The Global City at PEN World Voices
by New York Brain Terrain on May 01, 2006
&uotPlease visit my blog to see the photos from this event.
Saturday was a very busy day for me festival-wise. I had an interview with Helen Oyeyemi at 10 am, the Idols and Insults event at 1, The Global City at 5, and A Believer Nighttime Event at 7. I plan to save the best for last and write up the interview after everything else, and I will defer to Michael Orthofer on coverage of the Idols and Insults panel. So, without further ado, I present to you THE GLOBAL CITY.
Panelists in this discussion included Alaa Al-Aswany (The Yacoubian Building), Paulo Lins (City of God), Melania Mazzucco (Vita), Carlos Monsivais (Mexico City), and Orhan Pamuk (Istanbul). (Yes, that is Orhan Pamuk in the photo above, even though the namecard says ;Melania.” The picture was taken at an angle.)
The panelists were all sandwiched together on a table on stage. It looked cramped but adorable on some strange level. After the introduction, each panelist read a passage from his or her book. Highlights included the police raids on bars in Cairo during the 1980s (Al-Aswany) and an experience climbing up the Empire State Building as it was being built in 1930 (Mazzucco). While the reading was going on, most panelists stared at the table. Orhan Pamuk, however, constantly kept glancing up at the audience. It was very quick, and repetitive. He focused on one section at a time. Look at the left section, look down at the table, left section, table, left section, table. Center section, table, center section, table, and so on. I remember during his interview with Margaret Atwood, he kept shifting around in his chair. I really liked him as a person: he was very cheerful and ebullient. And, as I could tell from this panel also, perpetually in motion!
If you’ve a date in Constantinople, she’ll be waiting in Istanbul
Pamuk stated that there were two types of city books. Those by people who actually live in the city (and therefore resemble a memoir), and those by people who come from outside the city (and therefore are like “exotic” books). His book, Istanbul, was a combination of the two: a memoir until the age of 22, and afterwards, a rumination/treatise about the city. In comparing Istanbul’s decline to other sad cities in decline, he first addressed the concept of a beautiful urban landscape. Beauty, he decided, was related to a feeling. Baudelard said that there was beauty in sadness and melancholy. Istanbul’s sadness, Pamuk said, stemmed from its decline. In 1852, Flaubert said that Istanbul would be the center of the world in one hundred years. Unfortunately, the reverse turned out to be true. The Ottoman Empire fell, and its inhabitants were sentenced to reside in rooms of melancholy. This melancholy, however, was different from Western melancholy in that it was a communal feeling. The nobility of failure, the acceptance of failure--these were sentiments that embraced the entire city.
City of Angels?
Carlos Monsivais likened L.A. to a second Mexico City. Many young Mexicans today often look to L.A. as their guiding light, their savior. They feel the need to escape the failure, hunger, and violence that is Mexico, and in L.A. they see the so-called land of opportunity. Once in L.A. (or anywhere in the states), however, they suffer indignities, they are often exploited and humiliated, but they endure it because they transfer all their hopes and dreams to their children. Their children can succeed where they could not, and that is what keeps them going.
When in Rome...
Melania spoke about the difficulty of writing something “new” about New York, being as so much has already been written about the city in both fiction and non-fiction. She finally decided to write about New York as seen from a different perspective, a “perspective from the ground”, she called it, meaning the perspective of two children who had never been in the city before. Two children who came from small villages in Italy, and for whom the city of New York was like a magical dream. Her latest novel, Perfect Day, is set in her native city of Rome. Rome, she noticed, has undergone a transformation during her lifetime. When she was a child, Rome seemed to be dying, showing off its ruins like a beggar. Now, however, it is a lively and vibrant city.
(On a side note, I’ve always been fascinated by the old saying that you are only considered a true Roman if seven generations of your family on both your mother and father’s side were born and raised in Rome. )
Rock in Rio
I caught my first glimpse of Paulo Lins in the PEN Hospitality Suite. I was waiting there for my interview with Helen Oyeyemi. Mr. Lins came in, thin, slightly hunched over, wearing a blue jumpsuit and rainbow-colored socks, and asked us a question in Portuguese before going in to get a snack. No one understood. “Is he participating at the next panel?” one of the volunteers wondered. “He’s going to need someone to take him down to his car.”
No action ended up being taken. However, when I arrived at the Tischman auditorium and saw the same man in the blue jumpsuit on the stage, I was very relieved that he had arrived at the panel on time.
I found out that Paulo Lins is the only participating author in this year’s PEN Festival whose work has not been translated into English. City of God has, however, been made into a film. (My friend Susan told me it was one of her favorite foreign films, so I will be sure to check it out. So should you.) The research for City of God actually started as an anthropological work, a study of the people involved in crime in the shantytowns of Rio de Janiero. Originally, these shantys were built on the hills of the city. In 1966, however, the US and Brazil agreed to move the shantys into building complexes (known as the Alliance for Progress). According to Lins, Brazil at that time was ruled under a military dictatorship that was supported by the US government. These shantytowns were 60 km from the center of the city, and Lins grew up in this area. While studying in university, an anthropology professor was conducting a study on crime and its effects on people in the city. She needed university students to interview the shantytown inhabitants who were either directly or indirectly involved with crime. However, she needed students who came from that area, and of all the students only four of them had grown up in the shantytowns. Paulo Lins was one of them. At that time, he didn’t want to get involved. He was writing poetry and reading literature and he didn’t want to get involved with anthropology. However, the woman professor, Lins said, was so beautiful, that he found himself agreeing to do the project. “I said I would even work for free,” Lins told us. So he began interviewing people. He had to submit regular reports, which were “not good” because he did not like anthropology, and he was forced to read anthropology studies--"all because of this beautiful woman!” Eventually he wrote a poem based on all the information he had gathered from interviews. He showed it to the woman professor, who took it to a literary critic, who then suggested that Lins write a novel. And that is how City of God came about.
The Man from Cairo
Alaa Al-Aswany is a man of many talents: during the day, he works as a dentist. In his spare time, he spins out epics like The Yacoubian Building. In fact, the Yacoubian Building really does exist in Cairo and it was where Al-Aswany held his first dental surgery. (This novel was also made into a film which showed at Tribeca this year. I had a ticket for last Wed’s show, but since it started at 8:45 pm and lasted three hours, I decided to go home instead.) His idea for writing a novel on a building came to him when the American embassy in Cairo was looking to relocate into another building. The building, he said, was cut like a piece of cheese, and when its inhabitants left, they left small objects, fragments of themselves, in the rooms. The rooms were saturated with human history. “I realized that in this room, this was where someone had experienced their first love. This was where a baby let out its first cry. This was where someone had died. This room had seen tense moments prior to a divorce.” He also told us a story about the research he did while working on the novel. Many of the settings in the novel take place in small bars (where everyone knows your name). Al-Aswany was not a fan of bars, but he made himself go into bars in order to get a feeling of the atmosphere inside them. Unfortunately, this was also during the time when police conducted frequent raids in the bars, and the first night Al-Aswany went into a bar, the cops came. The police, he said, told him that he couldn’t be in a bar if he was a doctor. Al-Aswany, thinking that if he told them the truth, they wouldn’t believe him, made up an excuse that he was from the States and wanted a beer. The police told him to go to a bar at a 5-star hotel instead. They also arrested all of his colleagues. So, Al-Aswany went down to the station and told them the truth: that he wanted to write books about bars. This convinced them. Everytime afterwards, if the police conducted a raid at a bar where Al-Aswany was, the policeman would step up to him, say, “Good evening, Doctor,” and then begin to arrest everyone else inside.
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