In the end, I'm almost ashamed to say, it was the presence of former Mr. Governor-General and prominent public philosopher
John Ralston Saul as MC for
Beyond Exile that made me decide to attend, Friday night at 7 o'clock. Co-hosted by
PEN Canada and the
Toronto Public Library as part of their
Freedom to Read Week, Beyond Exile was presented on a posters as a night when three (named) Canadian journalists would interview three (unnamed) writers who'd received refuge in Canada. This is a noble cause, but I have to say that it was Saul's presence that's a clincher.
The evening was a busy night, Saul introducing the event, pointedly mentioning the empty chair that was left for
Akbar Ganji, an Iranian journalist imprisoned by the Islamic Republic since 2000 before going on to introduce the pairings. First up was Toronto print journalist
Haroon Siddiqui, who interviewed
Ameera Javeria, a Peshawar-based journalist who with her husband contributed to Pakistan's
The Frontier Post and
The Friday Times until the publication of an allegedly blasphemous letter in the first newspaper and her relentless exposure of Pakistani honour killings resulted in death threats against her. CBC veteran
Christopher Waddell followed with
Sheng Xue from China, a writer of poetry and prose who fled China after the 1989 Tiannamen massacre and later became an activist of the Chinese overseas democracy movement. Last was
Jian Ghomeshi, who interviewed Iran's fiction and drama writer
Reza Baraheni.
The condition of being an exilic writer, installed in a foreign environment far from a dangerous homeland, was explored in these conversations. Of the three interviewees, English-speaking Javeria was best off, feeling at home in a sort of secular, left-wing and academic environment. Sheng Xue, for her part, suffered so severely from culture shock on arriving that it was only after her father's death in 1994 that she could start to write again. Fear, for their lives, their families and friends, and their countries' future was something that all three felt. Baraheni stood out for his remarkable good humour, first demonstrated when Ghomeshi asked him to respond to news reports that Iran was now the country most hated by polled Americans. Each writer read aloud a sample of their work for five minutes or so, Javeria reading the introduction to her unpublished book on honour killings, Sheng her prose elegy to her father, and Baraheni a sample of a dramatic monologue along with an English-language poem.
As I left at 9:30, clutching my Starbucks gift bag including a most excellent autographed copy of PEN Canada's travel anthology
Writing Away, I worried. Sheng talked about the intensification of the Chinese government's control over Chinese society, Javaria of the rise of violent religious bigotry in her Pakistan, Baraheni more obliquely about his hopes that there wouldn't be a war over Iran, Ganji of course didn't talk at all. I take full advantage of my rights to freely express myself--in writing, in conversation--and the three writers interviewed do the same in Canada, but our counterparts in those three countries with more than one and a half billion people can't do the same. I know that good things can't come of this, and I think that I will commit myself to PEN Canada somehow. Without sounding trite, I just had the sinking feeling that it may not be enough.
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pauldrye's False Steps examines the abortive British effort in the late 1950s to build its own space launch vehicle.
