PEN World Voices: Bookforum: Political Engagement report
by literary saloon on May 03, 2008
PEN World Voices Festival coverage
Originally posted at: The Literary Saloon
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Asli Erdogan could not make it to the festival, due to illness, so Bookforum: Political Engagement was a two-man show, with Nuruddin Farah and Elias Khoury, moderated by Albert Mobilio.
Farah and Khoury come from perhaps the two places in the world that have been most seriously and violently unsettled for the longest, Somalia and Lebanon.
Farah has lived in exile for decades, while Khoury—though he currently teaches at NYU—says he has never been an exile. For Khoury, Beirut has always been central to his writing, while Farah said he found exile helped his writing: "distance distills", he said, allowing him to get at the pure essence of the place, as he has continued to live in the ‘country of his imagination’.
For Khoury the language to write in was never a political choice: he only knew how to write in Arabic he said (though he completed his graduate studies in Paris (i.e. is presumably fluent in French) and certainly speaks English well enough). For Farah the situation was more complicated: raised in the Somali-speaking part of Ethiopia, he learned a number of languages but faced various hurdles—most notably, at least with Somali, the fact that the Somali language had no written script until 1972 ..... With Somali, Amharic, Arabic, and English to choose from—and trying his hand at it seems like all of them—he claimed that it was the typewriters that decided it: English had the strong, dependable Royal typewriters. Later he also wrote in Italian, but those Olivettis kept breaking down ..... (He also noted that he wrote the first seven chapters of Maps in Somali and published them in serial form, only to be hauled before the censors, who demanded changes he was not willing to agree to; publication was suspended, and he switched to English.)
Politics seems almost inevitably to play a role in these authors’ writings, but there was also some discussion of their activity beyond just writing—including Farah’s role in trying to help broker peace in Somalia, and Khoury’s opposition to a Holocaust-denying event and then his response to an Israeli ambassador lauding him for that action (he did not particularly appreciate it, suggesting that denouncing some of the Israeli treatment of Palestinians would be the better response).
Farah, in particular, has a nice way of mixing anecdotes into his answers to make his points, but both authors were in good form, making for a fairly interesting event.
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