The protagonist of Jim Powell’s debut novel The Breaking of Eggs, Feliks Zhukovski, has spent his entire life blindly loyal to communism. His stance is principled and uncompromising; it has caused him to distance himself from family, friends, and potential lovers. But, at age 61, this self-exiled Pole living in Paris is forced to consider his entire worldview as the Berlin Wall falls and communism crumbles.

In the hands of a less able novelist, Feliks would give communism the heave-ho, embrace capitalism, and move to America. But Powell refused easy answers. For him the picture is more complex, political labels are fluid, and no ideology is perfect.

While Feliks’ struggle is ultimately with ideas, it is tenderly rendered on a human scale as Feliks meets people who defy simple categorization, including his long-lost brother, a former girlfriend, and even a former French spy who tricked Feliks during the Cold War.

Powell is no stranger to new beginnings. He was born in 1949 in London. After careers in advertising, politics, and pottery design, not to mention a stint at an errand boy for the Beatles, Powell began writing a novel at age 50. He published his first, The Breaking of Eggs, at age 60.

In this interview with Sampsonia Way, Powell talks about the tragedy of communism, discusses the fallibility of government, and explains why Americans shouldn’t be disillusioned with politics.

You’ve said that your novel The Breaking of Eggs started with the question,  “What is home?” In writing the book, did you arrive at an answer?

No, and I didn’t expected to because it can mean different things for different people. For most people it’s a physical place: a house, a neighborhood, a town, a country, but it can also be ideas or causes. Whatever it is, home is a very emotive word for everybody. I wanted to think about whether it was possible to get to be 60 years old and have no idea where or what home was.

Feliks, your protagonist, finds his home in the cause of communism. As communism is dismantled, he’s suddenly homeless.

That was true of a lot of people starting from the 1930s onwards as the news of the atrocities and terror under Stalin started creeping out from the Soviet Union. After that you were faced with a choice: deny that any of these things were happening, blame it on biased reporting, or say yes, these things have happened, they are atrocious, and there therefore has to be a complete revision of my thinking. A lot of people chose one of the first two.

But there were also a lot of people didn’t really choose. They didn’t altogether deny that terrible things had happened, but that didn’t make them shift their allegiance. Feliks is one of those. It is those people who gave the novel its title. Those sorts of apologists—the half-apologists—they didn’t deny everything, but they started to try and justify it, and the most frequent justification was: you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

Photo © Bunny Dunstone

What do you think of that justification?

Well, it sounds quite homely, doesn’t it? Until you remember that the eggs being broken were actually millions of human beings.

When you want to change something, some group is going to lose out in that change. But what was unprecedented in Europe was the scale of that loss. It wasn’t just the number of losers, but it was also what they lost. Often they lost their lives, and if they didn’t lose their lives, they lost their liberty and any form of freedom we would recognize. You can’t say that was an incidental byproduct of this process. It was actually part of the process itself and was why communism was ultimately evil, if not in its intent, then certainly in its implementation.

Feliks seems able to overlook this because he’s not a deep thinker, at least in the first half of the book. He keeps saying, “I didn’t even think about that,” or “I’ve never considered that before.” Do you think that that kind of thinking is necessary to maintain an allegiance to an ideological system like communism?

Feliks would undoubtedly describe himself as an intellectual, but he’s an intellectual who puts huge fields of inquiry completely out of bounds. He’s convinced himself of something at a relatively early age and can give you all of the justifications in the world for it, but never actually thinks much beyond it. He starts to acquire an inquiring mind because he’s forced to when he meets people who have different perspectives and experiences from himself.

He does have several grains of honesty in him; if he didn’t it would be a very boring book because he wouldn’t change at all. But he is honest enough to actually start paying attention.

One of the people who forces him to reconsider his positions is his mother, who spent the war in Poland and then was sent to a forced labor camp under the communists. She writes him a long letter about her experience as a “prisoner of politics,” rather than political prisoner. What’s the distinction for you?

A political prisoner is active politically and has become a prisoner for that activity.

But there are other people who are innocent casualties of these vast clashes of ideas. People who haven’t actually made a stand for the freedom of their own country.  A large number of those people at the end of World War II ended up in labor camps. Not heavy-duty prisons—the heavy-duty prisons were for the political prisoners—but they nevertheless ended up in captivity. They were just casualties of politics. In the book I wanted to play with the word prisoners so “prisoners of politics.”

Do you assign different morality to them?

I wouldn’t use the word “morality,” but I would assign different justifications. For the second of those two things, I could see no justification whatsoever. For the first, even though I may not agree with the justification, I can see a justification. There is no reason for the second. About 200,000 Poles, the vast majority of which were not activists for or against anything, were displaced in their own country at the end of the war. They were basically taken away by the communists and put in labor camps or wherever. About 10 years later, after Stalin had died, they were allowed to go home again with no explanation.

Another thing that Feliks’ mother says is that Stalin was worse than Hitler. Do you also believe that?

I think you can make that case, but it’s not a case that I would make. This part was edited out, but the conclusion that Feliks reached in the last chapter is probably closest to my feeling. He says that as human beings, they were probably on par with one another, but you couldn’t judge them only as human beings because they were also representatives of an ideology. Feliks makes the point that fascism is an evil ideology full stop, whereas communism can at least be portrayed as a noble ideology. The ideology itself is set out to help the human race—which fascism never set out to do. It may have been completely impractical, and it certainly failed, but as an ideology it isn’t evil.

In an interview with New Zealand’s The Dominion Post, you said that you are more attracted to doubt than ideology. What is the value of doubt?

The value in doubt is that you’re unlikely to ever impose your convictions on other people with force because you’re not completely sure that you’re right. It’s a cliché, but it’s true: the more you know, the more you discover that you don’t know.

As life goes on, I’ve become less certain about those things. I still believe what I believe, but I’m not going to assert that what I believe is some universal truth or set of truths, which therefore, everybody else should believe. I think that if the whole world managed to have that doubting attitude, it’d be less inclined to impose itself on other people.

You were active in politics for years, worked on several campaigns, and even made a bid for public office yourself. Have you’ve become disillusioned by politics?

No, I’m not disillusioned. But I’m also more fluid in political attitudes than I was when I was younger. I really don’t think one ought to be disillusioned by politics ever, even though it frequently causes one to be disillusioned. But if you do think that having a democratic system, for all its imperfections, is better than having any other system, then somebody has got to make that system work; and even if they fail, then somebody else has got to try and do better next time. You’ve got to keep believing that things can get better.

Just as there’s no such thing as a perfect human being, there’s no such thing as a perfect government or a perfect political party. They’re all collections of human beings and have all the faults that we’ve all got as individuals—and the virtues as well. But they’re never going to be perfect.

I know I’m generalizing but one thing that is lovely about America is that you are enormous optimists. You find it a lot easier than us world-weary, cynical Europeans to place all of your trust in a person as you did with Barack Obama. Now, two years later, there is disillusionment. I think that is unfair on the man because expectations pinned on him were the most extraordinarily difficult circumstances—both at home and abroad—that no human being could possibly deliver on completely.

You set the book in 1991 at the end of the Cold War in Europe. Why is this time period still relevant?

I love to try and make sense of the times that I have lived through. The setting isn’t contemporary, but it isn’t the ancient past either. It’s kind of hovering somewhere in between. But for a great many people who lived through the period of communist domination of Eastern Europe, it is still a huge subject. And also for those who didn’t, it might actually be interesting to know a little bit about it.

When we learn history in school, history stops arbitrarily roughly 50 years before we’re being taught. History curriculums are set by people who are at least one, if not two, generations older than the people being taught. Because they’ve lived though them, those 50 years aren’t history to them, those years are actually current affairs.

This black hole of history poses a huge danger because our leaders need to be aware of history and most of the relevant lessons are the lessons of recent history. You’ve permanently got generations of world leaders who are pretty hazy about the very history they should be drawing lessons from.

Read Elizabeth’s bio.

Lorin Stein enjoying Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Dots Mirrored Room at the Mattress Factory

The Paris Review is also well known for author interviews. Starting with E. M. Forster in 1953, these conversations are a sort of compass for those who want to understand what was in the mind of the most important writers of the last 57 years. What is the criterion to decide who is going to be interviewed?

I haven’t made a study of the history of the interviews, but my sense is that the interview isn’t used as a tool for drawing American attention to writers who are very well known abroad, but rather used to draw attention to writers who are already very influential for American writers. For instance, I didn’t assign the two interviews that are in the fall issue—the Houellebecq interview or the Norman Rush one but I hustled the interviewers along. For me these writers should be better known because they have a really disproportionate influence.

Samuel Delany, for example, is a writer who is being interviewed right now. When I interviewed Jonathan Lethem, he gave me a reading list, and the first thing I had to read was Samuel Delany. I don’t think Delany’s books have ever sold many copies, but if you want to know what’s going on in American literature, you had better know about him and his literature. So, in that sense, it may become a more parochial interview than it was; it may do less to encourage international understanding, but I think that now the literary community in the United States feels that it’s more marginalized than it used to be.

How do literary institutions and awards contribute to this feeling of marginalization?

There is a tendency for the big institutions to try to evangelize and give big prizes to under-known writers or to use prizes to bring writers into the public view. And I think that’s often a mistake because they may be overspending their cultural capital. I think that the use of these awards is in consolidating literary opinion—especially at a moment when there are no more book reviews or newspapers. I just think tactically that the way to use the National Book Award or the Pulitzer is to ratify an opinion that already exists in the literary community. You don’t try to make an opinion that doesn’t already exist.

Ratify an opinion that already exists. That’s exactly how the interviews in The Paris Review got started.

That’s right, and I think that that’s good. We want it to be a pantheon. When the founders of The Paris Review started the interviews, they just found their favorite writers before they died and they said, “you’re our heroes; how do you do it?” and I think that’s a very powerful idea. They weren’t saying, “I think life hasn’t been fair to such-and-such writer”–well, there may have been an element of that, but the main motive was always pure adoration. So I want us to interview people we really adore.

But it’s impossible to read everything. Is that not dangerous?

It may be that our tastes are narrow, but I would rather take that risk, because at the end, when you wake up at four in the morning, nervous, at least you know what you love. I would rather be able to defend the interviews that we do than have to explain, uncomfortably, why we haven’t done some interviews.

You said in an interview that you have been reading The Paris Review since you were 14. Of all the interviews you read, which have you have liked the most?

My favorite interviews are all–for some reason–of English writers: P.G. Wodehouse, Philip Larkin, and Henry Greene. Terry Southern’s interview with Greene I especially love. Southern: “What was the basic situation, as it occurred to you, for Loving?” Green: “I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks, and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was: ‘Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.’ I saw the book in a flash.”

Which of the interviews published in The Paris Review would you not include if you could go back and be the editor since 1953?

Oh, if I had one I would never tell!

Stein looks at Winifred Lutz’s Garden Installation at the Mattress Factory

Has a writer ever rejected an interview with The Paris Review?

Yes. It just happened with Ira Glass. I’m hoping he’ll change his mind. Ira Glass started a program called This American Life that consists of people telling true stories from their lives—and they’re very beautifully edited. I thought it would be fascinating to get him to talk about how he gets people to tell stories on the radio–and he wanted to do it, but he is too busy. Hemingway refused and refused and refused and then finally said yes, but then George [Plimpton] had to go and find him in Cuba. A lot of writers are very afraid of talking about what they do. And they’re right!

You said that the literary community in the United States feels more marginalized than before, but the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy said that the United Sates is too insular in terms of literature. What do you think of this statement?

I think that’s true and false. You can’t really generalize about the American reading public. We have a huge reading public. FSG just published a French writer who is unknown in France. He got a very good review in The New Yorker and his book will sell a few thousand copies, I suspect. That means that more Americans will read him than people in France. It can be done. What Barbara Epler [editor in chief of New Directions Press] does, can be done. Compared to the vast amount that is read in America, world literature makes up a small percentage, but it still represents a huge market. I would also say, in a defensive way, that we produce so much literature, and we export so much literature, it would be asking a lot for us to import as much foreign literature as Holland, for example.

Hemingway said to The Paris Review that “the most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” Has the current method of marketing destroyed these detectors somehow?

I think these detectors are inherently fragile. Remember, when Hemingway gave that interview, he had already written The Old Man and the Sea. One must take all talk of bullshit detectors with a grain of salt.

Faulkner said that the best job that was ever offered to him was to become a landlord in a brothel. In his opinion the place was quiet during the morning hours. There was enough social life in the evening. All the bootleggers in the neighborhood would call him “sir.” And he could call the police by their first names. What is the ideal occupation for a writer in these days?

If you want to be a great French poet, clearly, you should teach or translate English. I am thinking of Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarme. Borges and Larkin seemed to draw strength from their jobs as librarians. My friend Philip Connors (a recent contributor to The Paris Review) gets his best writing done during the summer, when he works in a tower as a fire lookout. Kerouac and Gary Snyder did the same. Marguerite Yourcenar wrote her great Memoirs of Hadrian on a cross-country train. Now my job requires me to take that same train. It hasn’t occurred to me to write a single word. Norman Rush blossomed into greatness thanks to the years that he and his wife ran the Peace Corps office in Botswana–though he wrote the novels after they left. One would have thought Melville had the perfect job, a sinecure as a customs inspector, but it didn’t help. Wallace Stevens, as we all know, was a giant in the insurance business. He made up his poems on the way to and from the office.

Everyone says editing kills you as a writer, but even here there are counterexamples. There seems to be no profession that can kill the spark, except maybe writing for the movies or teaching creative writing–and yet many writers do these things and muddle through.

Read Silvia’s bio.

………………………………………..Previous Page >>>

Photo © National Arts Club Page Series, pageseries.wordpress.com

New York, Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Chicago, San Francisco, Claremont, Los Angeles. Those were the cities in the whistle-stop tour of Lorin Stein. On his journey, the 37-year-old editor of The Paris Review hopped from train to train promoting a magazine that is 20 years older than him, a magazine that has become a map and a compass for universal literary opinion.

Stein has been described as “New York’s youngest, brightest, boldest literary powerbroker.” He was raised in Washington, D.C., attended the Sidwell Friends School, and graduated from Yale in 1995. Already an American critic and translator, Stein joined Farrar, Straus & Giroux at 25 and built a strong career as an editor.

Last April he replaced Philip Gourevitch–who ran the magazine for five years—and filled the shoes of George Plimpton –the first and legendary editor of The Paris Review. Since then, Stein started a series of revolutionary changes: the new daily blog updates the printed magazine’s content, the redesigned website has 200,000 visitors a month, and the magazine’s relationship with reportage has ended. However, the challenges he faces are steep. The new literary market doesn’t forgive anyone, and forgets almost everyone.

Striving to maintain a universal appeal is a difficult task to put on the shoulders of any editor. In taking over The Paris Review, Stein not only has to deal the magazine’s historically international readership, but also with criticism of the insular nature of United States’ literature. Insularity? Maybe. But Stein made an unusual point: he believes that the United States’ literary community also feels marginalized.

During his brief visit to Pittsburgh, Stein stopped by Sampsonia Way headquarters and took a break for this conversation. We talked about headaches, deadlines, writers, manuscripts, interviews, American awards, brothels and shit detectors. All his answers were infused with intelligence, precision and humour, just like the first issue of The Paris Review that he published.

After having edited books that received the National Book Award, or the Pulitzer Prize, you left Farrar, Straus & Giroux in March to join The Paris Review. What was your biggest fear at that point?

The thing that woke me up in the morning then is the same thing that wakes me up in the morning now: I’m interested in publishing and marketing fiction and poetry — and interviews and contemporary art— that I think should have a much bigger readership.

There is plenty of room for little magazines that don’t try to grow their readership and serve a very specific readership. That’s fine. That’s healthy. But the value of publishing a literary magazine is an open question. If you do it well, then the question is answered for the next month. But it is not a market that exists particularly, and I’m very interested in markets.

The recently redesigned website has 200,000 visitors a month

In a magazine, the deadlines are tighter and instead of dealing with the single ego of the writer you were editing, you now have to deal with many egos. What are your biggest headaches editing The Paris Review?

No headaches from the writers so far. I think the biggest headache is time: I still don’t know quite what’s going to be in our December issue. I have to learn how to relax and just trust in God…Well, probably not God, unfortunately!

A book can take about a year from the time you get the finished manuscript, so you have all the time in the world to figure out the jacket and all that stuff. A magazine is really different. And I don’t have sang-froid.

In a 2003 interview, George Plimpton said that The Paris Review got about 20,000 manuscripts a year. How many manuscripts have you gotten since you’ve started in April?

I don’t know because I don’t read them all. We have interns and editors who read them. But I spend every weekend, since I’ve started six months ago, reading submissions.

When I worked for a book publisher I wouldn’t keep reading if I saw the first page of a book and it wasn’t something I could imagine giving that much of my life to. Now I’m reading many good short things. There are many times when I ask someone on the staff for a second opinion, and this is new to me.

The Paris Review was founded as an alternative, as a vehicle for the voices of new writers. Is that still true today or does an unknown writer face the terrible phrase: “No unsolicited material accepted.”

No. No. We read it, almost definitely late—we’re still looking at things from March— but we read it. In the fall’s issue is a piece by John Daniels about Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I’d been reading him in N+1, a magazine that I admire at lot. He wrote an essay about hating Kafka and I loved it, so I sent it to all these different magazines, but they wouldn’t publish it, even though it was a good essay. It just wasn’t what they put out. That was the first moment that I thought I might want to, someday, start a book review.

Why was a book review your first thought?

Because I think that book reviews are a great American cultural treasure. And also there’s a tradition of the essay—the belletristic essay—that, in America, we take so much for granted that we don’t even talk about it, but we all read them all the time, and it’s not even considered high art. But if you look at a men’s magazine like GQ, most of them keep on staff at any given time a really serious essayist. I think that’s part of our patrimony…

…………………………………Continue to page 2 >>>

Musicians of the 2010 Jazz Poetry Concert

Video production and editing by Glen Wood

Tenor saxophonist Erica Lindsay’s distinct sound comes in part from her training under experimental hard-bop composer Mal Waldron, whom she says taught her that compositionally “anything goes.” Both Waldron’s instruction and Lindsay’s involvement in Europe’s free jazz scene are the roots of her work’s poetic movement.

Writing pieces for big-band and other large ensembles (such as the Unique Munich Saxophone Choir) has also added a definitive structure to Lindsay’s unique style. Through a love of experimentation and a wealth of experience writing music, she has found a way to combine her talents as a composer with her skills as an improviser into something dramatic, yet instantly accessible.

As a result, her recent works have an undeniable flow. Carefully organized melodies move into improvisational passage so cleanly, you might assume that pieces like “Yes” and “Gotta Get To It” were laboriously composed in their entirety. Her tunes have been described as “soul-searching” and “coated with Trane-spirituality.” She is currently working on combining improvised saxophone with orchestral compositions influenced by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg.

Lindsay is currently the only woman part of Oliver Lake’s Big Band Ensemble—a label she puts no stock in whatsoever. She plays with a natural authority and is constantly listening, turning to each of her band-mates as they soloed during City of Asylum/Pittsburgh‘s Jazz Poetry Concert. When her turn came, she spun a hypnotic line of variants on a theme that sometimes arced above the rest of the band, and other times seamlessly blended with the ensemble’s larger sound.

In person Lindsay is quiet and contemplative; she chooses her words carefully. Meanwhile her eyes sparkle with the same  spontaneous elements of the music she makes. In this video, Lindsay talks about composition, improvisation, poetry, and playing with a large band.

Read Joshua’s bio.

Musicians of the 2010 Jazz Poetry Concert

Video production and editing by Glen Wood

According to baritone saxophonist Alex Harding, if you want to know jazz, you must first know the blues.  “The blues is what this music is about. Period,” he said during rehearsal for City of Asylum/Pittsburgh’s 2010 Jazz Poetry festival.

Harding was born in 1967 in Detroit and grew up during a time when Motown, R&B, and the blues blared from every radio and jukebox. He first learned the drums, but made the switch to sax after hearing Grover Washington, Jr., a saxophonist from Buffalo known for his funk and soul inflected jazz.

Harding said that he still “thinks conceptually” as a drummer, which explains the propulsive and rhythmic quality of his solos. According to Jazz Times, Harding plays with “steamroller momentum and uncommon ferocity…it was sheer fireworks.”

While Harding pulls from many different traditions and influences, his sound is unique and innovative.  His dynamic and soulful solo on Oliver Lake’s arrangement “Lonnie’s Lament” by John Coltrane stunned audience members at this year’s Jazz Poetry.

In addition to working regularly with Lake, Harding has performed with artists  such as the Sun Ra All Star Project, David Lee Roth, Lester Bowie’s Hip-Hop Philharmonic, Roy Hargrove, and Aretha Franklin.

In this video, Harding explains how the sound of the sax emanates from the same place as the human voice and reflects on the rich jazz legacy of rust belt cities like Pittsburgh and Detroit.

Read Elizabeth’s bio.

Pittsburgh-based poet Terrance Hayes has been nominated for a National Book Award for his collection Lighthead. He is one of five finalists for poetry along with C.D. Wright, Kathleen Graber, James Richardson, and Monica Youn.

In his interview with Sampsonia Way magazine, Hayes describes Lighthead as “the illumination of the imagination.”

Read the full interview.

The award is organized by the National Book Foundation and finalists are selected by five-judge panels who are asked to name the best books published last year and written by United States citizens.

Winners will be announced on November 17 at a ceremony in New York City.

Hayes is the author of three previous volumes of poetry including Wind in a Box, which was named one of the 100 Books of 2006 by Publisher’s Weekly. His other honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a professor of creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University.

Read selections from the National Book Award nominated, Lighthead.

Alejandro de la Fuente

Organizing the exhibition “Queloides: Racism and Race in Cuban Contemporary Art” has been a mix of obstacles, audacity, and adventure. The exhibit, which opens this Friday at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, was first shown earlier this year in Havana and the curator Alejandro de la Fuente was unable to attend. He was banned from Cuba. Later he was expelled from the country when he tried to visit family in Havana.

De la Fuente, a Professor of History and Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, has written extensively on slavery and race relations in Cuba and Latin America. His book, Nation for All: Race, Inequality and Politics in Twentieth Century Cuba is a valuable tool for understanding a country where mentioning racism is still a taboo.

Here, de la Fuente argues that the artists in this exhibition challenge the official history of Cuba, which is one of harmony and equality, by telling a different story. While celebrating a new cultural bridge between Pittsburgh and Cuba, he laments the attitude of Cuban cultural authorities and the persistence of racial inequality in a socialist society.

What inspired you to organize Queloides?

There were three previous exhibitions in Havana between 1997 and 1999: “Keloids I,” “Keloids II,” and “Neither Musicians nor Athletes.” The last two were curated by the late Cuban art critic Ariel Ribeaux.

After I finished Nation for All, my book about race and politics in Cuba, I realized there was this group of visual artists who were trying to paint what I was trying to write. But I couldn’t get hold of their paintings, I couldn’t see an image, there was no website, there was no catalog, there were no press releases. The exhibits were almost clandestine, even though they were public exhibits, so that piqued my curiosity.

I wanted to do an art exhibition because I realized that art is a space where you could do so much more in the Cuban context. Art had become the space where you could talk about racism and get around censorship.

Why the Mattress Factory?

In 2006 I learned that Ariel Ribeaux had died in Cuba from injuries he sustained during an attempted murder in Guatemala. He had been working as a journalist and editor there and returned to Cuba after the attack. I decided that Queloides should also be a homage to his contributions and a way of telling him—wherever he is—we’re not giving up, we are going to continue what you started.

In 2007 I met Elio Rodríguez, my co-curator for Queloides and I organized his exhibit at the Frick Fine Arts Gallery at the University of Pittsburgh. While Elio was in Pittsburgh, we went to the Mattress Factory. As we began to think about Queloides, we immediately thought of the Mattress Factory. It’s a place where artists can do what they want and Barbara Luderowski, its founding director, and Michael Olijnyk, its co-director, are adventurous enough to take on a project like this.

Queloide can be translated as a thick raised scar, which anyone can develop after a serious wound. Nevertheless many people in Cuba believe that black skin is particularly susceptible to them. How else does this exhibition illustrate the persistence of racial stereotypes in Cuba?

One of the threads of the exhibit illustrates the fear of blacks. If you want to experience racism in Cuba, sit at a bar in a hotel and just watch the police for a half hour. You’re going to see the police stop almost exclusively Afro-Cubans. In the minds of these policemen—some of whom are black themselves—there is a clear association between blackness and criminality. This idea is reflected in the title of a piece by Manuel Arenas: “Cuidado hay Negro” (Look out, there’s a black man.)

You also can see that fear of black people in the work of photographer René Peña, whose image we are using to promote the exhibit. In this image a black man who looks very tender has a sword in his hands. This shows that it doesn’t matter how tender they are, it doesn’t matter how human they are, there’s always danger associated with Afro-Cubans.

Another theme in the exhibition seems to be the importance of African descent.

Many of the artists are very interested in highlighting how central Africa is to Cuba as a nation. They want to show that we are African. Everybody accepts this idea in Cuba, but only at a rhetorical level: we even have a saying: “Quien no tiene de Congo tiene de Carabalí” (Those who don’t come from the Congo come from the Carabalí). The problem is that you don’t find the real descendants of people from the Congo or Carabalí in the hotels, you don’t find them in the best jobs, and you don’t find them in the offices. What some of these artists are trying to do is to put Africa in front of our face and say “Look, this is who we are.”

I suspect that the artists are writing a critical revisionist history of the Cuban nation instead of the typical grand narrative of a harmonious nation in which we all get along and are a happy unified people. What they’re saying is, “There is another history—a history of rape and violence and a history linked to slavery—and that’s our history too. We have to recover the gods, we need to recover the languages we lost.”

What else we can see in the exhibition?

Some artists simply make fun of the persistence of racist stereotypes and racist ideas, such as the idea that black people are sexually powerful or dangerous. So their work is quite explicit about these things and it really doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand it once you understand where we’re coming from.

Marta María Pérez Bravo

Did the Cuban revolution fail to eliminate racism because there weren’t meaningful policies against discrimination?

It’s such a paradox because the Cuban revolution did much more than any other event in the Americas to eliminate social inequalities, including racial inequalities. By the 1980s in Cuba, racial gaps had really closed in some key social indicators, such as life expectancy and access to education or healthcare. Racial inequality was quite minimal in Cuba compared to places like Brazil or the United States.

The problem is that after many years of talking about racism as a “solved issue,” the issue became a taboo in public discourse. If you look at the Cuban press or the public debates, there are almost no references to racism, except to note how successful Cuba has been in eliminating it or how racist the United States was. So those who insisted on talking about issues of race were basically characterized as counter-revolutionaries – people who were creating division within the Cuban family. And that was a tragedy.

In the early 1990s, numerous cultural actors including some artists who are showing work in this exhibition, began denouncing racial discrimination in Cuba. That was unthinkable in the 80s. What prompted this greater awareness?

In the 1990s the Cuban government lost the power to maintain the welfare state as the Soviet Union, its financial backer, broke apart. When the government didn’t have the resources to distribute goods the way it had in the 1970s and 80s racism became obvious.

All these artists, who were coming out of art school in the late 1980s or so, found a world that they didn’t understand. They had grown up in a place that was mostly egalitarian, that had a commitment to ideals of social solidarity, and suddenly that place began to change. Cuba became more global and the economy was dollarized in the 1990s.

It didn’t really matter if you were a good person or an educated person because all that mattered was if you had dollars or not. Of course what happened was whites had more access to dollars than blacks because of the composition of the Cuban-American community, which sent dollars to their families. That created a huge income gap between whites and blacks that didn’t exist in the 80s.

Enjoy! by Armando Mariño

You’ve been banned from Cuba due to the exhibition. What happened?

We presented this project to Cuba’s cultural authorities in 2008. I wanted to show it first in Havana because I didn’t want to do it only for foreign consumption. I understood that this was a polemic project, but I also thought that the situation had changed in the island. Racism is something that has been recognized even by Fidel Castro, who had acknowledged publicly that racism has not been solved.

The cultural authorities were never quite enthusiastic about the project, but they said we could do it. The authorities had no chance to select the artists. I think several of the bureaucrats started having nightmares that this might endanger their positions and their privileges or that state security may call them. Maybe they did call them.

Also, this is the first time in post-revolutionary Cuba that the word “racism” has appeared in the title of an exhibition.

Yes, and they didn’t know how to deal with that. As 2009 progressed, they tried to kill the project saying that I was being financed by the counter-revolution, which is something they always say when they want to silence you. They actually said this to some of the artists too.

I was very clear from the very beginning and said: “Look I’m not going to ask for money from the governmental agencies that do political work.” This exhibit was conceived during the Bush administration and there was no way I was going to take a dime from those sources. So I approached private foundations. However, the authorities began to spread the rumor that I could be detained if I traveled to Havana.

Some artists even suggested we forget about the exhibit in Cuba and just go to the Mattress Factory. But I wrote a public letter to the artists and to the cultural authorities saying, “Absolutely not, don’t cancel the exhibit. If I’m the problem, I’m out, I’m not coming, that’s fine. You don’t have to put my name there, I don’t care. I just care about the project.” Literally I begged the artists to stay in the exhibition and to do it in Havana.

At the end the authorities wanted to print the brochure without my texts or my name, and I refused to do it. The exhibition didn’t have a brochure.

Juicio Cromático by Manuel Arenas

In June you went to see your family and you were expelled from Cuba.

I tried to go after the exhibit had closed and they kicked me out. I was in the airport and they took my passport, took me to an office, and escorted me back to the airplane with my wife and daughter. We have always tried to teach our daughter to love Cuba and here she saw repression for the first time in her short life. She was crying and I told her, “Cry later, but not here. Don’t show them, hold it.”

But you were holding it too, I bet.

We both held it. When they were taking us back to the airplane I just told the guard “I’m not a hater, but I’m not going to forget, I will remember.”

So the price you paid for doing this was really high.

I started to called it “la osadía de hacer ‘Queloides’” (the audacity of doing ‘Queloides.’) It’s a huge price to pay. This is about my family, my friends, my landscapes, and my sea. But I thought it was a price I had to pay in order to create a conversation that is healthy for Cuban society. The official media outlet covered the exhibit with silence, but I know that the society talked about it.

There is a blogging revolution in Cuba. How have the bloggers covered the exhibition?

A lot of people went to see the exhibit. The difference between Ariel’s exhibition in the 1990s and now is that now you have this new world of people who post online every day. I was here in Pittsburgh, and I got an invitation by email from Havana. I was laughing. Even though the Internet is not that big in Cuba, all these bloggers and Internet users are helping to change the current situation. Before them, the government had a monopoly over public speech. So on one hand you have the official silence, and on the other hand there’s this sort of subterranean world where people are passing information around. One guy wrote “Queloides: Condenada al silencio” (Queloides: Condemned to Silence) on his blog.

We can’t deny that here in the United States and in Pittsburgh, there is also racism. What do you expect from the people who are going to see the exhibition here?

There is something pretty universal about racism. Racism is an epistemological assumption of the western culture. Some of the stuff we are doing is a pretty universal, so it can be understood by people in the United States, São Paulo, or Johannesburg. In that sense I really hope that this exhibit is not only going to help people know more about Cuba, but also to learn more about their own world. Hopefully they will begin to think that some of these assumptions, these stereotypes, are not just a problem in Havana or Pittsburgh.

Do you want to know more about Cuban freedom of speech? Read Kilobytes of Discord and Blogging under Fear

Queloides runs through February 27, 2011.

The artists, who were all born in Cuba, include Pedro Álvarez, Manuel Arenas, Belkis Ayón, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Roberto Diago, Alexis Esquivel, Armando Mariño, René Peña, Marta María Pérez Bravo, Douglas Pérez, Elio Rodríguez, and José Toirac/Meira Marrero.

Read Silvia’s bio.

Photo © http://jonathanstray.com

When the Nobel Foundation announced that Chinese intellectual and activist Liu Xiaobo won the Peace Prize, we celebrated at Sampsonia Way. The prize committee lauded Liu Xiaobo “for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.” We hoped this would help the jailed writer gain his freedom.

However, the announcement ignited a furious response from China: They have detained other intellectuals and accused the Norwegian Nobel Committee of violating its own principles by honoring “a criminal.” Liu Xiaobo’s wife is now under house arrest.

Liu Xiaobo’s so-called criminal activities are primarily his publishing of anti-government literature that criticizes China’s lagging democratization and unacceptable stances on freedom of expression. He was also a key organizer of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations.

This is not the first time the Nobel Peace Prize committee has raised the ire of the Chinese government. They denounced the awarding of the prize to the Dalai Lama in 1989.

In the face of this controversy, Sampsonia Way can just say what we have witnessed: Liu Xiaobo is a person who fights for democracy and works to disseminate his and other people’s writing, expression, and thoughts. Is this not another way to contribute to peace in the world?

Below is a letter that Henry Reese, director of City of Asylum/Pittsburgh, wrote about Liu Xiaobo in 2009. The letter asks you to sign a petition protesting Liu Xiaobo’s arrest. In this letter, Reese also recalls when Liu Xiaobo was the president of Independent Chinese PEN and wrote to City of Asylum to celebrate the residence of the Chinese poet Huang Xiang in Pittsburgh.

Henry Reese: “Join me in signing the petition now”

In 2004, Chinese poet and dissident, Huang Xiang, came to live on Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh. He was the first resident of City of Asylum/Pittsburgh, where I am the founder and director. Huang Xiang quickly made the urban row house his own by painting selections of his poetry on the outside walls in bold, grass-style Chinese calligraphy. The house seemed like a poetry anthology, and we started calling it “House Poem.”

Photo © Kin Cheung/AP

That fall, Pittsburgh’s mayor and city council issued a proclamation declaring November 21, “Huang Xiang Day.” One-hundred fifty Pittsburghers—from all walks of life—gathered that rainy evening on Sampsonia Way to welcome the exiled poet. In the dim, flickering street light, Huang Xiang stood in front of “House Poem” and signed the front door. He then read his house to the crowd. Dancing, shouting, whispering and singing to the sky and earth, he startled everyone with the most dramatic ode to freedom we had ever experienced.

A few days later, I received a message from several Chinese poets. While they were sad that Huang Xiang could not publish or even read publicly in China, they were joyous that he had been so publicly honored in the United States. One letter, dated December 12, 2004, even came from Liu Xiaobo, the president of Independent Chinese PEN. He applauded our “mutual interests in freedom of expression and the rights of writers” and invited future cooperation.

Imagine my shock when I opened the newspaper the next morning to learn that Liu Xiaobo had been arrested and that his computer had been seized!

In that moment, the repression of writers in China became disturbingly personal. Did Liu Xiaobo’s invitation to me lead to his arrest? And what did it say about the situation in China that I could even think that there was a connection?

Liu Xiaobo was soon released. Since then, I have learned a good deal more about how far-reaching Chinese terror reaches. When they learned just how much Huang Xiang was a persona non grata to Chinese authorities, several American universities withdrew invitations to him, not wanting to jeopardize their cultural exchanges and relationships with Chinese institutions. Translators declined our offers of commissions to translate his work, fearing that Chinese authorities would deny them entry to the mainland. This is the flipside of the banality of evil.

On December 8, 2008, Liu Xiaobo was arrested again for co-authoring a pro-democracy manifesto. This time, the charges were far more serious and the consequences far more dangerous to him. I will never understand how Liu Xiaobo endures. But I do know that he deserves the few moments that it takes to click on the hyperlink below and sign a petition to protest his arrest. I’ve done it and I ask you to do the same.

Collectively our watchfulness does have an effect on Chinese authorities, so I ask that you join me in signing the petition now.

Henry Reese, founder
City of Asylum/Pittsburgh

Please sign this petition now!

Photo © Renee Rosensteel

Pittsburgh-based poet Terrance Hayes has been nominated for a National Book Award for his collection Lighthead. He is one of five finalists for poetry along with C.D. Wright, Kathleen Graber, James Richardson, and Monica Youn.

In his interview with Sampsonia Way magazine, Hayes describes Lighthead as “the illumination of the imagination.”

Read the full interview.

The award is organized by the National Book Foundation and finalists are selected by five-judge panels who are asked to name the best books published last year and written by United States citizens.

Winners will be announced on November 17 at a ceremony in New York City.

Hayes is the author of three previous volumes of poetry including Wind in a Box, which was named one of the 100 Books of 2006 by Publisher’s Weekly. His other honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a professor of creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University.

Read selections from the National Book Award nominated, Lighthead.

Hinemoana Baker at the Jazz Poetry Concert, Photo © Renee Rosensteel

In “Our Children Have Run Away to Fiji” New Zealand poet Hinemoana Baker writes, “When they get there they make entirely/ different noises. This one used to sound human, like a laugh/ now there is more of a yawn to him in the mornings/ a knock, a vernacular; a measurement known mainly to those/ who live in America or Australia. But they were so human to us!/ Now they are so much more, so much has changed.”

In her lyrical poetry, Baker reveals her love of sound and of language. She writes in both official languages of New Zealand, English and Maori, an indigenous language that has been preserved from extinction by recent efforts by Maori leaders and supporters.

In her second collection of poetry, Kōiwi Kōiwi | Bone Bone, Baker combines a dedication to biculturalism with strong elements of humor, wit, and autobiography. She uses personal reflection to unpack the hidden meaning behind everyday moments, where an instant of mistaken identity between two strangers can become a larger comment on different societal expectations on men and women. Baker’s lyricism stems in part from her work as a successful singer and songwriter.

Currently Baker is participating in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. She recently performed her music and poetry at the 2010 City of Asylum/Pittsburgh Jazz Poetry Concert alongside Oliver Lake’s Big Band and writers Yusef Komunyakaa (USA), Khet Mar (Burma), Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador), and Maryja Martysevich (Belarus).

In this interview, Baker talks about the tension between Maori-speaking and English-speaking culture, the pressure to reduce your identity to a simple label, and what it means to communicate with her higher self.

In your poetry, you use both English and Maori. What is your relationship to the Maori language?

Like most people in New Zealand who speak Maori, I didn’t learn it at my Nanna’s knee. I learned it at university. That’s slowly changing because there’s been a huge renaissance in Maori language and culture in the last 25 years.

I’m not, by any means, a fluent speaker but I really love it. It couldn’t be more different from English, both culturally and linguistically. I find that tension really satisfying. I’m constantly surprised, in a good way, by the differences.

How would you describe those linguistic differences?

I once heard it said that English is very good at defining the absolute, finite details about how things are different from each other, whereas Maori is very good at finding commonalities. In Maori, it’s not as possible to be clear about the ways in which we differ or disagree. It’s just not the same in English, which probably reflects the difference in the ethics of English culture and the ethics of Maori culture as well.

As a writer do you feel pressure to identify as either Maori or non-Maori?

The vast majority of Maori New Zealanders also have non-Maori heritage. However, I still feel a pressure—perceived or real—to choose, but I don’t choose. I consciously say that I’m both and aim to be as proud or ashamed of both. I’ve always been a person who doesn’t really fall into either camp and so I fall between the cracks a little bit, in terms of everything from how I live my life and what events I attend to what kind of government funding I receive.

Photo © Renee Rosensteel

In addition to being a poet and a writer you are also a successful singer, musician, and sound producer. What do you see as the relationship between songwriting and poetry in your work?

Lyrics need a lot more help to come alive. Poems have to perform on the page, they don’t get help from music. When Jan Beatty interviewed me on the radio for Prosody, WYEP’s poetry program, she said, “When you read I hear this rhythm and this pace going on. Is that a New Zealand language thing? Or a Maori thing?” I think it’s because I’m a musician. I don’t know if that’s happening on the page for people when they’re just reading it but I hope so. I think there is some conversation happening there.

Your first book, matuhi | needle is accompanied by Maori artwork and a CD featuring you reading poems and singing. What went into the decision to include these elements?

The book was published with the help of the actor Viggo Mortensen, and he was really interested in doing a book combining work by Maori artists and poets. Viggo was living in New Zealand, mostly in Wellington, for about two or three years making Lord of the Rings. By the end of it he really loved Wellington and wanted to give something back to the city. He approached me and said, “I’d like to publish your book.”

When he said, “Would you like a CD in the back?” I said, “Okay, let’s do that.” I know a number of people who are either dyslexic or have some sort of visual impairment. They listen to poetry a lot rather than read it. I thought the CD was a great opportunity and, because I was working on my first album at the time, I thought I would add a track or two from that. It was all fairly hasty and we probably could have done it better but it does mean that I have this amazing object. I was the most hated poet in New Zealand after it was published.

Do you have any recommendations for readers who are interested in contemporary New Zealand literature?

In terms of our literature, our poetry is really strong. A good place to start is a website called Best New Zealand Poems, published by the International Institute of Modern Letters and supported by Victoria University Press. There’s also the New Zealand Book Council which has a massive amount of links to various other places.

How would you describe the reception of poets and authors in New Zealand today?

It would be safe to say that we haven’t been a country that really embraces and celebrates our artists as much as we celebrate and embrace our rugby players. I think that’s slowly changing. We do have a bit of an attitude, that thing of like, “Well, what do you do?” or “What are you actually doing?” When I do residencies, there is a sense of, “Will you just get a real job? A job that we can understand?” That’s probably the case around the world, but particularly in New Zealand.

Does the push towards social acceptance in the job sphere translate to other parts of your life?

It’s similar also in terms of my sexuality; I’ve had relationships with both men and women. Over the years I’ve been a bit of a thorn in the side of people who would rather I was either just with men or just with women. People who think, Could you just stand up and say that you are a lesbian, please? There’s just an urge in me to resist ticking that box. In terms of living my life, I believe that things are just way more complex.

That desire to “resist ticking the box” comes through often in your work. Your poetry plays with and challenges societal expectations of gender roles. Is that a conscious decision?

It’s not so much a conscious thing as it’s just that I live my life. Sometimes I notice odd, little jarring events where it becomes obvious to me that I’m not necessarily fulfilling everyone’s expectations. Sometimes those moments are worth writing about.

Photo © Renee Rosensteel

I’m not working for a cause or anything like that. I am a political animal, but I don’t feel like I need to tell people about it as much. It’s integrated into my bones. I do feel issues of justice, of right and wrong, very deeply. However I also know that my best writing—and maybe everybody’s best writing—comes from those times when you’re asking questions and not knowing all the answers. One of my professors, the poet Bill Manhire, said to me that you’re always going to be writing from that spot of questioning.  You don’t want to be writing from a place of: “I’m really certain of myself and I’m going to tell you all about it.”

Do you see poetry as an attempt to unearth or understand things that are otherwise hidden?

I do. For me, poetry has always been a process of learning something I didn’t know that I knew. It’s not exactly as if somebody else is writing it, but if I’m doing it well,  poetry gives me access to some other kind of wisdoms that aren’t mine, but at the same time, they are. It’s like communicating with your higher self.

Read Jen’s bio.