| | PEN WORLD VOICESThe New York Festival of International Literature is opening on April 24 and offers 6 days of nternational literary fellowship. | |
|
 |
April 24 | Green Thoughts: Writers on the Environment
 When: Tuesday, April 24
Where: The Great Hall at Cooper Union:
7 East 7th St.
What time: 7–8:30 p.m.
With
Billy Collins, Jonathan Franzen, Moses Isegawa, Pico
Iyer, Laura Restrepo, Marilynne Robinson, Roxana Robinson, Salman
Rushdie, Gary Shteyngart, Colson Whitehead
>> Buy tickets now
>> All Tuesday programs
|
|
|
April 25 | Town Hall Readings: Writing Home
 When: Wednesday, April 25
Where: The Town Hall: 123 West 43rd St.
What time: 8 p.m.–9:30 p.m.
With
Don DeLillo, Kiran Desai, Neil Gaiman, Nadine Gordimer, Alain
Mabanckou, Steve Martin, Salman Rushdie, Pia Tafdrup, Tatyana Tolstaya,
Saadi Youssef
>> Buy tickets now
>> All Wednesday programs
|
|
|
April 26 | An Evening with The Moth
 When: Thursday, April 26
Where: 37 Arts: 450 West 37th St.
What time: 8–10 p.m.
With Neil Gaiman, Pico Iyer, Laila Lalami; and Jonathan Ames as your MC
>> Buy tickets now
>> All Thursday programs |
|
|
April 27 | Conversation: Kiran Desai & Vikram Chandra, with Rachel Donadio
 When: Friday, April 27
Where: Gilder Lehrman Hall, The Morgan Library: 225 Madison Ave.
What time: 6:30–7:30 p.m.
>> Buy tickets now
>> All Friday programs
|
|
|
April 28 | The PEN Cabaret
 When: Saturday, April 29
Where: The Bowery Ballroom: 6 Delancey St.
What time: 8–10 p.m.
With Oliver Lake, Victoria Roberts, Sam Shepard, Patti Smith, Saul Williams, Huang Xiang, and surprise guests
>> Buy tickets now
>> All Saturday programs |
|
|
April 29 | The Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture with David Grossman
 When: Sunday, April 29
Where: The Great Hall at Cooper Union: 7 East 7th St.
What time: 6:30–7:45 p.m.
With Nadine Gordimer
>> Buy tickets now
>> All Sunday programs
|
|
|
|
For this year's Festival, PEN World Voices brings together writers from
around the world to discuss their relationships to their own and each
others’ homes; the political and social implications of concepts like
homelands; and how literature helps us negotiate the divide between the
familiar and the strange, the mundane and the exotic.
Read impressions of Home & Away from the following World Voices participants. |
|
|
Dorothea Dieckmann on Home & Away
When home is where you come from, aren’t you always
away? On all your ways you want to come home again, trying to find a
way. Always away on all ways home. A way away, a road abroad. What
leads you on your way is memories, memories of yourself, remembering
your self to be a member of something, a part of something you are
apart from. You don’t know who it was, you don’t know the place. But it
must be somebody somewhere in the way you talk, you think, you dream.
So the way home is the way of words. My way of words is the German way,
but thinking about an English way to express my thoughts about home and
away I find another direction home. The German way contains the words
Heim and Heimat, which is not home and at home, although Heimat seems
to be a mix-up of at and home, heim and at. But Heimat leads me into a
homemade confusion. It leads me to the Fatherland, it leads me to
nostalgia, it makes me homesick in a sick way. It is a word made in
Germany which always makes me mad in Germany. So, writing in English I
find myself on a way that shows me where my self comes from. You must
be away from home to find a way home.
Copyright © 2007 Dorothea Dieckmann. All rights reserved.
|
|
|
Pico Iyer on Home & Away
The beauty, which is the challenge, of the modern moment is that the
very terms “home” and “away” have become as mongrel, as mobile, even as
interchangeable as those old standbys, “East” and “West” (or “high” and
“low”). Home exists somewhere in the future for many of us—an idea, a
vision, a language or set of values that we carry around inside
ourselves and that has more to do with where we’re going than with
where we came from. And “away” therefore becomes equally slippery, as
some of us suspect that in fact it’s the place where we were born, the
land whose passport we carry, the culture we embody in our faces and
voices that is the truly foreign place.
Traveling across the world today, you find the very MTV
video or McDonald’s outlet or overfriendly neighbor you’ve journeyed
6,000 miles to get away from; yet waking up in the place that you think
of as home, you find yourself surrounded by the rhythms and stories,
the histories and costumes of cultures that not long ago belonged to
the far corners of the earth. The new century is asking us to redefine
“citizen” and “community” and “tradition,” to expand our notions of
“travel” and “exile” and “exoticism.” But most of all it’s asking us to
create for ourselves, each one of us, a new and living sense of “home”
and “away.” The Other is on our doorstep, and home is less a place we
inhabit than one we devise, as we move around a world that is moving
around us, faster than ever before.
Copyright © 2007 Pico Iyer. All rights reserved. |
|
|
Jo Tatchell on Home & Away
Home. The very word smells of clichéd biscuits, still warm from the
oven, of comforting food, goose down pillows, scented hugs, even the
harsh, boundary setting tones of a parental dress down. The reality is
invariably somewhat less rose tinted but, for me, it is still the place
where I used to pull my shoes off, drop my coat on the floor and eat
with elbows on the table, where people accepted me even when I was
obnoxious enough to paint every wall in my room black in a moment of
misguided homage to Nietzsche.
But home, full of acceptance,
also represents the ordinary. And perhaps because of that it is the
place from which I yearned to flee. It took years to see that, despite
settling in other places entirely I have only gone on to recreate much
of my original home in another little corner of the world. For home is
not so much a place, but a memory, a set of ideas that travel with us,
as mine did, while my family moved from the lush humidity of Kerala to
the plains of Africa and the deserts of Arabia. And those memories,
with their rituals and habits, ease us into whatever present we find
ourselves in.
And it is our memories that play the greatest
trick of all, pulling the poles together, so that we are able to exist
in both the past and the present at once, always far away in our
memories of old homes and perfectly at home in the grand, exotic away.
Copyright © 2007 Jo Tatchell. All rights reserved. |
|
|
Nabeel Yasin on Home & Away
The exile was a poetic idea in the poetry I wrote in Iraq, an
existential sensation about expatriation in time and other people. I
explored the complexity, the mix of feelings about birth and death,
love and departure, pain and pleasure, the maze and the horizon.
Later,
exile became reality, my daily fate. And the experience of being an
exile permeated everything, excluding me from language, making me a
stranger in train stations, airports, motorways and winding forest
roads. It changed the way I looked at everything and everybody from the
faces of policemen to the visa stamps in my passport.
And my
wife and son were victims of my exile: like two trees I tried to plant
them, without success. And this failure confused me. The further away I
moved from my homeland the more I began to imagine I was perhaps on my
way home once again. Talking about home and reading about home replaced
being there.
Now I am on the threshold of returning to my
homeland for the first time in twenty-seven years. When I left, for
strange, unknown lands, I did not expect anyone to welcome me. Always,
I told myself that one day I would return home and there receive a warm
welcome. Now that my return is approaching I wonder, with so many of my
family and friends dead or gone, who will open the door when I knock at
it, and who will be there to welcome me.
Copyright © 2007 Nabeel Yasin. All rights reserved. |
|
|
Saadi Youssef on Home & Away
The seventh of January 1992. Another Paris morning: rain and leaden
sky. It is 8:30 and darkness is still total. Only the windows light the
jet-black morning in this working class suburb where I live. The roar
of the cars and the buses penetrates the double glass. People are going
to their factories and businesses while my papers, waiting, remain
blank.
Why am I in Paris? Why am I here and there, there and
here, in migrations that started thirty-five years ago?
Moscow-Damascus-Kuwait, Beirut-Algiers-Damascus.
Beirut-Cyprus-Beirut-Damascus...Aden, Cyprus, Belgrade, Tunis, and at last: Paris.
What am I doing in Paris?
What am I doing in non-Arab land?
Exile
includes the idea of abrogation—abrogating the relationship of the
individual with heaven, earth and society. There is a vertical line
connecting heaven—where the worshipped is—with earth—where the
ancestors lie in the long repose of death. And then is a horizontal
line ordering the village or the town where homes, memories and
childhood playgrounds are. At the point of intersection between those
two lines stands the individual.
The horror of exile is in the
uprooting of the individual from this point of intersection and
transplanting him in another spot, which is not a point of
intersection, where neither heaven is the primordial one nor the
ancestors are ancestors; where there are no homes, no memories and no
childhood playgrounds.
What remains therefore?
Hardship
only: toil and pain in order to preserve the primordial composition,
the stock that is threatened by extinction, and the root that is drying
up.
But the rules of the artistic process make such preservation
an extremely laborious task. The more someone makes an advance in art’s
way the more his need for deeper roots increases—deeper roots at the
point of intersection, not in the soil of exile.
Copyright © 2007 Saadi Youssef. All rights reserved. |
|
|
|
Interview with Neil Gaiman
From The Wild River Review
I
think that freedom of speech is purely and simply the most important
thing we have. The freedom to have ideas, the freedom to express those
ideas in honest writing, whether writing fiction or non-fiction. And I
think the fight that PEN has and the fight that individual writers and
journalists around the planet have, day after day, to express
themselves—to write, to talk honestly about things that have happened
is in every sense of the word—vital.
>> Read more |
|
|
Interview with Pico Iyer
From The Wild River Review
I
am not rooted in a place, I think, so much as in certain values and
affiliations and friendships that I carry everywhere I go; my home is
both invisible and portable. But I would gladly stay in this physical
location for the rest of my life, and there is nothing that I want in
life that it doesn’t have. To me rootedness is mostly just a matter of
deciding what you need, preferably as limited as possible, and finding
a situation that answers that — I call that man rich, as Henry James
has it, who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.
>> Read more |
|
|
Interview with Alain de Botton
From The Wild River Review
The
idea of free speech can be taken for granted in the prosperous,
developed and so-called free world. But, I think that recent events
have shown the inhabitants there that free speech is not something they
can necessarily take for granted. There is a constant impulse to censor
and to repress ideas that are uncomfortable. And people do want to lock
others up for their ideas and beat them up and maybe even kill them. So
there is a really constant threat that’s still there. Even though we
might have thought in the West that this is something Voltaire fought
for in the 18th century, and that we are somehow over that. Well, I
think we’re absolutely not over that and it’s a continuing battle and
that’s why I think an organization like PEN will always have its work
to do.
>> Read more
|
|
|
|
|   
|
