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Exile, Writing, and Cultural Freedom

An evening in support of the International Network of Cities of Asylum with Svetlana Alexievich, Russell Banks, Jayne Cortez, Fernando Garavito, Bei Dao, Wole Soyinka, and others.
Friday 28 May 2004

The International Network of Cities of Asylum (INCA) was created after an appeal launched in July 1993 by 300 writers from all over the world for a new international structure capable of organizing a concrete solidarity with persecuted writers, in the form of a Cities of Asylum Network.

Svetlana Alexievich, born in 1948 in Belarus, is the author of War Doesn’t Have a Woman’s Face which brought official accusations of “pacifism and an unheroic portrayal of the Soviet woman” and subsequent persecution. With Perestroika came the lifting of the ban on her book, The Boys of Zinc, which deconstructed the myth of the Soviet-Afghan war. The book was attacked by the military and Communists alike, and in 1992 Alexievich was subjected to a political court suit which was later stopped after protests from international human rights watch groups. Frequently attacked by the Loukachenko regime, Alexeivitch was accused of being a member of the CIA, had her telephone bugged, and was forbidden from making public appearances. In 2000 she was provided refuge under the International Network of Cities of Asylum and now resides in Paris.

Russell Banks, INCA’s current president, is a prolific writer of fiction, whose titles include Searching for Survivors, The Relation of My Imprisonment, Continental Drift, Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, and Cloudsplitter. Banks has made a life’s work of charting the causes and effects of the terrible things “normal” men can and will do. He writes with an intensely focused empathy and a compassionate sense of humor that help to keep readers, if not his characters, afloat through the misadventures and outright tragedies in his books.

Jayne Cortez was born in Arizona, raised in California, and resides in New York City. Described as a “womanist warrior poet,” Cortez is the author of ten books of poetry and has performed her poetry with music on nine recordings. Her poetry ranges from the overtly political to streetwise and is delivered in a voice celebrated for its political, surrealistic, dynamic, innovatively lyrical and visceral sound.

Fernando Garavito, is a well-known and highly respected newspaper columnist from Bogotá, Colombia. He was forced into exile after publishing a biography in 2002 detailing the links between Colombia’s drug cartels, right-wing paramilitary groups, and the then-candidate and current President, Alvaro Uribe Velez. After fleeing to the United States with his family, Garavito found work teaching in Maine, but by mid-2003 the family was in desperate economic straits and inquiries back home revealed it was still not safe to return to Colombia. It was at that time that Garavito was referred to the International Cities of Asylum project. This led to sponsorship by PEN New Mexico, with support from Lannan Foundation, and Garavito and his family relocated to Santa Fe. This spring, Garavito joined the faculty at University of New Mexico as a lecturer and Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Latin American Studies.

Bei Dao, who was forced into exile following the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, is widely treasured by those who participated in China’s democracy movement. Dao is a member of China’s “misty school,” a movement of fresh poetics that emerged in the1970s using “free verse” in a hermetic, semi-private language characterized by oblique imagery and elliptical syntax. Dao’s poetry depicts the intimacy of passion, love, and friendship in a society where trust can literally be a matter of life and death.

Wole Soyinka, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986 and president of INCA from 1997-2000, is among contemporary Africa’s greatest writers and one of the continent’s most imaginative advocates of native culture and of the humane social order it embodies. Soyinka is a playwright, novelist, and memoirist as well as an outspoken critic of the Nigerian dictator General Sani Abacha, and now lives in exile in the United States. His experiences that led up to exile are vibrantly described in his memoirs Aké: The Years of Childhood and The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka, about his two years in solitary confinement (1967 – 1969), punishment for supporting Biafran secession.

Click the Next Page link below to read articles published in the New Mexico press regarding Fernando Garavito and the International Network of Cities of Asylum.

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