IN THE MARGINS
by Peter Koch

Artvoice, NY

September 06, 2007

Just Buffalo Literary Center has turned a corner this year with Babel,
a dramatic upgrade to the previous If All of Buffalo Read the Same
Book reading series. With four internationally prominent authors
on the bill–Orhan Pamuk, Ariel Dorfman, Derek Walcott and Kiran
Desai–including two Nobel Prize winners (Pamuk and Walcott), Babel
promises to vault Just Buffaloto the level with UB’s Distinguished
Speaker Series.

According to artistic director Mike Kelleher, "The idea of the series
is really to bring global perspective to the literary discussion in
Buffalo." This is much-needed perspective, especially as we approach
the six-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the World
Trade Center. In those years, our nation’s foreign policy has grown
increasingly aggressive and antagonistic, its people more xenophobic
under the guidance of the Bush administration. But globalization
will only force us into more and more frequent, and undoubtedly
uncomfortable, encounters with the wide, unknown world. Kelleher offers
this: "You can and should read history, and you can and should read
the newspaper, but literature brings experience down to the personal
level, and you, as the reader, see events from the inside through the
eyes of a character. I think that’s a crucial experience, in terms
of learning to understand other cultures." Seeing the world through
the eyes of other cultures by reading their greatest writers is a
first step in that direction. Just Buffalo has recruited four such
renowned writers, and they make up the Babel reading series.

The series’ title recalls the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel,
in which all of humanity, united in language and purpose, attempts to
build a tower to the heavens. When God witnesses man’s arrogance, he
resolves to confuse the uniform language of the earth so that humans
can not understand one another, thereby preventing future attempts
to build such a tower. He scatters the people across the globe, and
the tower is abandoned. (A footnote: The tower is said to have been
built in ancient Sumer, which many historians believe to be Biblical
Shinar in modern Southern Iraq, today the world’s most visible stage
for cross-cultural misunderstanding.) The Tower of Babel has popularly
become a representation of human beings’ separation from one another by
way of language (the Hebrew verb balal means "to confuse or confound")
and culture. At the same time, it suggests the possibility of their
coming together once again, which is where Just Buffalo’s Babel series
steps in. The four authors in the series could be said to be united
by a single factor: duality. Each of them straddles multiple cultures,
multiple ways of seeing and understanding the world.

Though he’s never left the wealthy district in Istanbul where he
grew up, novelist Orhan Pamuk has been straddling worlds his entire
life–Europe and Asia, wealthy and poor, secular and religious,
popular and avant-garde. Such is the nature of life in contemporary
Turkey, which for the past century has been experiencing a rocky
transition from the Islamic Ottoman Empire to a secular, westernized
democratic republic that began with the leadership of Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk in the 1920s. While it’s that new political system, along
with its accompanying shift in values, that made his family rich
(his grandfather built railroads in the 1930s), Pamuk has been openly
critical of the government’s suppression of free speech, as well as
its violent civil war against Kurdish separatists and denial of the
Armenian genocide of World War I. These radical ideas have landed
him in hot water from time to time, most notably in 2005 when he was
tried by the government for "blatantly belittling Turkishness."

Pamuk has published seven novels, a screenplay, a book of essays and
a memoir entitled Istanbul: Memories and the City. Snow, published
in 2004, and the book chosen by Just Buffalo for his presentation,
tells the story of Ka, a poet and political exile who’s returned
to Turkey for his mother’s funeral. While in country, he travels
to Kars (kar is Turkish for "snow"), a remote city in Anatolia,
in search of Ipek, a beautiful woman he knew as a student who is
recently divorced. Kars is isolated by a snowstorm, during which
Ka investigates the recent suicides of girls forced to remove their
headscarves by an occasionally brutal secular regime. Through this
lens Pamuk dissects and examines the ongoing conflict in Turkey,
and arguably the world beyond, between the forces of "Westernization"
and fundamental Islam. Pamuk reads on Thursday, November 8 at 8pm.

Argentinian-born Ariel Dorfman also operates at the borderlines,
focusing much of his work on exploring the intersection of art
and human rights. He has spent much of his life on the run from
repression. Born to Jewish immigrants in 1942, his family fled to
the US in 1945, due to anti-Semitism and political intolerance in
Argentina. In 1954, however, in the age of McCarthyism, Dorfman’s
father was targeted as a communist threat, and the family fled once
again, this time settling in Chile, where he gained citizenship. The
peace he found there wouldn’t last, though. On September 11, 1973,
the American-backed General Augusto Pinochet led a violent coup
against the democratically elected government of Marxist Salvador
Allende. Dorfman, media adviser to Allende’s chief of staff, was forced
to run for his life, and he lived in exile in Brazil and Europe for
17 years. Many of Dorfman’s friends and political allies, however,
didn’t make it out of Chile. Their fate–torture and death–has
shaped much of Dorfman’s ongoing examination, and condemnation,
of human rights abuses worldwide.

As the political winds have blown Dorfman’s life from exile to exile,
he’s had to struggle with reconciling his dual identities.

Through the writing of countless works spanning nearly every genre
(novels, plays, a memoir, a travel narrative and collections
of poetry, short stories and essays) Dorfman has come to highly
value that duality. By living in two worlds and borrowing from their
"linguistic rivers," he believes he can unite distant communities. He
strives to do this, just as he strives to keep human rights abuses
at the forefront of the reading world’s mind. His play Death and the
Maiden tells the story of a Chilean woman who kidnaps the man she
believes tortured her during the rule of Pinochet’s regime. Dorfman
reads Friday, December 7 at 8pm.

West-Indian poet and playwright Derek Walcott has spent his career
examining the conflict between the heritage of European and West
Indian culture. Walcott was born in 1930 in St. Lucia, a small
windward island in the Lesser Antilles that was then a British
dependency. St. Lucia has been variously influenced by its original
Amerindian inhabitants, 400 years of colonial rule by England and
France, and by the African slaves brought over by the Europeans to
work on the sugar cane plantations. Walcott, who is of mixed heritage,
has dealt with his own duality partly by writing his plays in a mix
of English and Creole patois, but is still defining his own role in
the complex culture and history of St. Lucia.

Walcott’s poetry suggests an inner exile from both European and African
cultures. Divided between the two, he can be accepted by neither. He
is a nomad between cultures, trying to find the meaning of home, a
way to reconcile the two. One of his first plays, Henri Christophe,
is typically themed: The freed slave Henri Christophe helps Toussaint
L’Ouverture liberate Haiti from French rule, but then himself becomes
a despot. Walcott has published dozens of plays and numerous poetry
collections in his time, and was awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize in
Literature. He reads Thursday, March 13 at 8pm.

Indian-born author Kiran Desai is a permanent resident of the US. At
the relatively tender age of 35, she’s also the youngest woman ever to
win the Man Booker Prize, the highest honor bestowed upon a citizen of
a British Commonwealth country. It’s an honor that’s somewhat ironic,
given that the book which was awarded with the Booker, The Inheritance
of Loss, is a sprawling examination of globalization, multiculturalism,
economic inequality and fundamentalism. Much of this is seen, however,
through the window of the postcolonial chaos and despair left by Great
Britain on her homeland. A wide cast of characters is united by their
common humiliation at the hands of the economic and cultural power
of the West.

For Desai, who affiliates strongly with both India and America, the
book "was a return journey to the fact of being Indian, to realizing
the perspective was too important to give up." She insists, however,
that literature "is located beyond flags and anthems, simple ideas of
loyalty. The vocabulary of of immigration, of exile, of translation,
inevitably overlaps with a realization of the multiple options of
reinvention, of myriad perspectives, shifting truths, telling of
lies–the great big wobbliness of it all."

It is a complex situation, being of two worlds, and perhaps the only
way to sort it out is through writing. Desai will continue to do
that. She reads Thursday, April 24 at 8pm.