pulling out this last name and trying desperately to pronounce it with each vowel sound: Kay? Key? Kei? Kei Miller. My own name. My own name had waited for me. It had dodged every finger dipping into that box. It had sat at the bottom, clung to the cardboard, and waited until the body whose presence it spoke for had arrived. I went on stage and won the competition. Cameras flashed; the next morning it was all about – Kei Miller, freshly arrived from Jamaica, had become the 2004 Manchester Slam Poetry Champion. A Slam Poetry Champion! O Christ. If an avalanche could only bury me then. When my professor, one of the UK’s most respected critics, congratulated me with, “Well done, Kei, I read that you won some slam thing or the other,” I knew that it wasn’t a real compliment – it was a realist painter saying bravo to a child’s crayon drawings. It was a concert organist smiling benevolently at some idiot who has learnt to pick out “Mary Had A Little Lamb” on the piano. I wanted to explain – Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 12, 2007 Nirwan Dewanto (Indonesia), Simone Inguanez (Malta) Khaled Khalifa (Syria), Kei Miller (Jamaica), James Na (Philippines) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” Miller 2 Please, sir. You misunderstand. I’m not a slam poet. I don’t do slam. I swear. I only did it for the money. I’m a real poet. I am ashamed to have won that prize, and truth be told, I am also ashamed that I am ashamed. The debate I’m trying to re-invoke here – literature from where I stand or sit, or stand or sit – is a new one that has quickly becoming old: a debate of the craft of poetry as it exists in rowdy performance halls versus the craft as it still exists in solitude; a fight between the poet who does his best work standing up, who finds his greatest eloquence on stage, or the poet who does his best work sitting down, who finds his greatest eloquence on the page. A description of the successful “page” or “sit-down” poet is, perhaps, someone who has typically published poems in a few major journals, who has a couple books published by a well-respected press, who preferably knows how to hob-nob with the best of them, and is invited to give readings by the National Poetry Society of America. In all likelihood he is, like most sit-down poets, a bitch, and probably, as a day job, holds a faculty position at some stuffy 500 year-old university. In other words – me. The “stage” or “stand-up” poet, on the other hand, has probably won a couple slams and is invited to give performances on BET. He is youngish—not yet thirty—and has funky hair. He would ideally like hip-hop and reggae and fit into that strange demographic America has invented to describe all things non-middle-class and non-white: in other words, he would be “urban.” He is completely social – gregarious even. If he went to university at all, he didn’t finish; he dropped out at the same time the university asked him to leave, and decided then he would become a poet, ranting against the system and all kinds of oppression. In other words – me. That these two descriptions should inhabit one body is perhaps the source of my schizophrenia, because typically I’ve learnt only to embrace the first. So consider this: although I almost never need to look at a book or a printed page to recite any of my poems, I have begun to take blank sheets of paper up with me to podiums, to shuffle through and glance down occasionally at their emptiness, all to give the illusion that I am reading – to remind the audience that I am not performing, or slamming, and that literature is coming, only inconveniently at that moment, from where I stand. Really, at my essence (I’m trying to declare) I am a sit-down poet. Knowing then my diagnosis, will you forgive my strange (albeit completely internal) reaction when a student right here in Iowa came up to me and said – “Oh my god! You’re awesome! And what I love about you is that you perform your work. It makes it so interesting!” Oh no no no no, I wanted to say. You didn’t! You didn’t just call me interesting! Heeeellllllll no! You just caught me on a bad day. You caught me on an off-morning. But see -- I’m a real poet, and honey, when I’m ready, I will bore the socks right off of you. I can be your ten hour lecture. I can be a drone. I can be that voice at the open mike who insists that every poem is different from the other but oh the relentless monotone that has you slipping off to sleep every few seconds makes his sonnets Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – October 12, 2007 Nirwan Dewanto (Indonesia), Simone Inguanez (Malta) Khaled Khalifa (Syria), Kei Miller (Jamaica), James Na (Philippines) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” Miller 3 sound the same as his villanelles as his haikus – makes his iambic meter sound the self same as his anapestic skipping. Oh child – I’m no performer. I am a poet. Get it right! And don’t you ever call me interesting again! Isn’t it silly? Isn’t it absolutely silly the clubs we try to be a part of, and the clubs we try to be apart from? This odd way we relish the privilege of sitting at the most boring tables, negotiating carefully between the cake fork, the salad fork and the dinner fork, pretending that the real fun isn’t happening behind us in the kitchen? Isn’t it silly this insistence that we belong to certain prestigious groups – that we be ‘sit down’ poets, Oxford poets, Iowa poets, published-in-the-New-Yorker poets, published by Knopf or Faber poets? Isn’t it silly, the way I flatly refused that performance on BET? Stupid, the way, only last week, I politely declined reading a poem on a slam stage in front of 500 people, but relished in performing the next night to a more distinguished audience of 30? And in refusing to be put into one box, do I not cling desperately to the inside of another? Isn’t it sad, this refusal to belong to a world that has always accepted me, that has always wanted me, and that, truth be told, I didn’t always hate? And yet now when they walk towards me with open arms, instead of just standing up and accepting the embrace, I sit down and fold my arms. And so what, if after reading your most technically ambitious poem they come up and tell you – wow, you were awesome. And you feel momentarily thrilled by this compliment, until a 15 year-old screams a histrionic rant or a sentimental poem that rhymes love with above and then dove, and they all stand and applaud and say to her, with even more enthusiasm than they did to you – oh my god! You rock! You’re brilliant! So what. In that place, on that night – literature is about how we stand up and give an account of who we are and where we are in our own voices. And at another time, in another place, isn’t it enough that you know that literature is about sitting – is about more than the abundant overflow of emotions, but also its recollection in moments of tranquility. The two things can coexist. Just as it is coexisting right now, in a strange way. Because hasn’t every road suddenly led us to that wonderful duality? If you decide that this humble offering is at all literature, then it is happening from where I stand, and from where you sit. For there you are, sitting, reading the text right along with me – and here I am, standing, giving it voice. Literature. From where you sit, from where I stand – it is happening. Or rather… it was. |
| 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 | 2007-10-12 |
Description
| Title | Literature from where I stand, Iowa City Public Library, October 12, 2007 Video, 700k |
| Type (DCMIType) |
Moving image |
| Type (IMT) |
mp4 |
| Duration | 01:06:37 |
| Digitization Specifications | Received as MPEG2 and converted to mp4 for streaming. |
| Date Digital | 2007-10-12 |
| File Name | iwp-icpl_10-12-07.mp4 |
| Original File Name | iwp_10-12-07.mpg |
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