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04/18/2005
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Araby Carlier is a member of the see you in the
streets generation that has brought us the
anti-globalization and anti-war movements. As a young
urban warrior she defended abortion clinics, stood
with the people in the streets of Cincinnati during
the rebellion after the police murdered Timothy
Thomas, she led Philly Freedom Summer against the
execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and has spoken at
countless demonstrations, conferences, radio shows,
and workshops across the country.
Most recently she co-produced for the Artists Network
of Refuse & Resist!, "Unconventional Heroes"-- an
evening of performance honoring courageous resisters
presented in the thick of the protest against the RNC
in NYC.
Araby became obsessed with novels after tasting the
liberation in Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
and Steinbeck's classic Grapes of Wrath. Armed with
the certainty that anyone will LOVE a great book,
Araby is applying her creativity and determination to
write about novels in a fresh way because she is
confident that another world is possible and many
books that already exist may light the way.
Araby's own blog is at:
liveswemightlive.blogspot.com |
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Archived entries
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PEN World Voices:
NY Festival of International Literature
by Araby Carlier (this piece also seen on Indymedia.org)
18 Apr 2005
I told a friend that Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace was
so fascinating because I didn't know anything about
pre-revolutionary Russia. My friend replied that when
he begins a work of fiction and it mentions an event
he doesn't know about he usually puts down the novel
and grabs a history text. I'm all about the history
texts, but putting down the novel I don't recommend.
When I entered my urban public high school in the
heart of the Midwest I was finally offered a non-US
history class. It was European history. The histories
were complemented by a strict literature syllabus of
American and European classics. President Wilson's New
Deal was punctuated by The Great Gatsby by F. Scott
Fitzgerald and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness shed
some light on King Leopold's bloody conquest of the
Congo.
I read three books in high school that snapped my eyes
open to the rest of the world: The Good Earth by Pearl
S. Buck, The Stranger by Albert Camus, and The God of
Small Things by Arundhati Roy. These books wound into
my life and so did a picture of China, Algeria, and
India not photographed for National Geographic. The
reality in novels pushed me beyond my borders. In the
past year I have taken to consulting maps almost
daily. I seek out the countries and cities where my
books are taking me. Three of four books usually
occupy my thoughts all at once, and as I check out the
distance between St. Petersburg and Puerto Rico I
wonder if Dostoevsky ever read The Arabian Nights, and
I know his contemporary Tolstoy did.
I am writing now from New York City, and many of my
friends and the readers of this blog are located on
the East and West coasts. We live in cities vibrating
with hundreds of languages, and thousands of living
narratives from every corner of the planet. New York,
Washington DC, Oakland, and San Diego are drastically
different from Akron, Des Moines, and Lincoln. While I
am certain many coastal natives couldn't find Akron on
a map, I am just as certain that New York City public
high school students do not typically graduate having
learned a comprehensive history of a country other
than the US or the nation their family originated in.
While my youthful seclusion from the rest of the world
seems so foreign to me now, I don't think that the
lack of global history in my primary education is only
endemic of the middle part of the United States.
Across the country history departments are dwindling,
and history courses are increasingly not a mandatory
part of the curriculum at many liberal arts colleges.
A student's knowledge of the past is rapidly found in
works of fiction. Where would students be without
novels from around the world? V.S. Naipul and
Staceyann Chin taught me of the vast South Asian and
Chinese Diaspora throughout Africa and the Caribbean.
Julia Alvarez guided me through Dominican Republic.
The senselessness of World War I is nightmarishly
clear in my mind because of Sebastien Japrisot and
Erich Maria Remarque.
Today is the beginning of PEN World Voices: The New
York Festival of International Literature. All week
libraries, schools, museums, and bars will be hosting
discussions, panels, and interviews with dozens of
writers from around the world.
I am on the edge of my seat to hear the voices of
Fadhil al-Azzawi, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Azar Nafisi,
Salman Rushdie, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. At the same
time, I feel so honored to be only a few hours away
from an introduction to writers whose names I do not
recognize, authors whose home-countries I have never
read about outside of the newspaper.
In a piece on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie
said that there is "something that literature needs to
recognize all the time: Reality is not realistic. This
is something we're all beginning to recognize. Have
you noticed how weird things are lately?" (44).
Technology has brought people closer than ever but at
the same time the imperial stabs the US has inflicted
on the rest of the world have driven us further apart.
The view of the planet and its people from within the
US as taught to us is not realistic.
Grabbing a history book to emphasize a novel is a
fantastic idea. Remember though, that while a novel
won't necessarily present a linear timeline of events,
a work of fiction will infuse history with the vibrant
humanity it is missing. We always hear how
desensitized we are to the violence and brutality
surrounding and sometimes intimately in our own lives.
Falling in love with the characters so affectionately
created for us by the writers I have mentioned and
more is one anecdote for curing us.
Rushdie, Salman. "Inverted Realism." PEN America A
Journal for Writers and Readers
6 Metamorphoses. Ed. M. Mark. New York: PEN America
Center, 2005. 44-45.
See also:
www.pen.org
liveswemightlive.blogspot.com
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