Last night, I attended a reading and panel with Christos Tsiolkas, Sofi Oksanen, and Tommy Wieringa sponsored by City of Asylum/Pittsburgh in partnership with Pen/America.

During the discussion, I was interested to hear that all three authors have previously worked in theater. Tsiolkas said his work in theater became part of his writing process; he tries to actually embody his characters when he writes in their voice.

“I’m sitting in a room all by myself thinking how would a 40-year-old woman sit in this room,” he said. “Then I’ll walk down the street and think, how would a 7-year-old child walk down the street.”

As he spoke, he shifted his body in imitation of their postures.

Reading these three writers’ work, I found myself embodying the characters as well. I flinched as Zara flinched in Purge; felt the heft of Hector’s confidence in my own shoulders as I read The Slap; and sensed the mower’s slow advancing blades, a knot tightening at the bottom of my throat, unable to tear my eyes away from the pages of Joe Speedboat.

Comparative religion scholar Karen Armstrong defines compassion simply as the “ability to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, to ‘experience with’ the other.”

Books give us an opportunity to practice the type of fellow-feeling that Armstrong sees as definitional to compassion. In other words, literature makes us better at caring for one another.

Even if reading a book doesn’t translate into direct and immediate action, it serves as an “antidote to those who would dehumanize us through war, deception, the logic of capital and the daily quotidian practice of cruelty and indifference,” in the words of Junot Diaz.

The fact that books remind us of our shared humanity with people who are profoundly different from us is what makes them so dangerous to dictators and so precious to us.

READ excerpts from all three authors’ works in our Literary Voices section.

Click here to read Elizabeth’s bio.

About a month ago, I went to see the poet Elizabeth Alexander speak at the Drue Heinz lecture series. She told the story of writing her poem “Praise Song for the Day” for President Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Despite the painstaking orchestration of that day, the inauguration team did not ask to see her poem before it was entered into the teleprompter.

She reflected, “Don’t forget that we live in a country were artists don’t have to say what we already know they are going to say and that these artist have a place in civic discourse.”

In other words, we live in a place where artists are free to surprise us.

These words have been ringing in my mind as I interview Haitian scholars and writers for a feature planned for our May issue. In the beginning, I mostly asked about writing and politics, oppression and poetry, exile and writing. I forgot that first and foremost, I was talking to writers, artists, and crafts people—all searching for that innovation in form or craft that could surprise and unsettle the reader.

I realized how easy it is to pigeon-hole writers in exile as “political writers” who can only speak with a collective voice, rather than consider them as highly individual artists who approach their craft in idiosyncratic ways.

So I re-read my notes from Alexander’s lecture and then cracked open, for the second time, Love, Anger, Madness by Haitian novelist Marie Vieux-Chauvet. Instead of searching for how the book is an allegory about dictatorship, I let myself be surprised by the shifting voices, quilted description, and stark images.

That is what is so subversive about good art:  It slips free of categories and holds the human imagination above the collective voice of politics.

Read Madison Smart Bell’s review of Love, Anger, Madness in The Nation.

Click here to read Elizabeth’s bio.

Translated by Thar Tet Toe

This is the final part of “45-hour Trip” by Khet Mar. In Part I she writes about her departure from Yangon and in Part II she relates her journey from Yangon to Taipei.

PART III

After the breakfast buffet, I rushed to do something important: send another e-mail to friends waiting for us in the States. Then I took a short tour around the hotel. The early morning air was cool and comfortable. The shops were not yet open and I didn’t know what kind of shops they were because all the signs were in Chinese characters. I couldn’t read a word of them. Taipei is magnificent and clean as a whistle. We went back to the hotel room for a good day’s sleep before our departure in the evening.

We made up for the weariness from the trip aboard the plane by having a lovely nap on the luxurious bed of the hotel room. We all woke up almost simultaneously at one o’clock and rushed into bathroom to prepare for the departure as we’d be picked up soon.

This time the airplane was bigger. We had a TV set attached to each individual seat. The airplane itself, I think because it was bigger, was much more stable in its flight.  My sons were now able to watch whatever TV program they wanted, or play games, leaving us unperturbed.

The flight lasted about thirteen hours from Taipei to Los Angeles where we arrived at around noon local standard time.

Since our flight schedule had been thrown off from the beginning in Burma, we missed our plan in Los Angeles. We had to wait another ten hours to board the plane to our destination: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,. The scorching March sun we felt in Rangoon made us enjoy the mild and marvelous air of Taipei even more. Then in Los Angeles, the weather was delightfully cooler.  The airport was vast and sprawling but we found no place to loll for a rest. And there wasn’t anyone to meet us. We longed for a little refuge after a tiresome flight.

I went straight to the China Airline counter and asked, “Our plane in Rangoon missed scheduled take-ff due to a faulty door, I was informed.  And the China Airline staff arranged a place for us to stay for the ten hours that we had to wait.  Here again in Los Angeles, we have to wait for another ten hours.  Wouldn’t you make arrangement for a hotel room for us?”

My long, assertive question was answered by an elderly-looking China Airline staff with a short, decisive no.

“We lost our time!” I insisted on.

He said he would talk with his superior, and I followed him. They talked to each other for a while in their language, which sounded gibberish to me.

Then he said to me: “No.”

I was a little vexed.  How would we manage the ten hours without a place to lay back. However, my sons were on a frolic trip running here and there, enjoying themselves.

After my failed quest for a hotel room, I had another important thing to do: send another e-mail to people from my program coming to pick us up at the airport.  My husband and younger son stayed on, watching luggage while my elder son and I went on a search for an Internet booth.

I found a place with a sign for the Internet. There were some laptop computers laid on a table, but there wasn’t anyone around. I watched for a while. Three women came. And I followed suit. The computer asked for remuneration. I inserted a fiver. The mail interface did not come up, or, the money inserted either. Yeah! I lost five dollars! I tried again on another computer, pressing  buttons that looked like they might work. Again it asked for money. I inserted another fiver. This time luck was with me. I was happy to see the Gmail page. I wrote that we’d be in Pittsburgh at 6 am the next day. I was quite relieved that the message has been sent. The five-dollar bill that I put in for the second time did not come out too. I concluded that I spent ten dollars in sending a single e-mail: the most expensive e-mail I had sent in my whole life.

As it was an ample ten hours, I tried to find ways to kill the time. We went out of the airport building thinking we would roam about. Wow! The hissing, restless wind was too cold for us to bear. We went back in. We searched for the gate where we would board the plane for Pittsburgh. We were tired and sleepy by the time we reached the gate. After a meal of McDonald fried chicken, I took a nap on the floor while my husband and sons roamed the place.

At 10:35 we boarded the US Airline plane, which was rather small. I worried that the din of the airplane engine would be a big annoyance. As it was late in the evening and their stomachs were full of fried chicken, my sons fell asleep right away. The plan was only half full so many passengers lolled in their seat, having the peaceful rest of a good sleep until the plane reached Pittsburgh.

Our long journey that began on March 9 in the eastern hemisphere now ended at western hemisphere spanning the half of the globe. It was six in the morning when the plane landed in Pittsburgh.

Click here to read Khet Mar’s bio.

Translated by Thar Tet Toe

This is a continuation of  “Forty-Five Hour Trip” by Khet Mar. In Part I she writes about her departure from Yangon.

PART II

All went smoothly. The tickets were re-arranged by the staff of the China Airline and the plane took off at 11:30 pm.  After lift-off the little plane twisted and turned in its flight and jolted my sons immensely. They were greatly giddy as the result.

“My ears are bursting,” one said, but after an hour or so they fell asleep.

The China Airline offered a $50 coupon to each of us for shopping as a compensation for the change in flight schedule. We received a total of $200. Since it had to be used within one day, we did some sky-shopping on the plane. We carefully chose the items shown and, after careful review, we decided to buy a $160 sapphire-hued watch and a $60 game set.  We were a little over and had to add another $20.

The game set cost around seventy thousand in Burmese money and we were rather reluctant to buy it.  Yet, it came out right.  When they woke up, my sons were much pleased with the game set that they practically forgot to grumble.

We arrived at Taipei Airport at 6 am on March 10, sleepy and sluggish. Waiting China Airline staff told us that the next airplane would take off at 4 pm and that they have made arrangements for the day’s sojourn at a hotel.

Big buses greeted us at the gate of the airport.  As the buses carried us to the Hotel Taoyuan, an hour’s drive from the airport, we had a sight-worthy view of beautiful Taipei.  My sons were delighted to see the resplendent hotel.  From our room on the 10^th floor, we had a wonderful view of the city. The blue sea and the keen coastline of the city looked unique to our eyes.  The endless blue sea was on one side and Taipei rose up to the sky on the other.  The wonderful scene made us relaxed, body and mind, after the stuffy six hours on the airplane.

Click here to read Khet Mar’s bio

Told from eight different points of view, Christos Tsiolkas‘ The Slap begins at a barbecue in a Melbourne suburb when a man loses his temper and smack a child. The parents take the man to court. The act triggers a series of repercussions in the lives of the people who witness the event—causing them to reassess their values, expectations, and desires. Tsiolkas fills in the back-stories of his diverse cast of characters while exploring the changing lifestyle of Australia’s middle-class. He also touches multi-culturalism, homophobia, and infidelity. Winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap is haunting rumination on contemporary family life.

READ AN EXCERPT OF THE SLAP

CLICK HERE to buy a copy of The Slap

Translated by Lola Rogers

Soon to be published in twenty-five languages, Sofi Oksanen’s award-winning novel Purge is a suspenseful tale of two women dogged by their own shameful pasts and the dark, unspoken history that binds them.

When Aliide Truu, an older woman living alone in the Estonian countryside, finds a disheveled girl huddled in her front yard, she suppresses her misgivings and offers her shelter. Zara is a young sex-trafficking victim on the run from her captors, but a photo she carries with her soon makes it clear that her arrival at Aliide’s home is no coincidence. Survivors both, Aliide and Zara engage in a complex arithmetic of suspicion and revelation to distill each other’s motives; gradually, their stories emerge, the culmination of a tragic family drama of rivalry, lust, and loss that played out during the worst years of Estonia’s Soviet occupation.

READ THE EXCERPT FROM PURGE

CLICK HERE to buy a copy of Purge.

PURGE © 2008 by Sofi Oksanen, English translation © 2010 by Lola Rogers, reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.

Translated by Sam Garrett

In Joe Speedboat the inhabitants of a sleepy rural town are shaken awake by the arrival of a kinetic young visionary—the eponymous Joe.

After a violent farming accident plunges him into a coma for six months, young Frankie Hermans wakes up to discover that he’s paralyzed and mute. Bound to a wheelchair, Frankie struggles to adjust to a life where he must rely on family and friends to complete even the simplest tasks. The only body part he can control is his right arm, which he uses obsessively to record all the details of daily life in his town.  But when he meets Joe Speedboat—a boy who blazed into town like a meteor while Frankie slept—everything changes. Joe is a centrifugal force with the touch of a magician and the spirit of a daredevil, and he alone sees the potential strength in Frankie’s handicaps. With Joe’s help, Frankie’s good arm will be used for more that just writing: as a champion arm-wrestler, Frankie will be powerful enough to win back his friends, and maybe even woo P. J., the corkscrew-haired girl who has them all in a tailspin.  Alive and exuberant with the profundities of adolescence, Tommy Wieringa’s Joe Speedboat is the supersonic story of an unlikely alliance and a lightning-quick dash to grow up.

READ THE EXCERPT FROM JOE SPEEDBOAT

CLICK HERE to buy a copy of JOE SPEEDBOAT

JOE SPEEDBOAT ©2009 by Tommy Wieringa, English translation © 2009 by Sam Garrett, reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.

translated by Thar Tet Toe

In March 2009, the writer Khet Mar left Burma to come to Pittsburgh for her residency with City of Asylum/Pittsburgh. In this three-part blog she relates her arduous journey from Yangon to her new home on Sampsonia Way.

PART I

I would love to relate my exciting—and challenging—experience as I made a trip that spanned thousands of miles in this world full of happiness, excitement, as well as, moments of pain and despair.

I left for the United States on March 9, 2009.  My two sons, neither of whom had ever been on an airplane, were really excited for their very first flight ever. We got to the Yangon Airport at 9 am, yet the departure wasn’t until 11.  After we checked in, we left our friends and family who came to see us off at the entrance because they were not allowed to follow us into the lobby. Mother and friends went back home while we got settled in the waiting area.  My sons looked at their watches anxiously.

“How I want to ride the plane!  Departure time—come, come, double quick!” my younger son grumbled as he saw the airplane stationed on the airstrip through the window. My elder son was also continuously asking his curious questions:

“Mummy, we can watch movies onboard, can’t we?”

“Can we also play games?”

“We’ll get meals?  What do we eat when we go hungry?”

My younger son interrupted with a question that was quite important to them: “Can we talk in Burmese?  Must we, in English?”

“Talk in English, son.  The hostesses do not speak Burmese.”

“When in English classes, I had to say ‘Please may I go out?’ when I want to pee, Mummy.  Should I do the same here too?”

“Yeah! Say like that.  The hostess will open up the door.  You just have to jump over!”

We all burst laughing as passengers nearby looked at us.  Amid our laughter, we heard the announcement that the take-off would be a little late.

“Alas! It will be late!” My elder son complained.

As I saw the staff of the China Airline bustling about, I had a notion that something might have gone wrong.  Chinese men in western suits with cell phones in one hand and a wireless speakers in the other came rushing in and talked to the Chinese flight attendants at the gate in Chinese a number of times in a worried tone.

Then there was another announcement: the departure will be at 11 pm. Passengers can go home for a rest and be back at the airport by 10 or stay in the lounge.

My son became very disappointed and so did everybody else.  I approached the woman at the counter and found out that the doorframe of the airplane wasn’t fit enough to bear the air pressure and needed to be fixed. Since it was the only aircraft scheduled, the replacement had to be ordered from Taiwan and would take six solid hours to get to the Yangon International Airport.

I considered going home. However, we had grandparents from both sides, who were much affected by the fact that they would not see their grandsons for years to come.  We would not rekindle their sad emotions and were worried they might be shocked to see us back without any prior notice.  Thus, I decided to call an aunt of mine and we were off in a taxi right away.

At my aunt’s house, I called on some of my relatives who I hadn’t had time to say goodbye to.  Then I emailed those on the other side who were coming to see us at the airport to tell them we would be late.  The narrow and stuffy internet café we went to was crowded, and overwhelmed with swirling smokes and a dreadful din of the electric generator as electricity was out at the time.  However—giddy and sweaty—I successfully sent an e-mail to the other side and we set out again to the airport.

READ Part II of “45-hour Trip”

Click here to read Khet Mar’s bio

I am a little disappointed that she didn’t win the first prize, but I am also excited that so many people saw her reciting her brave poetry.

The headline in Arabian Business reads “Saudi death treat poet misses out on Million’s Poet title,” but that fact that she kept reading in face of death threats and public outcry makes her a winner in my book.

And she took home over $800,000 in prize money. Not bad.

Click here to read Elizabeth’s bio.

OK, I admit it, I don’t really know what they are saying on “The Million’s Poets,” one of the most popular television shows in the Arab world. But I have been obsessively trolling YouTube and whatever English-language Arab newspapers I can find to follow the show. It’s an American Idol-esque poetry competition in which competitors recite their own poetry to a television audience of seven million, who then vote for the winner.

I am rooting for Hessa Hilal, a Saudi journalist and mother of four, who recites fearless poetry criticizing the violent messages of hard-line Muslim clerics, the isolation of women in Arab society, and the American involvement in Iraq. She performs her poems in a traditional head-to-toe abaya. Listening to her read challenges my preconceptions of Arab society and the significance of the veil. Like a lot of Westerners, I hold a stereotype of Arab women as cowed in silence under their covering. Seeing Hissa, I realize it is possible to speak—and to speak powerfully—from behind the veil.

Since the show’s beginning in early February, she has regularly received death threats.

My scavenging for information turned up a real gem this week: A BBC interview with Hissa in English.  In the interview she talks about why she wears the abaya, what her victory would mean for Arab women, and her love for Charles Dickens.

We find out tomorrow if she will win the million dirhams prize (about $270,000). I’ll try to keep you updated!

Here are some of the other YouTube clips I found of poets reciting their poetry on “The Million’s Poets,” including last year’s main female challenger. Again, I can’t understand the language, but I am blown away by the rhythm of the words and I love how the audience participates.

Poet Aydah Al Aarawi Al Jahani

A beautiful call and response

Poet Fraanah

Again, I stress I don’t know Arabic, so I’d love to hear any insights folks have in the comment field!

Click here to read Elizabeth’s bio.