The city, Iowa City Public Library, September 5, 2008 Video, 700k |
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The city, Iowa City Public Library, September 5, 2008 Video, 700k
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| Title | The city, Iowa City Public Library, September 5, 2008 |
| Creator |
Mhlongo, Nicholas Raimo, Veronica, 1978- Madžirov, Nikola, 1973- Rahman, Ruby |
| Creator - Nationality |
South African Italian Macedonian Bangladeshi |
| Contributor | Merrill, Christopher |
| Date Original | 2008-09-05 |
| Description | Niq Mhlongo's talk is titled "Still Searching for the Gleam: The Unreal Realities of Joburg City in a Post-Apartheid South African Novel" referring to Johannesburg's lure into fantasies of comfort, convenience, pleasure, and fortune, and discusses that city as the setting for his two novels. Veronica Raimo's talk, titled "The Zone" roots her discussion in her background as an Italian fiction writer, describing culture and events witnessed in her home city of Rome, as well as in the temporarily adopted city of Berlin. Nikola Madzirov's talk, "Cities of Births and Memories" saying that "cities of memories are built upon the foundations of our ruined personal longings and dreams." Ruby Rahman describes special experiences she encountered in Iowa City, Iowa; Prague, Czech Republic; and Dhaka, Bangladesh. |
| Geographic Subject | United States -- Iowa -- Iowa City |
| Chronological Subject | 2000-2010 |
| Transcription | MHLONGO Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series-September 5, 2008: Niq Mhlongo (South Africa), Veronica Raimo (Italy), Nikola Madzirov (Macedonia), Ruby Rahman (Bangladesh). For electronic text, please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu 1 STILL SEARCHING FOR THE GLEAM: THE UNREAL REALITIES OF JOBURG CITY IN A POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICAN NOVEL NIQ MHLONGO As my point of departure in this presentation about the influence of Johannesburg city in my writing, allow me to quote a paragraph from one of the United States’ prominent scholars, James Conlon who wrote extensively about the city: ‘Cities are places where the goods of foreigners, their food, clothing, gadgets, and art, are made available for native experience…Not only does the city include museums and libraries, it is itself a vast museum, a living library of faith, tastes, styles and dreams packed densely together and available for experience in a reasonable amount of time…It will include as well the world cruelties, perversions and deficiencies…’ 1 This passage captures the essence of what many writers who have used the city as their subject have written. Now, I want us to take a little journey in our mind to the Southern tip of Africa where I come from: South Africa. I want to introduce you to Johannesburg, the biggest and the most cosmopolitan city in my country. It is in this city where I have set both of my novels, Dog Eat Dog (2004) and After Tears (2007), as well as my short stories. So why did I choose this city of Johannesburg to be the subject of my writing? The answer is that in addition to being born and still living there, I was motivated by the power of the gleam of the city. I’m referring to the city’s ability to lure the people into believing that it can fulfill their egos, and their empty quests for a life of comfort, convenience, pleasure and fortune. If you read any novel that is set in this city today, you will see that it is given names such as Egoli, which means a place of gold or Maboneng, a place of lights. These romantic names are often used to camouflage the cruelties of this city. Of course, the names came with the discovery of gold in 1886, the year in which the city was born and the gleam of hope was created even for the man living more than six thousands miles across the ocean. But that gleam of hope has since bred what Max Weber referred to as ‘the disenchantment’ MHLONGO Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series-September 5, 2008: Niq Mhlongo (South Africa), Veronica Raimo (Italy), Nikola Madzirov (Macedonia), Ruby Rahman (Bangladesh). For electronic text, please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu 2 and ‘instrumental rationality’2. By this he meant that life in the city is driven by a means-ends thinking, where the focus is on goals and the means to achieve them. Perhaps it would be better to illustrate this by telling you a little story that recently happened to me and my two friends as we were driving right inside one of the Johannesburg city centre streets. Well, let me start by emphasizing that in the heart of the city of Johannesburg you will hardly see a white person. I have to say this because race and class matters in South Africa. If you come there, you will realize that most cities, except for Cape Town, are predominantly black. By this I mean that even the people of mixed race who we call colored people in South Africa hardly walk in the city centre. Both whites and colored people prefer to do their shopping in the malls that are situated in the outskirts of town since the city centre is associated with the lower-class which is mostly black. So, a friend of mine by the name of Wonderboy, who is colored-his mother is black and his father is white-was driving an Audi car. I was sitting besides Wonderboy while a lady friend by the name of Zukiswa, a fellow scribe, was sitting in the back seat talking on her cell phone. At the traffic light we stopped and Wonderboy made a phone call from his cell phone. In two ticks, two thugs were pointing a gun at us, demanding that we give them our wallets and phones. I was still a bit shocked, and I reluctantly searched my pockets and handed them both my cell phone and wallet; which had no money anyway since I’m a writer. From the backseat, Zukiswa was still talking to someone, and I heard her concluding her call by saying callously, ‘oops, I think we’re getting robbed here, so I’ll speak to you later’ The fact that it was rush hour and the traffic was moving slowly didn’t help much because the guys just walked along the car as if they knew us. At the same time they were helping themselves to our CD’s, wallets and cell phones. Zukiswa tried to complain once she realized that it was indeed a robbery, but Wonderboy calmed her in his perfect isiZulu language, which is the most spoken language in South Africa. The thugs were so amused to hear him speak in isiZulu that they started laughing while joking that a ‘white man was speaking the language of the black people’. They then asked if Wonderboy was Zulu. He told them that his mother was a Zulu, and he didn’t know his biological white father. Then the thugs apologized to us. They said that they had made a mistake as they ‘only rob white MHLONGO Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series-September 5, 2008: Niq Mhlongo (South Africa), Veronica Raimo (Italy), Nikola Madzirov (Macedonia), Ruby Rahman (Bangladesh). For electronic text, please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu 3 people and not blacks’. To cut the long story short, they returned all the items they had taken from us, and we drove off. This little incident for me highlights another view of the city as the special embodiment of obstacles such as unequal economic relations, poverty, dislocations, unemployment, sexual transmitted disease, racism, ignorance, corruption xenophobia and crime. The search for the gleam of the Johannesburg city by the thugs had resulted in what Cornell West might call their ‘spiritual impoverishment, the collapse of the meaning of life, the absence of love of others and self, the breakdown of family and communal bonds’3 that still exist in most rural setups. The gleam of the city had reduced those thugs to ‘rootless and dangling people with little link to supportive networks, family, friends that sustain some sense of purpose in life’4 Therefore, most of the post-apartheid novels in South Africa today like When a Man Cries by Mahala, Bitchies Brew by Khumalo, Room 207, by Moele, and The Day I died by Ngenelwa, The Madams by Wanner, and Some of My Best Friends Are White by Ngcobo, and others have dug deep to explore the underbelly of the Johannesburg city to expose its challenging life. References: Conlon, James Cities and the place of philosophy, in Philosophy And The City-classic to contemporary writings, State University of New York Press, 2008, p199) Weber Max, Concepts and Categories of the City, 1921 West Cornell, Race Matters, 1993 Raimo Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series-September 5, 2008: Niq Mhlongo (South Africa), Veronica Raimo (Italy), Nikola Madzirov (Macedonia), Ruby Rahman (Bangladesh). For electronic text, please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu 1 The Zone Veronica Raimo There is a sort of constitutional taboo for a writer coming from Italy to talk about a topic such as “the city”. Since Italo Calvino wrote his book Invisible cities, we have spent years speculating about cities. “The city” as a topic has been exploited more or less as a metaphor for everything. However, almost every important city has been exploited and read as a possible text. Both “emotional topography” of the city and the attempt to “semiologize” it had become quite fashionable practices. When you write fiction in Italy there exist a sort of a moral/civil commitment to be connected to the place where you live, which quite often is a city. As if there is a demand to bring “reality” into your work by transforming the space where events are set by turning the city into one of the characters. A few months before I traveled here, some other writers and I came up with an idea to start a new online magazine about Rome; it would be our attempt to understand what was going on in our city, analyzing social events which could have not been explained with the usual categories we were familiar with. Rome has changed a great deal in the last few years. We had a left wing administration which used the alibi of “multiculturalism” to make people forget that immigrants need social rights much more than ethnic cinema festivals (which by the way they never took part in). For example, there is this district in Rome, called Pigneto, located communal houses very often built without any permission. For years it was just an historical lower and middle class district, and people who lived there were quite fond of their place. Then immigrants started to rent flats there, and more recently it became quite a fashionable place to live because young bohemian newcomers started moving there. They opened ateliers, cafés, bookstores, since it was still quite a cheap place to exploit and good way reinforce utopia on earth and sell the concept of a “multicultural district” as if they were trying to sell a car. The inner transcendence in such a concept can have bad consequences. Some months ago the main Italian newspapers printed the story that some Neo-Nazi men wearing swastikas on their t-shirts broke into a Bengali shop in Pigneto and destroyed it. The next day people were demonstrating on the street against racism. Pigneto, all of a sudden, became a symbol of the fight against racism (again in a transcendental way, it was not a fight to find a cause-effect relationship of what had happened, but a fight against an ideology – racism – in the name of a more suitable one, multiculturalism). A week or so later, a fifty-year-old man Raimo Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series-September 5, 2008: Niq Mhlongo (South Africa), Veronica Raimo (Italy), Nikola Madzirov (Macedonia), Ruby Rahman (Bangladesh). For electronic text, please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu 2 with a big Che Guevara tattoo on his arm, who was born in Pigneto and who is considered a sort of pioneer there, and dislikes both immigrants and the new bohemians, finally revealed the truth. It was he who had organized the expedition to the Bengali shop with some local men who were happy to help him. It had nothing to do with Neo-Nazis, and the swastika that they were supposedly wearing was a fictional element similar to the ones you invent for creating urban legends. What actually happened was that a North African man, who was accidentally in that shop, had stolen a native Pigneto woman’s wallet, and he didn’t want to give it back. The wrong act was not stealing a wallet, but stealing the wallet of someone who belongs to the autochthonous Pigneto community. There are some fundamental rules even criminals must respect. Someone who tries to be too smart and who breaks this sort of ancestral code of honor needs to be punished because he can be dangerous. The community uses him as an external element of possible entropy by investing him of some specific bad qualities. Let’s take as an example what the Slovenian philosopher Zizek says about Jews and Nazis. “It is not a question that Nazis attributed false properties to the Jews; the point is why did the Nazis need the figure of the Jew as part of their ideological project? It is clear why: their project was to have capitalism […] which would magically maintain what they thought previous eras shared, a sense of organic community and so on, so in order to have this, you must locate the source of evil not in capitalism as such, but in some foreign intruder, that through its profiteering just introduces imbalance and disturbs the natural cooperation between productive capital and labor”. 1 Some months ago I was translating the comic book Droopsie Avenue by William Eisner, in which he explains how the Bronx in New York was born and how it developed. This process reminded me a lot of what is going on in Rome; the idea that your experience of a city is founded on a sense of possession and genuine belonging. Which brings me back to the magazine we wanted to start. That event with the so called Nazis in Pigneto opened up new categories for us since we didn’t know how to react to it. Justice was in fact rooted in a devotion to the community. So it was as if Rome-the city itself-was rebelling against the categorization that bohemians and artists had tried to create for it. Or maybe it was rebelling against the idea that writers and artists are supposed to have a better insight into the world - or the small geographic world where they belong - than other people. While I lived in Berlin for two years with many other writers, artists, actors, film-makers, musicians and the like, I had an apartment in Prenzlauer Berg. Prenzlauer Berg is a paradise of the social democratic idea of political correctness. Organic food and homosexual relationships 1 Slavoj Zizek, The Believer, July 2004 Raimo Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series-September 5, 2008: Niq Mhlongo (South Africa), Veronica Raimo (Italy), Nikola Madzirov (Macedonia), Ruby Rahman (Bangladesh). For electronic text, please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu 3 are available to everybody in order that they not feel guilty for environmental problems or endemic male chauvinism. Yuppies of the cultural sector make sure that people enjoy their residency there in the same way that some other people enjoy sexual tourism in Thailand, all projecting a certain image of their social identity. So it seems that everybody is producing some cultural values there, except for people who are actually working in Prenzlauer Berg, such as immigrants who work in their own shops but who don’t live there and don’t hang out in cafés or concerts at night. This leads of course to a sense of guilt that social democracy, with all its efforts, can’t hide completely. And it also leads to a paradoxical situation in which everybody stands at some distance from the community to which one actually belongs, assuming he belongs to a virtual community that doesn’t exist anymore, and thus defining his individual identity in opposition to the very same collective identity he supposed to be a member of. Let’s take one of the possible categories: artists in Prenzlauer Berg. Every single artist constantly complains about all the other artists surrounding him, about their struggle for coolness and fancy clothes, accusing them of some lack of authenticity. He keeps talking about how things were better just a few years before, how the city used to be different, and more modest and more genuine, and how proud he is of having been there when things were like that. This short-term nostalgia I think is one of the most common feelings of people living in the cities of the west. Afraid of changes, and the transformations that they themselves take part in (sometimes in a very active way), they prefer to conjure - and miss - a lost world that is actually just the projection of their inability to accept the new world. In the same way that death is hidden and removed from daily life in western societies, poverty and social unease migrates more and more to our cities’ suburbs. But again, the perverse paradox is that these suburbs operate in the middle class imagination as a last refuge for authenticity and real life, even if it then is necessary to distance oneself from the utopia in order for the utopia itself to work properly. Madzirov Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series-September 5, 2008: Niq Mhlongo (South Africa), Veronica Raimo (Italy), Nikola Madzirov (Macedonia), Ruby Rahman (Bangladesh). For electronic text, please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu 1 CITIES OF BIRTHS AND MEMORIES Nikola Madzirov "There is a nearby street forbidden to my steps" Jorge Luis Borges When I met Adam Zagajewski in Berlin a few years ago at the east side of the ruined wall of temporary partings and constant doubt, and when I pronounced in Macedonian the name of his native city as Lavov, he said that at that moment he became richer for one more name of his birthplace. I often question myself how many birthplaces should one have in order to be able to escape his own death or to escape the memory of cities where he lost someone? Many of my close friends mispronounce the name of my city as Strumisa, or Strumika, thus giving me a new birthplace based solely on the architecture of language and our consciousness. And when that other place is natural, when it is not situated in the houses of the past, then it is immeasurable (Gaston Bachelard). But is anyone able to construct a city with no houses of memories in it and with no monuments that exist just because of the tourist maps and the collective historical losses? If we look at photographs from our travels, we'll see that we always stand beside a monumental building or a square of historical significance. The least numerous in our albums are the photos of the houses in which we live and the spaces where the cities of our own ancestors and inheritors expand, slowly, like local cemeteries which in the course of time conquer the nearby hill. The world is big, but inside us it is as deep as sea, wrote Rilke. We travel through space, through new cities to escape the archaeological sites of our inconstancy. We inhabit the space between the monument and the moment, between the itinerancy and eternity. The cities of memories are built upon the foundations of our ruined personal longings and dreams. We can move in and out of them without breaking any agreements for restricted movement kept in the archives of any two countries at war. Escaping to those invisible cities of certainty, I found a shelter from permanent inner exile, a neat hotel room for a guest who does not understand the language of the country where he has arrived. This emotional nomadism can be the basis for a new architectonic harmony of the limitless spaces. Alain Bosquet moved the coordinates of the tangible by saying that the poet is in the city only to prove that the city itself is located somewhere else. And so by escaping towards Madzirov Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series-September 5, 2008: Niq Mhlongo (South Africa), Veronica Raimo (Italy), Nikola Madzirov (Macedonia), Ruby Rahman (Bangladesh). For electronic text, please visit www.iwp.uiowa.edu 2 something, not from something, the new cities open themselves, like the doors of a supermarket, abundant in everything except hopes with expired dates. The city is our new nature, a new forest that does not bear fruit, a polygon of our mythical childhood and a mausoleum of all particular hopes and ambitions. Even today, if I throw down the toys that are still kept in a carton box from a used television set, I could construct a city with all its elements that keep it alive-small police cars, traffic lights, train station, a small house with a yard and a dog near the wooden fence. Roland Barthes says that the toy always signifies something and this something is always closely connected with society and is composed of either myths or the methods of the contemporary life of adults. And the city of adults is predictable and large - just large enough to trigger the children's urge for reconstruction and harmony. Therefore, I am not sure whether I belong to my birth city that is a manifestation of some geographical constant or of a cultural variable. When I was a child, by the principle of semiotic reduction, my parents first taught me to pronounce the name of my street and house number so that if I lost myself in the womb of the city I would be able to tell people where I lived. At that time the name of my city was not important at all. But then in my first journey outside the city, in my suitcase I placed all local legends and stories that are deeply connected with its presence in the atlases of collective memory. I accepted all undecipherable letters incised in the stones, all successful and unsuccessful tactics of Macedonian emperors, all contours of the Byzantine crosses and all taxes of Ottoman invaders... Such a city of the past does not ever sleep. Even in the densest darkness, when there is no harvest moon, when there is no reflection of the snow, it is open for new inhabitants that never carry a key with them. It has always been my notion that new cities are born where streetlights begin. I could imagine each measurable space sink in the dark, even my room, but never the city. Streetlights enabled me to see what was on earth, but never what was in the sky. When all the lights are extinguished at the same time like candles from a birthday cake, then the center and the ghetto become one. At the end of that light, the streets of longing for new paths begin. I have so many birthplaces; I wish I had as many places to die. Rahman 1 “The City” Ruby Rahman In a popular Bengali classic, a rich young man named Navakumar finds himself on a shore after a miserable shipwreck. Surrounded by a dense forest, he tries to make his way through it in search of food. All of a sudden a very beautiful young girl appears with all the innocence of Miranda in The Tempest. She asks Navakumar, “Passer-by, are you lost in the forest?” Let me come out from the spell and grandeur of the splendid classic novels and turn to the reality where I am in. The other day, I was standing on Gilbert Street trying to find my way to the Prairie Lights Bookstore. I was confused as to which way I should go. Then alone came one of my friends from the International Writing Program, no less wonderful than Miranda and with greater generosity. My friend drew my attention to the road map of Iowa City, and as she showed me how all the streets intersect with one another at right angles, I found my way. The map of the city looks like a geometric drawing with several rectangles. There must have been a lot of town planning, logic and wisdom behind the development of Iowa City. So there is no way one can get lost or be confused in this city as one may be in a forest. So, this is the city, a creation of man. A city is like a piece of art. It is created like the Grecian Urn for which John Keats wrote an ode. People pour their passion, their love and, above all, their toil into the construction of a city. Every city has its special beauty as well as its glamour. In addition, every city has its unique character. It seems, in fact, that a city even possesses a soul. When a traveler visits a new city, its outward charm attracts the traveler. But it is important for a stranger to touch the soul of a city and to know its unique character. I read the book “The City of Joy” written by Dominique Lepierre. I discovered how deeply he penetrates into the life of the city of Kolkata and how intensely he feels the pulse and ambience of that Indian city. In recent times, we find the city playing a vibrant role in literature as well as in all other spheres of art: painting, sculpture, music and so on. In the early twentieth century, we hear Charles Baudelaire, the French poet, speaking about the city, as if singing hymns in his own sarcastic way in his poems. I consider Baudelaire the pioneer to portray the city in poetry. In a rather ironical manner, he places the city in his poetry with his striking, shocking and peculiar metaphors. We know Frantz Kafka, who never visited America (am I right?), wrote a novel, namely America. There is a poem by Federico García Lorca, the Spanish poet, namely “Poet in New York”. We hear the city howling in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”. Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish Rahman 2 poet and Nobel Laureate, is another urban writer who portrays the city very vividly in his poetry. And there is T. S. Eliot’s poetry full of city images. He talks about the River Thames and the London Bridge. He tells us about one J. Alfred Prufrock who plans to measure his time with coffee spoons. We hear again from him about an urban character – Phlebous, the phoenician, a fortnight dead in his poem “Death by Water”. In Bangladesh, there are many poets who are noted as urban poets as they portray the city largely in their poetry. A major poet among them is Shamsur Rahman who passed away two years ago. Another of these urban poets is Shahid Kadri who has been living in New York for the last two decades. I want to share with you some of my experiences which come to my mind. One day, about twenty years ago, I was walking through the streets of Prague with a map of the city in my hand. It was my second day in Prague, and I knew nothing about the city. Suddenly, I noticed a nameplate in front of a small house marked with an inscription, “Here lived Franz Kafka”. Kafka is one of my favorite writers. Imagine, what a thrill it was! The same thrill I went through when I saw quotations of the writers inscribed on the pavements of Iowa Avenue. Now, as I am writing at my desk in my temporary home in Iowa, I can see a map of Iowa City hung on the wall. The Iowa River is flowing gracefully across the city. It is difficult for me to imagine how furious it was only two months ago. However, this river reminds me of the River Buriganga, which flows by my city Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. Whenever I fly back to Dhaka from an overseas trip and look through the window of the aircraft to my city, I feel an indescribable peace. From up in the sky, it is a beautiful green city crisscrossed by rivers. But, to one on the ground, Dhaka is a vibrant, busy, overcrowded city, teeming with both sides of Reality–the bright as well as the dark. I have lived in Dhaka since my early childhood. I saw the city growing up through continuous evolution. Bangladesh is a poor and underdeveloped country. But Bangladesh has a very rich cultural and traditional heritage. In 1971, Bangladesh emerged as an independent country after a long courageous liberation war, at the cost of 30 million lives. Dhaka, as the capital city, bears the marks of all these struggles upon her face. To me, Dhaka is the source of all the strength that enables me to carry on the struggle of “To be or not to be”. In one of my poems, I wrote, “O Dhaka, where should I go, leaving you behind? O Dhaka, my childhood friend!” |
| 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/ |
Description
| Title | The city, Iowa City Public Library, September 5, 2008 Video, 700k |
| Type (DCMIType) |
Moving image |
| Type (IMT) |
mp4 |
| Duration | 01:25:19 |
| Digitization Specifications | Received as MPEG2 and converted to mp4 for streaming. |
| Date Digital | 2008-09-05 |
| File Name | iwp-icpl_9-5-08.mp4 |
| Original File Name | iwp_9-5-08.mpg |
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