I’m sitting looking out at the Indian Ocean from the eastern edge of Africa in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It is Labor Day, at least in the U.S., though in the U.S. it is actually still Sunday night; but here it is morning with billowing white clouds, blue sky, palm trees, sun shining through—the end of winter in the Southern Hemisphere.

It took 17 hours of flying and a few hours of waiting in Amsterdam—roughly 20 hours to get here. When I arrived in the hotel room last night and the bellman turned on the TV, the BBC in a pulsating picture and sound was reporting on the approach of Hurricane Gustav to New Orleans and the interruption of the Republican National Convention. Was this important news in Tanzania? It was, in any case, the BBC news, and I was interested but couldn’t help but note how far one can go and still have America follow.

Outside the window in the hotel this morning, men are cutting the grass by swinging machetes across the lawn. From a distance it looks as if they are practicing their golf swings, but in the morning sun they are tending to the grass without lawn mowers or power tools.

In the following days here and in Uganda I’ll have the opportunity to visit schools and projects where educators and writers are responding to the shortage of books for children, particularly books with stories relevant to the children and books in local languages. This morning I’m aware of the stories we carry with us, the narrative in our heads wherever we go, the power of this narrative in shaping our lives and the importance of listening to the stories of others and opening up the narrative.

“Once upon a time in a place where the sun usually shines and the winds blow through the palm trees, there is a little girl who lives on the edge of the Indian Ocean, and every morning when she wakes up, she….”

This past Sunday in the late summer afternoon with a thunder and lightning storm at two, then blue sky and sun by four, we held a small family barbecue to welcome home from Africa the daughter of a good friend and to send off that night to Africa our future daughter-in-law. Both young women are graduate students in International Relations. The first was working in a refugee camp in Ghana with families soon to return to Liberia. The other, a PhD student, is researching the role of education in post conflict Uganda and earlier in the summer was in Malawi, where she and other graduate students had started a nonprofit to raise money for girls’ scholarships to high school (Advancement of Girls Education—AGE).

Our friend’s daughter had brought back a bundle of glass bead jewelry—blue and brown beads, black, red and white beads, etched beads, green and yellow beads, and red, white and blue beads all strung together in an array of bracelets and necklaces--as well as brightly colored children’s clothing, all of which she spread out on the table. She is selling these and will send the proceeds back to the refugees and the surrounding community; she’s also raising funds for at least one high school scholarship for a young man who helped her during her stay at the refugee camp.

There are thousands of stories like these of young people out in the world looking to learn and to give back. I have the privilege of knowing many in the U.S. and abroad whose commitment beyond their national borders suggests a generation that won’t retreat but will connect with the globe. They stay in touch with each other via the internet—even in villages or refugee camps, there is often a way to find an internet connection or at least a cell phone texting connection. These young people don’t hold political office; they don’t have a political agenda—at least not a partisan agenda--they are simply starting to take a share of the world onto their shoulders, one experience, one friendship, one lesson at a time.

The challenges of poverty, education, health, security won’t be easier for the next generation. And a summer abroad isn’t sufficient education for a lifetime, but it is the beginning of a journey, a journey matched by the young men and women who have gone abroad with the military and confront issues of security and war and peace.

In 1961 the U.S. launched the Peace Corps as an agency set out to assist underdeveloped countries meet their needs for trained man/woman power. I was recently told by a young military officer that today we need an additional Peace Corps on Steroids because while the military can provide security, it can’t accomplish the necessary reconstruction in the countries. Instead there needs to be a civilian corps committed to work in dangerous areas and assist in rebuilding, along with those in the societies.

Today the globe is connected as few could have imagined even a decade ago, but this shrinking of the world has not yet shrunk the problems though it has opened up possibilities and a global dialogue.

What is the responsibility of the current generation in this eventual hand off? A rather weighty question for a blog, I admit, but if anyone wants to offer a thought, I’d love to hear.

Since April I’ve been back on the Potomac River, sculling in the rushing waters after the spring rains, dodging logs and flotsam flowing downstream from Great Falls and beyond. I’ve been pressing into the middle of the river on hot, sultry days in June when barely a breeze stirs the air, though the current still hurries beneath the boat. I’ve been rowing beside much larger sculls from the universities, dodging the wake of the speed boats which cruise along beside the Viking-size crafts as coaches shout instructions. In my small white scull I’ve tried to hear what they call and emulate the grace and power of the collegiate oarsmen and women.

Facing forward, watching the landscape recede as I move backwards, I’ve been thinking about the past even as I plunge into the future. This perspective of the rower, driving headlong towards what he can’t see except for quick glimpses over his shoulder, is a useful one to master.

I’m back in Los Angeles this week for readings and interviews and will be talking about my own earlier fiction—No Marble Angels and The Dark Path to the River. Many of the short stories in No Marble Angels are set during the Civil Rights era—the Nashville sit-ins, the Little Rock school integration, the aftermath of the ’68 riots in the cities. It was a time when ordinary citizens took extraordinary actions. It’s easy to romanticize the times, but the consequence of many of those actions changed our laws and our lives and opened up our society. The future grew out of the clarity of purpose of those who could glance over their shoulders and press towards the future even as they had to face the restrictions of their present day.

As the U.S. moves into its next era—whatever that may eventually be called—one hopes it will be a period of national and international Rights Realized.

On June 4 China will face the 19th anniversary of the killing of citizens occupying Tiananmen Square. Nineteen years ago as president of PEN USA, I remember well sorting through dozens of unfamiliar Chinese names as we sought to untangle what writers had been arrested. Today there are at least 42 writers imprisoned in China.

I wake up 22 stories in the air. Most of Hong Kong is in the air with thousands of high rises shooting into the sky. I’m in a cubicle—two small beds pressed against each wall, a tiny shelf between, a TV mounted on the wall at the foot of one bed. At the head of the bed is a large window so the room is airy and looks out on other windows in the sky.

I wake in the middle of the night because of jet lag and then again early in the morning before the sun rises. I turn on the TV whose screen flashes the financial news of Hong Kong—the major world indices, Hong Kong currency exchange rates, global gold prices, Hong Kong stock market prices, statistics on which the financial world relies, accompanied by jazz and elevator music. The only news channel on this hotel TV is the Chinese Broadcasting Company from the mainland; it broadcasts the mainland government’s view of the news.

I am in Hong Kong participating in a freedom of expression symposium: One Dream: Free Expression in China, sponsored by the Hong Kong Journalists Association, International Federation of Journalists, World Association of Newspapers, PEN, Reporters Sans Frontieres, and others. In its bid for the Olympic Games, China promised to open media access in the year running up to the games. The conference is assessing that promise; the continued arrests of writers indicate the promise has not been fulfilled.

Our colleague, the General Secretary of the Independent Chinese PEN Center, was detained at the airport and not allowed into Hong Kong even though he holds a Chinese passport, even though Hong Kong is supposed to be the freer arm of China. Other writers from the mainland were kept out at the border between China and Hong Kong.

As light dawns through the window, I watch 17 Buddhist monks in bright orange jackets sentenced for their alleged role in the disturbances in Tibet; their actions, the report says, threatened the peace and prosperity of China. I watch a report of Chinese President Hu Jintao meeting with Taiwan’s Honorary Chairman. The commentator explains these two men, sitting stiffly on large white chairs, are discussing the peace and prosperity of China. This orderly, stylized version of life, this peace and prosperity promoted by the news, contrasts with the bustle and chaos on the streets below where the lanes and avenues are filled with honking and shouting, with people, rickshaws, cars, bikes, with stores, food stalls, neon lights, electric wires strung everywhere. On the ground is the commotion of a city overgrown and rising higher and higher into the air.

But on TV the government spins the news until it is a confection floating above reality on the ground. I consider the spinning that goes on in my own country—to some extent in most countries when governments and politicians offer their version of events. But an important difference is the multiple points of views citizens can hear, the independence and variety of those views, the freedom citizens have to write, report and even spin the news themselves differently than the government, and the right they have to choose.

* * * * *
Ten days after I leave Hong Kong, a major earthquake shatters the Sichuan province on the mainland. The authorities order websites to delete postings on the disaster and detain activists who question the government’s response. A number of Chinese journalists ignore the orders that ban direct reporting and go to the sites. Finally media is allowed in, at least some media. But one writer Guo Quan, Assistant Professor at Nanjing Normal University, is detained for his articles criticizing the government’s response and questioning the safety of certain structures, including nuclear facilities nearby. Another writer, Chen Daojun, was arrested three days before the earthquake and charged with “inciting subversion of state power” for an article criticizing the building of a chemical plant in Pengzhou, just 39 km away from Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province where the earthquake shattered buildings and threatened those very nuclear facilities, including fuel processing and weapons plants. The last article Guo Quan posted online before he was picked up urged the government to release information about the safety of nuclear facilities in the aftermath of the quake, but the damage to these high security installations still has not been fully reported.

For more information about freedom of expression in China and how to assist writers in prison in China you can link to International PEN’s China Campaign and the We Are Ready for Free Expression Campaign.

One of the more creative and moving responses to the Olympics in China this year is a poem relay, initiated by writers and members of International PEN. The poem June, was written by Shi Tao, who is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for sending to pro democracy websites a government directive for Chinese media to downplay the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests.

You may recall in 2004 Shi Tao was identified when Yahoo! turned over his email account to the authorities. Charged with “illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities,” Shi Tao now faces the next decade in prison. His poem June is his memorial of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

June

By Shi Tao

My whole life
Will never get past “June”
June, when my heart died
When my poetry died
When my lover

Died in romance’s pool of blood
June, the scorching sun burns open my skin
Revealing the true nature of my wound
June, the fish swims out of the blood-red sea
Toward another place to hibernate
June, the earth shifts, the rivers fall silent
Piled up letters unable to be delivered to the dead.

(translated by Chip Rolley)

International PEN through its 145 centers around the world is circulating the poem as a parallel to the Olympic Torch relay. Over 110 PEN centers are participating by translating the poem into at least 90 (and counting ) languages, and then sharing the written and oral versions in their countries and on the internet. By the end of the journey the poem is likely to be translated into as many as 100 languages, languages large and small--multiple Chinese dialects, English, French, Spanish, Catalan, Basque, Galician, Portuguese, German, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Icelandic, Bosnian, Serbian, Slovene, Croatian, Macedonian, Romanian, Hungarian, Finnish, Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, Russian, Chechen, Hindi, Pashto, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Greek, Turkish, Kurdish, Japanese, Malay, Haitian, Somali, Afar, Swahili, Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, Krio, Wolof, Poular, Lusoga, Lingala, Chichewa. Tagalog, Cree, Nahuatl, Tsotsil, Mayan, Bikol, etc. etc.

To read and to hear the poem in all the various languages, you can visit the Pen Poem Relay where a map will show the journey and an arrow will allow you to click on the translation, or click one of the PEN centers to read and listen.

The poem relay began in Athens March 30 and started its journey through Europe and the Middle East then to North America and Latin America. On May 2 the poem arrives in Hong Kong, and in June to Tibet, where it will be translated into Tibetan and the proposed Uyghur PEN Center will translate into Uyghur. Finally August 6-8 the poem will arrive in Beijing where it will be read in Mandarin.

There are 39 writers silenced in prison in China. Here is the voice of one of them carried around the globe by fellow writers. For more information on all of the Chinese writers in prison and campaigns on their behalf, you can visit International PEN’s China Campaign and the We Are Ready for Free Expression Campaign.

To honor the international spirit of the Olympics, the dedication of individuals performing at their highest levels, and the aspiration towards a world where freedom of expression includes both body and mind, this poem is being carried one writer, one reader, one click of the computer at a time around the globe. Its journey is on behalf of all the Chinese writers currently in prison with the hope that they will someday have the same freedom. This particular torch burns digitally, kept alive in the thoughts and languages of a world community.

I’m driving into Los Angeles from the airport thinking about unity of opposites. I haven’t been back to LA in several years. I used to live here. Every time I return, I fall back in love with the city, with the sun and the blue skies and the bougainvillea and other flowers, the palm trees and the ocean in the distance. I can’t see the ocean from the 405 freeway, but I know it’s there.

I raised my children here until they were 9 and 11 when we moved to London, England. In the beginning, however, when I first moved to LA reluctantly from New York City, I looked for and found all the stereotypes I brought with me. We landed in our New York suits and jackets and went straight from the airport to Venice beach, where adults were roller skating by the ocean in the middle of a work day. “How can we live here?” I asked my husband, “It’s not serious enough.”

When the real estate agent asked what kind of neighborhood we wanted to live in, I told her that we’d like to live in a mixed neighborhood. She was silent for a moment, then said, “I think Christians and Jews live together over there.” When I explained what I meant, her face clouded and she said, “No one has ever asked me for that before.” This was 1978.

The first writer I met in LA worked for television and wrote for the soap operas, but she had written one novel. She told me, “Nothing has ever taken me so long.” “I know,” I answered in sympathy. “It took me so-o-o long,” she repeated. “How long?” I asked. “A year!”

I despaired. Most novelists I knew would not consider a year a very long time. Why had we left New York?

As time went by, however, and I started raising children and my sense of time and my sense of myself broadened, as I met the writers in LA, found neighborhoods and people from all backgrounds, taught at the university, as I learned the joy of roller skating and biking and running on the beach, especially when one is serious all day long, I fell in love with the city.

So now I am moving down the freeway thinking about unity of opposites, perhaps because I’m in this town of screen plays and movies and have an appointment, but perhaps also because of the recent national debate over whether one can feel bonds to someone who opposes what one believes. Unity of opposites is the dramatic concept in which an antagonist and protagonist are united in a struggle in which one of them has to yield--even die, at least figuratively, before the struggle is over. It is a principle that governs great dramatic works, the element that keeps the protagonist and antagonist on the stage together rather than one of them just walking off and going home. The resolution either breaks the unities at great cost or leads to major transformation.

In the next few days we will be remembering the assassination 40 years ago of Dr. Martin Luther King and the beginning of a tumultuous spring and summer in 1968 when our nation struggled with its unities. Forty years later we are witnessing the fruition and also the complexities of that struggle to realize a “more perfect union.”

In Los Angeles I learned to set aside a whole briefcase of preconceptions and limitations. As I turn off the freeway towards the ocean, I am hoping, actually counting on, the resolution of our national drama to yield transformation and not tragedy.

I’m writing this, my second blog, on the birthday of my oldest son and a day when much of the U.S. is watching presidential primary results. I find myself thinking about words, action and change—three concepts that have been debated relentlessly on the airwaves in this U.S. primary season. How do words link to actions that bring about change?

Let me start with my son who spends his days in abstract thought. He is a mathematician, a logician, whose thoughts and work are understood by only a very small number of people around the world. He teaches more accessible math at a university, but his research time is spent thinking and then writing in words and symbols which only a few understand. When I asked him once how his ideas might be applied a hundred years from now, he smiled his patient smile and asked, “Mom, do I ask you how your literature applies?”

All right, I get that. I understand the value of pure ideas, ideas for their own sake. I understand the need to think and to add to the universe of thought even if one doesn’t know the value the thoughts may have and even if they are shared with only a few. It is a way of ordering, discovering and revealing the harmony of the universe.

Now I want to jump—I wonder how I will do that—to take this narrative to the next idea—well, it’s my blog, no editor, no one—so I can just jump any way I want. Sixty years ago two documents came into being. One preceded the other by a few months. I have worked with and been inspired by the words and ideas in each. Both documents have brought about a lifting of the global consciousness. Because of these ideas, actions have been undertaken and at least some change has resulted. The first document is known by many in the worldwide community of writers and the second is known by the world at large. Both were developed in the aftermath of the atrocities of world wars. The first is the Charter of International PEN and the second is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights .

PEN’s Charter was 22 years in the making, and its articles were said to have been consulted by those working on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. International PEN’s first president John Galsworthy wrote the first three articles in 1926 after an argumentative gathering of writers from the East and West in the first international meeting held in Berlin after World War I. The articles he drafted were approved and served as “a touchstone of P.E.N. action.” Eventually they became part of the P.E.N. Charter, which affirms among other ideas that literature should “remain common currency between nations” and works of art “should be left untouched by national or political passion” and members of PEN should use their influence “in favor of good understanding and respect between nations.” The fourth article of the Charter which dealt with censorship was developed after the Second World War. This Charter in its entirety was approved at the Copenhagen Congress of P.E.N. in 1948 shortly before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights came into being.

Both documents were framed in an idealism that confronted the nihilism of the Second World War. The one document was developed by writers, who are suspected of idealsm anyway; the other was drafted by experienced politicians, who labored to articulate ideals to which the world should strive. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights pledges nations to “promote universal respect and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms.” It was ratified by 48 members of the United Nations with no votes against and eight abstentions. The Declaration is the most translated document in the world today.

It is fair to question whether the words in these documents have led to actions that have brought about sufficient change in the world. I’m sure the conclusion would be that they have not. Yet it is worth pausing to ask where we would be without the articulation of these ideals. In this sixtieth anniversary year of both documents, I want to pause and acknowledge and celebrate in my small way the value of words.