http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/ en Copyright 2010 Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:44:27 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Boats skimmed along the Potomac River this last weekend of August—power boats, yellow and red kayaks, boxy green canoes, sleek white sculls.  I settled into the latter late Sunday afternoon, dropping oars into the warm water.  Many in Washington are still out of town—on vacations or home visiting constituencies—but in their place are tourists exploring the nation’s capitol. The heart of the city beats on in festive cadence. Baking in the summer sun, I eased leisurely down the river—past the Kennedy Center, the Watergate apartments, past the Georgetown waterfront where outside cafes were filled with people eating and bicyclists walking their bikes, past the new park along the river, then under Key Bridge, where a moment of shade brought relief.  On the bridge above bikers and runners and cars crossed the river to and from Virginia.  My scull sliced the surface of the water past the spires of Georgetown University, which peeked through the trees on the shore like a medieval fortress. I aimed out to the Three Sisters Islands, rowing with one oar to turn the scull then traversed the river, crossing the wakes of larger power boats so I could return on the opposite side, rowing past the nature preserve of Roosevelt Island towards the public boat house. By the time I neared the home shore, sweat was dripping down my brow into my eyes, blurring my vision. The sun was slowly sinking in the sky, but relinquishing none of its heat. The boat house was already closing, and kayaks and canoes were pulled up on the dock; mine was one of the last sculls to return. Summer is near its end. On Labor Day next weekend American flags will flutter beside the Potomac, and the political season with midterm elections will shift into high gear.  But before the business of campaigns and politicians fill the air, summer may yet linger for just a bit longer like a temporary denouement before the pace of life accelerates. I take a moment here to savor the summer, which has been spent almost entirely in Washington—one of the hottest summers on record—a summer of writing, reading  good books and welcoming into life a new grandchild. It has been a summer of quiet pleasures and great moments. http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2010/08/on_the_river_the_end_of_summer.html http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2010/08/on_the_river_the_end_of_summer.html Mon, 30 Aug 2010 15:44:27 -0500 The New York Times, “I never imagined I would be born at the age of 60, at an altitude of several thousand feet above the Atlantic. That isn’t gibberish; it’s what I felt when I was released from jail in Cuba and exiled to Spain last Monday.” The birth of a child brings one’s focus intensely close and personal and at the same time extends it outwards, straining towards the universe and the universal, towards the hope for future generations. Birth and rebirth, the ever present possibility of a new story, the ascendency of human potential and freedom—it is a potent and motivating reason to get up each day, to reach out to one’s fellow human beings each day, to put one foot and one word after the other. This blessing I wish for little Carolina—that is the name I gave my granddaughter when I didn’t know her name because for a while her parents had lived in the Carolinas. (I’ll keep her real name private for her to use.) May she add her even temperament, her balanced judgment, her fairness, her intelligence and her compassion to this sometimes troubled world of ours. --July 25, 2010]]> http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2010/07/blessings_and_new_birth_1.html http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2010/07/blessings_and_new_birth_1.html Sun, 25 Jul 2010 23:30:02 -0500 Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna Claire Messud’s Emperor’s Children Roxana Robinson’s Cost Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come Sarah Blake’s The Postmistress C. M.  Mayo’s The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand Katharine Davis' East Hope Sarah Pekkanen’s The Opposite of Me (The last five are recent books by Washington area novelists, a vibrant group of women.) I would love to hear what you’re reading and recommending and to hear comments on any of these titles you’ve already read. Finally I’d like to share a gift subscription to Poets and Writers Magazine if you are not already a subscriber. If you don’t know the publication, it is the magazine for poets, fiction writers and creative nonfiction writers, relied on by most writers I know as a valuable information source for the business of being a writer as well as for substantive articles on literature. The first 20 people who respond will get a free introductory subscription. Just click below with your comments and with a Yes to PW. Happy summer reading!]]> http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2010/06/summer_reading.html http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2010/06/summer_reading.html Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:31:23 -0500 (To answer many requests for the introduction of Isabel Allende, who gave an outstanding reading at the Washington National Cathedral, I’m posting it here.) Isabel Allende has been called “a literary legend,” a “cultural bridge builder” and one of the most influential Latin American women leaders, but she is also like a good friend with whom you take off your shoes, curl up on the sofa and figure out life together. I first met Isabel Allende over 20 years ago in Los Angeles when she was giving a reading. I was involved with PEN, who may have been co-sponsoring the program--I no longer remember--but I remember attending a powerful evening with my colleagues. For the past months I’ve been absorbed in continuing my reading of Isabel Allende, and I can confirm that I am one of her good friends—though she may not know this. But as a reader, I have the feeling I am not alone in this club, or tribe, because if you immerse yourself in her fiction and memoirs, you not only feel you know her from her easy and confidential prose, but you think she surely knows you because of her insights into life. And even if she doesn’t, you feel she might want to know you and then let you move into the tribe of people she collects around her. This intimacy she achieves is in part responsible, I’m sure, for her wide readership. Reading her books is like sitting and having coffee with friends at a kitchen table when one of them asks, “You want to hear a story…let me tell you what happened…” And off you go into her world. In her memoir Sum of Our Days Isabel tells the reader this is in part what her life is like with her friends, including the Sisters of Disorder who follow each other’s trials and pray for each other and share their varied views of a larger spiritual life. In her writing she weaves the strands of spiritual quest, history, love, politics and individual liberation into a body of work that informs and entertains and provokes thought. The intimate relationship Allende conveys in her writing belies the strict discipline she embodies as a writer who writes six days a week, ten hours a day when she is at work on a book. She has published over 18 books--novels, short story collections, memoirs, and young adult novels as well as plays and a body of articles as a journalist. Three of her books have been made into movies. She has won numerous awards, including the Gabriela Mistral Order of Merit, the first woman to win; she’s been elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters; she’s been awarded honorary doctorates and has also taught writing in universities, including the University of California at Berkeley. Her work has been translated into over 28 languages and sold over 56 million copies. Born in Peru of Chilean parents—her father was a diplomat—she grew up mostly in Chile, with a few years in Lebanon. After the military dictatorship of 1973 when her cousin Salvador Allende, then President of Chile, was ousted and assassinated, she moved to Venezuela with her husband and two small children, where she continued her career as a journalist and television personality. She once tried to get an interview with Pablo Neruda, the renowned Chilean poet, but he declined and told her she had too much imagination to stay in journalism. While in exile in Venezuela, she received notice that her grandfather, with whom she’d spent her childhood, was dying. Since she wasn’t able to return to Chile, she started writing him a letter that became her first novel House of Spirits. Ever since Isabel begins her books on January 8, the day she started that letter. “I am a writer because I was blessed with an ear for stories, an unhappy childhood and a strange family,” she says. House of Spirits, published in 1982, established Allende as an important writer, and with each book, her readership has grown all over the world. She writes in Spanish then works closely with her English translator. Her writing begins with the heart. “In reality the most important things about one’s life happen in the secret chambers of the heart, ” she says, adding that “All fiction is ultimately autobiographical. I write about love and violence, about death and redemption, about strong women and absent fathers, about survival.” The themes of history, memory, love, violence repeat in her novels, which are filled with her strong women seeking love and also their own identities in societies that don’t easily yield them space. That is certainly true in her new novel Island Beneath the Sea as in her trilogy House of Spirits, Daughter of Fortune and Portrait in Sepia. Allende identifies herself as a feminist, and her writing testifies to her passion for the freedom and spirit of women. She is also compassionate and equally interested in the heart and psyche of her male characters. In her novels and memoirs she shows a strong belief in life and wisdom that transcend the material world we live in. She and her characters listen to understand the larger spiritual world. Often they intuit the advice that might come from those who have passed on. In the here and now Isabel Allende is fortunate to have a large gathering of family and friends around her, who cherish her. She moved to the United States more than 20 years ago and after her first marriage, she married for a second time a man whom she says is the love of her life. She became a U.S. citizen in 2003. Most of her family and close friends live within a few miles of her in the San Francisco area. Reading her memoirs, I’ve come to know at least a version of her life and family—much more than most families know about themselves. “I’m always willing to open up my life and my heart,” Allende says, “because I believe that generally it is not the truth exposed that makes one vulnerable but the secrets one keeps….I am aware of how much we all have in common.” I will take the risk of offering one word to sum up, at least what I felt, about Isabel Allende. The word is generous. She is generous as a story teller and a memoirist and as a person. She opens doors and shares herself--her thoughts and feelings--yet with the discipline of an artist. Implied is the assumption that in doing so she is showing what will heal and illumine life for others and also for herself. This generosity explains, at least in part, her world wide popularity. She has also started a foundation with the proceeds of her memoir Paula about her daughter who died young. The Isabel Allende Foundation helps women and girls in Chile and the San Francisco area to be empowered and protected through projects in education, health and the literary arts. She quotes her daughter’s motto as one that guides her and the foundation. The motto: “When in doubt [ask]: What is the most generous thing to do?” ]]> http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2010/05/introducing_isabel_allende.html http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2010/05/introducing_isabel_allende.html Fri, 21 May 2010 12:15:29 -0500 volcanic cloud hovered above like the mythic hand of Vulcan, unseen and disrupting the plans of mere mortals. I was stranded in Casablanca after a short research vacation, en route to a literary festival in London and board meeting in Paris. What does one do, stranded in Casablanca? I headed north to Tangiers and waited out the volcanic ash and waited for an open seat on an airplane. It was not hard duty. The “doorway” to Africa, where the Mediterranean and Atlantic oceans meet, is where Hercules is said to have smashed through the Isthmus and created two continents. Under blue sky with no volcanic ash in sight, I contemplated the pillars of Hercules, one in Europe—the Rock of Gibraltar—and the other in Africa. I wandered through medinas and souks, drove along the coast, visited Tetouan and Cueta, guided by a 6’2” history teacher who strode slightly in front of me in a long saffron robe, maroon fez, hands behind his back, instructing me in 3000 years of history in this region where the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Moors, pagans, Christians, Muslims and Jews all trod, where at least four colonial powers—England, France, Spain and Portugal—claimed and fought for land. I learned that Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States after it gained independence, and the first foreign legation the new United States of America sent out was to Morocco. “You understand?” the guide kept asking me as he spun through the stories of conquest and power, of cultures on the move. “I told you that, remember?” I expected an exam any moment. In mythology Hercules features most prominently in the region, but in the days after the volcano, I also read legends of Vulcan. In one tradition he is said to be the father of Jupiter, king of the gods. In another mythology he is the son of Jupiter and Juno, who threw their ugly baby off Mount Olympus. Vulcan fell for a day and a night and broke a leg when he finally landed in the sea. There he sunk to the bottom where a sea nymph found him and raised him as her son. According to legend, he spent a happy childhood playing with dolphins and the fish and all the wonders under the sea. On land Vulcan eventually discovered fire and its properties, including fire’s ability to draw out from stones the iron, silver and gold which Vulcan then hammered into swords and shields and into jewelry for the woman he thought was his mother. In myths as in history, events come back on themselves. Juno, admiring the woman’s jewelry, discovered that the talented blacksmith who’d fashioned it was Juno’s own son. Juno demanded that Vulcan return; he refused. The plot thickened…. In myth the eruptions attributed to Vulcan and the volcanoes he inspired relate more to his unfaithful wife Venus than to his rapacious mother, but let me stop here with myth and history swirling on the shoreline, with blue ocean in front and blue skies above, the coast of another continent in view and a big immoveable rock with caves beneath on the opposite shore. ]]> http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2010/04/stranded_in_casablanca_out_and.html http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2010/04/stranded_in_casablanca_out_and.html Wed, 28 Apr 2010 12:39:03 -0500 (As part of International PEN’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of its Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC) which works around the world on behalf of writers who are imprisoned, threatened and killed because of their work, the former chairs of the WiPC have been asked for brief personal memories of their years. For me those years were 1993-1997.) My years as Chair of International PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee began in a way with Salman Rushdie and ended, or at least were framed, by Ken Saro Wiwa. Both were global cases that mobilized writers and others around the world to protest the edicts of governments that tried to stifle dissent and imagination by killing the writer. Rushdie survived; Saro Wiwa did not. I was elected Chair at the International PEN Congress in Santiago de Compostela, a medieval city in the hills of Northern Spain. The surprise guest at the Congress was Salman Rushdie. At the time Rushdie made few appearances and traveled clandestinely with extensive security, though when he arrived at the hotel, he confronted hundreds of people gathered on the plaza who'd come not to see him, but Julio Iglesias, the Spanish singer, who happened to arrive at the same time. Rushdie addressed the PEN Congress under tight security. Though the fatwa calling on Muslims around the world to kill Rushdie had been issued in 1989, his case still loomed and defined that period as PEN and the freedom of expression community came to terms with the threat of radical Islam to free expression. A few days later a young woman in Bangladesh offended militant Muslims and local mullahs with her novel criticizing Muslims attacking Hindus in communal violence in India. Death threats and fatwas were issued against Taslima Nasrin by those extremists. As community pressure built, the Bangladesh government temporarily withdrew her passport and took out an arrest warrant against her for “deliberate and malicious intention of hurting religious sentiments....” At one point it was reported that the snake charmers in Dhaka threatened to release their snakes into the city if she wasn’t prosecuted. The case of Taslima Nasrin took many turns, including a clandestine meeting in a hotel restaurant in London where the WiPC director and I went to see a young man who’d claimed on the phone to be Taslima’s brother. We had a spotter at a table near the door in case of trouble, and MI5, or perhaps it was MI6, we thought were watching nearby. The man turned out in fact to be Taslima’s brother, and he was trying to get her safely out of the country. PEN worked with her lawyer to secure her safe exit from Bangladesh in the dark of night, and she was flown to Sweden where Swedish PEN helped find her refuge. Ken Saro Wiwa, the popular Nigerian writer, opposed the brutal regime of Sani Abacha and championed the rights of the Ogoni people in an area of Nigeria where oil companies produced and polluted the landscape and shared few proceeds with the local population. Ken was imprisoned, along with others, charged with the murder of four Ogoni leaders, sentenced to death and given no right of appeal. PEN and the freedom of expression community mobilized, challenging the charges and the sentence and holding meetings in Parliaments with national leaders, staging readings and mounting vigils around the world, particularly in the countries of the British Commonwealth and in the U.S. During that period I moved from London to Washington, DC. where each day I called to get an appointment with the Nigerian Ambassador. Finally, one morning when I was actually in New York, I got a call saying the Ambassador would meet with me. I quickly got a plane back to DC and along the way called the Freedom to Write director at PEN American Center and asked her to arrange to have another writer meet me at the embassy. The writer didn’t need to do or say anything; I just wanted there to be two of us to add weight to our delegation. As it turned out, the Ambassador was suddenly bid to the U.N. in New York so we crossed in the skies, but in Washington I met with the second and third diplomats at the embassy, arguing for Ken Saro Wiwa’s life. Midway through the meeting, a fellow writer arrived and sat like an anchor on the other end of the sofa. For all the arguments presented and all the nodding of heads and taking of notes, I feared at the end of the meeting that the decision to execute Ken Saro Wiwa had already been made. On November 10, 1995 representatives of human rights organizations—PEN, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and others—were outside the Nigerian Embassy in Washington to protest and seek another meeting when the word came out that Ken Saro Wiwa had been hanged that morning in Port Harcourt. The shock of his execution was felt around the world, not only in the freedom of expression community but with the many governments which had also been involved in the protest. Most colleagues I’ve worked with over the years can tell where they were when the fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie and when they heard the news of the execution of Ken Saro Wiwa. These two cases were seminal, changing the landscape of the work that was done. Rushdie’s foreshadowed a threat which knew no national boundaries, and Ken Saro Wiwa’s highlighted our limitations. During those years there were hundreds of cases in China, Turkey, Russia, Algeria, Burundi, Korea, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, Syria, Ethiopia, Egypt, Rwanda,-- cases in more than 60 countries--all important, many of whom were released, some of whom were killed and a few of whom still remain in prison. “If the face of global fear used to be a face across a border, it is now the face of a neighbor once tolerated,” I reported during that period. “In Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania, Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Greece, India, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Bangladesh, Georgia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tajikistan, Egypt religious and/or ethnic strife has set portions of the population against each other.” At the PEN Congress in Prague in 1994 my report noted, “Five years ago, the March 1989 Writers in Prison case book listed among our main cases Vaclav Havel and a dozen other Czech writers. Today with the sea change in global politics, PEN has no cases in the Czech Republic. The Writers in Prison work often rides the tides of larger political forces, but in that turbulence, the individual writers connect to each other through the work of the Writers in Prison Committee, through letters to the threatened or imprisoned writers, letters to governments on the writer’s behalf, through acts as simple as a German PEN member sending toothpaste and a toothbrush to an imprisoned South Korean writer or a Norwegian PEN member finding an optician to send free glasses to a recently released Cuban writer, or to acts as complex as Swedish PEN assisting in the safe departure and relocation of our Bangladesh colleague.” (PEN’s WiPC was formed in 1960, the year before Amnesty was founded. Further information on the work and cases during this half a century when human rights became an important part of the global dialogue can be found at “Because Writers Speak Their Minds: 50 Years of Defending Freedom of Expression.”) ]]> http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2010/03/because_writers_speak_their_mi.html http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2010/03/because_writers_speak_their_mi.html Wed, 31 Mar 2010 06:22:32 -0500 50 Years of Defending Freedom of Expression I’m staring straight into the sun lighting up the sky in shades of pink before it sets. I watch it slowly losing altitude behind a building near the World Bank. The yellow globe is sinking into the river, into the trees of Virginia across the Potomac. I am typing without looking at the page, my eyes fixed on the sun which I want to keep in the sky. For some reason I feel frantic to keep staring at the sun, hoping it won’t disappear. But in the time it has taken to write these few sentences, it has already lost half its sphere and is now only a diameter on the horizon. Soon it will be dark. I keep writing. I have just read Arthur Koestler’s “The Cell Door Closes” about his first moments in prison. Perhaps that is why I feel an irrational desire to keep this light in the sky, this sun from sinking…ah now it is but a sliver above the roof tops. How quick its descent once it finds the horizon, as if it wants to leave and go to the other side of the earth. And now it is gone. How long did that take? As long as it took to write this paragraph, this opening of a blog about the fiftieth anniversary of International PEN’s work for writers in prison.   Arthur Koestler was the first writer on whose behalf PEN successfully intervened. An earlier appeal on behalf of Frederico Garcia Lorca in 1937 arrived too late, and he was executed in Spain shortly after his arrest. But PEN’s advocacy for Hungarian novelist Koestler, also condemned to death in Spain, was noted when his captors released him.   In 1960 PEN founded a Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC), which preceded the founding of Amnesty, to work on behalf of writers imprisoned, disappeared and killed for the expression of their ideas. Over the years PEN’s WiPC has defended writers around the world, including  such well known ones as Josef Brodsky, Wole Soyinka, Breyten Breytenbach, Vaclav Havel, Ngui wa Thiong’o, Salman Rushdie, Aung San Sui Kyi, Ken Saro Wiwa and currently Liu Xiaobo and thousands of others.   For four years (1993-1997) I had the privilege of chairing that Committee.  And the year of the fatwa (1989) against Salman Rushdie—a seminal event for anyone involved in freedom of expression work—I was president of PEN USA, one of the two PEN Centers in the US.  During 25 years of working on freedom of expression, I’ve had the privilege of knowing and working with committed writers around the world who advocate on behalf of their threatened colleagues. It is a global network. If one were to map it, one would see intricate, criss-crossing corridors: writers in Poland working for writers in prison in Vietnam, writers in Ghana and Scotland taking action for the release of writers in China, PEN members in Australia and Germany and Italy working on behalf of writers in Cuba, writers in Mexico and Japan protesting the imprisonment and laws affecting writers in Turkey; members in Canada and the U.S. and Sweden speaking up for writers in Iran and Myanmar, writers in England and Norway for those in Belorussia. One can imagine hundreds of hands pushing up their bit of the sky to lift the horizon.   Failures as well as successes bind this network. In its fiftieth anniversary year, it is a tribute to the imagination which begins with imagining someone else. Imagination after all is the enemy of tyranny for it cannot be controlled.     From Arthur Koestler’s “The Cell Door Closes” from Dialogue with Death:   “It is a unique sound. A cell door has no handle, either outside or inside. It cannot be shut except by being slammed. It is made of massive steel and concrete, about four inches think, and every time it falls to there is a resounding crash just as though a shot has been fired. But this report does away without an echo. Prison sounds are echo-less and bleak. “When the door has been slammed behind  him for the first time, the prisoner stands in the middle of the cell and looks round. I fancy that everyone must behave in more or less the same way. “First of all he gives a fleeting look round the walls and takes a mental inventory of all the objects in what is now to be his domain: the iron bedstead the wash-basin the WC the barred window His next action is invariable to try to pull himself up by the iron bars of the window and look out. He fails and his suit is covered with white from the plaster on the wall against which he pressed himself….. And this is how things are to go on—in the coming minutes, hours, days, weeks, years.     How long has he already been in the cell? He looks at his watch: exactly three minutes.” Found in This Prison Where I Live: The Pen Anthology of Imprisoned Writers]]> http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2010/02/because_writers_speak_their_mi_1.html http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2010/02/because_writers_speak_their_mi_1.html Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:57:56 -0500 International PEN to establish a Haitian Center, which it did in 2008. Georges was the founding President. Born in Haiti, Georges lived in Montreal, where for years he was a professor of social geography at the University of Quebec. He was also a vigorous defender of freedom of expression for writers, especially in Haiti, where he had been a political prisoner under the Duvalier regime.  He visited Haiti as often as possible and was in Port-au-Prince when the massive earthquake struck on January 12. He was at a friend’s house, along with his wife of 43 years, Mireille Neptune. Neither Georges nor Mirelle survived. It is with deep sadness that I, along with colleagues around the world, bid Georges Anglade farewell. Georges has been described by many friends as “a force of nature,” perhaps because of his grand size, his hearty laugh and his embrace of life. The force of nature which confronted him cannot really extinguish him.  In his book Haitian Laughter, Georges wrote, "A people of laughter, they often say, justifiably astonished to see Haitians laugh in spite of their three hundred years of desperate situations; but do they know that it is precisely those three hundred years’ -wars that made them a people of lodyanseurs* [storytellers]….?” Georges himself told these stories. The force of his life remains in his writing, in memory, and in the stories. In an odd coincidence, the day of the earthquake, I was re-reading (as I do every decade or so) Graham Greene’s masterpiece, The Comedians, set in Haiti during the dictatorship of Popa Doc Duvalier. The novel embodies the nightmare, the passion and the love of the place. Speaking of his hotel Trianon, the narrator notes: “I had grown to love the place, and I was glad in a way that I had found no purchaser. I believe that if I could own it for a few more years I would feel I had a home. Time was needed for a home as time was needed to turn a mistress into a wife. Even the violent death of my partner had not seriously disturbed my possessive love. I would have remarked with Frère Laurent, in the French version of Romeo and Juliet, a sentence that I had reason to remember: Le remède au chaos N’est pas dans ce chaos. The remedy had been in the success…”   The world is now mobilizing to bring aid to Haiti. One can only hope that the attention and outpouring can restore and revitalize not only Haiti but the world that is for this moment at least coming together to assist.   [*lodyans are “brief, humorous stories, designates short, amusing tales at which Haitians are past masters and which are told at particular occasions (parties, evening gatherings, after a good meal…). The person who tells these lodyans is known by title of lodyanseur...”]]]> http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2010/01/haitian_farewell_1.html http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2010/01/haitian_farewell_1.html Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:39:48 -0500 White House, the city looks like a postcard for the holidays. Over the weekend if you didn’t have to travel, the record snowfall—between 15-20 inches, the largest ever in December—was magical. We walked into a restaurant with a fire place, met with family and friends for lunch then played in the park with our family dogs—one old dog and two puppies—who jumped and romped and tumbled through the snow as if it had fallen for their pleasure, theirs and the children who were sledding down the hill. But the snow has now begun to melt during the day and to freeze at night, leaving crusty, icy mounds. From the window it is still beautiful, but it is a pain if you are trying to park a car at the curb or walk along paths not dug out when it was fluffy.  The holiday lights still blink, and the puppies still race across the white fields as if life was all that it was meant to be. And yet as I sit here typing this December blog, trying to settle into the holiday spirit, I am acutely aware that half a world away a trial is under way at this very moment in Beijing for a Chinese writer and dissident whose “crime” was to draft, along with other Chinese citizens, a vision--Charter 08--calling for human rights, rule of law and  democratic reform in China. An important writer and literary critic, Liu Xiaobo was held for six months at a secret location, then formally arrested and transferred to a detention center in June, and finally twelve days ago indicted for “incitement to subvert state power.” He is being brought to trial today-- December 23--less than two weeks after the indictment and on the eve of Christmas when many diplomats and journalists will be away.  His motion to postpone so his defense could have time to read and prepare against the 20 volume indictment was denied. Liu’s wife was told she can’t observe the trial and has instead been named a prosecution witness. Across China activists and supporters of Liu’s have been warned to stay home and not participate in any activities in support of Liu. These actions have led China observers to conclude that the trial is purely political and a guilty verdict has already been determined. Around the world freedom of expression and human rights organizations and activists are preparing for the worst—a long jail sentence for Liu.  A vigil has been called at the Chinese embassy in New York. Petitions are being prepared and at the same time lobbying continues in the hope for some recourse. At this holiday season when hope is celebrated and rebirth, anticipated, the voice of a single Chinese citizen echoes as light as snow falling on grass and as hard as the frozen earth beneath.]]> http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2009/12/hard_edge_under_the_snow.html http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2009/12/hard_edge_under_the_snow.html Tue, 22 Dec 2009 23:34:47 -0500 Going to the Movies             Sitting on a thin gray-pink mat on the train platform, the children are waiting for us. We make our way over stones and past garbage, through a chain-link fence to what looks like an abandoned station. Along the tracks shanty houses and rows of laundry line the route a few feet from where the trains will come whizzing by.  Some of the children, ages 5-15, live here, but most don’t have homes. They are the street children of Delhi, India, a population estimated between 150,000 to one million in Delhi alone.  Some have grown up in the city and left their homes but more have stowed away on trains and arrived from the countryside or other cities looking for their future.             We are visiting Salaam Baalak [Salute the Children] Trust which works with these children to help return them to their families if that’s possible. But if the children have been abused or the parents have sold them to traffickers, they are not returned. In that case training, schooling and places to live are sought.    Our guide is a teenager who himself had lived on the street but for whom intervention made the difference. He notes that for most children, the street will prevail. He explains that 300 trains come into Delhi every day at different stations, and the children slide off of these. If they aren’t found within a few weeks, it is difficult ever to get them back for they may be trafficked for labor or prostitution or petty thievery or just become denizens of the streets.   “We go to the train stations and look for the new children,” he says. “We can recognize the new ones; they are looking for help; they don’t know anyone. Kids living on the street learn how to survive, but anyone on the street for a few weeks starts to enjoy the freedom not knowing what may yet be in store.”    Many of the children hide at the stations, waiting for the luxury trains to come through. While the train is stopped, they scurry into the cars to gather the discarded magazines and food which they later sell.   “What do you think they do with the money they get?” our guide asks.   “Buy food?”  someone suggests.   “Yes.”   “Buy drugs?”    “Usually glue to sniff, yes.  But the largest amount of their money goes to films."   “Films?”  we ask.   “The cinema. On Fridays when the new films come out, the children wash, clean their clothes and go to the movies!”   For a few hours a week the children soar away in their imaginations and exist somewhere else.  The question hovers how to feed and nourish these minds so they can in fact someday soar away and live somewhere else.   Elephants Are Forever   In the middle of one of Delhi’s larger slums the Katha Khazana School serves the community from infants to parents and focuses on pre-school through level 12.   The school is for children of the most impoverished; many are rag pickers who search through the city’s dumps with their parents for items to use or sell.   Children enter the brightly colored arched gateway of the Katha Khazana School into a sprawling open spaced building with courtyards and arched doorways, decorated with startlingly original art—brightly colored and friendly snakes, dragons, lions, tigers, fish--all swimming, prancing, hanging on the walls. At the end of one corridor a round-faced elephant with big pink ears and a trunk extended into the hall greets the visitors.  The art is by the children and is added to and replaced every quarter when the theme of study changes. This year’s theme, through which the curriculum of language, social studies, civics, math, science, art, etc. is focused is Sustainable Environment, and the particular focus this quarter is: Elephants Are Forever!   My guide Sadik started six years ago at the Katha school and now at age 18 is about to graduate and hopes to go on to college. He also  works with Katha, which has 50 early childhood centers and 96 primary schools, publishes children’s books and works with women on small income generating businesses in sewing, cooking, and teaching.  In the past years, the women have earned hundreds of millions of rupees in their projects and have been able to lift their families out of poverty.   “Katha started with a few children in 1988,” said Geeta Dharmarajan, executive director. “We soon realized we couldn’t change the way the slums look, but we could bring people out of them. We hope to educate the children to be leaders in their communities.”     Today Katha helps children and their mothers in 72 slums and street communities across Delhi.  It is just one of many organizations working in the communities in Delhi with staff and volunteers to facilitate the transition from the street by changing first the landscape of the mind.              ]]> http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2009/11/two_delhi_stories_going_to_the.html http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2009/11/two_delhi_stories_going_to_the.html Sun, 29 Nov 2009 09:47:42 -0500 From the November/December 2009 Issue of World Literature Today as the Introduction to the Special Feature, "Voices Against the Darkness: Imprisoned Writers Who Could Not Be Silenced" The prisoner Halil closed his book. He breathed on his glasses, wiped them clean, gazed out at the orchards, and said: “I don’t know if you are like me, Suleyman, But coming down the Bosporus on the ferry, say making the turn at Kandilli, and suddenly seeing Istanbul there, or one of those sparkling nights of Kalamish Bay filled with stars and the rustle of water, or the boundless daylight in the fields outside Topkapi or a woman’s sweet face glimpsed on a streetcar, or even the yellow geranium I grew in a tin can in the Sivas prison— I mean, whenever I meet with natural beauty, I know once again human life today must be changed . . .” —Nâzım Hikmet, Human Landscapes (1966) In 1938 the renowned Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet (1902–63) was sent to prison, charged with “inciting the army to revolt,” convicted on the sole evidence that military cadets were reading his poems. He was sentenced to twenty-eight years but was released twelve years later in 1950. His “novel” in verse, Human Landscapes from My Country, was written in prison, featuring Halil, a political prisoner, scholar, and poet who was going blind (see WLT, October 2003, 78). One of the cadets reading Hikmet’s poems was the young writer Raşit, who met the senior poet in prison. Raşit helped care for Hikmet, and Hikmet mentored Raşit, who went on to become famous in his own right as the novelist Orhan Kemal. The friendship of the two men endured past prison, as Maureen Freely’s article “The Prison Imaginary in Turkish Literature” (page 46) chronicles. In this issue of WLT, stories, essays, and poetry from Turkey, Burma/Myanmar, Iran, South Africa, Libya, and Iraq show prison as a cage, a crucible, a classroom, a stage, a fraternity from hell. The challenge for the writer in prison is to survive and to keep writing. Governments have long tried to stifle dissent by imprisoning the writer. The charges vary: “inciting subversion of state power,” “insulting religion,” “insulting the president,” “insulting the army,” “spreading false news.” Today the largest number of writers in prison for the longest periods are in China, Burma/Myanmar, Cuba, Vietnam, and Iran. In some countries such as Mexico and Russia, the threat to writers is assassination, often by criminal elements who operate with impunity. In Latin American countries such as Colombia, Peru, and Honduras, death threats are serious inhibitors to free expression. In many African countries such as Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, and the Gambia, violation of criminal defamation laws—particularly those relating to “insulting the president”—can land a writer in prison. Worldwide, the increasing use of anti-terror legislation has resulted in imprisonment of writers when the line blurs between legitimate dissent and criminal advocacy of terror and violence as in Spain and Sri Lanka. In the United States, writers are rarely imprisoned for their writing, but over the years the U.S. government has denied visas to writers from other countries whose political views the authorities object to. The texts in this issue are from writers who were locked up for political reasons in some of the harshest prisons by authoritarian governments on both the left and the right. Common among the jailers was not their politics, but their fear of opposing opinion. Implicit was the belief that the writer and his words could undermine the authority of the state. For a generation of Turkish writers, prison was almost a rite of passage as the government incarcerated anyone suspected of communist or leftwing sentiments. Conditions in prison were harsh, but Nâzım Hikmet insisted that the writer must master his despair in order to pursue his literature. Hikmet committed himself to his fellow prisoners, tutoring them and learning from them. He warned the younger Raşit about the corrosive effects of despair: “Beware, my son, protect yourself from this, be even more bitter and sad, but let your joy and hope shine through.” As seen in these texts, the writer’s imagination and the support of fellow prisoners and those outside the prison penetrate the despair and allow hope to struggle through so that the spirit endures and literature survives. The story “Life on Death Row” (page 52) chronicles how the prisoner’s life in Myanmar shuts down to a small, dark space, but also how the prisoners “boosted spirits by singing” and relating books to one another. In “Seven Years with Hard Labour: Stories of Burmese Political Prisoners” (page 55), Sara Masters recounts the experiences of writers who have served and are serving in the infamous Insein prison in Myanmar. She also tells of people outside the prison and the country who give voice to those locked up or shunted to the margins. Through theater and film, Actors for Human Rights and the iceandfire theater company render the humanity, humor, and tragedy of the Burmese, which the government would hide away. In U Win Tin’s poem “Fearless Tiger” (page 43), the narrator’s courage and endurance spring from his certainty that truth, the people, time, and God are on his side: “Like a tiger in the zoo, / Rolling in a cage. / Do they think it has become harmless? / […] / It’ll always be a fearless tiger. / Just like me.” U Win Tin spent nineteen years in Burma’s Insein prison. Iraqi poets Saadi Youssef and Amer Fatuhi (pages 60-61), imprisoned at the beginning and end of the Baathist regime, both use the tools of the imagination to assault the darkness. Tunisian writer Omar Al-Kikli’s stories “Awareness” and “The Technocrat” (page 51) show a writer in harsh conditions—in his case, ten years in a Libyan jail—still finding in the life around him the beauty that helps him endure. “For the first time, he could see the clear sky with a mixture of delight and suffering. He wondered why he hadn’t recognized the splendor before no….He wished that he could take, from the sky, a blue fragment abundant with clarity and brightness and keep it with him.” The challenge of captivity and freesom is not simply political. In “The Inextricable Labyrinth” (page 45), Breyten Breytenbach shares the existential dilemma he faced when the society that imprisoned him changed. Proud to be “a statutory, convicted terrorist” in apartheid South Africa, Breytenbach finds himself trapped as a free man by respectability and responsibility. “I have seen. I am responsible. I must report….And here I am now, writing myself, burrowing into an inextricable labyrinth.” Iranian filmmaker Nahid Persson Sarvestani (page 57) highlights the importance of the witness to tell the story. In an interview, Sarvestani explains her compulsion to film the struggle of the people in Iran, particularly women, who are bound by repressive laws. Imprisoned under house arrest herself, Sarvestani notes that after the recent presidential election, Iranians “could not be quiet any more. Despite the fact that the regime imprisons, tortures, and executes young people in order to keep others quiet and under control, people will not be silenced or stopped.” Sixty years ago Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserted: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” A number of signatories who subsequently imprisoned writers signed this declaration, including Turkey, Burma, Cuba, Iraq, and Iran, represented here. Article 19 set the standard for freedom of expression in the last half-century. Though its full realization has not yet been achieved, its ideal reflects the dream of Hikmet’s narrator in the opening poem that “human life today must be changed.” A number of the writers represented in this issue were released from prison early, in part because of pressure from those outside who advocated on their behalf. With the combination of a megaphone for the writer and a klieg light on the abuser, organizations such as PEN, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and others lobbied governments and mobilized international institutions and citizens to uphold the right for individuals to speak and write freely. Readers of this “Voices Against the Darkness” section can celebrate the writers and the writings that have survived, rather like a yellow geranium growing in a tin can. To read other prison literature featured in this issue of World Literature Today, go here.]]> http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2009/10/introduction_yellow_geranium_i_1.html http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2009/10/introduction_yellow_geranium_i_1.html Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:08:46 -0500 On its 60th Anniversary, China is Still Crushing Freedom Congress should pass Resolution 151 to speak out on behalf of arrested dissident Liu Xiaobo. From The Christian Science Monitor WASHINGTON - The People's Republic of China celebrated its 60th anniversary today with massive military parades, fireworks, and concerts throughout the country. In mid-November, President Obama will make his first presidential visit to Beijing, marking the 30th anniversary of Chinese-US relations with an agenda likely to include the environment, security, and the global economy. In the time between these milestones, the fate of an individual Chinese citizen hangs in the balance and may well foreshadow future relations with China. Liu Xiaobo, one of China's leading writers, intellectuals, and dissidents, is expected to come to trial and be sentenced after the anniversary celebrations and before the president's visit. That's why Congress must act quickly. The proposed Resolution 151 calls for Mr. Liu's release and urges China to "begin making strides toward true representative democracy." The resolution notes Liu's own words: "The most fundamental principles of democracy are that the people are sovereign, and that the people select their own government." Resolution 151 should be passed with dispatch before Liu's trial and sentencing so that it might signal to Beijing how much America cares about the lack of freedom in China. Liu was arrested last December and charged this June with "inciting subversion of state power" for his role as one of the principal drafters of Charter 08, a document that set out a democratic vision for China. Charter 08 was originally signed by more than 300 leading writers, engineers, teachers, workers, farmers – even former public servants and Communist Party officials. It was subsequently signed by more than 10,000 Chinese citizens. The document was circulated widely on the Internet, though it is now blocked in China. Patterned after Charter 77, which demanded basic civil and political rights in Czechoslovakia when it was under Soviet domination, Charter 08 calls for nonviolent democratic change in China and for a government that recognizes that freedom "is at the core of universal human values," and human rights are inherent, "not bestowed by a state." In a recent visit to Capitol Hill, writers from the Independent Chinese PEN Center, where Liu is a former president, as well as American writers, urged members of Congress to accelerate the passage of Resolution 151. The Chinese writers, who were in touch with Liu up until the day he was arrested, say that they believe a resolution by the US Congress would have a beneficial effect and help mitigate the severity of the sentence, which could be as much as 15 years. However, the resolution needs to pass before his trial and sentencing; otherwise it will come too late. There is wide bipartisan support for the resolution, but questions arise: Can this essentially symbolic gesture actually help Liu? The emphatic answer from his Chinese colleagues is yes. Even if he's not released, Chinese authorities, sensing pressure from China's chief trading partner, might give a shorter sentence to one of its leading thinkers and writers. Will this gesture complicate US policy toward China? The question instead should be: How can the US have a policy with China that ignores the imprisonment of major democratic activists? The release of Liu Xiaobo would be an enlightened act that the Chinese government could take in the wake of its 60th anniversary, signaling to the world that it is not afraid of ideas. ]]> http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2009/09/on_its_60th_anniversary_china.html http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2009/09/on_its_60th_anniversary_china.html Wed, 30 Sep 2009 23:59:23 -0500 It can develop energy and progress into the future without washing away the town of Hasankeyf, its jewel of the past. From The Christian Science Monitor Washington - In the southeastern corner of Turkey near its borders with Iraq and Syria, environmentalists, human rights organizations, and archaeologists recently won a battle in the effort to avert a cultural tragedy. Swiss, German, and Austrian firms pulled out of their contract with the Turkish government to build a dam that would flood and destroy a historical ancient city, harm ecosystems downstream, and displace thousands. To permanently protect this area though, it should be designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Ilisu Dam, a cornerstone in a project to develop Turkey's electrical and water capacities, is the largest and the most controversial of the 22 dams and 19 power plants scheduled in the $32 billion Southeast Anatolia Project. At the heart of the controversy is the town of Hasankeyf, carved into the limestone cliffs above the Tigris River. Hasankeyf is reputed to be one of the oldest continuous settlements on earth, at least 10,000 years old, with relics found this summer that may date it to 15,000 years old. In the Kurdish region of southeastern Anatolia, Hasankeyf has hosted at least nine civilizations, including the Assyrians, the Romans, the Byzantine Empire, the Mongols, and the Ottomans. On a central trading route in ancient Mesopotamia, Hasankeyf boasts more than 4,000 caves; 300 medieval monuments; 83 archaeological sites with ruins, including Hasankeyf Castle, built by the Byzantines in AD 363; and historic tombs and mosques. Its cultural and archaeological value is priceless. Today the hillsides are dotted with artisans' stalls, children on donkeys, and caves with restaurants inside. If the Ilisu hydroelectric dam is constructed as planned 50 miles downstream, much of Hasankeyf – historic caves, ruins, and all – will be buried under 400 feet of water. The flooding will also submerge 80 surrounding villages and displace tens of thousands of people in what would be Turkey's second-largest reservoir. While the government has said that it will relocate people and preserve some of the antiquities of Hasankeyf, residents of the region say the compensation isn't enough. The European firms, which revoked their $1.6 billion loans in July, say that Turkey has not sufficiently met World Bank standards to preserve the environment, the population, and the culture in its planning for the Ilisu Dam. The Turkish government claims that it will proceed with the dam anyway. The issues are complex. Advocates and opponents cast the debate as preservation of the past challenging progress for the future, conservation versus energy, national interests versus minority Kurdish interests, nationalism versus the interests of neighboring countries. The government argues that the dam will bring irrigation and power to the region. Opponents maintain that much of the electricity generated will go to other parts of the country. Iraq has protested vehemently against Turkey damming the Tigris River just upstream and further restricting the water flow across the border. There is also the geopolitical drama of the European partnerships withdrawing and Turkey potentially pursuing other partners such as China and Russia. The one clarity in this widening controversy is that Hasankeyf should be preserved. The city has already been listed by the World Monument Fund as one of the world's 100 most endangered sites. In 1978, the Turkish government designated Hasankeyf as a site for conservation, legally protecting it, and the government halted an earlier attempt at a dam project. However, after the fighting in the southeast in the 1980s and '90s with Kurdish guerrillas, Ankara reversed its position and approved the hydroelectric dam. The Turkish government should once again take steps to preserve this cultural treasure for itself and for the rest of the world. Preserving Hasankeyf would go a long way in demonstrating the government's goodwill to the citizens of the region. Turkey can develop and progress into the future without washing away this jewel of the past. If the Turkish government is still determined to erect the Ilisu Dam, it should at least modify the size and specifications so that Hasankeyf survives. It should also put in an application to designate the city as a UNESCO World Heritage site. By taking these two initiatives, the Turkish government would take a major step in honoring its own history and allowing the future to crest alongside of, but not flood, what has gone before. ]]> http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2009/08/turkey_can_avert_a_tragedy_on.html http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2009/08/turkey_can_avert_a_tragedy_on.html Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:03:59 -0500 Ilisu Dam. The Dam is a cornerstone in a larger project to develop Turkey’s electrical capacity over the next decade.   At the heart of the controversy is Hasankeyf--one of the cradles of civilization—claimed to be the oldest continuous settlement on the globe. Just this month archeologists have found relics they say date the site even earlier than the 10,000-12,000 years recorded; they are now speculating Hasankeyf may be 15,000 years old.   In the Kurdish region of southeastern Anatolia, Hasankeyf and its ruins rise up the limestone cliffs along the Tigris River,  where at least nine civilizations have passed through, including  the Assyrians, the Romans, the Byzantine empire, the Mongols, and the Ottomans.  In ancient Mesopotamia, Hasankeyf was on a central trading route. The area boasts over 4000 caves, which were used as shelter and also as protection from invaders. Some of these caves are still occupied with artisan workshops and restaurants.   As one journeys up the hillside, up the stone steps to the ruins of Hasankeyf Castle, built by the Byzantines in 363AD, the visitor passes the minaret from El-rizk mosque and the circular Zeynelbey Tomb with its blue bricks in geometric designs. One can follow the secret water passageways through the rocks. Visiting Hasankeyf is a journey into antiquity with more than 300 medieval monuments and 83 archeological sites. Today the hillside is also dotted with artisans’ stalls and children on donkeys and restaurants inside the caves. During the controversy over the Ilisu Dam, the mayor in protest  chose to live in one of the caves.   If the Ilisu Hydroelectric Dam is constructed as planned fifty miles downstream, much of Hasankeyf will be buried under 400 feet of water. The flooding will also submerge 80 surrounding villages in what would be Turkey’s second largest reservoir. While the  government has said that it will move and preserve some of the antiquities, the Hasankeyf residents insist that it is impossible to move caves and many of the ruins.  Those from other villages  have also protested that the compensation being offered isn’t enough to resettle them.   The European firms, which pulled their $1.6 billion loans and loan guarantees earlier this month, claim that Turkey has not sufficiently met World Bank standards to preserve the environment, the population and the culture in its planning for the Ilisu Dam. The Turkish government has charged that the withdrawal is political and has said it will proceed anyway, with potential funders from China, Russia and India or on its own.   Those who want to preserve Hasankeyf, which has already been listed by the World Monument Fund as one of the world’s 100 Most Endangered sites,  urge that the town be declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. However,  that request must come from the Turkish government,  an unlikely step as the government moves forward with its $32 billion Southeastern Anatolia Project that includes 22 dams and 19 power plants. The southeast is one of the poorest areas in Turkey and one which has been fraught in the recent past with political strife with the Kurdish PKK. The government says it is developing electrical and water resources by building the Ilisu Dam; opponents charge that this particular dam will destroy Kurdish and world culture as well as the environment.   The battle over the building of the Ilisu Dam also engages Turkey’s neighbors, particularly Iraq, which has claimed that the damming of the Euphrates  River and now the Tigris River upstream further exacerbates Iraq’s already problematic water supply.    For the moment Hasankeyf  goes on with daily life. Though summer is hot there, the caves of Hasankeyf are cool. A visitor can sit back on the cushioned sofas, listen to Turkish music, eat kebabs and hear about and see the last 15,000 years of history before the future washes it away. (Larger JL-A article  Portal to Antiquity: Hasankeyf, Turkey  in World Literature Today,  July-August, 2009)  Further Commentary]]> http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2009/07/on_the_tigris_hasankeyfwalk_in_1.html http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2009/07/on_the_tigris_hasankeyfwalk_in_1.html Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:03:02 -0500 International PEN Writers in Prison conference joined to the Global Forum on Freedom of Expression conference in Oslo, Norway, where the sun doesn’t set in the summer. In Oslo, activists from organizations around the globe discussed, debated, and strategized into the summer nights about the state of freedom of expression around the world and the mechanisms to protect it. Everyone understood that societies without this freedom are most often without political and civil freedoms as well so the defense of freedom of expression is the front line. The timing of the conference coincided with the 20th anniversary of the crackdown in Tiananmen Square in China. This year of 2009 is also the 20th anniversary of the popular uprising against the military government in Burma/Myanmar after the election of Aung San Sui Kyi, who was re-arrested this May; it is the 20th anniversary of the fatwa in Iran against Salman Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses, and it is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The year 1989 was a threshold year. So where have we come twenty years later? After Oslo, I went briefly to Paris en route to Normandy, where the 65th anniversary of the World War II invasion was being celebrated. I was headed to Normandy for a bike trip through the countryside and the historical sites, not for the official celebrations, but I was in Paris the day President Obama and his family arrived. It was also the day of the men’s semi-finals of the French Open in tennis. (You see the elements of this blog complicating…) Driving back to the hotel after Federer beat Del Potro and Soderling beat Gonzalez, I was talking in my broken French with the taxi driver talking in his broken English about the matches and about the arrival of Obama and about world politics in general. The driver was ebullient—an oxymoron perhaps for a French taxi driver—but he was ebullient nonetheless. “The world…the U.S….France…Europe…it is hopening,” he said, gesturing with his arms, trying to explain what he meant about the opening he saw in the world and the hope he felt. “We have hopening between us!” This optimism was more circumspect but also cautiously present among many monitoring free expression. There are serious problems in countries like China, Iran and Burma/Myanmar where writers who speak out are given long prison terms and in countries like Mexico where writers without sufficient protection from the state are killed by criminal cartels, but at the same time citizens are speaking out. One can look at indices that track and analyze freedoms within societies and see that the trend has been towards opening. That day in Paris the sun was shining, but for the rest of the week and most of the bike ride through Normandy, the skies were grey and drizzling, not dissimilar to the weather during the Normandy invasion. Every now and then the sun would shoot through as we pedaled into the rain and the wind along the coast. At both the American and European cemeteries we—all children of the generation who fought the war—paid quiet homage and in the German cemetery we stood in sober reflection. The war of our parents was the last world war, though there have been plenty of regional wars and battles since. But in the last twenty years at least, societies have been unlocking and the citizens’ voices have grown in volume and strength. However, neither on the wind-swept coast of Normandy nor on the light-filled avenues of Oslo, did any of us predict that only a few weeks later hundreds of thousands of Iranians would fill their streets. Their call for reform and the opening up of their society still hangs in the air. In Normandy we met a gentleman now in his late 80’s who worked in the French Resistance during the war. He lived across from the German headquarters, and the night of the invasion his task was to report on what went on there as the Germans realized that the invasion had begun. He was in his early twenties at the time. He spent the rest of his life as a professor, but his participation on the right side of history, his small, but crucial acts remain central to his memory and were honored at the celebrations. Looking back, he could see the long arc of history which at each moment can appear as disparate and unconnected as the separate elements of a story…a dog, a butterfly, a battle, a waterfall…but with the knitting of time and the shaping of history can render a story that almost makes sense.]]> http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2009/06/a_time_of_hopening_1.html http://www.joanneleedom-ackerman.com/blog/2009/06/a_time_of_hopening_1.html Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:17:42 -0500