International Authors: 1989-2009, Video, Iowa City Public Library, October 9, 2009 |
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International Authors: 1989-2009, Video, Iowa City Public Library, October 9, 2009
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| Rating | |
| Title | International authors: 1989-2009, Iowa City Public Library, October 9, 2009 |
| Creator |
Case, Maxine Ivaškevičius, Marius, 1973- Rajčic, Dragica Yangsook , Kang Grigoryan, Violēt |
| Creator - Nationality |
South African Lithuanian Swiss South Korean Armenian |
| Contributor | Merrill, Christopher |
| Date Original | 2009-10-09 |
| Description | South African author Maxine Case discusses Miriam Tlali and Bessie Head, two former South African women IWP participants. She then gives a brief history of apartheid and closes by stating that she is grateful for the efforts of authors such Tlali and Head who made the freedoms Case enjoys possible. Marius Ivaškevičius of Lithuania discusses the differences of living in Lithuania as a child and living there now. He states that when he was a child, he had romantic ideas about Western Europe and now Western Europeans have antiquated romantic ideas about life in the East. Dragica Rajcic from Switzerland begins by stating that the fall of Communism and the 1991 war in former Yugoslavia continue to be driving forces of her work. She then reads a narrative in which she and others discuss the state of affairs in Europe, the U.S. and Yugoslavia. South Korean author Youngsuk Kang begins by stating that 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Kang then says that the wall separating North and South Korea keeps people apart not only politically, but culturally, and economically and hypothesizes that reunification will soon become a dream of the past. Violet Grigoryan from Armenia discusses that despite the fall of the Berlin Wall, countries such as Armenia continue to struggle as when the Wall still stood. She gives a brief synopsis of Armenian history after the fall and explains Armenia’s difficult relationship with Turkey. |
| Venue | Iowa City Public Library |
| Topical Subject (LCTGM) |
Authors Writing |
| Personal Name Subject | Case, Maxine; Ivaškevičius, Marius, 1973-; Rajčic, Dragica; Yangsook , Kang; Grigoryan, Violēt |
| Geographic Subject | United States -- Iowa -- Iowa City |
| Chronological Subject | 2000-2010 |
| Transcription | 1 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 9, 2009: Maxine Case (South Africa), Marius Ivaskievicius (Lithuania), Dragica Rajcic (Switzerland), Kang Yangsook (South Korea), & Violet Grigoryan (Armenia) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu Maxine Case 1989 to 2009: STANDING ON THEIR SHOULDERS In 1978, the South African writer Miriam Tlali was a participant in the IWP. During her visit, Tlali read her short story “Just the Two of Us”, which deals with sexual relations and the balance of power between a white male train conductor and a young black woman traveler. According to the Ghanaian writer and academic Ama Ata Aidoo, this was the only time that the story was read (although she credits the reading as taking place in Ohio). The story was promptly banned in South Africa.1 Tlali was no stranger to adversity. Born in Johannesburg in 1933, she attended the University of Witwaterstrand for two years until it was closed to black people. She later attended the University of Lesotho, but was unable to complete her studies due to financial difficulties. Tlali completed her first novel, Muriel at Metropolitan in 1969, but it was only published in 1975 – and banned in 1979. Her novel Amandla, based on the 1976 Soweto uprising, was published in 1980, but banned a few weeks later. Then, of course, there was Bessie Head, a visitor to the IWP from September to December 1977. Born to a white mother and an unknown black father, Head was adopted by a white family, who returned her on realizing that she was not white. She was then fostered by a colored family until the age of 13, after which she attended a missionary school. Head worked first as a teacher and then later as a reporter for a variety of publications. She also became involved in politics, becoming a member of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). Head was arrested for her PAC activities in 1960 and provided the police with information, a fact which tormented and shamed her. Early in 1964, Head became determined to leave South Africa, believing that she would find inspiration to write in a “free African country”. She applied for and received a teaching post in the protectorate of Bechuanaland, but the South African government refused to grant her a passport. In March 1964, Head left South Africa for Bechuanaland (it became known as Botswana upon its independence in 1966) on a one-way exit permit, which meant that she could not return to the country of her birth. Head was to remain without citizenship until 1979 when the Botswana government granted her citizenship without her asking for it. (Her own application in 1977 was turned down.) After achieving international acclaim for her writing after a lifetime of poverty, Head died from hepatitis at the age of 49 in 1986. I’ve used Head and Tlali as two examples to typify the problems faced by writers during apartheid. In talking to students and visitors from other countries, I realized how difficult it is to comprehend the depth of the separate lives that South Africans lived; which was the grand design of apartheid. How do I explain, in one short paper, a system that permeated all aspects of life in South Africa? How do we explain its longevity? Perhaps fiction provides the easiest answers: allowing a glimpse into the impact of apartheid on the individual level. But here are the cold facts. 1 Interestingly, Tlali circumvented this problem by changing the title to “Devil at a Dead End”, which was published in her collection Footprints in the Quag (1989), which was published in the USA in the same year with the title Soweto Stories. 2 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 9, 2009: Maxine Case (South Africa), Marius Ivaskievicius (Lithuania), Dragica Rajcic (Switzerland), Kang Yangsook (South Korea), & Violet Grigoryan (Armenia) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu Apartheid refers to a system of legal racial segregation and was introduced by the National Party government following the general election of 1948. It would be in effect from 1948 to 1994. A distinction can be made between “grand” apartheid and “petty” apartheid. Grand apartheid aimed to separate the country into white South Africa and African “homelands”, thus depriving African people of citizenship rights in “white” South Africa. Black people had to carry passes (identification papers for African men and women), which effectively restricted their movement. Petty apartheid describes the laws (similar to the “Jim Crow” laws in the USA) which were introduced. Under these, people had to be registered according to their racial group; interracial sex and marriage were prohibited, and residential areas were strictly segregated, as were schools, trains, buses, beaches, toilets, parks, stadiums, ambulances, hospitals, and cemeteries. These laws were strictly (and often brutally) enforced. The fight against apartheid began in 1948 with the African National Congress (ANC) advocating a policy of nonviolence with resistance taking the form of boycotts, strikes, civil disobedience and non-cooperation. Frustrated by the inability of peaceful protest to achieve results, members of the ANC broke away to form the PAC, under the leadership of Robert Sobukwe. Sobukwe advocated mass action against discrimination. The PAC planned an anti-pass campaign whereby PAC supporters around the country were to leave their passes at home and offer themselves up for arrest at their nearest police station. The protest took place on 31 March 1960. On this day, protestors were met by armed policemen – confronted by thousands of protestors in Sharpeville, police shot into the crowd, killing 69 people, while two people were shot dead in Langa. This would become known as the Sharpeville Massacre. The aftermath of Sharpeville was widespread condemnation from other parts of the world, which fuelled antiapartheid sentiments. The government declared a state of emergency on 30 March 1960. Mass arrests ensued (more than 18,000), and almost all African leaders were imprisoned. The ANC and PAC were banned on 8 April 1960, forcing the movements underground. The Sharpeville Massacre was thus a turning point in the liberation struggle. In response to a more brutal and intensified era of state repression, the armed struggle was born. However, the liberation movement soon suffered a major setback with the arrests of key ANC leaders including Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada, Dennis Goldberg and Nelson Mandela, who were subsequently tried for treason in the infamous Rivonia Trial. The result of this was that Mandela and seven of his colleagues were sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island in June 1964. From 1967, the ANC concentrated on launching attacks on the government from outside the country, but the Internal Security Act (1972) gave police powers to detain people without trial for a renewable period of 90 days. In 1976 a law was passed stipulating that mathematics and social sciences be taught in Afrikaans. In Soweto, a student protest demonstration was fired upon and two students were killed. This led to clashes between the community and the police and spread to other black townships. Steve Biko’s death in detention in 1977 ushered in further resistance against apartheid. During this time, a generation of students became committed to putting liberation before their own education. Thousands passed through South Africa’s borders for military training in Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana and other countries. It soon became evident that the apartheid system could not sustain itself and resistance flared up between 1984 and 1986 with the support of increased international condemnation. Measures included the passing of the Comprehensive Anti3 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 9, 2009: Maxine Case (South Africa), Marius Ivaskievicius (Lithuania), Dragica Rajcic (Switzerland), Kang Yangsook (South Korea), & Violet Grigoryan (Armenia) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu Apartheid Act by the US Congress in 1986. With an economy in a tailspin and their backs to the wall, the National Party government had no other option but to negotiate with Nelson Mandela and other resistance leaders. Mandela was released in February 1990; the petty apartheid laws were repealed in 1991 and on 27 April 1994, South Africa’s first non-racial democratic elections were held, with the ANC winning a 63% majority and Nelson Mandela becoming the first democratically elected president. I count myself lucky to have come of age during the dying days of apartheid, and luckier still to have come of age as a writer in a democratic South Africa. Of course, no young democracy is without its problems, but what gratifies me is that I am free to write what I like – without censorship or fear of reprisal. While I might enjoy the pool, the poker, the waking up late and compare participating in the IWP to a being a child on summer camp with the absence of parents and responsibilities, I am fully aware of whose shoulders I am standing upon. And I am grateful. Marius Ivaškevičius The Conserved East I remember arriving at the coast of the Baltic Sea as a child and how I loved staring at the horizon. I knew that Europe was over there, and that if it weren't for the Iron Curtain of the Soviets, the shore on the other side would be clearly visible. I knew too that I would never see that world. Sad, but what could you do. I'd walk along that shore thinking I might find some thing washed up by the waves; a shoe once worn by a European – by a Swede, a Frenchman, or a German – maybe a handkerchief or a bottle, or a fragment of something, or just any old scrap of foreign garbage. I never found a thing. Strange, because these days the sea tosses out such bits of garbage every so often. When I came to Paris for the first time I knew about the city only from books and the songs of Joe Dassin. I felt strange holding the map of the Paris underground, where all the legendary locations were marked just by underground stations: the Luxemburg Garden, Montparnasse and the Louvre... With map in hand I used to take a train and emerge like a mole in some place in Paris; I would mark it as “seen” and slip back into the underground. Some stops were disappointing. For instance, the Champs Elysées. The title was promising: fields; but there was just an ordinary street. I used to ask the passers-by where the fields were. “Here”, a woman answered, both of us standing in a noisy street. But the greatest shock happened at the “Bastille”, where we were honestly hoping to find a fortress when we got out. “It’s not here anymore”, answered a Parisian woman. “And where is it?” “Demolished”. “When?” “In the eighteenth century”. Back in Lithuania a friend of mine from my university years asked me whether I drank enough Calvados. Because it seemed to him that Paris was the place where everybody did nothing but ceaselessly gorge themselves on apple brandy. Western Europe existed only in books for us then. It came to us through fragments of literature, cinema, pop culture and ideological history. The information often arrived a couple of decades or even centuries too late. But now everything is upside-down. We consume the West fresh, and the West still requires the East conserved. At the moment I am finishing a documentary film commissioned by German and French television. The subject of the film is quite bizarre: a local gay rights organisation has adopted a Soviet sculpture erected right in the centre of Vilnius as their symbol. The reason is that the sculpture represents two men – builders. The creator of the sculpture was quite enraged. A scandal erupted. We started to make a film. When we sent the edited material to our producers in Germany I was quite 4 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 9, 2009: Maxine Case (South Africa), Marius Ivaskievicius (Lithuania), Dragica Rajcic (Switzerland), Kang Yangsook (South Korea), & Violet Grigoryan (Armenia) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu surprised by one of their comments: “In your film, Lithuanian society looks too modern; show us more ordinary people.” What does “ordinary” mean: miserable, unhappy, social outcasts begging on the streets? But we did not choose our heroes; we took those suggested by the subject matter. It is as though someone bought a table from your shop, and says when you bring it to him: “Sorry, the one I bought was covered in dust.” “But we wiped it off”, you answer. “And I ordered a dusty one”, your client insists. The stereotype of tired post-communist Eastern Europe has grown deep in the minds of Western Europe, and continues to be fostered. Western people often declare their willingness to see the identity of the new European countries, but they really see only the remnants of communism. I would like to warn everybody that Lenin, Stalin and disintegrated collective farms are not our identity. This is dust, some of which still remains on the streets and in people’s heads. I have relatives in England. During Soviet times they sent us second-hand clothes. I have photographs from my childhood in which I am standing dressed in English jeans and a cap, which, at that time, meant real wealth. There are people who still send parcels to their "poor eastern European" relatives in Lithuania. When a parcel wings its way from London with worn women's tights in it, you begin to understand that our reality has changed incomparably quicker than the West's understanding of us. The worn tights were what brought us closer together, but now they separate us. A British person who sends that sort of parcel would never dare to visit us. Just like a British person who has been to Lithuania would never dare to send us worn tights. Dragica Rajcic A Summer Evening in Berlin, July 2009 The consequences of the fall of the Berlin wall, the fall of Communism and then in 1991 the outbreak of war in former Yugoslavia, which forced me to flee to Switzerland, preoccupy me, though it might sound absurd, at an existential level. It drives my writing and my life. I can hardly offer explanations, or write user guides on how to approach the present based on the reason and lessons of the past. I feel the shock, the wounded astonishment which lived in the eyes and hearts of my parents’ generation and which was passed on to us. They lent us the war wounds of the twentieth century. I am no political commentator but like most of us an object of political delusion, a product of so-called humanitarian catastrophes. A woman fleeing. Borrowing German words, I write about the Other. The languageless. There are more than 100 books about the wall, the reunification of the German nation, but a novel, a big novel is still waiting to happen, the writer there to explain reality. That’s the reason I’m going to take you on a little visit to Berlin. It’s mostly American tourists who board the tourist bus at Kurfürstendam in the early evening heat. I buy 10 black and white souvenir postcards. Frozen moments. One is of Checkpoint Charlie, where in Friedrichstrasse on October 27th 1961, ten American and ten Soviet tanks stood facing each other, building the wall. By February only white rabbits were crossing the barbed wire to mate. Another postcard: a mother on the ladder with her young son waving across the wall in Friedrichstrasse. 400 people were shot in attempts flee. Kennedy said in 1963 that the wall was a thousand times better solution than war. November 10th 1989: the collapse of the wall within 45 minutes. 20,000 people had come, a mass of people 5 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 9, 2009: Maxine Case (South Africa), Marius Ivaskievicius (Lithuania), Dragica Rajcic (Switzerland), Kang Yangsook (South Korea), & Violet Grigoryan (Armenia) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu hugging next to the ruins of the wall, rejoicing. Walking in the Zoological Gardens, finding the place where the socialist Karl Liebknecht was killed in 1918, close to the iron sculpture with the list of 46 names transported to Auschwitz, I take photos of the names of Jews on the asphalt of the Berlin sidewalk. In the evening at Kreuzberg, eating, drinking with Utz Rachowski, poet, imprisoned for the ownership of forbidden books – arrested and convicted to 27 months in prison for “subversive agitation” (duplicating and disseminating his own texts and those of Jürgen Fuchs, Wolf Biermann and Reiner Kunze). In 1980: denaturalization, exile to West Berlin. Now he lives in his Vogt home as an advisor to Stasi victims. 200 years ago it was Schiller’s birthplace. When Kabale und Liebe was staged, whole rows of audiences fainted at once, entered into discussions that lasted into the early hours of the morning. Today that only happens talking about Michael Jackson’s death. Utz's father was a Pole armed for the SS. Günter Grass only admitted after he had won the Nobel Prize for literature that he succumbed to the Hitler illusion-----back then. Today, Utz is somber, sobered. In his novel Likvidation, Imre Kertesz, the Hungarian Auschwitz survivor and Nobel Prize winner, wrote that the best way to survive a dictatorship is to continue your life in the next dictatorship. With the breakdown of the Hungarian dictator, Kertesz's hero killed himself. His hero's only homelands were literary texts. Everything changed when no-one cared any more about what used to be, what’s the point of living in the vacuum of a free market economy…dreamt freedom tastes different but how… Utz Rachowski says he feels like he is in the wrong place in the wrong country. We remember Socialist slogans, brainwashing, Mayakovsky funeral for 100,000 people, he was constantly observed by the KGB, the avant-garde split up, perhaps promoted says Utz..."Do you still have a persecution complex?" asks L, amazed. L is an American Germanist. "I don’t understand that you can’t accept the present but wander around in the past like a ghost." Utz looks at the table. His friend Sally explains to me that we Yugoslavians had it easy and then went mad. I should explain the war in a single sentence...have another drink. He was in Bosnia a few years ago, it's unimaginable how destroyed everything is, God-damned nationalism, how could the unimaginable happen, he asks whether it all depends on language, Serbo-Croatian, Bosnian, how is that we do not understand...you were free...!!!???? I am silent...I think language problems are the last possible reason for starting a war and am ashamed how people again and again succeed in looking for sensible reasons for wars. L. is writing a book about the women of the ruins of Germany who had to rebuild both the land after the Second World War and their husbands once they were released from imprisonment in the USSR. "Economy mistook itself for democracy" declaims Utz, and looks L. in the eyes as a representative of all of America’s politics, all of her people. The men keep talking about the commercialization of the book market and the speculative greed of the West. We women try to move the conversation to love, yes love, "simple love" we say almost as one voice and Salli and Utz remember all their lost loves as if women were a type of pastime between political activities. I and L. get up and wobble on unsteady legs through the lively Kreuzberg streets, slightly tipsy. We realize that we hardly spoke about how we see the world through women's eyes. We decided that it was like Christa Wolf's novel Kassandra. The role of women today is still to heal, warn, feed, kiss, to make love, somehow. It's outrageous. I talk about the beginning of the war in former Yugoslavia. The women were persecuted first, writers and journalists deemed to be witches, the ones who opposed the national delusion. Raping women as a systematic war method … ethnic…cleanliness. Now we are in a united Europe, barricading itself up with bureaucratic statutes as a fortress against the refugees. Role model USA. The green card is coming soon.- Turkey’s membership, a country where according to surveys every third woman is beaten by her husband, is controversial - both in the EU and in Turkey. Back to fundamentalism...it’s the irrational foundations that seem so tempting, from Hegel to Marx from Hitler to Stalin, L. says we are 6 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 9, 2009: Maxine Case (South Africa), Marius Ivaskievicius (Lithuania), Dragica Rajcic (Switzerland), Kang Yangsook (South Korea), & Violet Grigoryan (Armenia) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu both...feeling, reason and more. We laugh about that and more. "Look how proud I am of America now thanks to Obama’s election."..... "God knows" I say and catch a glimpse of a woman in a headscarf wearing high-heeled shoes. "Tell them about how both my brothers terrorized their families since they returned from the war" L. says. 3.5 million American soldiers have post war traumatic syndrome and shell shock, her brother was in Iraq. I live in Switzerland as a refugee. Now we are talking about love, whether it is somehow learnable.... a long silence, actually we know everything and are always poverty stricken - a direct result of this mass of unused knowledge. I get in a taxi and drive to Hotel Europa Park Inn. Japanese tourists are sitting outside and I cannot understand a single word, not even whether they are fighting or having a normal conversation. In my room a phone call, my mother worried – "don’t go to America" she says, "it must be particularly hard to live there, I saw on the TV how the hurricanes sweep everything away and students go on shooting sprees and people fall out of windows like dolls." I say, "Mama, it’s a miracle a miracle what a human being can go through and keep living, unimaginable, yes, Mama, I’ll take care of myself" I say and stare into the darkness, writing, a couple of sentences for later, is this necessary I ask myself. But of course said Friedrich Hölderlin, who wrote to his brother in 1793: “but I love the immense, beautiful disposition of deteriorated people too. I love the generations of future centuries..... our grandchildren will be better than us, freedom must come one day, and virtue will flourish better in the holy warming light of freedom than under ice cold despotism...that is...I nurture seeds now in our time that will ripen in another.” Before the Berlin bed makes me unconscious I read a line of Hölderin: “It is also always a death to our silent blessedness when it is forced to become language". That was about the love of his life....and I....how to live the blessedness, writing? Despite everything, somewhere. Translated by Zahra Mani Youngsuk Kang The Image of the Wall I lost my house, so go to a cocoon. This is my house nobody can disturb. However, although I have a new house, now I lose myself to go back. from The Wall, Abe Cobo This year marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germany has sent one thousand memorial sculptures symbolizing the wall to troubled areas of the world. In addition, the German government will gather up the sculptures again, and destroy them during anniversary celebrations at Brandenburg Gate. It means we still have a lot of walls that need to fall. Recently, the number of migrant laborers from other countries and North Korean defectors has increased rapidly in South Korea. The number of Northern arrivals each year has increased up to 10,000 from 5,000 between 2006 and 2008. Generally, such refugees escape from their land not for reasons of ideology, but of livelihood. While the older refugees mainly intend to remain in the South, the young refugees desire to seek other destinations. Recently, the British government sent Korea an official document to request the fingerprints of five hundred North Korean defectors who entered Britain. The young and smart refugees who had crossed the border of several Asian countries finally managed to immigrate to Britain via the South. Why do they leave for Britain with a knapsack? They say, ‘It's very hard to live in South. We want to learn English.’ They work hard there to remove the label of “refugee." They would rather work odd jobs in England than live under discrimination in the South Korea. 7 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 9, 2009: Maxine Case (South Africa), Marius Ivaskievicius (Lithuania), Dragica Rajcic (Switzerland), Kang Yangsook (South Korea), & Violet Grigoryan (Armenia) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu Meanwhile, there has been a gradual increase in literary works regarding the communication problems with Northern arrivals and the process of settling down in the South. In my novel Rina, I describe a refugee woman's growth and border crossing from a general perspective rather than focus on the differences between North and South. I prefer to respect her decision to keep moving rather than be unconditionally welcoming. As a result, the protagonist of my novel also decides to go to another country instead of choosing to stay in South Korea. Five years ago, in Seoul, I first met some teenagers enrolled in a North Korean Refugee School. They had arrived in the South with their parents, and were preparing for their university entrance exams. I spoke to one girl specifically, who was was short and shy. I asked her several questions. 'How many countries did you travel through to arrive here? What happened on the journey? Do you want to go back to your hometown again? Do you miss your friends there?' However, she did not answer at all. Therefore, I asked a different question, 'Do you like Korean people?' Soon, she criticized me and complained loudly, 'You can't imagine how hard it was to get here! How dare do you deal with me like this? What a corrupt capitalism!' I answered, 'I know you're in a bad situation. So am I.' The young North Korean arrivals quickly get accustomed to capitalism. Often, they have strong material desires. Many of them drop out of university and find a part time job. They do not speak in a Northern dialect because they are worried about discrimination, and are very fashionable. People cannot judge whether a woman is from the North from her appearance. Often a North Korean woman will try to hide her refugee origins from her boyfriend, worried that if he discovers that she was a refugee, he will leave her. A broken heart gives her more serious pain than the suffering caused by crossing the border. Finally, she wipes her tears away, and asks me, 'Do you know a good cheap plastic surgeon?' Korea still has "the wall" which blocks unification. This applies not only politically, but also across dichotomies of consciousness, thought, aesthetics and wealth. Koreans are so accustomed to living in this situation that we often cannot recognize this wall. To be honest, I would not necessarily support the reunification of North and South, and once the old generation passes away, not many people will support reunification. However, I would like to deconstruct “the wall” in my fiction, and open new aesthetics of the novel. A mature society is tolerant of cultural diversity. When I met the teenagers from the North for the first time, I was skeptical whether South Korean society would have the capacity to accept them and the influx of different cultures they would bring. That is one of the most important issues Korean literature is facing, and will face, to help us to destroy our own "wall.” Violet Grigoryan Heavy Architecture on Frail Shoulders The German artist, Joseph Beuys, in one of his works of 1964, proposed to elevate the Berlin Wall by five centimeters to create a “better property”. What Beuys was proposing was, certainly, the reverse, even though it wasn’t similar to the Reverse that my colleague here, Min Htet Maung, writes about in his poetry. The sarcasm of Beuys’ reverse was in reality breaking down the wall far more fundamentally than its physical fall would, since that reverse first questioned and broke it down in our understanding. Whereas, when the physical wall was broken, its chips flew far and wide and multiplied the wall, erecting new, virtual “Great Walls of China” in and between various countries. 8 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 9, 2009: Maxine Case (South Africa), Marius Ivaskievicius (Lithuania), Dragica Rajcic (Switzerland), Kang Yangsook (South Korea), & Violet Grigoryan (Armenia) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu The Berlin Wall came to symbolize the thousands of kilometers of barbed wire that separated us, Soviet citizens, from the prohibited world. If I and my colleagues Marius and Vafo were invited by the IWP in those times, we wouldn’t have been allowed to come. Even if we were graciously granted visas, we would have been accompanied by a “writer” in a suit and tie, whose “literature” would comprise our activities step by step and word by word, and later be submitted to KGB. In Soviet countries there is a famous Russian song – moy adres ni dom i ni ulitsa, moy adres Savetski Sayuz, which translates to - my address is neither the home, nor the street I live on, my address is Soviet Union. An inhabitant of Alcatraz could perhaps introduce his address in exactly the same way – my address is neither a house, nor a street, my address is Alcatraz. One of my poems embraces a passage in prose, where an Iranian-Armenian lady complains that it was her husband’s choice to move to Soviet Armenia from Iran. She recalls what her Iranian neighbor has warned her �� keshvari ke… I wrote this in Farsi with Armenian letters, but did not include a translated note, so that the reader (just as you now) can unexpectedly come into collision with a lingual “barbed wire”, the lingual “Berlin Wall” and feel the obstruction on an instinctive level too. As Vahan Ishkhanyan, an Armenian writer and journalist, wrote in one of his essays, on the other side of Soviet barbed wire “was the unattainable wonderland, from where streamed the colorful chewing gums, high quality electric appliances, pornographic magazines, delicious chocolates, stylish clothes… and anti-soviet or other prohibited literature”.2 The fall of the Berlin Wall was immediately followed by an avalanche of chewing gum and pornographic magazines, jazz, and, most importantly, sex, which was said not to exist in the Soviet Union. Then Marlboro cigarettes came out and only officials could have them, so by smoking them we also joined, as the advertisements claimed, the scent of the world. Then came Coca Cola and Burger King, the horror and threat of global warming and terrorism, bananas and break-dance, AIDS, the “Supermarket” of Ginsberg and the real supermarket, bird flu, advertisements, various religious sects, and homosexuality (the Article on the conviction of homosexuality was eliminated from the Criminal Code of Armenia in 2003.) There is an Armenian joke: a person is chasing a Jew to kill him. When asked why, he replies that they crucified Jesus Christ. When he���s told that it happened two thousand years ago, he answers – “I just found out about it”. It’s quite possible that many Armenians will learn about the fall of the Berlin Wall only two thousand years from now. Armenians were, however, still among the first to find out about the fall of the Wall. As early as February 1988, the Karabakh Autonomous Region, which was within Azerbaijan, declared its independence from Azerbaijan and joined Armenia. When the Soviet Union did not recognize it, the Karabakh Movement gained momentum. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the residents of tiny Armenia, who often take pride in being the first to strike blows at the foundations of the gigantic Soviet Union in 1988 through the demonstrations of over one million people for Karabakh (while the act of demonstration in itself was a miracle for the Soviet Union), now found themselves within new, much more constricted walls. Karabakh declared its independence right after the fall of the Soviet Union. In response, Azerbaijan launched a war against Karabakh. Armenia supported Karabakh, and established a security belt over seven Azerbaijani regions. Turkey then stepped in to support Azerbaijan, imposing a blockade on Armenia that is still in place today. In the 1990s, due to the blockade and to gas-pipes exploding in Georgia every week, Armenia survived unheated winters with air temperatures dropping to -30°C (-22°F), in conditions of hunger and darkness, deprived of even electricity. And what in Europe qualified as a “new cold war” last year, when there was no gas for a short period of time, were already 2 http://www.armenianow.com/?action=viewArticle&AID=1833&CID=1913&lng=eng&IID=1106 9 . Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series, October 9, 2009: Maxine Case (South Africa), Marius Ivaskievicius (Lithuania), Dragica Rajcic (Switzerland), Kang Yangsook (South Korea), & Violet Grigoryan (Armenia) For electronic texts please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu termed as “the cold and dark years” in Armenia 15 years ago. Due to its closed borders, many products in Armenia, which is not a rich country, have the same prices as in wealthier countries. In fact, sometimes they are more costly (the very first day I entered a grocery store here I saw grilled chicken that cost $6.99. This is actually cheaper than in Armenia, so I bought two. Of course, I couldn’t eat all of it and this, in fact, cost me as much as it would in Armenia). It may seem strange to you to find out that, presently, when an agreement is pre-signified with Armenia on opening the Turkish border, many local and Diaspora Armenians organize demonstrations. How can people be against the opening of the border due to which life may become more comfortable, prices go down and grilled chicken become affordable to everyone? For two reasons – the Genocide and the Turkish policy in the Karabakh conflict. The subject of opening the borders has suspended the process of the international recognition of genocide as an excuse for not impeding the improvement of Armenian-Turkish relations. The way Armenians treat the issue of genocide and opening of the Turkish border can be described as “Antigone syndrome”: she wishes to bury her brother, that is, to preserve the human order as opposed to political, public order. Moral need is referred to instead of the political needs that come to dictate the human imperative of burying one’s relative and performing the ceremony of mourning. Unless the genocide is recognized both internationally and by Turkey, for Armenians, the corpses of their grandfathers and grandmothers still remain unburied, their horrid death and torture and the mourning of their memory not yet legitimized. You cannot bury someone without his death certificate. The second reason is that Turkey, as a condition for opening the borders, verbally asserts its position on the issue of Karabakh, which is subjective and defends the interests of its ally or its, as they say, brother Azerbaijan. It’s also true, that despite the fact that the agreements pre-signified in Geneva on August 31st, do not say a word about Karabakh, even so, Erdogan, the Prime Minister of Turkey, states, that unless the Karabakh issue is resolved and the Armenian army depart from its positions, the border will not open. He perceives the resolution of that issue to be the return of Karabakh to Azerbaijan, and getting rid of its population, which is now entirely Armenian. If the collapse of the Soviet Union, apart from the interests and new positioning of superpowers, was not meant to contribute to the right of autonomy of colonized small countries, and Karabakh, which was independent before finding itself within Azerbaijan in accordance with the map drawn by Lenin and Stalin, was never to clarify its address, all these come to prove, that the Berlin War fell, but our address is orientated through the wall – slightly to the right of the wall, big, red, with hammer and sickle on it… Which means that our address is always the same - moy adres ni dom i ni ulitsa, moy adres Savetski Sayuz (my address is neither the home, nor the street I live on, my address is Soviet Union). |
| Type (DCMIType) | Moving Image |
| Type (AAT) | Presentations (Communicative events) |
| Type (IMT) | mp4 |
| Duration | 01:24:33 |
| 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 | 2009 |
| File Name | iwp-icpl_10-09-09.mp4 |
| Original File Name | iwp_10-09-09.mpg |
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