After mentioning the recent attack on Salman Rushdie in a postscript to my essay a couple of weeks ago (My First Black Friend, August 14), I started thinking, again, about asylum programs for writers who are under one kind of threat or another, especially as they came into being here in the USA. I think it’s worth a little explaining.
As many of you know, when Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, ordered a fatwa against him, a certain percentage of the Muslim world fell into a murderous revenge, and Rushdie went into hiding.
What you may not know, however, is that a few years later - in Paris, in 1993 - The International Parliament of Writers grew concerned with writers not nearly as famous as Rushdie nor with his resources, who also needed protection from despots. And out of that concern came a Refuge program, in which European cities - mostly Scandinavian - offered safe harbor and financial support to those writers who fit the bill.
One of the members of that Parliament of Writers was Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright, poet, essayist, novelist, Nobel Prize winner and fighter for human rights, who also happens to be a long-standing and deeply-valued friend of mine.
Wole, who resided mostly in the States back then, had been trying to get an American city interested in providing sustenance for endangered writers, but he had been rebuffed at every turn, basically due to cost. Atlanta turned him down, Oakland turned him down… and other cities did as well.
This went on all during the middle part of the 1990s, until it became apparent that the reason such programs were successful in Europe was that they were situated in socialist or quasi-socialist countries… which meant, of course, that their governments paid for it.
Not so in America. In our beloved country people had to pay for such things or they would die almost before they got started.
Well, one night in Las Vegas, when Wole and I were dining together at Piero’s Restaurant, and he began bemoaning his lack of success with the program, I said something like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if Las Vegas were the first American City of Asylum? That would knock people’s socks off, don’t you think?”
Wole did not think so. In fact, he thought the idea was preposterous. So we laughed about it during dinner, through our first bottle of wine, and well into our second. The funny thing about only two people drinking two bottles of wine, however, is that a preposterous idea can suddenly turn into a good one.
“Hold on a minute!” Wole said out of nowhere. “ Las Vegas as the first City of Asylum in America? Is that what you just said?”
I hadn’t just said it, at least an hour had gone by, but I said, “Yep.”
Soon after that, the idea went from being a good one to a brilliant one. Everyone in the literary world would be bowled over. Las Vegas? Sin City? Asylum for writers? Ha!
The wine again, perhaps? Or perhaps not.
We finished our meal and the very next day we went to see an old Iowa Writers’ Workshop classmate of mine, Glenn Schaeffer, who had given up writing (temporarily) to become the CEO of Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. (How that happened is a whole other story)
Glenn - who still loved writing and writers - saw the greatness of the idea without any wine, and offered to pay for the first year of a writer’s stay in Las Vegas out of his own pocket. Others were in the meeting, most importantly the late Sarah Ralston, who took the reins. We, that is Sarah, Glenn, and I, went to see Oscar Goodman, Las Vegas’s famous mayor at the time, who agreed that the city would sponsor the program as long as Glenn paid.
So we were off to the races!
Syl Cheney-Coker, a Sierra Leonean poet and novelist, was the first Asylum writer, arriving in Las Vegas just after the dawn of the new millennium. Syl was followed by the poet and calligrapher Er Tai Gao from China.
Then, in 2006, when the Black Mountain Institute was founded at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas - by its former president, the literary scholar, Carol C. Harter - Black Mountain took over the program’s administration, fundraising and all.
The novelist and short story writer, Moniro Ravanipour arrived from Iran in 2007, followed by another Iranian, Hossein M. Abkenar, a fiction writer and screenwriter… And those are just the writers that I have met and know personally.
That is how the first U.S. City of Asylum program got started in Las Vegas.
Other cities came to the rescue of international writers after that, most prominently and with great distinction is the City of Asylum, Pittsburgh, founded in 2004 by Ralph Henry Reese and Diane Samuels.
You may remember that I mentioned Henry in my August 12th essay, too, for he was also wounded on stage in the knife attack on Rushdie. He was wounded, most of the press accounts said, because he was in the path of the murderous man intent on killing Salman, and that is surely true.
But it is just as true that Henry was wounded because of his belief that writing, indeed that art in all its forms, has a better chance of saving our crumbling, faltering, rusting, dying world, than anything else.
In the deepest sense, I think those beliefs were what brought Henry to the stage that day.
And they are what must bring the rest of us - you and I, our parents and children - to whatever stages might present themselves to us, however small or large.
“The pen is mightier than the sword” is no mere adage, if that pen is properly applied.
Postscript…
Post postscript…
I will be in Tacoma on Saturday, September 10, between the hours of 9:30 a.m. and 3 p.m., for a book signing of my new novel, The Grievers’ Group, at the Pacific Northwest Shop, 2702 N. Proctor St., Tacoma, WA 98407.
If you are in the area, please come by and say hello.
Also, that same evening, from around 7 and for a couple of hours, I’ll be at The Blind Pig at Millhouse, 2515 N. Proctor St., just a couple of blocks from the Pacific Northwest Shop. I would be delighted if anyone reading this felt like coming by to chat and/or have a drink.
I will be in the depths of Cornwall on the 10th, Richard, otherwise very very tempted to jump on a plane to Tacoma. Enjoy it all - there will be throngs of admirers, I'm sure.
Ha, yessir---Julia and I discussed that before you even replied. I told her that if I'd written a sentence like that in your class, those adjectives would have hit the wall like some of those books you said you didn't like. But I have to agree that the point needs to be emphasized. Those particular modifiers hit the spot (and not the wall).