Note to self - why I write what I write, Iowa City Public Library, September 12, 2008 Video, 700k |
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Note to self - why I write what I write, Iowa City Public Library, September 12, 2008 Video, 700k
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| Rating | |
| Title | Note to self - why I write what I write, Iowa City Public Library, September 12, 2008 |
| Creator |
Lam, Agnes Hu, Xudong, 1974- Umez, Uche Peter, 1975- Pick, Anat Henríquez, Leonardo |
| Creator - Nationality |
Hongkonger Chinese Nigerian Israeli Venezuelan |
| Contributor | Merrill, Christopher |
| Date Original | 2008-09-12 |
| Description | Agnes Lam, using few words as is her preference, writes poetry because it is something she likes to do. Hu Xudong's talk, "From the Margin of a Painting to Plural Inner Selves" describes the myriad transitions he has gone through growing from a young boy painting into a modern Chinese poet. Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike's talk, "I Sing a Discordant Melody; I Tell a Different Story" does just that, meandering between ideas of people left in darkness and misrule in Africa, discovering Shakespearean sonnets, and the dialectic between possession and dispossession of the Négritude movement. Anat Pick elaborates on her writing and the verbal connection she explores with her writing, in her talk "Why I Recite What I Write." |
| Venue |
Iowa City Public Library |
| Geographic Subject | United States -- Iowa -- Iowa City |
| Chronological Subject | 2000-2010 |
| Transcription | Lam Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – September 12, 2008 Agnes Lam (Hong Kong/Singapore), Hu Xudong (China), Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Nigeria), Anat Pick (Israel), Leonardo Henríquez (Venezuela) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” 1 Why I Write What I Write Agnes Lam My background Perhaps I should begin with a little note on my background. I was born in Hong Kong and educated in English from primary school. I left Hong Kong at 19 to study in Singapore because they gave me a scholarship. Singapore then sent me to do my Phd in linguistics in America. When I completed that, I taught at the National University of Singapore for some years before I returned to Hong Kong. I now teach at the University of Hong Kong. For the last year, I was also the Acting Director of the Centre for Applied English Studies there with 41 teachers, 12 administrative staff and about 7,000 students. The nature of my job demands that I write a whole range of genres: teaching materials, development plans, budget justifications, staff appraisals, curriculum documents, research grant proposals as well as academic books and articles. Sometimes, I am invited to write newspaper articles about poetry. I have done some translation of poetry from Chinese into English when a friend needs my help. I also write poetry myself. In all my writing, I aim to use as few words as possible to capture what I want to say as accurately and as clearly as possible. I do not always succeed but that is my aim because my readers’ time is so precious. Why I write poetry Writing poetry is not a requirement of my job but just something I like to do. Because it is something I just like to do, it is not something that requires a reason or a purpose. Do we ask children why they like to blow soap bubbles into the air? No reason. They just like to see them rise into the air, refracting the spectrum of colours from the sun. Do we ask them why they like swimming? No reason. It just feels good to glide through the water. I have often been asked why I write poetry. I usually reply carelessly: ‘I don’t know. I just do. It’s like breathing.’ If I may quote from the introduction to my first collection, Woman to Woman and Other Poems (1997). … To me, poetry is part of everyday life. I see it and hear it everywhere in everything. I cannot trace how this awareness began. I was a rather quiet child who liked to sit by myself gazing at the sea. I also read a lot from a young age. The death of my father when I was thirteen and the difficulties in my first marriage could have enhanced that sensibility. The times when I could not speak of my own dissolution could have made me more sensitive to similar circumstances in other people’s lives. … Through writing poetry, I reorder my inner dissonance. If I can articulate the fury and the calm, perhaps my words may offer some comfort in resonance to another who does not. If there must be a reason for my poetry, then that is the reason – to understand, to empathize, to comfort, to create harmony and happiness … The first poem I ever wrote was written for my father when he passed away. In many of my teenage poems, mostly not published, I was just trying to understand myself, trying to make sense of the universe around me and within me. When I looked around me, I did not understand why there was so much cruelty in this world. I understood kindness because that made people happy but I did not understand cruelty because it made everyone unhappy. And when I closed my eyes, in the inner Lam Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – September 12, 2008 Agnes Lam (Hong Kong/Singapore), Hu Xudong (China), Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Nigeria), Anat Pick (Israel), Leonardo Henríquez (Venezuela) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” 2 darkness, I saw the stars out there in the galaxy still and I did not understand the vastness of the spaces between them. So I wrote poetry … Then I went away from home, first to Singapore and then to America, and I thought constantly of the worlds I left behind. I felt the need to write about those worlds, almost as if I needed to persuade myself that they were there still, perhaps because it was in my connection with those worlds that I could retain my bearings in a strange land. There was a poem I wrote in America which seems to epitomize this existence, at once ephemeral yet with a reality of its own: Petals in three countries I can grow if but a little each time I transplant the air pollen dusted allergic to spring dripping with sodas in the heat of summer a chlorine bath later smelling burnt and crackling on autumn trees in the clear winter icicles break and bite extremes in America modulated in Hong Kong negligible on the Equator but always petals unfurling I thrive on the spectrum of colours smells noises temperatures humidities degrees of pollution in the pervading air ready to be watered by droplets pressed between a child’s small fingers a gift for Father without roots Lam Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – September 12, 2008 Agnes Lam (Hong Kong/Singapore), Hu Xudong (China), Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Nigeria), Anat Pick (Israel), Leonardo Henríquez (Venezuela) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” 3 I grow with but the scent for a season even a moment translucent petals dancing in a raindrop spectrum mere petals of scent and light dissipated and mangled in an afternoon storm as the traffic halts on the red light and pedestrians cross in their umbrellas 28 June 1986, LRDC I still remember the traffic junction in Pittsburgh when that image overwhelmed me so completely I had to write about it when I reached my apartment to free myself from it so that I could be peaceful again. Soon I found that my poetry could do something like this for other people around me as well. About a decade ago, one of my friends lost her baby. She was a foreigner in Hong Kong; when I visited her, she told me she could not bring herself to tell her relatives and friends back home she had lost her baby. That night, as I prayed for her, I seemed to see a happy baby floating in the air, not physically of course, but I felt her presence. And I wrote this poem. To Sonia Tonight I think of you, a child that should have been born to your mother in a foreign land. I would have held your little hand, nails trimmed by your Chinese grandmother with the baby clipper she brought all the way from Canada for you, her first grandchild so longed for from her first daughter-in-law. You were to be your mother’s first born, first loved, first bathed, clothed and fed, showered with presents from relatives and friends on the other Pacific shore. You were with her Lam Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – September 12, 2008 Agnes Lam (Hong Kong/Singapore), Hu Xudong (China), Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Nigeria), Anat Pick (Israel), Leonardo Henríquez (Venezuela) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” 4 when she got onto the plane. Did you leave quietly over the ocean water? Did you walk through the window onto the clouds? She could not hold you to say goodbye. She could not look into your eyes, kiss your cheeks for the last and first time. She did not know you were leaving. She does not know where to find you now. I saw the tears in her eyes, her dark lashes wet, her chestnut hair tied in a short pony-tail, a child left alone, away from home. Sonia, Sonia, your mother’s first conceived, is it possible for you to visit her? Tell her you are well where you are. You are still alive, more so than before. On the other shore, you need not be fed or clothed. You are grown and need no care. You are loved by many radiant as you are, light, complete, pure. You, her first, know and love her so. 1 November 1997, Rodrigues Court for my Canadian friend married to a Chinese immigrant to Toronto now living in Hong Kong Actually, my friend was not Canadian but, to protect the privacy of the people I write about, I might change a few details here and there in a poem and, before I publish any poem of this sort, I always seek permission from the people involved. In this instance, my friend took my poem and sent it to her relatives and friends and that helped her recover from the loss of her baby. A few years later, a young pastor in an English-speaking church in Hong Kong also had to counsel a young couple who lost their baby and he told me later he gave them this poem and it comforted them. Not all my poems are gentle like these two. I have written some poems about the political situation in Hong Kong and China and, occasionally, even about China’s relations with the West. I always write for peace but two or three of my poems have been misunderstood as poems to incite people to war. Perhaps I should take that as a compliment but I was grateful to read Peter Nazareth’s review of my second collection, Water Wood Pure Splendour (2001), in World Literature Today, in which he observes that my poems are “fighting poems that seek to heal”. Readers like him understand that my intention, even if I write about political circumstances, is to enhance understanding for greater empathy between different ethnicities and nationalities. Lam Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – September 12, 2008 Agnes Lam (Hong Kong/Singapore), Hu Xudong (China), Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Nigeria), Anat Pick (Israel), Leonardo Henríquez (Venezuela) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” 5 These eighty days At this juncture of my writing, I seem to be going through a different phase. I might be returning in some way to some of the concerns in my younger days, though with a different idiom, I hope. It is not as if I have ever lost those themes, which might range from pure joy in a certain lyrical moment to metaphysical sadness. Some of my recent poems go somewhat beyond home, country, culture or ethnicity to an appreciation of beauty and philosophical explorations but I will not quote from them. There are a few samples on the International Writing Program web: http://iwp.uiowa.edu/writers/index.htm/, if you are interested. My revisiting these themes might have something to do with my age. Under a normal life span in Hong Kong, I have fewer than 10,000 days left to write. Eighty of these days are being spent in Iowa. Someone could go around the world in eighty days. I only seek to write part of a collection of poetry. Three weeks have already gone by. But I am now well adjusted to life in Iowa. I love my little apartment decorated all in white and green on a hardwood floor in a house exactly a century old. I now have a satellite vision of the grid of streets in this patch of America – Fairchild to my north, Prentiss to my south, Van Buren to my east and Madison to my west. I have acquired a mini rice cooker. I have also discovered I can remove tea stains on a mug with toothpaste and have learnt to hang up my laundry with such art I only have to do minimal ironing. And I have at last completed a chapter for an academic book on China for two forbearing editors. So finally I am free, temporally and emotionally, to walk along the river, to think, to write poetry … These eighty days are very precious to me. When they are over, I will have to write the next development plan for my Centre and all the associated genres again … For these eighty days of poetic freedom, I am most grateful to everyone at IWP for making life so easy for me here in Iowa. I also wish to thank my fellow IWP participants for being so inspiring and collegial and you, our dear audience, for being so supportive. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Xudong Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – September 12, 2008 Agnes Lam (Hong Kong/Singapore), Hu Xudong (China), Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Nigeria), Anat Pick (Israel), Leonardo Henríquez (Venezuela) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” 1 From the Margin of a Painting to Plural Inner Selves Hu Xudong When I was a little boy, I liked very much the classical Chinese painting and attempted to be an artist. After I learned by myself how to make Chinese ink and wash, which is done on waterabsorbing papers with a brush dipped in pure water and black ink, not oil, I got a big surprise: Some of my paintings were selected to be included in an exhibition. Then there came a serious problem. To obey the traditional rules of Chinese ink and wash, I had to write calligraphy of classical poems on the margin of the paintings, because without this kind of calligraphy a Chinese painting isn’t considered finished. So I forced myself to write the first poems of my life, one hour before I handed these paintings to the curator. I really want to forget these stupid metrical poems since they were a sort of childish nightmare; however, they were the unconscious beginning of my poetry writing. For most Chinese contemporary poets, such an experience sounds a little weird: starting with classical Chinese poetry then turning to modern or postmodern poetry—how could it be possible? Although lots of American scholars, like the erudite professor Stephen Oven from Harvard University, are fascinated by classical Chinese poetry, our classical poetry and contemporary poetry are totally separate from the beginning of the twentieth century; they use different Chinese language, different aesthetics and different rhetoric. It’s very common for an American contemporary poet to write a sonnet, but it’s quite ridiculous for a Chinese contemporary poet to write a seven-character octave in the classical Chinese language of Tang dynasty: Imagine the American poet John Ashbery writing in Latin! Anyway, I continued to write Chinese classical poetry with the unique purpose of matching it with Chinese ink and wash until I went to Peking University at the age of 17. Peking University is just like the University of Iowa, with a strong tradition of poetry writing. Almost 60% of the important poets in the history of modern or contemporary Chinese literature are from this university. Although our university didn’t offer any courses like the creative writing courses offered here, we had a dynamic community of good poets, and I still think this atmosphere, with informal links between newcomers and skillful poets, is more effective than any kind of course given by faculty. I benefited quite a lot from the interactions among this mafia-like community, and I began to write poetry with contemporaneity, seeking a variable inner-world inside my daily life with sensitive lines which are like barking hunters running in the forest of the words. At the beginning of their writing careers, most young poets believe in what Seamus Heaney wrote in his poem “Personal Helicon”: . . . I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing. To give unknown darkness a perfect shape, to place random imaginations in a discrete order, was my great pleasure in writing, but I failed to “see myself.” I mean, I didn’t, and still don’t, think poetry will lead me to a single self. How about plural selves? How about unexpected selves? Poetry is something that will invent secretly other kinds of yourself when you are writing. So I became a fan of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Unlike Walt Whitman, who enlarged a unique self to a splendid capacity, Fernando Pessoa split himself into uncountable infinite. This guy is amazing: He is far beyond the creator of poems; he created at least 90 poets. All of these 90 poets are Xudong Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – September 12, 2008 Agnes Lam (Hong Kong/Singapore), Hu Xudong (China), Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Nigeria), Anat Pick (Israel), Leonardo Henríquez (Venezuela) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” 2 pseudonyms of himself; they have their own backgrounds and careers, publishing poems in their own styles, criticizing or influencing each other, even interacting with the “real” Fernando Pessoa in magazines or journals. The most interesting thing is, Fernando Pessoa was not insane, but he sometimes believed that all his pseudonyms were real people. When dying, he yelled his pseudonyms one by one, just like a sad farewell to his family members. One of his famous pseudonyms, Alvaro de Campos, wrote in a poem “Resumo”: Sentir tudo de todas as maneiras. Sentir tudo excessivamente, Porque todas as coisas são, em verdade, excessivas I don’t have the English translation in my hands, so I’ll try to translate it like this: To feel everything in all the ways, To feel everything excessively, Because all the things are, in fact, excessive. This is very close to what I am doing in my poetry writing: putting all kinds of wires of my sensibility and discernment into a very concrete space, to see them make intensive short circuits. For example, in one of my poems, “White Cat Toqtamish,” I tried to condense various narrative fragments of both true and fake history about the remote empires of the steppes in Central Asia into an eccentric image of a white cat which I saw by chance on my way home on one of the most boring summer nights in Beijing. Each of these historical fragments contains one of my strange dimensions of being. I really want to read this poem; unfortunately, it’s still waiting for translation. One of my friends, the American poet Forrest Gander, wrote a short introduction about me in one of his essays, and I’d like to quote it here: “The brilliant, exuberant Hu Xudong, who teaches World Literature at Peking University and speaks of a plural inner self, writes a high speed, macaronic poetry that incorporates provincial dialects, advertisements, classical references, and surrealism.” I think this short description of my works is better than most of the tedious critiques in China. In the end, if someone wonders why this Chinese poet doesn’t mention more cultural or political icons of China, I would like to answer you in couple of lines from a poem “A Literatura como Turismo” (“Literature as Traveling”), written by the most important Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto: Instead of leading us to the exact cities, Reading gives us other nationalities. Umezurike Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – September 12, 2008 Agnes Lam (Hong Kong/Singapore), Hu Xudong (China), Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Nigeria), Anat Pick (Israel), Leonardo Henríquez (Venezuela) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” 1 I Sing a Discordant Melody; I Tell a Different Story Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike Ekele m unu. I greet you all, ladies and gentlemen. I am honored to share with you the artistic processes that molded my life as a bearer of songs; a story-teller. I hope I may be able to sate the eclectic appetite of a people whose cultural and literary affluence is an inspiration to many a writer. When I say, “I write,” I mean, “We write,” because I'm speaking for a people. “I” is collective in most African literature, particularly in poetry. This can be seen in the Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, in which Aimé Césaire proclaims, “My mouth will be the mouth of the misery that has no mouth; my voice, the freedom of those voices which fall into dungeons of despair.” I am from the Igbo-speaking part of Nigeria. The Igbo have a rich cultural history and heritage. Idioms, riddles, aphorisms, anecdotes, folklores, and proverbs embellish the oral tradition, intersperse the language, and serve communicative purposes as well as instructive purposes. In Igboland, stories assume great importance and therefore are venerated. Stories do not serve only to illuminate community values, but also remind people of individual and collective responsibilities—responsibilities towards building a society that is both harmonious and congenial for human development. The importance of stories is highlighted by Professor Emmanuel Obiechinna, a foremost Igbo scholar, in the 1994 Ahiajoku Lecture Series, an annual forum for the promotion of Igbo civilization. He stated that, akuko ka e ji a muta okwu (the story is the medium through which we understand the word); akuko bu ndu (story is life).” Chinua Achebe, the Igbo writer, also underscores the primacy of stories. He tells us through a character in his book Anthills of the Savannah: “The story is our escort; without it, we are blind.” Sadly, my people still paddle in darkness, because we have “blind elite” as Véronique Tadjo, a writer from Cote d’Ivoire, makes us realize in her allegorical novel The Blind Kingdom. For her, “the problem with our continent [Africa] resides principally in its blind elite. The bourgeoisie could have been a factor for progress but in fact were rapacious and blind and have failed the majority of the people.” The tragedy of the misrule in Africa is further highlighted by the late Nigerian poet Ezenwa Ohaeto in The Chants of a Minstrel: The idiot-king does forget Despite the mighty rage of fire It finally settles down as ash. In most nations of Africa, it is a fact that the government expresses scant respect, or none at all, for the sacred language of literature; the language that, ironically, has nurtured a positive image of Umezurike Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – September 12, 2008 Agnes Lam (Hong Kong/Singapore), Hu Xudong (China), Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Nigeria), Anat Pick (Israel), Leonardo Henríquez (Venezuela) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” 2 Conrad’s so-called “Heart of Darkness” on the “whitewashed” minds of the world; that has to a great extent lessened the blight of our shameful inadequacies in the international arena. I have always admired the African writer, because, as the Ugandan writer Goretti Kyomuhendo has said, it’s easy to lose hope when one lives in Africa, and I’m compelled to quit writing altogether. Yet I can’t. This brings me back to the subject why I write what I write. I remember the 14-year-old scribbling a lopsided verse across the blackboard: his first; a satiric doggerel of the acronym GRA, the exclusive Government Reserved Area of the elite. He parodied it to mean Government Rejected Areas, alluding to the infamous slums where he grew up. A year or so later, stricken with infatuation, he tried to impress a big-bosomed girl by presenting to her his first novel, a handwritten sappy romance. All she offered him was a smile; nothing more. In 1996, he was compelled to tackle some personal gloom. To worsen matters, General Abacha, Nigeria's late ruler, plunged the university system into the muck, and this teenager beheld his undergraduate dream spiraling out of control, like a maniac. Grappling with bile and despair, he picked up, quite inadvertently, dear William Shakespeare sitting in an oblique and forlorn pose on a cobwebbed shelf in his uncle's library. The Sonnets! Shakespeare accompanied him in many a heedless adventure: the young lad tossed his heart and soul head-on into a world of words. A world more fantastic than any Tolkien or Rowling could have conceived. George Orwell said that one cannot assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. The past is always redolent. It makes us intelligible to the next generation. African writers, old and young, dead and living, have often armed themselves with prose, poetry and play, as arsenal of remonstration and resistance. Look at our glorious history, the bloody crepuscule of colonialism, the heady meridian of Pan-Africanism, the hazy twilight of nationhood; the recurring motif remains: Dispossession. Early and other Francophone writers couched their story in “Négritude”; a literary and political movement developed in the 1930s aimed at restoring the cultural identity of black Africans. Though the founders made us believe that they were fighting French colonial racism, the truth is that Négritude heightened the dialectic between possession and dispossession. The Anglophone writers on the other hand, were not fixated on blackness, because they realized that color was never enough to sustain an opposition, so they expanded their story to embrace all facets of the African reality and explicitly denounced dispossession without situating the language within the insularity of any ideology. The point I am making is this: Whichever way one looks at the above premises one cannot Umezurike Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – September 12, 2008 Agnes Lam (Hong Kong/Singapore), Hu Xudong (China), Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Nigeria), Anat Pick (Israel), Leonardo Henríquez (Venezuela) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” 3 dissociate the story from the context of dispossession. In his seminal essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" T.S. Eliot talks about fidelity to tradition and a "continual surrender of self" to the vast order of tradition. Permit me to localize Eliot’s premise to suit my argument. As an Igbo I recognize that story-telling does not occur in a vacuum, but builds on tradition. Story-telling embodies our relationship with the past, the present and the future; in fact it connects with and embodies the continuity of tradition. Anyway, much as I would like my writing to be far removed from the theme of dispossession; I cannot. My dilemma is even echoed in one of my poems, “River Urashi”: I am no bearer of manifold tales of my tribe I am cosmopolitan in prodigal ways, garbed in the city peacock’s colors Errant son, scornful of the magic of songs . . . Dispossession. Exploitation. That is the pestilence ravaging our farms. Despoiling homes; destroying lives. I am no stranger to it, to the manic collusion that transcends color and race. Lamenting the fortune of the oil-rich communities, Nnimmo Bassey, a Nigerian environmental poet, chanted in his book We thought it was Oil but it was Blood: These pipes dry our lands These pipes drain our souls These pipes steal our dreams. See why I find it difficult to free myself from identifying with tradition? Even when I shut my eyes, I still picture fumes of gas flaring. I still perceive the odors of oil slick. How can I tuck myself under the smug poetry of romance or philosophy when my mind is daily assaulted by the pestilence eating away my land? Should I embrace the call of being a politically disengaged man and become what Jean-Paul Sartre called a "bastard?" No, my writing will continue to ring as one long, uncompromising squall. Let despoilers hear! Shearers of songs hear! Hackers of tongues hear! This is why I write what I write – because I am unable to spit in the face of the king who is deaf to the millions crying out for bread; the blind king who is aroused by bloodshed and desperate to reduce the ancestral earth to a collage of mushroomed waste. I do not want to embrace pessimism, because hope is haunted everyday in Nigeria, so what I am saying is this: I echo the endless song of a distraught people. I sing a discordant melody. I tell a different story. Dalu nu Thank you. Pick Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – September 12, 2008 Agnes Lam (Hong Kong/Singapore), Hu Xudong (China), Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Nigeria), Anat Pick (Israel), Leonardo Henríquez (Venezuela) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” 1 Why I Recite What I Write Anat Pick I usually introduce myself as a writer and performer of spoken-word poetry in invented language. I also use the term “phonetic poetry” or “sound poetry,” although there exists a wide range of other titles that might suit my work no less. I guess my phonetic material originates in my mother and father tongues: Persian, English and Hebrew. Nonetheless, in the neighborhood where I grew up, a suburb not far from Tel Aviv, families of immigrants mainly from East Europe lived side by side with Jewish immigrants from all over the Muslim world. The bonding language between us all was Hebrew. I began a career as a musician, but at a certain stage, took a sharp turn toward art studies. I created a limited body of visual works which consisted mainly of three dimensional puzzles. The titles I have given to each work played an important role in the overall concept and in the “reading” of that work. Those were my first steps toward realizing that text can play a role equal to elements from other media. In a work I presented in 1997 called “The Forbidden Museum” I used, for the first time, action, text, installation and objects. I used speech and body action to present objects which otherwise would have been hanging on the walls of a museum. This was when I realized that I can’t make a separation between text, voice and action. When I started my way as a performance artist, text was only one of the means I had for communicating my ideas. Over the course of time, I started using verbal material as a pivotal performance tool: the text became acoustic raw material, language became substance, motivating and shaping the very act of speaking, and hence the body’s entire operation in space. I would like to refer to two aspects of language which my work addresses: first, creating a lexicon of personal, invented language and composing poems from it; and second, developing speech techniques. I am constantly building and expanding my lingual lexicon. The stages of this work are comprised of gathering language particles—I call them flakes—and writing them down in English letters, (no matter what their source is). Then I sort them into families by a variety of criteria. The process of actual writing then starts with selecting and arranging different particles into language units of various lengths. These units should have a very solid quality. They should have integrity to the point that they can melt into each other. Otherwise they will drift apart from each other and find their way back to their original mother language. The next and final stage consists of creating sequences out of a few units, and exploring the structure which will contain them. What guides me in the selection of specific phonemes and the rejection of others is not unequivocal. Among other cultural elements there is an inner recognition, originating in an early phase of my life, where the blend of languages heard at home possessed an illogical, musical-sensual meaning. The question of the parameters used to select the language flakes also applies to the laws of their arrangement. Sometimes, my invented language begins to resemble the grammatical order of existing languages. In other words, the material “organizes itself” into what rings like orderly sentences. When this Pick Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – September 12, 2008 Agnes Lam (Hong Kong/Singapore), Hu Xudong (China), Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Nigeria), Anat Pick (Israel), Leonardo Henríquez (Venezuela) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” 2 happens, the required work is to decipher the musical - lingual code that makes things sound as though they have a familiar meaning. Once that code has been revealed, I reorganize the material again and again to break away from this code. This “reorganization” might seem like the deconstruction of language. In one way, it is: it’s the deconstruction of the established structures of established languages. But there’s more to it: I have an inner wish to find a different, unique structure, by gliding back towards the origins of speech and the physical experience of producing verbal sounds. Indeed, I can’t talk about my writing without talking about the verbal manifestation of that writing. Writing, in my case, is simultaneous with speaking the language particles. The production of these sounds can be very gratifying. It is very much akin to munching food: operating the mouth is not so different when it operates empty—that is, when it speaks words—or when there is the presence of some substance—that is, food. The mouth, which serves as a strict checkpoint for food and air, serves at the same time as a tireless machine for the production and distribution of words. In other words, the mouth is the region of conflict for our intersecting mental and sensual functions. When I use invented language, I’m interested in the overall sound and also how it feels. Sometimes the vocabulary of sensuous associations triggered by the language particles guides me toward a somewhat culinary arrangement of language. The substance of language might be described as “tasty,” and biting down on different language particles yields different “tastes.” When language is used as an excuse for taking pleasure in the operation of the mouth, it undermines the need to use structured language. And it is that very specific need to use structures—but in an innovative and exploratory way—which guides me back to writing. So here I am left with the question first put to me, but in a reversed form: Why do I write what I recite? Henríquez Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – September 12, 2008 Agnes Lam (Hong Kong/Singapore), Hu Xudong (China), Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Nigeria), Anat Pick (Israel), Leonardo Henríquez (Venezuela) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” 1 The Phantom of Liberty Leonardo Henríquez (Why do I write what I write, was the question for this panel: “I don’t have any idea” would be the most sincere answer. But I know well why it is not me who writes what I write): I Under the influence of the daily-shrinking space of expression that we face in our countries (here, there and everywhere), confronting intellectual dangers and risks of this contraction, we only depend on ourselves. And, as is well known, self-confidence leads to nothing more than eccentricity: writing between lines, concealing sense. Looking for alternative meanings, new methods, new styles and flamboyant literary architectures come to us. I will never forget a terrible but accurate sentence I heard from a young European filmmaker: Democracy has put to sleep our wildest dreams… II !VIVAN LAS CADENAS! “Long live chains". That was the cry of the Spanish who, in the face of Napoleon's occupation of their country, preferred--or claimed to prefer-- the dreadful reactionary rule of the Bourbons over the liberal ideas of their revolutionary neighbors. In that moment of truth they preferred bad Spanish ideas to good French ones: a heroic and perverse choice of unfreedom. Thus the heroic and perverse choice of writing. But what other means do we have to prevail against our tedious and authoritarian powers? Humor, always. Unconventional writing, maybe… III There exist but three respectable beings: The priest, the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill, to create. The rest of men belong to the fatigue party, made for the stables, in other words for the practice of that, which is called professions. Charles Baudelaire, Mon coeur mis à nu Henríquez Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – September 12, 2008 Agnes Lam (Hong Kong/Singapore), Hu Xudong (China), Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Nigeria), Anat Pick (Israel), Leonardo Henríquez (Venezuela) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” 2 “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Einstein LITERATURE Occupation of idlers NOVELS Corrupt the masses. POETRY Completely useless. LACONICISM Language no longer spoken. (Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas) IV Artists are made from different wood. We don’t have the practical skill of lying politicians do, or science’s useful knowledge to destroy, so we claim to be at once honest and clever, the voice of God, the voice of our people. But beware, some of us don’t even believe in God (a few of us do not even believe in people…), Therefore, we turn to poetry, prose, the most extravagant writing styles, to cope with our vague complex of superiority, to cope with repression as well as injustice, often to survive our many personal failures and our few personal achievements. V So then, why do I write what I write?: Because of T. S. Eliot, Mark Twain, Ezra Pound or Henry James; Paul Auster, Garcia Marquez, Borges, Camus and many others whose names I don’t even know how to pronounce , and whose writings I sometimes don’t even understand (take the wisest of them all: James Joyce). VI I write because it is a prolific, demanding, exciting, and revealing form of art, because is the cheapest way to generate counterculture and to pursue lost causes. Henríquez Iowa City Public Library and the International Writing Program Panel Series – September 12, 2008 Agnes Lam (Hong Kong/Singapore), Hu Xudong (China), Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Nigeria), Anat Pick (Israel), Leonardo Henríquez (Venezuela) For electronic text, please visit www.uiowa.edu/~iwp and click on “News & Events” 3 VII I write what I write because I wrote for the movies, because I got tired writing for the movies; because, in movies every sentence has a production cost, and now I write (irresponsibly) what comes to my mind… VIII In Spanish we have a beautiful and accurate proverb: El papel aguanta todo… (Paper will put up with anything): …The silence began to daze me. A resounding, irritating, intriguing deafness that transformed the scarce sounds into rumors, into dangerous inventions. Far down below, tied to a long dock like a narrow peninsula, floated a kind of schooner, and when it struck a buoy, a chilling metallic wail was heard. I had a bad feeling. And I feared that, at any moment, something terrible would happen. However, it was the creak of the cypress wood floor that caused me to back out from the balcony. Though I could appreciate the lavishness of this exclusive suite, it was too late to bask in its luxuries: four gold censers adorned with motifs of bats and peaches occupied the four corners. The bed was covered in a raw silk comforter, scattered with red rose petals in a disordered harmony. At the foot of the bed, skillfully folded in half, was a woven bathrobe, so precious that I wished my initials were embroidered on its front. A vein of black jasper led to a sunken bath built into an indoor garden. My attention was drawn to a though framed in glass: In this garden are three philosophies: Confucianism, which prizes practicality, social responsibility, morality, and political thought. Taoism, which aspires to unity with nature and is indifferent to fortune and fame apart from morality. Finally, the thoughts of him who inhabits the garden. … |
| 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 | Note to self - why I write what I write, Iowa City Public Library, September 12, 2008 Video, 700k |
| Date Original | 2008-09-12 |
| Type (DCMIType) |
Moving image |
| Type (IMT) |
mp4 |
| Duration | 01:25:19 |
| Digitization Specifications | Received as MPEG2 and converted to mp4 for streaming. |
| Date Digital | 2008-09-12 |
| File Name | iwp-icpl_9-15-08.mp4 |
| Original File Name | iwp_9-15-08.mpg |
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