Another writer detained in China + news from Haiti

Zhao Shiying, whose pen name is Zhao Dagong, was detained earlier this week, after police officers searched his home and took his wife and son in for questioning. Zhao joined the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC) in 2004, becoming a board member the following year and the Secretary General this past October.

Zhao’s detention may have resulted from his support for former ICPC President Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison on Christmas for “inciting subversion of state power.” Zhao is one of the original signers of Charter 08, a declaration calling for political reform in China, which was cited in the verdict sentencing Liu.

The day after Zhao was detained, Google announced that the company would reconsider its relationship with China, after detecting “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from” China. Google, according to the announcement, has “evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.”

Microsoft, meanwhile, plans to stay in China, as Peter Foster reports from Beijing for The Daily Telegraph, putting that decision in the context of Zhao Shiying's arrest.

Even sadder news for PEN this week comes of course from Haiti, where Georges Anglade, a writer and activist and the founder of PEN Haiti (he was imprisoned there in 1974), was among the thousands of victims of the country’s worst earthquake in two centuries. His wife Mireille was also killed. The president of International PEN, John Ralston Saul, has written a tribute to Anglade for The Globe and Mail.

Writers Simon Winchester and Edwidge Danticat are working to educate readers about the situation in Haiti, as The Christian Science Monitor reports. Danticat, a native of the country (who wrote about fear for us last year), has spoken about the situation there—and the country’s history and culture—with NPR, The Wall Street Journal, and Democracy Now.

Winchester will speak about the earthquake at Idlewild Books on Tuesday, January 19, along with a relief worker from the United Nations, with suggested donations—and any proceeds from the sale of both Winchester’s books and the books in Idlewild’s section on Haiti—going to relief efforts.

Edwidge Danticat on “the dark realities of the moment”

While putting together PEN America 10: Fear Itself, we asked several writers to comment on the issue’s theme -- to write something brief about what they were afraid of, or how they've confronted fear in their work or in their lives. We printed these in the journal along with newspaper headlines from the past year about some of the fears that have been particularly prominent lately. We’ve put about half of the responses up online, including the one below from Edwidge Danticat.


When FDR said, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he also said, “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.” I fear not being able to deny the dark realities of the moment. I fear an absence of fear, the kind that leads to recklessness. When people have nothing to fear they can act carelessly, irresponsibly. They can Ponzi-scheme away people’s livelihoods and retirement funds without giving it a second thought. I fear global warming. If polar bears can’t survive, do my two little daughters even have a chance? I fear the silence that allowed these things to worsen, the gradual boiling of frogs that Al Gore talks about in An Inconvenient Truth. I fear that I am one of those frogs. I fear another terrorist attack, like the kind that happens in other countries all the time, the kind that residents of besieged cities eventually get used to and learn to live with. I fear world hunger, because it would mean genocide for people in countries like my birthplace and homeland, Haiti, the oft-designated “poorest country in the western hemisphere.” At the same time, I fear cloned meat, genetically engineered crops, and outbreaks of salmonella. I fear peanut allergies and MSG. I fear plagues of locust, rivers turning into blood. I fear “the withered leaves of industrial enterprise.” I fear the closing of borders, each country redefining its identity by excluding others. I fear right-wing conspiracies. I fear left-wing conspiracies. I fear guns of all kinds. I fear cameras in public toilets. I fear small talk at parties. I fear uncaring little children who grow up into uncaring little adults. I fear the end of the word—not the world, which in the end can probably take care of itself, but the word, which we all have to be around to keep alive. I fear that when FDR said we have nothing to fear but fear itself, he might have been kidding, but no one got the joke.


Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist, and most recently, Brother, I’m Dying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She lives in Miami with her husband and daughter.

How Chinua Achebe is like Barack Obama

At Tuesday evening's sold-out tribute to Chinua Achebe, celebrating the 50th birthday of Things Fall Apart, Edwige Danticat (pictured left, afterwards, with Ha Jin) began by explaining why she liked Achebe before she'd ever read his books. "I loved his name," she said. "He seemed like family-- he has a strange name, too. Now I say that," she added, "about Barack Obama." (Big round of applause.)

Chimamanda Adichie also spoke of seeing herself in Achebe and his work. Her first stories, she said, which she wrote when she a small girl, were about "English children with blue eyes who ate apples, played in the snow, and had dogs named Socks." She hadn't learned, she said, that "people like me could exist in books." Achebe taught her that.

Chris Abani was drawn to Achebe for a different reason: to pick up girls. His older brother's "shtick for getting girls," he said, was to quote Achebe. And so Abani, looking for tips, read Things Fall Apart-- the first book he had read by an African writer, after spending his youth devouring everything from "The Silver Surfer to Dostoevsky."

Colum McCann read the Yeats poem "The Second Coming," from which Achebe got his title; Suheir Hammad performed one of her own poems; Ha Jin spoke about being a "migrant writer in the English language," and said that Achebe worked to "extend the frontier" of English through his "mastery of the language." Toni Morrison read some of Achebe's words on that subject-- out of an anthology she put together in the late '60s for high school classrooms (which, she noted ruefully, made it into very few classrooms).

Finally, Achebe himself took the stage, after an introduction from Leon Bottstein. He said that Things Fall Apart "wrote me," and then told an amazing story about sending his manuscript of the novel-- the only one he had!-- to England so that it could be professionally typed. He only got it back with the help of an English woman he knew in Nigeria. When asked what he would have done if it had been lost, he said, with dry, dark humor, "Probably the same thing that Okonkwo did."

Other reports on the evening here, here, and here.

PS. Remko Caprio raises some challenging points in the comments (scroll down), and has the most thorough overview of the evening I've seen over at his own site.

Things Fall Apart, fifty years later

Mark Sarvas points to this excellent article about Chinua Achebe and his landmark novel, Things Fall Apart, which recently turned fifty. The article discusses, among other things, the influence of the novel on writers who came after Achebe:

One of the most celebrated young Nigerian writers, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, says that she read Things Fall Apart when she was around 8 and has periodically reread it. "I find that I liked the same things each time - the familiarity with it. I hadn't realized that people like me could be in a book," she explains.

Countless others have cited Achebe, from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who once called "Things Fall Apart," a "major education" for me, to Ha Jin, a Chinese-American novelist. Achebe himself recalls some letters he received about a decade ago from students at a women's college in South Korea.

As it happens, all three of these writers-- Adichie, Toni Morrison, and Ha Jin-- will be at the PEN tribute to Achebe taking place a week from today at Town Hall in New York. They'll be joined by Chris Abani, Michael Cunningham, Edwidge Danticat, Suheir Hammad, and Colum McCann. The evening will also feature a special performance by the Francesca Harper Dance Project with dancers from the Alvin Ailey School. And there are still a few tickets available.

Friday Miscellany: Fantastic Women

PEN member Natasha Radojcic has co-founded, with Alison Weaver, a new literary journal, H.O.W., "dedicated to publishing quality fiction and non-fiction while giving voice to those suffering in silence worldwide." (H.O.W. = Helping Orphans Worldwide.) Jonathan Lethem is a contributing editor.

The new Tin House (pictured at left) is called Fantastic Women, and has work from Rikki Ducornet, whose "Tangible Dreams" appeared in PEN America 5: Silences. ("The best books cause us to dream," she writes there, "the rest are not worth reading.") It also has an essay from Rick Moody about Angela Carter, whose "The Kiss" appears in PEN America 2: Home & Away.

Three Percent provides the list of Prix Goncourt finalists, including Lydia Salvayre and PEN America 6 contributor, Marie Darrieussecq.

Lastly, Laila Lalami has some interesting thoughts about Albert Camus' L'étranger, which she first read at fourteen:

Meursault's killing of the character referred to simply as "the Arab," the complete absence of any dialogue from the three Arab men who confront Raymond and Meursault on the beach, the fact that the only Arab character who says anything is Raymond's abused and oppressed girlfriend, the absence of the Arab man's family or any Arab witnesses at the trial: these are not coincidences, naturally, but clear narrative choices Camus made. One might argue that Meursault's fight with the chaplain and his realization at the end are an assertion of the Self in the face of an indifferent universe and a moralizing society, but I think that assertion about the absurdity of life comes by way of victimizing the Other.

Afternoon update: The amazing Edwidge Danticat testifies before the US Congress' Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law.