PEN World Voices: everybody, on faith and reason
[6 May: having finally located the relevant notebook, which I'd left at work, I am continuing to blog the PEN fest, a week and a half later. This is an account of the longest evening, and hence the longest post!]
The night after the Pamuk talk, I found myself in another endless sold-out line of eager bibliophiles--as Rushdie said later that evening, prompting applause and whistles, this is "a literary festival that the city apparently wants." The rock-concert feeling was not diminished by the occasional appearance next to us of black limousines, from which issued forth Chinua Achebe (the thick queue parted like the Red Sea for his wheelchair), Toni Morrison, and later on, Padma Lakshmi.
The theme of the evening was Faith and Reason, and the array of writers who spoke approached the topic in wildly different ways--some read from their fiction, others from readers' letters, some gave prepared speeches written for the evening, and Jeaneatte Winterson simply seized the stage and dazzled with an vivid, impromptu monologue that, for me, was the highlight of the evening.
A rundown: Rushdie appeared first, and after his introduction, read an excerpt from Nadine Gordimer's remarks, as she couldn't make it due to a family emergency. The excerpt touched upon her lack of religious sentiment--"thank God I'm an atheist," she quoted--but also on her bond with and respect for Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and her opinion that "fiercely held" political ideologies could be as serious a threat to reason as any other form of blind faith. Rushdie then read a (not particularly great) passage from Shalimar the Clown about Shalimar's embrace of fanaticism.
Chinua Achebe spoke next, reading the passage from Things Fall Apart where Okonkwo's uncle Uchende chastises him for his self-pity in exile. He then read two very different letters he recieved about a particular line in that passage-a song of mourning sung when a woman dies: "For whom is it well, for whom is it well? There is no one for whom it is well" (when Achebe--who has a marvelous, rich reading voice--came to the Ibo lyrics, he sang them a capella; later in the evening Zadie Smith, too, would sing). The letters he read came from an Englishwoman with cancer, who found in the song a reverse-echo of Julian of Norwich's famous prayer, and from a woman in Sarajevo(?) who had lost many loved ones in the Balkan conflict, and found a strange sort of comfort in a line where Uchende asks Okonkwo if he thinks his pain is the greatest, and tells him to consider others who have suffered worse.
Next came Martin Amis, who was just awful (I'm sorry: I can't stand the man, and thought his recent New Yorker story about Mohammed Atta was terrible, for much the same reasons Amitava Kumar outlines here). He read some excerpts from some weak Hitchens-esque piece he'd written about Islamist extremism, making what he seemed to think was a funny joke about cross-cultural differences in wife-beating habits (he was referring to the case of Saudi television journalist Rania al-Baz). The only bright note in his sour, stale appearance was the quotation from Conrad that he finished with.
The Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli then spoke about Latin America, and her hopes that people there were turning away from the religious fatalism that had accompanied the recent decades of neoliberal reforms and choosing again to fight for the "heaven on earth" of progressive dreams. Roberto Calasso, whose work I don't really know at all, gave a lively little speech about how "faith" and "reason" were both "words subject to abuse, persecution, and mistreatment." He criticized both a reason based on false postivism, and a faith "that has come to be about easy certainties," preferring the definition of the latter in Hebrews 11:1--the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Aside from Winterson, the speaker I enjoyed the most was E.L. Doctorow, who read his essay "Why We are Infidels"--there's a truncated or earlier version here at the Nation, but the thing in its entirety is good enough to warrant buying the book. His piece--a meditation on "this God-soaked country"--was, to my mind, the most thoughtful and eloquent response to the evening's theme. It was a paean to pluralism and the resolute separation of church and state--"I'm aware that this is a secular humanist canticle I'm singing," he said at one point--but his warm appreciation of the more joyous facets of faith (a delighful aside about the irrepressible appeal of gospel music, for example) stood in stark contrast to Amis's scorn.
David Grossman started out playing for laughs, saying "I come from a region that should charge royalties on every debate on faith and reason," but quickly moved to a more somber passage from his book The Yellow Wind, sharing an account of a 1987 visit to a religious settlement in the West Bank and the incomprehension and dread he felt towards the kindly, fervent settlers. Elias Khoury followed, with a certain symmetry, and read a passage from his novel The Gate of the Sun, before announcing his regretful withdrawal from a later event that week on the grounds that he had just discovered its co-sponsorship by the Israeli consulate, and chooses to refuse participation in all "government-sponsored" events.
Yusuf Komunyakaa spoke next, reading his poems "Thanks" and "Ode to the Maggot" (the latter he delivered with particular brio) and then Toni Morrison read, in her rich deep voice, the passage from Paradise about the confrontation between two preachers over the meaning of God's love, and the symbol of the cross (here's a part of it). Zadie Smith followed, shrugging off applause with the caveat that as a "writer of comic novels" she is "totally unqualified to hold forth on such abstract concepts." She read the funeral passage from On Beauty, and like Achebe, when she came to a burst of song in the text--in this case, the first lines of Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus--she sang.
Then came two Southeast Asian writers, Duong Thu Huong (whose translator read a short passage, after which Huong recited a Vietnamese poem) and Ayu Utami, who read a sharp little parable of a story called "Smell."
And then Jeannette Winterson strode onto stage and transfixed everyone in the building. Eschewing notes and podium, she took the lone microphone at center stage and delivered a funny, aching, spellbinding account of her childhood--as the lesbian adopted daughter of a pair of semiliterate Pentecostal preachers in the north of England (a story familiar to anyone who's read her first, autobiographical novel)--and the books that proved her salvation. She left home at sixteen, but some of that proselytizing verve stayed with her--she has the stage presence of a charismatic evangelist, and speaks with the cadences of a gospel truth. She told us how her mother, terrified of the subversive threat of "secular" literature, allowed only six books in the house: the Bible, and five other books about it; how she retold Jane Eyre to the young Jeannette, but changed the ending so Jane marries the tiresome missionary. "My mother was terrified that books might fall into my hands. She didn't realise that I might fall into the books, and stay there for safekeeping." Jeannette's mother would say, "The trouble with a book is that you don't know what's in it until too late"--and soon Winterson was proving her right, hiding books beneath the mattress (you can fit 77 paperbacks into one layer on a single-size bed, she told us) until the night her mother caught her with a copy of D. H. Lawrence, and burned the whole pitiful, precious library. It was then, she said, that she realized "whatever you think is precious can be destroyed--and that's why I still memorize texts.." Later: "Reading is an act of free will, a private act." When she fell in love with another girl, her mother threw her out--with the parting question, "Why be happy when you could be normal?" And Winterson went away "weighing those words in my hands," and soon finding herself weighing others-- thus resolving "to refuse false choices," and embrace the ambiguity that literature helped her find.
Finally, Rushdie returned, sidling up to the podium, and with a mischevious smile, opened a book and began to read the infamous dream sequence from The Satanic Verses: the story of Mahound the Prophet and Salman the Persian, and the latter's loss of faith, ending with the plaintive observation, "it's his word against mine." And that, somehow, seemed the perfect last-word for the entire event: this man standing openly on a stage in New York, setting loose those troublesome words all over again.
The night after the Pamuk talk, I found myself in another endless sold-out line of eager bibliophiles--as Rushdie said later that evening, prompting applause and whistles, this is "a literary festival that the city apparently wants." The rock-concert feeling was not diminished by the occasional appearance next to us of black limousines, from which issued forth Chinua Achebe (the thick queue parted like the Red Sea for his wheelchair), Toni Morrison, and later on, Padma Lakshmi.
The theme of the evening was Faith and Reason, and the array of writers who spoke approached the topic in wildly different ways--some read from their fiction, others from readers' letters, some gave prepared speeches written for the evening, and Jeaneatte Winterson simply seized the stage and dazzled with an vivid, impromptu monologue that, for me, was the highlight of the evening.
A rundown: Rushdie appeared first, and after his introduction, read an excerpt from Nadine Gordimer's remarks, as she couldn't make it due to a family emergency. The excerpt touched upon her lack of religious sentiment--"thank God I'm an atheist," she quoted--but also on her bond with and respect for Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and her opinion that "fiercely held" political ideologies could be as serious a threat to reason as any other form of blind faith. Rushdie then read a (not particularly great) passage from Shalimar the Clown about Shalimar's embrace of fanaticism.
Chinua Achebe spoke next, reading the passage from Things Fall Apart where Okonkwo's uncle Uchende chastises him for his self-pity in exile. He then read two very different letters he recieved about a particular line in that passage-a song of mourning sung when a woman dies: "For whom is it well, for whom is it well? There is no one for whom it is well" (when Achebe--who has a marvelous, rich reading voice--came to the Ibo lyrics, he sang them a capella; later in the evening Zadie Smith, too, would sing). The letters he read came from an Englishwoman with cancer, who found in the song a reverse-echo of Julian of Norwich's famous prayer, and from a woman in Sarajevo(?) who had lost many loved ones in the Balkan conflict, and found a strange sort of comfort in a line where Uchende asks Okonkwo if he thinks his pain is the greatest, and tells him to consider others who have suffered worse.
Next came Martin Amis, who was just awful (I'm sorry: I can't stand the man, and thought his recent New Yorker story about Mohammed Atta was terrible, for much the same reasons Amitava Kumar outlines here). He read some excerpts from some weak Hitchens-esque piece he'd written about Islamist extremism, making what he seemed to think was a funny joke about cross-cultural differences in wife-beating habits (he was referring to the case of Saudi television journalist Rania al-Baz). The only bright note in his sour, stale appearance was the quotation from Conrad that he finished with.
The Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli then spoke about Latin America, and her hopes that people there were turning away from the religious fatalism that had accompanied the recent decades of neoliberal reforms and choosing again to fight for the "heaven on earth" of progressive dreams. Roberto Calasso, whose work I don't really know at all, gave a lively little speech about how "faith" and "reason" were both "words subject to abuse, persecution, and mistreatment." He criticized both a reason based on false postivism, and a faith "that has come to be about easy certainties," preferring the definition of the latter in Hebrews 11:1--the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Aside from Winterson, the speaker I enjoyed the most was E.L. Doctorow, who read his essay "Why We are Infidels"--there's a truncated or earlier version here at the Nation, but the thing in its entirety is good enough to warrant buying the book. His piece--a meditation on "this God-soaked country"--was, to my mind, the most thoughtful and eloquent response to the evening's theme. It was a paean to pluralism and the resolute separation of church and state--"I'm aware that this is a secular humanist canticle I'm singing," he said at one point--but his warm appreciation of the more joyous facets of faith (a delighful aside about the irrepressible appeal of gospel music, for example) stood in stark contrast to Amis's scorn.
David Grossman started out playing for laughs, saying "I come from a region that should charge royalties on every debate on faith and reason," but quickly moved to a more somber passage from his book The Yellow Wind, sharing an account of a 1987 visit to a religious settlement in the West Bank and the incomprehension and dread he felt towards the kindly, fervent settlers. Elias Khoury followed, with a certain symmetry, and read a passage from his novel The Gate of the Sun, before announcing his regretful withdrawal from a later event that week on the grounds that he had just discovered its co-sponsorship by the Israeli consulate, and chooses to refuse participation in all "government-sponsored" events.
Yusuf Komunyakaa spoke next, reading his poems "Thanks" and "Ode to the Maggot" (the latter he delivered with particular brio) and then Toni Morrison read, in her rich deep voice, the passage from Paradise about the confrontation between two preachers over the meaning of God's love, and the symbol of the cross (here's a part of it). Zadie Smith followed, shrugging off applause with the caveat that as a "writer of comic novels" she is "totally unqualified to hold forth on such abstract concepts." She read the funeral passage from On Beauty, and like Achebe, when she came to a burst of song in the text--in this case, the first lines of Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus--she sang.
Then came two Southeast Asian writers, Duong Thu Huong (whose translator read a short passage, after which Huong recited a Vietnamese poem) and Ayu Utami, who read a sharp little parable of a story called "Smell."
And then Jeannette Winterson strode onto stage and transfixed everyone in the building. Eschewing notes and podium, she took the lone microphone at center stage and delivered a funny, aching, spellbinding account of her childhood--as the lesbian adopted daughter of a pair of semiliterate Pentecostal preachers in the north of England (a story familiar to anyone who's read her first, autobiographical novel)--and the books that proved her salvation. She left home at sixteen, but some of that proselytizing verve stayed with her--she has the stage presence of a charismatic evangelist, and speaks with the cadences of a gospel truth. She told us how her mother, terrified of the subversive threat of "secular" literature, allowed only six books in the house: the Bible, and five other books about it; how she retold Jane Eyre to the young Jeannette, but changed the ending so Jane marries the tiresome missionary. "My mother was terrified that books might fall into my hands. She didn't realise that I might fall into the books, and stay there for safekeeping." Jeannette's mother would say, "The trouble with a book is that you don't know what's in it until too late"--and soon Winterson was proving her right, hiding books beneath the mattress (you can fit 77 paperbacks into one layer on a single-size bed, she told us) until the night her mother caught her with a copy of D. H. Lawrence, and burned the whole pitiful, precious library. It was then, she said, that she realized "whatever you think is precious can be destroyed--and that's why I still memorize texts.." Later: "Reading is an act of free will, a private act." When she fell in love with another girl, her mother threw her out--with the parting question, "Why be happy when you could be normal?" And Winterson went away "weighing those words in my hands," and soon finding herself weighing others-- thus resolving "to refuse false choices," and embrace the ambiguity that literature helped her find.
Finally, Rushdie returned, sidling up to the podium, and with a mischevious smile, opened a book and began to read the infamous dream sequence from The Satanic Verses: the story of Mahound the Prophet and Salman the Persian, and the latter's loss of faith, ending with the plaintive observation, "it's his word against mine." And that, somehow, seemed the perfect last-word for the entire event: this man standing openly on a stage in New York, setting loose those troublesome words all over again.
posted by kitabet at 11:32 AM
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