Pen World Voices Literary Festival

NOTE: The following was scheduled for posting on Mon 5/3. I postponed it two days to allow room for Bin Laden's death.) 

     The Pen World Voices literary festival took place here in New York last week. Unfortunately, an unusually busy work schedule only allowed me to attend two of its events.
     My impressions of the two follow:

- Revolutionaries of the Arab World, 4/27/11 - 

     The first event I attended saw six panelists discussing the Arab Spring. I picked it out of a long list of programs in part out of the hope that it would do one of two things: cure me of my idealistic infatuation that the revolutions will somehow blow the lid off global evil, or legitimize that infatuation by exposing me to others who felt the same.
     In the end, it did neither, and was something of a disappointment, lacking a specific agenda and digressing as a consequence, consisting entirely of secular individuals who couldn’t speak to the religious experience of the uprising, and featuring a gender ratio that I wasn’t all that happy with: five men and one woman.
     That said, the speakers themselves were enthralling, not the least of which being Rula Jebreal, a Palestinian journalist and novelist and the aforementioned sole female contingent of the bunch. She had an exacting presence about her, and spoke in a manner so commanding of attention that when she praised the dictator oustings for putting and end to “all that bullshit,” it didn’t seem as if anything else needed to be said.
     Rula also offered what is possibly the most compelling litmus test I’ve ever head for determining whether or not a revolution will reproduce evil: “see how the military beaves and how the women are treated, and then you’ll know.”
     I also became an immediate fan of Alex Nuns, the only non-Arab on the panel, a fact he acknowledged, in classic British Isles deadpan, in his introduction: “like the moderator said, I’m just an English guy.” Ironically, through his co-editing of Tweets from Tahrir: Egypt’s Revolution as it Unfolded, In the Words of the People Who Made It, managed to bring to the audience the most intimate portrait of the revolution of any of the presenters: scattered tweets and Facebook posts from the young men and women who rallied in the thick of it.
     When asked what made the Arab revolution significant, Alex answered simply, “For the first time in decades, Arab public opinion counts.”
     There was, in addition, Abdelkader Benali, a Moroccan novelist whose work has garnered multiple awards internationally, and who spoke of the revolutions with the fierce and unmitigated enthusiasm that most closely resembled my own.
     Further resonances emerged when the moderator put to him the question of whether or not political enthusiasm can in fact corrupt the quality of one’s writing by sliding the scale toward propaganda, a concern I’ve frequently had about my own work, with Companions of the Garden a prime example.
He answered, compellingly if not directly, that the spirit of the revolution and their nature trickles into his writing whether he wants them to or not.
     “With something like this,” he said, “it’s really hard to maintain distance.”
     Given the incredible talent of everyone present, it was a shame that the course of conversation proved so scattershot, and also that it was only allowed a mere 80 minutes to breathe.

- The Moth: What Went Wrong, 4/30/11 – 

     On Saturday evening, I attended a night of high-priced storytelling with the Moth, an organization devoted specifically to the world’s oldest art form. The theme of the night was “What Went Wrong,” a concept that the various storytellers were allowed to interpret as they saw fit.
    Salman Rushdie hosted the event. Though my respect for him has sunk wildly since his signing of the petition for Roman Polanski’s release, I couldn’t deny being a little humbled at seeing him in person, and was impressed by how personable he was, both funny and engaging.
     The concept of the evening was truly brilliant, five great authors switching off at the microphone, and, for rigorously enforced ten-minute blocks of time, telling their stories. Not reading samples of their work, or reciting poetry. Telling stories.
     Jenny Allen, one of my favorite presenters of the evening, told the devastatingly moving and oddly hilarious story of picking out a wig while battling cancer, negotiating such horrifying phenomena as the $5000 differential between wigs made of Indian women’s hair and the higher-prices wigs of European hair.
     Elif Shafak, one of the more popular novelists in Turkey, whom the feminist in me compels me to learn more about, told of the eleven-plus days in which she didn’t leave her apartment in Istanbul, having vowed not to do so until she’d finished her book.
     Australian naturalist and outdoorsman Warren McDonald recounted the forty-eight hours he spent pinned beneath a boulder; how it cost him his legs but couldn’t keep him from climbing, the story ending with him dragging himself to the summit of a peak in Tasmania.
     After the intermission, playwright Edgar Oliver spun the wonderfully weird yarn of his wine-laden, Bohemianesque escapades in Tangiers, and Jonathan Franzen, closing out the night on the perfect note, raised the uncomfortable question of what happens when a storyteller claims as his own the story of someone else.
     Walking away from the near saturation of talent, I felt even more the looming obligation to read more than I’m reading.
     I have yet to be convinced that short of experience, a writer has any greater duty.