Chinua Achebe - PEN America Issue 2: Home and Away (PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers)

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Published by PEN American Center,
an affiliate of International PEN,
the worldwide association of writers
working to advance literature
and defend free expression.

PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers
Volume 1, Issue 2 (Fall 2001)

PEN American Center, 568 Broadway, Suite 401, New York, NY 10012, Telephone: (212) 334-1660. Fax: (212) 334-2181. e-mail: .

This issue is made possible in part by the generous funding of Furthermore, the publication program of The J. M. Kaplan Fund.

Copyright 2001 PEN American Center, Inc.

Opinions expressed in PEN America are those of the author of each article, and not necessarily those of the editor, the advisory board, or the officers of PEN American Center.

All rights reserved. No portion of this journal may be reproduced by any process or technique without the formal consent of PEN American Center. Authorization to photocopy items for internal, educational, or personal use is granted by PEN American Center. This consent does not extend to other kinds of copying, such as copying for general distribution, for advertising or promotional purposes, for creating new collective works, or for resale.

Printed in the United States of America.

Postmaster: send address changes to PEN America , c/o PEN American Center, 568 Broadway, Suite 401, New York, NY 10012.

ISBN: 0-934638-18-7
eBook ISBN: 0-934638-39-X

ISSN: 1536-0261

cover photograph: Christa Parravani

Please see page 224 for the text acknowledgments.

CONTENTS

LAGNIAPPE

Short Talks

Anne Carson

Photographs

Christa Parravani

EDITORS NOTE

W ith this issue, we welcome a gratifying number of new readers, thanks in part to Library Journal , which named PEN America one of the Ten Best New Magazines of 2000. For those of you who are having your first encounter with our journal, heres a bit of background. PEN American Center is the largest branch of International PEN, an association of writers, editors, and translators which since 1921 has defended authors whose ideas inconvenience or endanger those in power. Lately, as censorship has diversified, PEN has endeavored to break silences imposed by reactionary ideology, economic and technological consolidation, poverty, and inadequate access to education. As well as speaking up for imperiled writers abroad, PEN members work closer to home, fighting illiteracy and building audiences for serious literature. At public eventsand more quietly, in schools and prisons and community centersvolunteers look for ways to connect good readers with good books.

PEN America: A Journal for Writers and Readers aims to provoke spirited exchanges of ideas about the written word and its place in the world. We publish literary essays; award-winning fiction, poetry, and nonfiction; conversations about issues of concern to writers; profiles of those whose work has been suppressed; and speeches from PEN tributes to literary forebears. We entitled this issue Home and Away because locating a congenial habitat preoccupied each of the three writers honored at recent PEN Twentieth-Century Masters Tributes. To make a home for himself as a writer, James Baldwin needed to leave the country of his birth. Flannery OConnor, after a couple of years up North, returned home to Milledgeville, Georgia, and stayed there for the rest of her life; she said that everything she needed could be seen from her own front porch. And Marcel Proust ruminated for three thousand pages not only on lost time but on places lost and found and found again; for some readers, his insights have permanently changed our view of the landscapes within and around us.

We built the rest of the issue with variations on these themes, like birds making nests from twigs and bones and fur and moss, pieces of bright ribbon and telephone wire. In the spirit of eclectic nest-building, weve included brief passages from a variety of booksnonfiction, fiction, poetryunder the recurring rubric Home and Away. Weve also included a translation forum: Robert Kelly has provided enticing commentary on literature that cant be read in English, and PEN members have nominated books that urgently need new translations. And from time to time, at the bottom of the page, youll find a visual lagniappe: part of a photo essay by a talented young photographer named Christa Parravani or one of Anne Carsons laconic, alchemic Short Talks. These photographs and essay-poems weave through the issue, rub up against longer articles, bounce off themechoing, insinuating, and opening spaces, we hope, where you can assemble literary homes of your own.

M. Mark

September 8, 2001

HOME AND AWAY

In Rwanda the government had adopted a new policy, according to which everyone in the countrys Hutu majority group was called upon to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. The government, and an astounding number of its subjects, imagined that by exterminating the Tutsi people they could make the world a better place, and the mass killing had followed.

All at once, it seemed, something we could have only imagined was upon usand we could still only imagine it. This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real. During the months of killing in 1994, as I followed the news from Rwanda, and later, when I read that the United Nations had decided, for the first time in its history, that it needed to use the word genocide to describe what had happened, I was repeatedly reminded of the moment, near the end of Conrads Heart of Darkness , when the narrator Marlow is back in Europe, and his aunt, finding him depleted, fusses over his health. It was not my strength that needed nursing, Marlow says, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.

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