International Writing Program Research Articles

Six Poems by Óscar Hahn

Óscar Hahn (b. 1938) was a member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 1971. He went into exile from his native Chile in 1974 after having been held in the Arica Prison following Pinochet’s military coup the previous year. Hahn earned a doctorate from the University of Maryland in 1977. His book of poems, Mal de amor (tr. Love Breaks), was banned by Chile’s junta in 1981. For some thirty years he was a professor of Latin American literature at the University of Iowa, where he now holds emeritus status. Hahn currently resides in Ohio.

Exploring the Popular Culture in the Works of Young Philippine Novelists

This research paper will discuss the manifestation of popular culture in the works of young Filipino novelists. It will focus on the novels of three young Filipino novelists in the Philippines. The three Filipino novels are Peksman (Mamatay Ka Man) Nagsisinungaling Ako (at Iba Pang Kuwentong Kasinungalingan na Di Dapat Paniwalaan) by Eros S. Atalia, published in 2007; Lumbay ng Dila by Genevieve L. Asenjo, published in 2010 and Sa Kasunod ng 909 by Edgar Calabia Samar, published in 2012. These three novels were prizewinners and received citations in the Philippines. All of the authors of these three novels became fellows of the International Writing Program (IWP) of the University of Iowa. The primary objectives of this research paper are: to explore the manifestations of popular culture in the selected three novels from the Philippines as works and practices of intellectual and incredibly artistic activity of young Filipino novelists and to build a new understanding and reading of the works of young novelists of the current generation in the Philippines. The methods in exploring and investigating the manifestations of popular culture will be based on the perspectives on popular culture of the Filipino scholar Rhoderick Nuncio that explains that the manifestation of popular culture is the enlivening with popular things, technology, images, symbols, signs, and commodities in people experiences to be awakened in the rapid changes of civilization. The presence of popular culture in the selected novels highlight their recurring nature and their impact on society. Finding showed that popular culture is a complex and ever-changing phenomenon that occurs uniquely in place and time, representing a complex of mutually interdependent perspectives and values. Selected Novels written by young Philippine novelists have a significant impact for both culture and language.

Engagement, reunion, division: 1979 Chinese Weekend in Iowa City

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes the Chinese Weekend at the International Writing Program in Iowa City to illustrate the nuances of the late Cold War geopolitics via transpacific cultural exchange. By looking at the Chinese writers at the IWP in 1979, it narrates a late Cold War story about cross-national, interpersonal exchange that goes beyond the framework of the governmental powerplay. The analysis of the Chinese Weekend, however, reveals that the exchange at the IWP was considerably mediated by the U.S.’s China policy. By zooming in to the Chinese Weekend held in Iowa City, this essay offers a glimpse of what 1979 meant for the Chinese diaspora in the U.S., and how the meaning was different for Chinese writers visiting Iowa City. Taking the Chinese Weekend as a case study, this essay interrogates the role of the IWP in engaging with China. It argues that although the IWP tried to transcend the division of the two Chinas, the Program could hardly free itself from the Cold War divide. Whereas the Chinese Weekend is celebrated as a Chinese reunion, the reunion was implicated in the geopolitics of Cold War in the 1970s.

Herd

Herd Barbara Ras (bio) Keywords Barbara, Ras, poetry, face, horse, dirt, dreams, night I felt hands cup my eyes, lower the lids, and hold themuntil they stopped shuddering, like in the story,when the girl covers a horse's eyes to calm it, releaseit from standing watch. You and I stood next to each otherin a business meeting, yes, at work, shoulder to shoulder our invisible shadows smoldering. Then I lay down on my side, stretched out my four legs,a horse able to sleep, safe with its herd watching. In my body I felt the warmth of the ground connect with the hot of the sun,a current carried the feel of your starched shirt and the gritof dirt against my cheek. Your name drifted awayinto pallid clouds, mine started to follow, and a tonguenew to me in reach reached to lick them back. Or maybe it was you who lay down like a horse givingitself to dreams. Your muscles twitched. Heat roseoff your body like remorse exploring the air for mercy. All this I knew, being your herd, and sharing your restlessnessfor tall grass, wind playing over a prairie that hides bird skull, a brass brooch, teeth. Could our colleagues smell the horses, the horse heat, the horse breath? [End Page 230] I heard "oysters," whispered in my ear as if I had asked your favorite food. No, I'd asked how many carrots a horse eats in a day. We didn't speak of what we didn't know how to hold in our hands. As always the day fell.The night caught it as always. [End Page 231] Barbara Ras barbara ras is the author of four poetry collections, including Bite Every Sorrow, which won the Walt Whitman Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; One Hidden Stuff; and The Last Skin. The poems published here are from her most recent book, published in 2021, The Blues of Heaven. Ras is the editor of a collection of short fiction in translation, Costa Rica: A Traveler's Literary Companion. She has taught poetry nationally and internationally with the International Writing Program. Ras is the founding director emerita of Trinity University Press. Copyright © 2021 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

Co-opting the International Writing Program during the Cold War

Abstract This article examines the Hong Kong writer Gu Cangwu 古蒼梧 (1945–) and his grassroots activism during the Cold War, namely, his appropriation of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program (IWP). At the IWP from 1970 to 1971, Gu grew critical of US foreign policy, coedited a newsletter produced in the IWP offices, participated in political demonstrations, and published correspondence in Hong Kong in support of the Baodiao movement. The author argues that Gu's activities co-opted a Cold War institution to promote collective political action among the Chinese diaspora and, importantly, among audiences back in Hong Kong, amplified political resistance against both the United States and the United Kingdom. An examination of Gu's writings, including his correspondence, poems, and 2012 faux memoir Jiu jian 舊箋 (Old Letters), in relation to Kuan-hsing Chen's model of “Asia as method” and minjian society, establishes how Gu's political awakening in the United States and the overall student-led Baodiao movement enlarges Chen's conceptual framework. Rather than arising out of indigenous practices, the transpacific movement began overseas among the Chinese diaspora and, in the eyes of Gu, led to genuine political change in Hong Kong.

Wang Anyi, Taiwan, and the World: The 1983 International Writing Program and Biblical Allusions in Utopian Verses

Issues in Sino-American literary exchange during the Cold War is a growing field of study in recent years. Literary historians note that “cultural Cold War” institutions such as the International Writing Program have been funded by conservative organizations to inculcate core Western values like liberal democracy as a bid to counter communism. Hence, whether individual Chinese writers during the Cold War era gave in to or resisted ideological brainwashing has become a critical field for study. By focusing on Wang Anyi’s American experience and its influence as described in her 1983 Utopian Verses, this article argues that in addition to the analyses of institutional constituencies, the current cultural Cold War paradigm has to take into account the actual interaction between writers and the institutions, and among the writers themselves. I examine how Wang was skeptical of, yet deeply attracted to, the Taiwanese left-wing novelist Chen Yingzhen’s religious and socialist utopianism. Chen’s socialist ideals and his religious faith provided Wang with a concentric framework to first position China and Chinese literature within a worldly context, and next, within the concept of utopian idealism. Nonetheless, such idealized utopianism was conditioned by the Cold War backdrop of ideological conflict.

Mothers and Daughters: Orphanage as Method

Published in 1986, one of Wang Anyi’s earliest books consists of the journals that she and her mother, Ru Zhijuan, kept during their stay at the Iowa International Writing Program in Fall of 1983. This essay uses Wang Anyi’s relationship with her mother as an entry point into a broader consideration of Wang Anyi’s oeuvre, arguing that Wang explores this relationship in a displaced manner in several of her subsequent works, in which she repeatedly characterizes both her mother and herself (and their respective fictional stand-ins) as figurative orphans. I propose that this “orphan” trope also offers a useful metaphor for understanding the metatextual turn that Wang’s literary efforts began to take a few years after she attended the Iowa International Writing Program.

The World Comes to Iowa in the Cold War: International Writing Program and the Translation of Mao Zedong

This essay investigates the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa under the directorship of Paul Engle and Hualing Nieh during the Cold War. It argues that the exchange and translation of literature at Iowa had been enabled and circumscribed by Cold War politics, interrogating the proximity between US Cold War agenda and Iowan literary ideal by critiquing Cold War liberalism embodied by Engle and Nieh. Their translation of Mao Zedong’s poems epitomizes a political and literary archive of the Cold War, symptomatically illustrating the figure and signification of “China” in the US imagination, and demonstrating the intimacy between literary production and political endeavor. Reading Nieh and Engle’s translation of Mao’s poems as letters of the US Empire specifically scripted through and within Cold War geopolitics, this essay interrogates the neutrality of creative writing and literary translation foundational to and claimed by the International Writing Program since its establishment in 1967.

Shibasaki Tomoka's Literature of Location

Shibasaki Tomoka's Literature of Location Kendall Heitzman (bio) The writer Shibasaki Tomoka (b. 1973) grew up in Osaka and still considers herself to be an Osakan through and through, although she has now lived in Tokyo for well over a decade. Her first novel, A Day on the Planet (Kyō no dekigoto, 2000), was turned into a (substantially different) film in 2003. Many of her stories and novels are set in the Kansai region of Japan, and in 2006 she won the Oda Sakunosuke Prize, at that time awarded to works with a connection to Kansai. In 2014, when she won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's most prestigious literary award, for her novella Spring Garden (Haru no niwa), she was a decade and a half into her writing career. The story translated here, "Right Here, Right Here" (Koko de, koko de, 2011), is the product of Shibasaki's mid-career, at a point when she was starting to give greater attention to questions of memory and history. Even in Tokyo, Shibasaki continues to write stories set in her native Osaka. Her Osakan characters speak to one another in the dialect of Osaka, Osaka-ben, which Shibasaki rightly distinguishes from Kansai-ben, the more commonly applied term encompassing the dialects of the entire region. To outsiders, Osaka-ben is often considered earthy and brash; it is heard across the nation as the province of Japanese comedy. For many Osakans, [End Page 96] it is a point of pride. To them, Osaka-ben conveys an air of openness and warmth, in sharp contrast to Tokyo's cold formality. Perhaps many people of various stripes who have experienced life in both places would agree, but this is surely too facile a description of a lived language for a region of well over 20 million people, one which has both casual and formal registers. When asked at a reading at the University of Oregon in 2016 how she herself feels the Osakan dialect should be rendered into English, Shibasaki reminded her audience that it is only a dialect to someone observing it from the perspective of "standard" Japanese; to the people who use Osaka-ben on a daily basis, it is simply Japanese.1 Translators and scholars have often mourned the loss of the Osaka dialect in translation, most noticeably with respect to Edward Seidensticker's 1957 translation of Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's The Makioka Sisters (Sasameyuki, published 1943–48), but to Shibasaki's thinking, the rhythm of the conversation and its seemingly limitless potential to wander afield denote its Osaka-ness far more than verb endings and vocabulary do. For Shibasaki, Osakan conversation is marked by its generosity of spirit: in Tokyo, she claims, you go into a store and ask if they have such-and-such kind of pen and the clerk has no problem simply saying, "No." In Osaka, the proper answer is something like, "Oh, we had it in stock until yesterday—if only you had come yesterday. . . ." Such a reply is very nearly the beginning of a story, and provides a way for the customer to respond in turn. In Osaka, Shibasaki insists, the speaker always feels an obligation to provide an opening for the conversation to continue.2 In "Right Here, Right Here," when the protagonist and her friend run into an acquaintance on a train platform, she feels obligated to "say something to make him laugh." When Shibasaki's characters speak, sentences trail off and conversations blithely meander far from where they started, as though the social codes of Osaka are inscribed into every story and novel. Osaka-ben is denoted in my translation of "Right Here, Right Here" by a slight expansiveness in the language the characters use. Shibasaki studied geography in college and has a great deal of interest in constructed spaces and urban history. "One of my favorite everyday activities is to conjecture about streets and buildings; no matter how many hours I observe them, I never get tired of it," she said in a public talk while participating in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in 2016.3 No surprise, then, that location—by which I mean a story...

An Interview with Alvin Pang

Alvin Pang, born in Singapore in 1972, is a prominent Singaporean poet, author, editor, translator and literary activist. He graduated with First Class Honours in Literature from the University of York in the UK and taught for two years in a junior college in Singapore. He has also worked as a civil servant, journalist, web producer and is currently an independent editor of both corporate and literary publications, including the public policy journal ETHOS, for which he is Editor-In-Chief. A 2002 Fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, he was named 2005 Young Artist of the Year for Literature by Singapore’s National Arts Council and conferred the Singapore Youth Award (Arts and Culture) in 2007. Pang’s first two poetry collections, Testing the Silence and City of Rain, both published by Ethos Books (Singapore), were listed in The Straits Times' Top Ten Books of 1997 and 2003. A collection of creative prose What Gives Us Our Names was published by Math Paper Press (Singapore) in 2011. His poetry has been translated into over fifteen languages; translated volumes of his work include Other Things and Other Poems (Brutal: Croatia, 2012), Teorija strun [String Theory] (JKSD: Slovenia, 2012) and Nar barbarerna kommer (Ramus: Sweden, 2015). His first UK collection When the Barbarians Arrive was published by Arc Publications in 2012. Pang has made numerous appearances at major international festivals including representing Singapore at the Poetry Parnassus festival, part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad in London, alongside Seamus Heaney (Ireland), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria) and John Kinsella (Australia). He participated in the StAnza Poetry Festival in St Andrews in 2013. After appearances at the Hay Festival Segovia (2014), he featured in the 2016 Zee Jaipur Literature Festival in India and the International Festival of Poetry in Granada, Nicaragua, and will appear at festivals in Bucharest and Belgrade later in the same year. Pang’s work has been featured in the Atlanta Review, The Wolf, English Review, Salt, Westerly, Australian Poetry Journal, Bonniers Literary Magazine, Washington Square Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and many others. His work has appeared in anthologies, including Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond by W W Norton (USA) in 2008, RHYTHMS: The Millennium Anthology of Singapore Poetry by Singapore’s National Arts Council in 2000, for which he was the English Language Poetry Editor, and The World Record by Bloodaxe Books (UK) in 2012 as part of Poetry Parnassus. Pang is a leading advocate and anthologist of Singapore writing. Anthologies he has curated include No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry in 2000; Over There: Poems from Singapore and Australia (co-edited with John Kinsella) by Ethos Books (Singapore) in 2008; and Tumasik: Contemporary Writing from Singapore, comprising both translated work and work in English, by Autumn Hill Books (USA) in 2009. In collaboration with US-based journal Drunken Boat in 2015, he curated UNION: 15 Years of Drunken Boat/50 Years of Writing from Singapore, a 600+ page anthology featuring 140 distinguished Singaporean and international contributors. Pang is also a translator of the Chinese language poems of the Singaporean Cultural Medallionist author Yeng Pway Ngon. Yugin Teo first met Pang when he was in the UK for the London Book Fair in 2013. Their conversation in April 2014 began at the independent bookstore BooksActually in Singapore, where Pang introduced him to a wide array of new Singaporean writing, and the interview then took place in a nearby cafe.

Violence and Being Human: A Conversation with Han Kang

WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 61 photo : peculiar view photography cover feature Four Asian Voices With autobiographical power, these Asian writers embody imagined homelands in verse and fiction, finding refuge and reconnection in words. Featuring HAN KANG 62 BERNICE CHAULY 68 WANG PING 74 MING DI 78 62 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2016 photo : baik dahum cover feature four asian voices Violence and Being Human A Conversation with Han Kang by Krys Lee B orn in South Korea in 1970, Han Kang made her literary debut as a poet in 1993. She has since published novels and short fiction and won the Yi Sang Literary Prize, the Today’s Young Artist Award, and the Manhae Literary Prize. She currently works as a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. The Vegetarian, Deborah Smith’s English translation of one of Han Kang’s five novels, has been shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. In The Vegetarian, a married woman rebels against strict Korean social mores by becoming a vegetarian, leading her husband to assert himself through acts of sexual sadism. Here, author Krys Lee speaks with Han Kang about her development as a writer and the recurring theme of violence in her work. Krys Lee: Can you tell us about how you became a writer? Was it something you aspired to be from a young age? Han Kang: I was always surrounded by literary influences—my father is a writer too, you see. We lived in a humble home; we didn’t have much furniture, and we moved around a lot. He loved collecting books, so naturally I was always surrounded by them—on the floor, in every nook and cranny. Everything except the window and door was blanketed by books. The library kept growing. I remember that books always felt “expansive” in the sense that they were in constant abundance, to the extent that I was surprised when I visited my friend’s home and saw how it lacked books. I read freely and absorbed the language, and my parents left me alone so I could read challenging novels as I pleased; I discovered that I loved reading. Writing came naturally, too. In my teens, I felt the common existential kind of angst over questions such as Who am I? What is my purpose? Why do people need to die, and where do we go afterward? All these questions felt burdensome, so once again I turned to the books that I believed held answers to many of the questions in my youth. They didn’t have any answers. Ironically, that encouraged me. It showed me that I could be a writer, too, that it was for those who have questions , not answers. KL: The visual arts, or a sense of the visual, feature strongly in your work. I was wondering where this interest first came from and how you found yourself using the point of view of the artist in your writing in The Vegetarian and Your Cold Hands. HK: When I was young, my aunt, who was studying art, lived with us for a time. Her room was always full of her work, and I’d often model for her, too. WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 63 64 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2016 It was difficult to stay still, frankly. That experience probably helped me understand the point of view of artists and their subjects in my work. I myself never really got into drawing. When I was at the Iowa International Writing Program, they gave me a stipend that allowed me to travel, and whenever I traveled to new cities in America, I was alone, so naturally I spent a lot of time looking at art in museums. I guess you could say I became truly aware of art in my twenties that way. I think I absorbed those experiences, and this is reflected in my writing. I also like examining and exploring details. Snow falling on a black coat, for example. For a split second, the snowflake looks almost hexagonal. This also goes beyond the visual arts. This idea of looking deeply at and into something is, I think, part of the realm of literature . But...

Od pisarza narodowego do światowego i z powrotem. O polskich uczestnikach Iowa Writing Program

Since 1966 Polish authors regularly participate in the world-famous International Writing Program at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, USA. Selected writers arrive in the United States as recipients of prestigious grants in order to meet American publishers, literary agents, journalists and readers. During their residency they establish relationships with other recognized writers and representatives of the world’s intellectual elite. Recommended by the Program’s organizers, they give lectures at renowned American universities after their residency in Iowa comes to an end. Due to these circumstances, they often perceive their stay in the US as an opportunity to upgrade their status of a national writer to the global one. Nevertheless, most of them do not succeed in such a transformation. The paper traces the efforts of three Polish writers: Andrzej Kijowski, Grzegorz Musiał and Artur Międzyrzecki, undertaken with the hope of making an international career. It also tries to find an explanation for their failure in this respect and to show how the lack of meaningful success outside Poland influenced the way in which these writers treated world literature and its representatives.

Collection Development Trip to Moscow, Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius, May 3–23, 2013

The author traveled to Moscow, Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius in May 2013. The primary purpose of the trip was to acquire materials written by former participants in the University of Iowa’s (UI) International Writing Program (IWP). The UI Libraries has an approval plan for works written by IWP authors from selected countries, including those she visited, but this trip was an opportunity to locate harder to identify materials and to learn from the writers themselves about their current projects.

The Past Prepares the Future: A Conversation with Burundian Novelist Roland Rugero

12 worldliteraturetoday.org WLT interview A Conversation with Burundian Novelist Roland Rugero Emily Hunt & David Shook R oland Rugero (b. 1986) grew up in exile from his native Burundi but returned as soon as he could to pursue his education and eventually work as a professional journalist and writer. His second novel, Baho!, was published in France in 2012 and is forthcoming in English in 2015 (Phoneme Media), in a translation from the French by Christopher Schaefer. An active booster of Burundian literature, Rugero cofounded the Samandari literary workshop, which meets weekly in Bujumbura, and launched both the Frenchlanguage short-story Prix Michel Kayoya, now in its fourth year, and the English-language Andika Prize, now in its first. Rugero recently spent ten weeks at Iowa ’s International Writing Program. Shortly thereafter we corresponded about his upbringing as a refugee, the sociopolitical dimensions of his writing and being a writer, and the use of Kirundi in his writing. photo : creg bal The Past Prepares the Future September–October 2014 • 13 Emily Hunt & David Shook: How did your childhood as a refugee shape you as a writer? What about as a reader? How did you learn to read—and what—growing up between places, across borders? Roland Rugero: I left Burundi for the first time and became a refugee when I was seven. I left for Rwanda in September 1993, around the same time as the assassination of President Ndadaye. Three months later, I returned to Burundi before leaving again to Tanzania, around the time of President Ntaryamira’s death. I stayed there for four years. Even as a child, the exile was a very painful experience: Burundi was the home to which I truly wanted to return. I spent a lot of time staring at Lake Tanganyika. I really felt like a refugee, mkimbizi in Swahili (literally, “he who runs”). I wanted to run backward, like I did when I was returning home from Kinindo’s elementary school. Exile gave me time for my first silences, far from the silly games of my schoolmates at the Centre Scolaire Congolais, in Kigoma. The time for my first readings, for wanting to understand, through the rare newspapers that I would find from Burundi, what was happening, and why, and to what end. Otherwise, I technically learned to read as a little street urchin, at the Stella Matutina primary school. My father always wanted us to attend public school. Also, I had the fortune, as I understood it much later, to grow up without television in my family home: my time there was reserved for reading . I read children and young-adult books (OuiOui , Tom Sawyer, Robinson Crusoe, Jules Verne), some comic books, scientific journals, and soon after, crime novels, Hugo, a little philosophy . . . EH & DS: You also work as a journalist. How does that work interact with your work as a novelist ? What is the state of Burundian journalism today? RR: The journalist, like the author, is a griot of time. The difference between them? The former is more used to urgency, to time passing faster and faster. The rapid time of the journalist thus creates the literary account that I develop with the nonchalance of an author. In my opinion, Burundian journalism today suffers doubly: first, as journalism does throughout the world (albeit to different degrees), from predatory powers, and second, for not properly demonstrating and giving full justice to the formidable space of expression taking place in Burundi. EH & DS: When and why did you decide to become a novelist? Is writing fiction political? RR: Fiction that recounts the human, in all its forms, is always political. In my view, mankind is never alone in a novel, whatever he may be. He is at least two, with the author of the story. With this, a city of interactions thus forms, a polis springs up. But I never really decided to be a novelist. I just realized that I could write stories. EH & DS: If the action of eating is linked to the present, what does the feeling of hunger imply, and how does that motivate your novella’s characters? RR: Since eating is linked to the present, hunger becomes a motor that pushes the characters...

Four Poems

May–August 2014 • 43 photo : nick fedele Four Poems Jeongrye Choi Catkind cats don’t grow to be tigers as a rose unfurls the blossom thorns fiercely wait there are tigers in all cats petals roll like small, unfolded tongues yellow eyeballs dizzy as moonlight running through centuries cats in their silver sleep grind teeth and clench claws cherishing the wild dreams of blood look inside any cat and there! the apricot of a tiger’s eye, shuddering like an apricot tree crouched in by an eagle now going on its way why are the strawberries so sweet probably to propagate their kind asks to be tasted then planted again and again people are devouring the pelvic curves of strawberry in their own ways shrewd, hiding stories in their seed each story disappearing like strawberries, there is another you inside you who laughs for the sweetness of strawberries a baseball geek, a dictator, a drunk stubborn while sons and daughters yell without reason you, you, and you, a suite of gifts that cannot be received just consider yourself from a distance, that you wearing the shirt and tie cancer cells hidden by an “I’m okay” hiding whims and unbending ideologies, “I love you” a small force that works like a cold, can be treated with a bowl of broth or sex, “I love you” only arrives when hiding inside other sentences because 44 worldliteraturetoday.org photo : hiram pascoal Jeongrye Choi has published seven award-winning books. Her poems have appeared in journals across the world, and in 2006 she participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Together with Wayne de Fremery and Brenda Hillman, Choi cotranslated an Englishlanguage collection of her poems, Instances (Parlour Press, 2011). She has a PhD from Korea University. Dan Disney is an assistant professor with Sogang University’s English Literature Program. Un Gyung Yi is a PhD candidate in English literature at Sogang University. Daye Jeon is completing her master’s degree in English literature at Sogang University. from east to west window a woman is hanging out laundry she has toiled, but still isn’t clean enough you are the one who chose this sunlight moves from east window to west the woman considers shifting the laundry you are the one who chose this not knowing it would be this way the sunlight hanging on the window will leave soon there was once a Spring, once sometimes a poem can be only just so despite all efforts it feels wrong but there can be no anger a coat that must be worn in any case be courteous, stay clothed things once frozen have melted now those which were enmeshed are freed, and this was meant to be, must be, had to be this way what good can be done saying things like this anyway there’s him on the radio, the younger brother joyriding in the Piano Academy’s bus becomes the pianist on the radio the mountains far from my old house are now gray apartments in my new house is coincidence the ardor of destiny a force touches, then confluence, that’s how I am here wandering lost on the streets, six years old and one note against another coincidence and destiny flirting with each other the shadow from the opposite building arrives on the western window a tired body coming darkly home from work Why Am I Writing Your Travelogue You leave by Aeroflot. Abandoning the ground. Penetrating the clouds. I watch vacantly. You who are no longer seen. Then seen again. Aeroflot. The word floats in the air. I see it clearly after it’s gone. Then I hear your flight is delayed. Waiting and waiting. Nothing. No word of anything . No food or water. No money. The airport. They took away my passport. Put me on a bus. And now they are taking me somewhere. I don’t know but the snow outside is piling up. Nobody knows where this place is. A shabby hostel finally. Filthy blankets. Frozen faucets. Bugs. No one should take Aeroflot. The only thing Aeroflot has done for me is yell. What’d I do wrong. Dragging me for...

Border Post, and: Rain, and: Fulcrum

Border Post, and: Rain, and: Fulcrum Ranjit Hoskote (bio) Border Post Where someone’s gouged a brick from the wall, a bicycle leans and listens to the light. One hand claps at air until another hand answers: a column of breath roots itself in the hushed soil. Rain We are nothing but water, you said, turning back from where the sun set sail this evening. The wind rushed through us, reporting to night’s bivouac. It’s raining daggers. I’ll wake up drenched, skin bruised, eyes stung by the flute that keeps the oblong hours of sleep. Come back, trace me to my deep hiding place behind ragged nerve and stupored vein. There’s no refrain but this to this song of first lines, the one line running over: my love, my love is as real as tonight’s rain. [End Page 40] Fulcrum Camille Claudel (1864–1943) The old man has gnarled, enormous hands that drip wax. He can break you down to muscle and set free the naiad hiding behind your mask. He can trap you in a tree that’s barely broken the rippling surface of marble or melt you down to a river of bronze. His kneading, curious fingers have found the greatness that crouches inside you. His hands mould it in a tight grip. He lets go only years after he’s pulled you apart, wounded you where it glories the most. Your last studio: the rolled foetal drawings fall open. Your body still hinges on where he is, leaps out in five directions at his touch. [End Page 41] Ranjit Hoskote Ranjit Hoskote is the author of five books of poetry, including Vanishing Acts: New & Selected Poems, 1985–2005 (Penguin). His poems have appeared in many journals around the world, including the Iowa Review, The Green Integer Review, Fulcrum, Poetry Review (London), and Akzente (Munich). Hoskote was a Fellow of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and is a research scholar at BAK, Utrecht. Copyright © 2013 University of Nebraska Press

Forgetting the Bodies

44 With David, in Havana I wanted to forget the bodies just as I have forgotten the doors, the half-closed books that I held against your chest and mine, during a summer that I knew was going to be final and eternal. I looked at the stairs of the Hotel Monserrate. And I thought: Reinaldo Arenas was the light in its darkness. The music in the bar on the hotel’s ground floor was now unbearable. Darkness and noise. A black page to also understand Cuba. I’ve never felt such breathlessness in any other setting. The asthma born in my childhood returns, like a mood. If I could bequeath it to one of my characters, I would write it a frail and sudden death: a tragic oxymoron for its disappearance. An operatic ending. I now understand how I’ve lost the peninsula, the pretexts I held before streets and professions that I misplaced. Profiles on the map. You believed that life was a color. And you now understand: it’s the absence of color. A chiaroscuro. I know that I’m repeating the movements of someone now absent, that my steps in Havana are nothing new. That my words, in the glossy magazine that you’re reading admiringly, were already spoken by someone. That this urgency is a fallacy. That I’m as dead as the man who, in a few years, will copy my last gesture. You used to read your diary softly so I could hear the silences instead of the words. The way you erased my presence from your life. The hushed formula by which you annulled my love. I no longer have an embrace against that cruelty. Tell me that you need me, here, in Havana. In the photo torn from the album of your dead. That this delirium is love, and that you’re with me as we enter the theater, for a performance that is only light. Mere atmosphere. Without actors or dancers. Emptiness and dampness. Tell me that the dampness is your need for me, that I drain like water, and like water I’m oblivion. A last word and I’ll have forgotten everything. On a corner of Havana, as the Hotel Monserrate collapses behind me, I know that the word will be your name: Reinaldo. Arenas I drank to imitate you in the darkness. And thus forget the bodies. Forget. Forget myself. Translation from the Spanish By George Henson Poet, playwright, and cultural critic Norge Espinosa Mendoza (b. 1971, Santa Clara) holds the distinction of being the first Cuban to participate in the University of Iowa’s prestigious International Writing Program. Founder of the Jornadas de Arte Homoerótico and co-organizer of Cuba’s annual Jornada contra la Homofobia, he is widely considered one of Cuba’s most important LGBT activists. His poem “Vestido de novia” was the first poem on a homoerotic theme to win the Premio de Poesía from Cuba’s state cultural magazine El Caimán Barbudo and has since become one of the most anthologized poems by poets of his generation. His most recent book, Cuerpos de un deseo diferente (Ediciones Matanzas, 2013), is a collection of poems, reviews, and essays on topics related to LGBT life in Cuba. For a biographical profile of George Henson, see page 42. Editorial note: Visit WLT’s website for another poem by Norge Espinosa Mendoza. Forgetting the Bodies Norge Espinosa Mendoza cover feature top photo : zoriah ...

Touch

Touch Mangalesh Dabral Touchthethings that arekept onthetableinfront ofyou Clockpen-stand anoldletter IdolofBuddhaBertolt Brecht andCheGuevara's photos Openthedrawer andtouch itsoldsadness Toucha blanksheet ofpaperwith thewords'fingers Touchlikea pebblethestill water ofa VanGoghpainting Starting life's hullabaloo init Touchyour forehead andholditfor a longwhilewithout feeling shame Totouch itisn't necessary for someone tositclose From very far itispossible totouch even Likea birdfrom a distance whokeepshereggsprotected "Pleasedonottouch" or"Touching isprohibited" don'tbelieve insuchphrases Thesearelong-running conspiracies Religious-gurus holding flags wearing crowns andshawls Bomb-throwers, war-raisers indulge infor keeping usapart Themore dirt themore wastethey spit Onlybytouch canthey becleansed Touchyoumust eventhough itturns things topsy-turvy Don'ttouch thewaygodspriests bigots devotees disciples Toucheachothers' feet andheads Rather touch thewaythetallgrassappearstocaressthemoonandstars Goinward feel themoist spottouch Seeifitstill remains there ornotinthese ruthless times. Translation from theHindi BySudeepSen MangaleshDabral (b.1948, Tehri Garhwal, Uttarkhand), a Hindi poet, journalist, and translator basedinDelhi, has published five collections of poetry andthree collections ofsociocultural /literary essaysandcommentary. He hasbeena fellow ofIowa's International Writing Program (1991)andrecipient ofthe Sahitya Akademi Award, the highest awardoftheIndian Academy ofLetters. Dabral's poemshavebeentranslated intonumerous Indian and European languages, and hehastranslated intoHindi thepoetry ofPabloNeruda, Bertolt Brecht, Ernesto Cardenal, andYiannis Ritsos. An UnverifiableTheorem: ATritina RaviShankar Thegunonceintroduced must beforgotten becauseitssnub-nose givesa pocket theweight ofsyllogism: noposthumous event canaffect us. Or,say,after itoccurs, deathcannot affect us: it'simpossible toimagine whatwehaveforgotten whenwhowewerenolonger hasanyrealweight. Stripped ofconsciousness a bodyhastheweight ofwater evaporating from a lake:breath leaving us. Thenonceintroduced theguncannot beforgotten. Theweight oftheforgotten: notwhatleavesus. RaviShankar is AssociateProfessor and Poet-inResidenceat Central Connecticut State University and the founding editorof Drunken Boat,an international onlinejournalofthe arts.He has publishedfourbooksorchapbooksof poems and co-editedRadhaSays,theposthumous poems ofReetikaVazirani, as wellas Language for a NewCentury: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, theMiddleEast,and Beyond, called"a beautiful achievementforworldliterature" byNobel laureate NadineGordimer. 521WorldLiterature Today ...

The Moral Imagination at Work in Haile Selassie's Ethiopia: Reconsidering <em>The Thirteenth Sun</em> by Daniachew Worku

Daniachew Worku’s The Thirteenth Sun is a pilgrimage narrative with a father-son conflict at its core, offering a complex and loosely allegorical depiction of a conflicted Ethiopian society at the close of Haile Selassie’s reign. Daniachew was already well known for his Amharic writing when he published The Thirteenth Sun in English, in Heinemann’s African Writers Series (AWS) in 1973. Drawing on a range of contextual information including records from the AWS and from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (IWP), this essay invites a reconsideration of this important Ethiopian text. Despite the ubiquitous decadence and violence of the narrative, the essay asserts that reconciliation emerges as a dominant theme, and that the novel thus offers a noteworthy instance of a writer’s moral imagination at work at a time of conflicted transition.

Path of Thunder: Meeting Bessie Head

Bernth Lindfors invited me some years ago to give a presentation about my experience with Bessie Head in the International Writing Program in 1977 on a panel he was planning for the annual meeting of the African Literature Association, but I did not reply. When I next met Bernth, I told him that I had not replied because I was conflicted: I did not want to draw attention to her behavior instead of her fiction because I was mindful of the dictum by D. H. Lawrence to never trust the teller, trust the tale. But the new issue of Wasafiri (Winter 2005) contains an essay by James Currey entitled Publishing Bessie Head, subtitled Memories and Reflections in which he lays out the negative things Bessie wrote and said to her publishers and agents?but he does not say anything about the negative things said about me in a biography of Bessie that he published, Thunder Behind Her Ears by Gillian Stead Eilersen (1995), who got her information from Bessie's letters and did not contact me. I feel that Currey has made it necessary for me to explain what happened when Bessie Head came into the International Writ? ing Program in August 1977. Eilersen says about Bessie in Iowa City (in a chapter entitled Ohio, 1977!):