GLOBAL WRITING IN NEW YORK
or
How the metropolis of immigrants globalises its writers
A feature by Jane Tversted and Martin Zähringer (Script in English only for this website. This radiofeature was produced by ARD/SWR in 2013)
Special Thanks to Barbara Epler, John Freeeman, Jose Manuel Prieto, Eliot Weinberger, Lee Ming Wei, Vivian Chiu, David Henry Hwang, Ken Chen, Gary Shteyngart, Elena Grokova, Jared Singer, Mahogany Brown, Daniel Gallant, Edwidge Danticat, Chang Rae-Lee and to New York, which is bigger than King Maga.
Speaker
Greenwich Village on Manhattan is a traditional zone of Anglo-American and Jewish literature and education. According to the Federal Census Bureau, 88% of the residents here are white. This does not mean segregation, but Anglophony. English is the key to all culture here. This can be seen very clearly in the educational institutions. Baruch College, for example, which is part of the wealthy New York City University, educates students with over 100 language backgrounds. Here, the Romance philologist Esther Allen teaches the art of translation. She also tries to sensitise the students in the seminars to the languages of the other participants and to enhance them. But English is the academic language of the world, and English is also a crucial transfer language for the perception of literature on a global level.
Take 1 Esther Allen
Translation into English doesn’t just serve speakers of English. … English is the language of global communication. If a Korean sociologist gets translated into English his colleagues in Thailand, Japan and China will be able to read his work. And it might be of much more interest to them than it might be to people in America or in England, that doesn’t really matter to him. He wants to be in English so that his colleagues in his region can read him because typically their second language for most of them will be English. Translation into English is absolutely key. I know that from for example Orhan Pamuk. Of the 50 translations into 50 different languages of his books let’s say half of them are done from the English translation. Because there are just a few people with the necessary level of linguistic and cultural skills to translate between Turkish and whatever other minor language.
Speaker
Esther Allen has published the P.E.N. report on the international situation of translation. Her own article in it is entitled „To be or not to be translated“. In it, the author describes English as the most important linguistic currency in the world. And this has a strong impact on the power of American publishers. English books have a potential market of over one billion readers. At the same time, Allen laments the unwillingness of American publishers to translate the world’s literatures into English. Of 290,000 new publications in 2009, only 3% were translations from other languages, and for works of fiction or poetry the figure was just 0.7%.
Take 2 Esther Allen
Of course what really very dramatically opend peoples eyes was 9/11. … a lot of initiatives through that decade in 2000. But what brought about a dramatic change of heart was 9/11. After 9/11 you suddenly heard things like that: Maybe we should give the rest of the world an English voice for once. They blow everything up because we don’t pay any attention to them otherwise, because we don’t give them any access to our written culture. Suddenly there were very energetic movements and in the first decade of 2000 a lot of publishers and initiatives were launched.
Speaker
These initiatives include the founding of publishing houses with an international focus, as well as government language and cultural programmes, for example in neighbourhoods such as Queens with an extremely high immigrant density. Overall, the demand for integration has also stimulated the creative writing industry, with City University in New York even launching a Spanish-language creative writing course. This is probably not quite enough for the approximately 30% of New Yorkers who are Hispanic. The international students at Greenwich continue to learn English and also do their basic literary exercises in English.
Atmo KGB 1, fade in English visitors‘ voices, continue playing under speaker text
They have chosen the KGB in the East Village as their stage. The KGB literature bar is located on the second floor of an old tenement block in the East Village. There used to be a Ukrainian workers‘ club there, whose symbolic fixtures and fittings are now a source of Soviet nostalgia: the literary underground gathers here between Lenin portraits and Mayakovsky posters, agitprop flyers and historical furniture. And once a month, the stage belongs to the students. More than two thirds of the audience are women, almost as many Asian women as white faces, a few African-Americans and a scattering of Hispanic Americans. The group of readers is just as mixed. But what unites everyone here is the English language.
Atmo KGB Mechana, ending with applause
O-Ton Jose Manuel Prieto:
I have an idea for an anthology of writers like myself – who live in New York but write in other languages, not English. It’s about different writers from many languages. For example, I have friends who write in Russian, Russian poetry, Russian novels, Russian short stories. You know, if you come here young, if you immigrate as a teenager, then you can easily learn the local language. But when you’re a bit older and come to America, you won’t want to or won’t be able to switch. That can happen, for example with Aleksandar Hemon, but I don’t think he was working as a writer before he came to New York. So if you come here and you’re already a writer, it becomes difficult. I wouldn’t be able to change my language. There are a lot of writers like that everywhere, I saw that in Mexico too. There’s a whole Russian community in New York, as well as a Spanish one. I will now be presenting a Spanish-language book on Friday, and this event will be held in Spanish. There are communities like this in many different languages in New York.
Speaker
Jose Manuel Prieto is an internationally renowned novelist. His books are not only translated from Spanish into English, but also into all major literary languages. He has lived in New York for several years, writes in Spanish and speaks Russian at home with his wife and children. Prieto knows many such authors here who write in their native languages for their home market and who are completely unknown in New York. With his anthology, he wants to make them known to a wider audience. At the same time, interested publishers would get their first impressions of these New York writers. Prieto has already presented his project to Barbara Epler from the publishing house New Directions.
Original soundtrack Epler
We don’t do anthologies, but his anthology is very exciting, but I didn’t want to publish it as an anthology.
Speaker:
New Directions is a publishing house for world literature. It is based in the tallest building in the West Village. Right at the top on the 19th floor, publisher Barbara Epler overlooks mythical terrain: the West Village and Little Italy as far as Chinatown, and in the second window the Financial District with the slowly growing Freedom Towers. In between lies the former immigrant island of Ellis Island, with the Statue of Liberty next to it. The publishing house was founded 75 years ago as a publisher of world literature and the American avant-garde. New Directions translates the modernists from Flaubert and Kafka to Tomas Tranströmer, Roberto Bolano and Willi G. Sebald. The group picture of world literature at New Directions is still largely dominated by European authors. But here, too, 9/11, and above all its aftermath, has left its mark:
O-tone Epler 1
We are looking a little more because just the nature of American interests in our current time. We have been looking at finding Arabic language writers because I think we are in an engagement. We are so ignorant on our side that we know so little about their literature, that I think there is a huge opportunity. Like we started with Coledo and now we are doing Sunal Ibrahim and we are looking at some other writers. So we published some very important Chinese writers that’s another area that we are interested in. I wouldn’t mind finding to me another area of great unrest and curiosities. We certainly looked at some Chechien and Russian authors I’m curious about that. No,we publish Victor Coledo, we publish interesting Russian authors but not on that scene. We are interested in everything. But it would be interesting for us to find something from a world area that we haven’t heard that much about. We know a lot about Europe I mean people who read a great deal. That’s not true of Americans in general, but for people who read a great deal the most represented languages are all European and then following the Latin America.
Speaker
Translated literature does not have it easy in America. Many newspapers and literary magazines favour national productions. Publishers and critics are often of the opinion that they are dealing with a kind of inferior original that cannot be presented to readers. Many critics equate competent criticism of translated literature with linguistic translation criticism. In other words, they don’t deal with translated authors at all because they don’t know any foreign languages. But even in this case, New York differs from the American mainstream:
O-Ton Epler 2 Among the critics
Among critics that stand out are James Wood. He did a huge piece for instance on Laszlo in the New Yorker. I got like yea, manna from heaven. We had a book that I didn’t think, we would be able to sell. A little staple book, with highly illustrated expensive for what it is, with this little animal inside and because of that article they sold out like. I was about to lose my shirt.
(play this passage without translation until the question)
James Wood is particularly good, Michael Dirda, Scotta Esposito, Michael Orthofer, more and more like chat post, blogs, things on the web, more than necessary. David Ulin, who writes a lot for The New York Times, he is very interested, the New York Review of Books in general. People like Mark Ford review in depth and with care and they are interested in world literature all of those people.
Would you say, New York is a centre of global writing?
For America, yes, definitely, I mean there are outposts like Grey Wolf and Copper Canyon in San Francisco and L.A. but that’s largely New York most of the publishers are here. The big ones that do some translations Knopf does translations, Hawkwood and Norton do translations and Penguin does Translations and then many, many, many of the great small presses who are the cutting edge of the translation are here.
Original John Freeman 1
The important thing I think to remember is that New York is not America. It’s an aberration (deviation) of America. America is a migrant country but the population here is extremely mixed and very cosmopolitan. There are lots of bookshops, there are lots of festivals and the kinds of cultural things we can take for granted here. Even though they are slightly new like the world voices festival from pen, the asian American festival, they are all new. But we can take that for granted now because there is so much happening.
If we lived in Minneapolis or Cleveland or Dallas or Mobile Alabama or Milwaukee there wouldn’t be these things. And that’s why bookstores and libraries are so important because they are in a very two dimensional way an ongoing festival of ideas and after books can get there, that’s a good thing. We have been lucky in this country in the last couple of years because new directions is still going strong, europaEditions has a very international list, Akashi books is something in Brooklyn, they have a very international list, something called Archipelago, which does a lot of writing from around the world, all kinds- Palestinian, German, Bulgarian and then there is a press called Dalkey Archive, which was run out of Normal Illinois which focuses almost entirely on literature in translation. I think if you create the books they will find readers.
So that helped I think the situation in the u.s. But it’s very different, I mean, the U.S. is a multicultural society and the u.s. is a society that reads outside its borders. It seems like it should be more related than it is. But there can be great parochialisms (provincialism) within a multicultural society. If people only want to read about the experience of their ethnic group then they are not really reading outside of their borders, then they are simply reading to rediscover in different language and narrative what they have experienced themselves.
John Freeman is a well-known literary critic, and reading beyond borders is part of his programme. His main job is currently as editor of the international literary magazine Granta. His office in New York is in Union Square, but the head office is in London and there are also branches in Bulgaria, Argentina, Spain and Italy. More are planned. Granta was a traditional Anglo-American magazine, but discovered the authors of New British Fiction early on, when Salman Rushdie, Tariq Ali, Amitav Gosh, Monica Ali and Hanif Kureishi entered the circle of English literature. Today, the magazine fearlessly reflects the image of globalised literature in America. The Granta best selection from 2007 includes these names: Olga Grushin, Uzodinma Iweala, Nicole Krauss, Daniel Alarcon, ZZ Packer, Gary Shteyngart, Yiyun Li, Jonathan Safraen Foer or Rattawut Lapcharoensap.
For me that means just looking at the globe, because who doesn’t want to travel, when they read, that what it is so much about, it’s about imaginary travel, if not figuratively, than literary going some place else, seeing something else, living another life. And you know you can only do so much of that within your borders. So what I am trying to do with granta is to try to really expand that way. Because it is also an important fact that the bookmarkeds in the U.K. and the U.S. are not so great either and the future of the book is global.
Speaker
Reading, travelling and the literary confrontation with globalisation are also the themes of Eliot Weinberger’s life. The essayist and translator has lived in the West Village since his birth in 1949 and has translated the Mexican Octavio Paz and the Chinese poet Bei Dao, among others. Weinberger engages in a kind of global cultural archaeology: he translates remote texts from the world’s literatures and interprets them poetically. In this way, he creates surprisingly subjective, yet also globalised correspondences: ancient Indian texts come into contact with Portuguese oral literature, Aztec chants or a kaleidoscopic migration history of the rhinoceros.
Original sound Eliot Weinberger 12’35
Well I have worked as an ordinary travel writer for travel magazines, especially when I was younger, because that was a way to pay for the trips. But travel writing, at least in the united states, is all done according to a certain kind of formula and it has to be a first person narrative, it has to be always cheerful. And if you have deviation from that format, they just edit it out. So it’s always you know: My wife and I drove up to the castle where we were greeted by the affable (friendly) innkeeper with his salt and pepper beard. It has to be in that style. Now obviously when I write my own essays, that are about different cultures or different places I just do, what I want to do in my style. And it’s not that kind of commercial magazine writing. It’s a whole other kind of thing. So, I’m not really a travel writer at all.
Original sound Weinberger 15’05
I just write about what I’m interested in and I don’t necessary see myself as a global writer in that sense. Except that I’m interested in a lot of things that happen outside the United States and I have never really written too much about the United States nor have I travelled that much in the United States. It’s typical New York provincialism, you know: I’m born on the island of Manhattan, I still live on the island of Manhattan. And when I travel, I tend to go outside of the United States.
Speaker
Like John Freeman, Eliot Weinberger sees New York as a special cultural zone that, apart from Wall Street, doesn’t have much to do with the rest of America. Just like himself. He is read more in Germany than in the United States. Perhaps this has to do with his sharp cultural criticism of the American way, perhaps also with his analysis of political conditions, especially in the Bush era. Weinberger observes the international tendencies of the literary market and sees strong shifts in the forms of authorship. He has written about the post-national author, as well as about the effects of multiculturalism on literature in America.
O-Ton Eliot Weinberger 3 in: parts weinberger I think whats happening
I think that’s what’s happening in the world now, of course we are in the moment of tremendous mass migration and also in a global communication. So that the idea of national writers is really breaking down because you have so many people who are either immigrants but are also writing in their second language and not in their mother tong . For me that has been tremendously valuable for the western languages. Because languages and literature tend to die when people just end up repeating the same old things to themselves. And the way you get new ideas new stories new perspectives new ways of dealing with the language is when you have new people speaking the language and writing in the language.
Speaker
Speaker
When so-called hyphenated Americans appear, the sales departments of American publishers sound the warning siren. According to the marketing credo, these names never cross the lips of an American, such books don’t sell! Nevertheless, the authors succeed and even make international careers. And when they question the Anglo-American dominance in cultural life, this simply reflects the noticeably changed demographic reality. Since the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 abolished the racist immigration regulations of the 1920s, 20 million immigrants have entered the country, according to official figures. Around 40% of them came from South and Latin American or Caribbean countries, the so-called Hispanic Americans, and around 40% from Asian countries, the Asian Americans. Following their more or less successful economic integration, the new immigrants are making their cultural demands known. Slowly but surely, they are changing the artistic and literary landscape of the United States. Especially in New York.
BLENDING
O-tone Lee Mingwei
Hello, my name is Lee Mingwei. I am from Taiwan but I live and work in New York. Currently I have two museum projects going on at this moment. The first one is at Museum of Chinese in America and the second one is at Brooklyn museum. The projects at MOCA: one of them is called The Travelers. It’s a very simple project. I have designed a hundred little books, left them at the museum a year ago so who ever comes to the museum, they can take a book with them to write about ideas of homes: why did they leave home and would they ever considering going home, back to where they came from. Once they finished the entry they can give it to the second person and the second would do the same writing and then give it to the third person. Once the book is filled, we ask them to send them back to the museum. So what you see in the museum are five out of one hundred because only five made it back. So we have ninety five of them travelling somewhere in the world getting themselves richer and richer into memory and content and once they are filled they will come back to the museum.
Atmo MOCA under speaker text, Mingwei laughing
Speaker
Chinatown, in southern Manhattan, around 80% of New Yorkers living here are of Asian origin. The Museum of Chinese in America, founded in 1980, is located here. The museum’s permanent exhibition features exhibits from over 200 years of Chinese immigration to America, but the staff cultivate an open concept of a living culture of remembrance. This includes theatre and literary readings, art exhibitions and conferences. Since 2009, the MOCA has had generously designed rooms on the SoHo border, and Lee Mingwei’s returned books were exhibited there at a vernissage.
I do think new york is a fabulous place … New York is a very open society.
I think New York is a fabulous place for immigrants. Because once you arrive in New York, you are a New Yorker. You’re not American, you’re not German, you’re not Taiwanese, you’re a New Yorker. And that’s the beauty of New York – anyone can be a New Yorker. Personally, I don’t think I could do this kind of work as an American in Taiwan. New York is a very open society.
Original sound Vivian Chiu
I think life in New York in general is not very easy,… if you compare this with years and years ago.
I find life in New York generally not very easy because the city is so big and competitive. Especially in my line of work. I work as an actress in the theatre and there are a lot of talented people. I wouldn’t directly say that Chinese-Americans have fewer opportunities, but Asian-Americans as a whole have fewer opportunities. Although there is a certain opening at the moment, it is no longer comparable to the situation a few years ago.
Speaker
Vivian Chiu is the PR assistant at MOCA in Chinatown and a trained actress. Like most New Yorkers, she works several jobs to make ends meet. Vivian Chiu is currently working as a stand-in at the Longacre Theatre in the central theatre district on Broadway. This means that she stands in for the female lead in the comedy „Chinglish“ in the event of illness. This is a highly acclaimed comedy about an American in China – real Broadway, perfectly staged, every dialogue polished, every scene spot on. The play’s humour is based on obvious communication problems between the actors, mainly because their translators aren’t much good either. Only the audience is informed about the hair-raising misunderstandings via a wall projector.
Original sound David Henry Hwang 2’50
My intention was to explore the different ways that people can miscommunicate with one another. There are so many different layers of miscommunication. The most obvious of them is language. But then sometimes even if you understand what someone is saying you might as well be speaking a different language because the underlying cultural assumptions can be so different. So I think its really about people by extension cultures and nations that are desperately trying to understand each other, but don’t necessarily have the tools to do so, or because we are not at that point of history yet.
Speaker
The playwright David Henry Hwang is a veteran of the Asian-American cultural scene. He celebrated his first successes on Broadway in the 1980s. Hwang has imbued his new play, which has already been performed in Chicago, with profound symbolism: The American entrepreneur played wants to equip the new Chinese shopping and cultural centres with Western characters on a grand scale, and he will even succeed in this English export despite all the miscommunication and mutual deceptions. Conversely, the real playwright Henry David Hwang is bringing Chinese characters to Broadway for „Chinglish“. Hwang even imports elements of Chinese folk opera and, above all, an astonishing amount of original Chinese text. This is completely new on Broadway, and it is obviously going down well. An audience member after the preview:
Original soundtrack Street Voice
It’s better than entertaining…. But that’s my very idealistic optimistic view.
It is better than entertainment. It is a mirror of the world. People from different countries and cultures come together all the time. And if they are together in the world, then these languages should also be together on stage. But that’s my very optimistic, idealistic view of things.
Original sound David Henry Hwang 6’30
I am not an immigrant, because I was born in America and therefore consider myself an American writer. But I am also a Chinese-American. Anything is possible. You can be an American writer, an Asian-American writer or a Chinese-American writer at the same time. I think the world has gone beyond the point where you could only have one identity. I think we’ve accepted that there are multiple identities in all of our lives and experiences. And the way these combine in each individual is what makes them the person they are.
But what constitutes such an individual? What „diversity of identities“ are we talking about? Many authors are now writing quite successful novels and stories, film scripts and plays, poems and essays about this. Immigrant literature is booming, and in New York it plays an important role. But many writers are not always comfortable with the immigrant author label. They don’t necessarily live in immigrant ghettos like China Town, Flushing Queens, Harlem, the Bronx or Little Italy, but in Brooklyn, where rents are still bearable and the black population is up to 90%. Not so on the East River, within sight of the glittering financial district of Manhattan in the trendy DUMBO neighbourhood.
Speaker
In DUMBO – Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. The skyline is characterised by the gigantic concrete structure of the bridge approach. And a tremendous amount of noise. At the top, the elevated railway runs from Manhattan into the depths of Brooklyn to Coney Island, and down here there are chic designer shops, art stores and galleries. But also the independent bookshops powerHouse Arena and Melville House. This year they are hosting the 3rd Page Turner Literary Festival of Asian American writers and artists. It is organised by the Asian American Writers Workshop, whose president is Ken Chen:
Original sound Ken Chen
The vision of the asian-american writers workshop is one where we believe in being 100 percent New York but also 100 percent transnational at the same time. A lot of the writers we have here today are not asian-american but they are part of a kind of transnational cosmopolitan story. So for example Teju Cole is a Nigerian writer, who has gotten very good reviews for his book. But a lot of his book is about wandering around in New York and travelling around the world. Later we have also got Hisham Matar. He is not asian, he is from Libya, his father was actually disappeared by Gaddafi many years ago. So I think what we see as an Asian-American identity is a way of processing what it means to be a globalised citizen. You have a large quantities of South-Asian, Chinese, Japanese, East-Asian intellectuals, who are migrating from Dheli, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, New York, London, Berlin. What that means is that Asian-American identity is a very special sight where you can understand what it means to have these sort of slippery multiple identities. I think the classic story in America trying to understand ethnic identity is much more about authenticity and about American nationalism. So for example if you where to go to a native American or a black American you would never go up to them to say: you are not American. You might suffer racism but there is no doubt that you are part of this American story. But if you are an immigrant, if you are someone who lives in 3 different places, if you are an immigré, then you are used having an identity that is much more slippery, that have several different valiances, several different selves at the same time and that is something that almost every asian-american knows, have to deal with.
Speaker
The hourly changing panels at the Page Turner Festival provide an opportunity to learn about the experiences of these writers. The importance of the community in the writing courses of the Asian American Writers Workshop is emphasised time and again. But there are also political guests from the Occupy Wall Street movement and writers who are not directly Asian Americans. This year’s guest of honour at the Page Turner Festival is the writer and musician Jessica Hagedorn, originally from Manila. The organisers will surprise her and the audience with a performance of quotations from her new New York novel „Toxicology“.
Atmo Toxicology, continue playing under text
Original sound Ken Chen
Jessica is a part of this whole generation that invented multiculturalism in the united states and it is a generation that rewrote the narrative of what literature is supposed to be. So literature didn’t have to be Henry James or James Lowell but could be something that was inclusive of all America. I think a way of achieving the American promise of a democratic literature. as you know like in the 80ies, 90ies there is a lot of controversy about what is multicultural literature, should we have writers of collour in our syllables at college? But as time goes on the way we understand race and the way we understand literature changes a lot. I think last year or the year before was the first year in American history where the majority of the babies born in hospital were not white. So in another 10 or 20 years it will be a mu? issue. So I think after Jessica Hagedorn there is another generation that might on the outside look atypical. They are not white Americans, their mother and father weren’t born here, they might not have been born here. They will actually be the typical American. That is a typical American foreigner.
So I think that is a lot of what we are doing: writers, who are immigrants writers, who are writing in these different identities are sort of a cutting edge, actually of what all of American literature will look like in the next twenty years.
Pull up Atmo Toxicology
Speaker
Ken Chen has good reason for his bold prediction. After all, of the eight million inhabitants of New York City, over one million are Asian Americans. What Ken Chen still misses as a cultural-political activist are the fruits of an adaptation that Asian Americans actually have no problems with. But their everyday cultural life is still characterised by institutional injustices. These include a lack of representation in the literary world, as well as in the upper echelons of the foundation system that are so important to America, where decisions are made on the allocation of funds for scholarships and cultural budgets. Ken Chen’s optimism also encounters other limits in America. Asians are currently dealing with a latently unfriendly mood since China has become known as a threatening player in globalisation. Immigrant literature as such is also not seen by everyone as necessarily progressive or emancipatory. Eliot Weinberger, who cannot be suspected of xenophobic tendencies, is of the opinion that immigrant literature in America tends to promote the nationalist project because it has weakened the urgently needed activities of translation. And this despite the fact that there are always upward phases for international literature, even in America:
Original sound Eliot Weinberger
During the Bush era, there was another phase when Americans were once again terrified of being American. There was a boom in translations. There were more reports on translated literature, prizes for translations, many more books were translated. Isolation has greatly diminished compared to previous years. On the other hand, the United States translates much less than European countries. And that has something to do with the idea of multiculturalism in the States. Americans are more interested in Chinese-American authors than in the Chinese themselves, they are more interested in Mexican-American writers than in Mexicans themselves. Americans think we get foreign from our own writers, we don’t need foreign writers.
Speaker
Ken Chen disagrees. He complains that the development of literature is not really recognised by Asian-Americans. This is because the Asian-American experience in literature is not as important to the culture industry as the confirmation of foreign images whose mental roots still date back to the Cold War. For example, the saga of the red Chinese. Anyone who writes about this can certainly expect attention and recognition in America:
Original sound Ken Chen T2 0’50 ff
And that is definitely the case if you look at what kind of Asian-Americans are successful in literature. It’s the complete opposite of what Eliot Weinberger claims. For example, the two most successful Sino-Americans Ha Jin, who won the National Award, and Yiyun Li, honoured as a „MacArthur Genius“ and one of the New Yorker’s Best 20 under 40. Both write novels about China. You could also read translated authors from China, and I don’t mean that as a disparagement of their achievements. But the interest is mostly focussed on the Asian subject in Asia and not on the subject in America.
Speaker
The post-national writer is a controversial figure, often associated with fears that, as in other areas of society, confirm the defensive attitude towards globalisation. In New York, one can hardly avoid recognising this type. For to the same extent that the national American author has been exported to the whole world in the course of globalisation, by means of the world language English, a few basic recipes for writing world bestsellers and the global network of market giants such as Bertelsmann and Amazon, the post-national author is now appearing to almost the same extent. He is a child of globalisation à l’America, and in New York quite naturally becomes a player in global writing, or an immigrant author. One of these globalised authors is Gary Shteyngart. Shteyngart came to New York from Eastern Europe with his parents as a child, is famous for his witty novels set in various metropolises and also writes reports for America’s biggest travel magazine. Shteyngart has nothing against being labelled an immigrant author and takes a pragmatic approach to the current market mould of the label:
O-Ton Gary Shteyngart:
Yes, why not, it’s actually helpful. Otherwise I would just be another Anglo-Saxon or Jewish American. It’s nice to be able to dispose of something like that. When I was a kid, it was horrible to be Russian, it was the Cold War and it was all about Reagan’s bad talk about empire. Even to the kids at Jewish school, I had to pretend I was born in Berlin. In Jewish school in America, it was better to be German than Russian. But at the moment it’s a great thing to be able to hang an ethnicity like that on your CV.
Speaker
There are female authors who only write about their own ethnicity. There are immigrant authors who completely Americanise their names. There are writers with Indian names who write post-Soviet Romanian novels, and dealing with other immigrant groups is part of a tradition of literary empathy in immigrant literature anyway. But there are also authors who have to write about their origins. The Russian immigrant Elena Gorokhova came to America as a young adult. She made the leap into English and works as an English teacher in New Jersey. In 2010, she published a memoir about Russia. Gorokhova talks about how she is dominated by her history as an author:
Original sound Elena Gorokhova in: EG parts
I do think that I am an immigrant writer. Because whenever I try to write an American play, even something small about America, I somehow fall back into this Russian thing. It’s either a flashback or a protagonist or something Russian in the play. It keeps pulling me back into this Russian – I don’t know what it is – identity maybe. But I’m not Russian.
Speaker
What am I and what am I not? This question is the existential dilemma of immigrants and an enduring concern of their authors. It is an important question, because in the end it is formulated like this: Who recognises me and who doesn’t? And this recognition is currently once again a decidedly political problem in the USA. It was also discussed at the Page Turner Literary Festival in Brooklyn, on a panel about the new immigration law in Arizona. This has the complicated name „Support our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighbourhoods Act“, i.e. a law to promote law enforcement and settlement protection. The aim is to enforce the prosecution of illegal immigrants. This is a proposal that could be very explosive in the United States, where millions of Mexican labour migrants have been working and living, often without regular papers, for decades. Crossing the border is becoming increasingly dangerous, harassment by authorities is on the rise anyway, and now the law criminalises helping illegal immigrants, even if it means taking a sip of water. The Asian American Writers Workshop has organised a protest under the name Culturstrike:
Atmo Culturstrike „Welcome to Page Turner, this Panel is culturstrike“
New York writers and artists travelled to the border to protest and also show cross-border solidarity with immigrants. The son of Nigerian parents, Tejo Cole – photographer and author – spent a week in Arizona together with predominantly Asian-American colleagues to gain a personal impression of the situation:
Atmo Tejo Cole, 2000 dead
Without translation 2 sentences, then continue
Arizona’s immigration law is provoking heated protests. It is the biggest demographic political issue of our time, at least in New York, where it is causing uproar and protest everywhere. Even on the other side of the East River on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. At the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, slam poet Jared Singer takes on Arizona Senate Bill 1070:
Atmo Cafe 1 Poem by Jared Singer
Ben Frankling once said
Democracy – two wolves and a lamb who have to decide what to have for lunch
And righteousness, accordingly, be a well-armed lamb
He said that a good American is someone
who would never tolerate his country doing something completely wrong
The state of Arizona recently passed a law that not only allows but requires its police officers to
To stop all those who might be illegal immigrants
For the first time since „equal but separate“ was recognised as fundamentally unequal
A racist manhunt legalised
This is a letter to the State of Arizona from the American Flag
Please, I beg you – take me down and burn me!
Atmo Continue poem under speaker text
Speaker
The Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the East Village stands in a historic location. Part of the Lower East Side with its plain tenements was known as Little Germany in the 19th century, later Eastern European immigrants arrived, and finally the immigrants of the so-called Great Migration arrived. These are members of the six million African-Americans who have left the south of the United States since the beginning of the 20th century and who have significantly changed the face of New York. The Great Migration also includes immigrants from the associated Caribbean Free State of Puerto Rico, whose citizens have had American citizenship since 1917. The Puerto Ricans in New York – i.e. Nuyoricans – gave their name to the Nuyorican Poets Café. They are the founders of a self-confident cultural and literary scene, which today is far more than just an expression of an ethnic subculture. The Friday night slams in the café are legendary:
Atmo Mahogany Brown,
Opening of the Friday evening slam
Continue playing under text
Speaker
The Nuyorican Poets Café started out as a living room club almost forty years ago and developed into a central arena for Latin jazz, off-off-Broadway theatre and, above all, the slam poetry scene. The audience ranges from the unemployed from the Bronx to students from Greenwich Village and young bankers from Chelsea. Allen Ginsberg once called the café the most integrated place on the planet. Nevertheless, the poets‘ emotional relationship to their surroundings is the binding agent of their art. But although in the case of the Nuyorican Poets Café it was originally closely tied to the Lower East Side and still is today, this art form combines the local of subcultures with the global, with the universal values of art.
Original soundtrack Daniel Gallant
I tell you this, it was started with the idea of localisation, it was started with the idea of being grassroots community based. However we are constantly surprised by the number of visitors and the number of people who ask questions online and who approach us who are from everywhere from the Ukraine, from Ghana, from Mississippi, from Hawaii, from where ever you can think of. Some of the artists who started at the café, some of the traditions that started there, some of the works that came out of the café, I think have stroke accord (resonance) with international audiences to the point that the idea of being local becomes synonymous with the being universal. Everyone has issues, conflicts, tensions in their own community that are reflected by the work that is performed on that stage. We find that when we have spectators from far away points who have never even been to New York and who wander into the café that they almost always find something and what’s on stage that reminds them of their own personal experiences. It may seem like contradiction in terms but the ideas of local and global seem to fuse when you are talking about spoken word. Simply because they may be talking about what happened to them in Brooklyn that day or what happened to them down the street but really what they are talking about is what happened to them inside, what happened to their emotions, what happened to their sense of dignity or their sense of entitlement or their sense of romance and those sensations are much more universal than they are local. So I think the answer is both, it’s both local and it is global.
Atmo Cafe love poem
O-Ton Gallant If you go to a poetry slam
If you go to a poetry slam at the Nuyorican Cafe, you will hear things that not even your closest friends or relatives would tell you. Once there’s that microphone, that stage and that audience, and especially when someone is able to put their experiences into rhyme or even blank verse, it’s incredibly fascinating to see how strong and confident the artists become. Sometimes it’s terrible, but most of the time it’s a wonderful experience. There is quite simply no comparable art form in terms of the accessibility, the directness and lack of pretence and also the fact that anyone, really anyone, can do it. You have to overcome a few hurdles for the Friday Slam, but not too many, and practically anyone can sign up for the open mic on Mondays. And really anyone working on their poetry, from any cultural background, can work their way through the competitions and make their voice heard. Many other art forms require more in-depth training from the artist or a lot of resources or technical infrastructure. With slam poetry, it’s the immediacy that is so appealing to people.
Speaker
The success of slam poetry, from its beginnings in Chicago via the Lower East Side to the metropolises of the world, is indeed a global sign: the collective language culture of minorities, immigrants and the declassed finds expression even under the most adverse circumstances. Silence wants to be broken. The same applies to writing and the authors of immigrant literature. Edwidge Danticat is one of their classic representatives. She came to Brooklyn from Haiti at the age of twelve, earned a master’s degree in creative writing and is one of the most established authors in American literature. The history of violence in Haiti runs through her books, a history that is usually not allowed to be discussed, even when immigrating to New York or Miami. The writer, who is in close contact with the immigrant communities, has to defend herself against her own people, because this history of violence is also continued in various forms in the diaspora – even if it is only concealed. Nevertheless, Edwidge Danticat remains connected to the local scene, also in her commitment to education. At the same time, it has a global resonance.
Original sound Edwidge Danticat
I see my readers in the whole world I mean I would have never imagined when I was writing the dew breaker that there would be a German version of it. I wasn’t thinking of Germany, I wasn’t thinking of the other places where the book has become translated. So I think sometime the most particular experience can be universal. the most specific story can resonate for people in places that you least expect. So when I am writing I am thinking of the one reader which is the girl that I was when I was 15. I always write for that. And sometimes now I write with my daughters I have two daughters who are two and six.
I imagine myself filling a library for them as they get older. I welcome off course every reader and it is fascinating to me when people who are from very different cultures connect on some level on a certain kind of book I think that’s what makes literature powerful and as far as immigrant writing in terms of whether its fiction or nonfiction it makes a culture sometimes accessible and understandable to people in a way that nothing else could because when you read a book when you write a novel you enters somebody’s life in a way that you never thought you could. And that is the power of literature, that is the power of writing.
Speaker
In the United States, the craft side of literary writing is taught in creative writing courses or schools. In New York, it is already advertised on the streets, and every better university has reasonably famous or well-known writers on its faculty. Writers like Edwidge Danticat, who also has the academic training, are aware that they cannot teach talent and passion for literature. But they can mentor, give advice and recommend important books
Original sound Edwidge Danticat
The creative writing programmes are even more important for immigrants. Many immigrant writers have to assert themselves in their families, they have to stand up to their families and get no support from them. They also have no support in the community and no access to writers, all of which only comes when they attend a creative writing course. On the other hand, they also have special experiences. For example, if you come to a mainstream programme like at the University of New York and you meet older people in your class who have contact with someone from your immigrant group for the first time, then you are suddenly challenged to represent or defend your race or your country. You arrive young in a foreign country and at the same time have to try to understand your own country. That’s a particular challenge because you have to overcome the clichés in people’s minds at the same time. But that’s the task of writers anyway, whether immigrant or not.
Speaker
In her novel „The Lost Father“, Danticat describes an inconspicuous hairdresser in a small immigrant community in Brooklyn. Only later does his daughter find out that he is one of the murderers of the Duvalier regime. Until then, this inconspicuous hairdresser was her model for an ambitious sculptural victimisation project. Perpetrators and victims in direct neighbourhood, their tense silence, the veil over the past – these are also the themes of Chang-rae Lee. Chang-rae Lee, who came to New York from Korea as a child, is also one of America’s famous authors today and also works as a creative writing lecturer.
Original sound Chang-Rae Lee 12’25
I sometimes get frustrated at the thought that people expect me to write in a certain way. That I have certain themes, certain forms and ways of writing that make my story something typically Asian American. If you take a closer look at Asian American literature, you’ll find a great diversity and polyphony and very different themes. Sometimes these authors don’t even touch on Asian American themes anymore.
Speaker
Chang-rae Lee does touch on these themes. But he deliberately transcends national and cultural horizons. The narrator in his novel „Fremd im eigenen Leben“ is a Japanese immigrant. At the end of a perfect assimilation as a businessman in Queens/New York, this Doc Hata is suddenly overwhelmed by memories of the Japanese-Korean War. This is the first time Chang-rae Lee touches on the repressed theme of the so-called Korean comfort women. In doing so, he makes clear how national historical themes change in the immigrant perspective – for hyphenated Americans, history is no longer a national project, not even a binational one. History becomes a question of transnational or even global relationships, a fissured landscape of memory that is accessible from several sides at once. In his new novel „The Survivors“, he approaches the silence of Koreans about the Korean War of 1950-1953:
Original sound Chang-rae Lee 0’45
I went to Korea to do research and tried to talk to people there, but many of these people didn’t want to talk. Sometimes it’s a bit difficult, of course people don’t want to talk about trauma and the past. You live in Germany, I’m sure you know about it. It’s human nature, let’s talk about my father’s generation. He was a boy of 12 during the Korean War. Millions of people died back then and the survivors had a terrible time. It was like Germany after the war, just total destruction. Everyone was hungry during the war and hungry after the war. I know people in their seventies, from my father’s generation, who never wanted to talk about that time. It’s just too terrible for them, an absolute and total disaster. My father lost brothers and sisters, saw terrible things.
Original sound Chang-Rae 2’20
Individual people, I’m not of the feeling that individual people need to remember but I think collectively we need to remember. Individual people should do what they want and can do. I came up against that, when I was interviewing my father, because I could see that is was very, very painful for him to talk about these things. But of course as a writer you know part of my interest here was again to set it in the Korean war because I have family connection there. But to talk about our collective experience as modern people we have always, always had the spectra of war with us in every year, that is what has shaped us as a species. Modern history is nothing than the history of war or aftermath.
Speaker
Chang-rae Lee is an exemplary author of this period. In his novels, he moves from the specific and individual questions of that delicate immigrant identity in America to the universal theme of war. And this writer shows how small literatures and minority discourses are increasingly transforming into something that corresponds very closely to the global upheavals of our time.