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Explore African Literature

Features • News • Nonfiction

Opening Speech at the 2019 International Literature Festival | Petina Gappah

by Submissions Editor

October 08, 2019

Petina Gappah is the author of the short story collections An Elegy for Easterly and Rotten Row , and of the novels The Book of Memory and Out of Darkness, Shining Light . The following is an excerpt from her opening speech at the International Literature Festival in Berlin, delivered on 11 September 2019. 

Across the Sea, a Field of Water

I am grateful to have lived in Berlin as a “Stipendiatin” of the Berliner-Artists-in-Residency Programme of the DAAD. The DAAD calls the fellowship they offer to artists from around the world “the gift of time,” and time is my subject tonight. Time, not as it is represented by hurrying, by urgency, but by the past, by history, by memory, by remembrance. I want to talk about why Europe’s history is still very much Africa’s present, and conclude with how historical fiction can bring empathy to our shared pain, and allow us to enter that painful past in a way that humanizes it.

In four weeks in May and June this year, I took an extraordinary journey. I boarded a French container ship, a working boat with a crew of 30 Philippine men commanded by a French master and his nine officers. It was called the CMA Fort-de-France, named for our destination, the capital of Martinique. I literally ran away to sea to write in tranquility, to escape persistent connectivity, to retreat from my life the better to reflect on it, and to plan my future. On board, I found a crew of 20 men, led by 10 French officers. I was one of three passengers. From the port of Dunkirk, where I boarded, we made our leisurely way around four European ports before striking out across the Atlantic towards the Caribbean.

As we found ourselves surrounded by an endless field of water, and I became inured to the repetitive life on board ship, moving from the officers’ mess to the gym, from my room to the ship’s library, and as I took daily walks on deck, the Atlantic in every view, I began to reflect on the many Africans who had made this trip to the Caribbean, not from Europe as I had done, but from Africa, and who made it too without the tools that I had: a Schengen visa, travel insurance, and a doctor’s certificate testifying that I was fit enough to climb up a ship’s gangway and make a sea journey. Above all, with the freedom and the will to travel.

When we arrived in the Caribbean, in Guadeloupe and Martinique, in what was my second visit to those beautiful, sun-struck islands, it came to me with a visceral shock that just about everyone I met was here because his or her ancestors were brought here as captives. These are people living in what Nathaniel Hawthorne called “unaccustomed earth,” their ancestors were transplanted as cargo from Africa. Almost every black person I saw was the descendant of a slave. Entire nations, whole nations, descended from slaves. There in the Caribbean, it struck me forcibly that the European past is very much the Caribbean present.

The Red-Bottomed Climbers of Trees

First, a brief family history:

I come from Zimbabwe, from a land in which knowledge, information and understanding were transmitted from one generation to the next through the oral tradition. Until colonization, we had unwritten codes on the law and social contracts, on governance and on family and communal living. We had history, but it was an unwritten history, passed down in stories and legends, in song, and most of all in our totems.

Zimbabweans are a totem people. Totems, almost always animals, or parts of animals, were used to mark what Marx and Engels called “degrees of consanguinity”; they were how we identified family relationships before the introduction of surnames; they were a mechanism to avoid inbreeding and to avoid incest. To marry a relative of the same totem meant you had to find and slaughter a pure white cow to appease the ancestors. White cows are extremely rare, so it was an effective taboo against incest.

One of my favorite legends, which comes from the 1500s possibly, from the land of the Mutapa Empire, is of a Portuguese trader who fell ill in the court of the Mutapa, who was then the emperor ruling over what is now Zimbabwe and parts of Mozambique. Expecting the trader to die, his countrymen abandoned him to his fate and returned to Portugal. But he healed and fell in love with his nurse, a maiden called Gambiza who was the daughter of the emperor. They married and had children.

But what troubled the court was the question of totems. Totems come from the father, so what totem were they to give to these strange children born of this union with a “totemless” man, with their light skin and slippery hair. They remembered that the Portuguese men had called each other by the title “Senor.” And so a new totem entered the lexicon of Shona totems: they called the children “Sinyoro,” and that is now the totem of that Portuguese man’s descendants. This may be the only totem named for a person. The Sinyoroare also the rare totem-holders who honor their female ancestor; to this day, the Sinyoro men give the title of Gambiza to any woman they marry, no matter her own totem.

It is in totem poems that we find these legends, giving clues to our unwritten history. I first heard our family totem poem in full flow on the day in 1976 that my father drove his new car, a Peugeot 404, to show it off at his rural home in Gutu. My grandmother and my father’s sisters leapt and ululated as they let flow the full poem:

These totems tell us where we came from, and of our past exploits. I must say I am yet to hear a totem poem that does not speak to past glories, of lost kingdoms and past chieftainships, and ours is no different.

Most of the Shona totems speak of Guruuswa, which means “the place of long grass.” Historians believe that this “place of long grass” was somewhere in the Great Lakes region, and that our ancestors trekked southwards until they found themselves in the land between the Zambezi and the Limpopo. It was to these lands that colonialism came, lands that had their own lives, with their own histories and traditions expressed in their own rich languages.

In 1890, my father’s father, a Shoko Mukanya who was called Chikwiro, the names of whose own ancestors have receded into unrecorded memory and thus into the mists of time, suddenly found himself living not on his lands, but on those of Cecil John Rhodes’s British South Africa Company, the corporation that, fueled by tales of the gold of Ophir and King Solomon’s mines, conquered Mashonaland and Matabeleland in what is now Zimbabwe. By 1923, his grandson Mureri was a direct subject of Queen Victoria in the Crown Territory of Southern Rhodesia. My father was born in 1942, and became the first Shoko Mukanya since the trek from Guruuswa to deal with modernity; to adopt a surname, which he took from his grandfather, Gapa; to get a Western education; and to move to the city to find a job.

In a Music Room, the Greater and Lesser Powers

The fate of Chikwiro, and his generation, the fates of subsequent generations, down to me and my son, were decided here in Berlin. Almost the first thing I did when I came to Berlin was to look for the building in which my fate as an African was decided, and where it was agreed that my ancestor Chikwiro would be a subject of Queen Victoria. Here in Berlin, it was decreed that I would speak English, not Portuguese like next-door Mozambique, or German as in Namibia, or French as in Senegal. And so I looked for the building in which my ancestors’ fate, and my own, had been decided.

In 1884, facing an extraordinary scramble for territory in Africa, 14 European powers gathered in Berlin. In this city, the history of the modern states of Africa began, based on boundaries drawn by a handful of men in court dress, who, like children playing a game of Risk, sat around a table and divided up a continent. The building they sat in was called the Palais Schulenburg. Before it was purchased for Count Otto von Bismarck, to serve as his Chancellery after the unification of Germany, it had been the residence of Prince Antoni Radziwill.

In his magisterial book, The Scramble for Africa , Thomas Pakenham, a historian who writes with the lyrical beauty of a novelist and the laser sharp detail of a forensic scientist, describes the setting of Bismarck’s Congokonferenz , or West Africa Conference, as follows:

The Conference began on Saturday, 15 November 1884. Winter had come early to Berlin; snow fell every night that week in a rococo blizzard which decorated the grey fluted pilasters and coarse yellow bricks of Bismarck’s house. . . and then reverted to slush each day when the delegates alighted from their carriages. On Saturday afternoon, just before two o’clock, the nineteen plenipotentiaries, with fifteen assistants, representing fourteen great and lesser Powers, climbed the stairs to the large music room and took their seats at the horseshoe table ready for the inaugural session.

I found out that the building, at 77 Wilhelmstrasse, had been turned into Hitler’s first Chancellery and was consequently bombed in the Second World War. I wondered whether this history had also been erased from the history books. I wondered how many German schoolchildren know that in that music room of the old Palais Schulenburg, where Count Radziwill had hosted salons in which was heard the heavenly music of Paganini, Chopin, and Beethoven, the great and lesser powers resolved simmering tensions over African territory and divided up a continent with clinical precision.

In this room, the great and lesser powers applied the “principle of effective occupation”: agreeing to take as theirs those areas already in their control, and extending their control to those territories and neighboring areas within their “spheres of influence.” They resolved quarrels that had arisen as they scrambled for a continent.

In the South, Portugal and Britain had been fighting over what are now Angola, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi. They agreed that Portugal would take Angola and Britain would get the rest. Over in the Nile Basin, and in the basin of Lake Chad, France and Britain had been fighting. The Congress agreed that the border would pass between Ouaddaï, which would be French, and Darfur, which would be British. In between was to be a “no-man’s-land.”

In West Africa, where France and Germany and Britain were fighting, they agreed that Miltou in what is now Chad would be French, the territory south of Miltou would be given to Germany, and a boundary line would be drawn between the territories controlled by Britain and Germany, passing through Yola, on the Benoué River and Dikoa going up to the outer extremity of Lake Chad. Where no natural boundaries existed, they drew precise borders determined by geographical coordinates. Thus, in a dispute between France and Italy, they agreed that Italy was to own the land that “lies north of a line from the intersection of the Tropic of Cancer and the 17th meridian to the intersection of the 15th parallel and 21st meridian.”

They acted as though Africa were one borderless land. They ignored the various city-states, kingdoms and, yes, empires that existed in what they called Darkest Africa. Families and nations were torn asunder, villages divided. Instead came oddities like those straight lines in North Africa and Namibia, the creation of teeming populous states called Nigeria and the Belgian Congo, made up of different nations and city-states, and the insertion into French-speaking Senegal of an English-speaking sliver of land called The Gambia.

At independence, African nations adopted a strategy that would have long term consequences: they doggedly insisted on respect for those colonial borders. We have seen on our television screens some of the aftereffects of that decision: wars of secession in Biafra, Katanga, the Niger Delta, and Darfur, and the breakaway of South Sudan, the only modern African nation to exist in defiance of colonial borders.

Back to Berlin: the Reich Chancellery is no more, it was bombed by the allies in the Second World War. The original building has been erased from Wilhelmstrasse, from living memory. After the First World War, Germany was stripped of its colonial possessions under the Treaty of Versailles, but even now, in Bagamoyo, you find testimony to Germany’s presence in Africa. Overlooking the ocean in their tranquil rest is an old graveyard where you find neat rows of the German dead.

Hier ruht in Gott, der Unterliutenant zu See, Max Schelle

Franz Grouca, Oberlazarethgehilfe, Kaiserliche Schutztruppe

Karl Koetzle, Liutenant, Kaiserliche Schutztruppe

Peter Merkel, Zahlmeister

Germany was in Africa only too briefly, but even that brief encounter left its traces. Your history, Europe’s history, is our African present. For us, for the nations considered to be les Damn é s de la Terre , the wretched of the earth, the erasure of that history is not possible. Bismarck’s Reich Chancellery may be gone, but the decisions reached around that table in that music room long ago left their permanent marks. Because Europe’s past is Africa’s present, it is the present of a continent and its wider diaspora.

Colonialism was not something that just ended with the independence of African nations. Like slavery before it, it was a debilitating and dehumanizing process accompanied by conquest. Colonialism’s most damaging effects were not in the physical transformation of African nations, but in the binary opposition it created, of self and other, white and black, good and evil, superior and inferior. This is territory that Fanon has trodden well.

These binary oppositions ultimately led to the racial discrimination that marked relations between the white settlers and the native populations. Europe could enjoy supremacy because it convinced the rest of the world, and the conquered peoples, that it was the responsibility of Europe to carry the “White Man’s Burden,” and that its mission was not an exploitative but a civilizing one. Rudyard Kipling was writing of the United States in the Philippines in his famous poem justifying imperialism, but his words were equally applied to Europe in Africa:

Take up the White Man’s burden — Send forth the best ye breed — Go bind your sons to exile To serve your captives’ need; To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild — Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.

And, more satirically, here is Hillaire Belloc:

Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not.

There is a joke much enjoyed in Zimbabwe that goes: when the white man came, he had the Bible and we had the land. He said, close your eyes, let us pray, and when we opened them, we had the Bible and he had the land! Like the best jokes, it is a joke that speaks to a truth. Our religions, our oral traditions, our communal life, our languages, our music, our totems, our poetry, and our dances, and yes, our very food, were considered primitive and inferior.  We were alienated from our own lands, and our cultures. The best hope for the “native” was to approximate European civilization in dress, manner, food, and language.

In my country, the white settlers taught that the mighty stone city of Great Zimbabwe that gave my country its name was built by the Phoenicians who presumably travelled down to Zimbabwe, built that great city, and then vanished, leaving nothing else behind, no bits of pottery, not even their bones. A white Rhodesian archaeologist called Peter Garlake, who also contributed to the study of the Yoruba civilization in Ife, Nigeria, lost his job at the University of Rhodesia because he exploded this nonsense theory and insisted that Great Zimbabwe was built by black people.

I agree fully with Ngugi who has written:

Berlin of 1884 was effected through the sword and the bullet. But the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard. The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom. But where the former was visibly brutal, the latter was visibly gentle.

This psychological violence that was done to the mind is indeed one of the most damaging effects of colonialism, an effect that we still live with today. Europe’s past is Africa’s present: we were taught and came to believe that the only civilizing influence was Europe, and the only civilization European.

Who Built the Seven Gates of Thebes?

I try hard to avoid raising problems without also raising solutions. And that is why I have proposed some solutions. I have spoken about the importance, from the European end, of acknowledging, accepting and teaching this history. And from our own end in Africa, I have spoken of how we can begin to live with the present past without being hostage to its pain. For both Europe and Africa, I have spoken of how to create a more equitable international economic order, and of what we mean by reparations, of matters of governance, and statecraft. I am an international lawyer, and these are questions that I engage with daily. But I am also a writer, and above all, I am a reader. So I want to end by speaking about the power of reading.

I want to posit that beyond these questions of governance and statecraft, reparations and global equity, there is yet more that we can all do. It is to read.  It is to read history, particularly where it is written by the subalterns. And to read fiction, the only real means we have to enter completely the inner life of another. I believe that historical fiction can help us understand the past with empathy and compassion.

I do not mean to say that reading replaces any or all of what is needed to redress this past and make the future equitable, or that fiction can replace history, but reading fiction creates empathy and understanding. Especially if we bring the subaltern to the center so that we read that history in a way that humanizes it, that looks not only at conquests and battles but the people who fought the battles, or who were conquered in those battles.

What is the story of that German man in the Bagamoyo graveyard, Peter Merkel, Zahlmeister ? How did he come to die in a far-off land? And who dug his grave, and put earth over his coffin. What were they thinking as they did so?

I believe that we should bring the subaltern to the center of history through learning about the unheralded figures of history, particularly when they feature in historical fiction.

I want to end with the words of Bertolt Brecht. I was going to read this in the original language in which he wrote this magnificent poem, but here in Berlin, I do not want to murder Brecht. Here is an anthem for the foot soldier, for the common man, the mason, the artisan, the slave, the cook. If you can think of Africa in the way he asks us to think of Classical Rome, of Thebes and Lima, China and fabled Atlantis, we will have reached far in our understanding of our shared past.

Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books are filled with names of kings. Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? And Babylon, many times destroyed. Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima’s houses, That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it? In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song. Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend The night the seas rushed in, The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves. Young Alexander conquered India. He alone? Caesar defeated the Gauls. Was there not even a cook in his army? Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears? Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War. Who triumphed with him? Every page a victory At whose expense the victory feast? Every ten years a great man, Who paid the piper? So many particulars. So many questions.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your kind attention.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Achebe, Chinua, The Education of a British-Protected Child (2010).

Belloc, Hillaire, The Modern Traveler (1898).

Brecht, Bertolt, “A Worker Reads History” (1936).

Coates, Ta-Nehisi, “The Case for Reparations “ (2014).

Fanon, Franz, The Wretched of the Earth (1961).

Knoll, Arthur J and Hiery, Herman, The German Colonial Experience: Select Documents on German Rule in Africa, China, and the Pacific 1884-1914 (2010).

Kipling, Rudyard, “The White Man’s Burden” (1899).

Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884).

McNair, Arnold, The Law of Treaties (1936).

Pakenham, Thomas, The Scramble for Africa (1992).

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988).

Suttle, Oisin, Distributive Justice and World Trade Law: A Political Theory of International Trade Regulation (2017).

Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War , translated by Rex Warner (2000).

wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ, Decolonising the Mind (1986).

• african history
• colonialism
• petina gappah
• zimbabwean literature

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Arundhati Roy calls the siege of Gaza “a crime against humanity.”

In a video address to the Munich Literature Festival yesterday, the human rights activist and Booker Prize-winning author of The God of Small Things  Arundhati Roy made a powerful speech in solidarity with the Gazan people, and with the millions around the world marching for a ceasefire.

Roy—who could not attend the Munich Literature Festival in person because she is currently facing trumped-up sedition charges in India for comments she made in 2010 about Kashmir —forcefully condemned the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza, as well as the German government’s draconian crackdown on pro-Palestinian advocacy and the continued bankrolling of the occupation by the US and other countries, stating that “If we allow this brazen slaughter to continue … Something in our moral selves will be altered forever.”

Below is the text of Roy’s remarks in full:

I cannot appear on a public platform, no, not even in Germany where I know views like mine are virtually banned, without adding my voice to the millions of people—Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Communist, atheist, agnostic —that are marching on the streets all over the world, calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

If we allow this brazen slaughter to continue, even as it is livestreamed into the most private recesses of our personal lives, we are complicit in it. Something in our moral selves will be altered forever. Are we going to simply stand by and watch while hospitals are bombed, a million people displaced and dead children in thousands pulled out from under the rubble? Are we going to once again watch a whole people being dehumanised to the point where their annihilation does not matter?

The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza are crimes against humanity. The US and other countries who bankroll the occupation are party to the crime. The horror we are witnessing right now, the unconscionable slaughter of civilians by Hamas as well as by Israel are a consequence of the siege and occupation.

No amount of commentary about the cruelty, no amount of condemnation of the excesses committed by either side, no amount of false equivalence about the scale of these atrocities will lead to a solution.

It is the occupation that is breeding this monstrosity. It is doing violence to both perpetrators and victims. The victims are dead. The perpetrators will have to live with what they have done. So will their children. For generations.

The solution cannot be a militaristic one. It can only be a political one in which both Israelis and Palestinians live together or side by side in dignity, with equal rights. The world must intervene. The occupation must end. Palestinians must have a viable homeland.

If not, then the moral architecture of western liberalism will cease to exist. It was always hypocritical, we know. But even that provided some sort of shelter. That shelter is disappearing before our eyes.

So please—for the sake of Palestine and Israel, for the sake of the living and in the name of the dead, for the sake of the hostages being held by Hamas and the Palestinians in Israel’s prisons—for the sake of all of humanity—cease fire now.

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24th ilb 5 – 14 Sep 2024 Program 9 – 18 Sep 2024 Young Program

Opening Speeches

Evening programme: David Van Reybrouck [ Deutsch / English ] [ YouTube Deutsch ] [ YouTube Englisch ]

International Children and Young Adult Literature: Angeline Boulley [ Deutsch / English ] [ YouTube ]

Evening programme: Leїla Slimani [ English / Deutsch ]

Greetings: Dr. Klaus Lederer [ English / Deutsch ] 

International Children and Young Adult Literature: Marianne Kaurin [ English / Deutsch ] [ YouTube ]

Evening programme: Mario Vargas Llosa [ Spanisch / English / Deutsch ]

International Children and Young Adult Literature: Sally Nicholls [ Deutsch / English ]

Evening programme: Petina Gappah [ Deutsch / English ]

International Children and Young Adult Literature : Elizabeth Acevedo [ Deutsch / English ]

Evening programme: Eva Menasse [ Deutsch / English ]

International Children and Young Adult Literature : Frida Nilsson [ Deutsch / English ] [ YouTube ]

Evening programme: Elif Shafak [ Deutsch / English ]

Opening speech  Die Kunst der Literaturkritik : Andreas Platthaus [ Deutsch ]

International Children and Young Adult Literature : Meg Rosoff [Deutsch/English] [ YouTube ]

Evening programme: César Aira [ Deutsch / English / Español ]

International Children and Young Adult Literature : Ruta Sepetys [ English ] [ YouTube ]

Opening speech  Die Kunst des Lektorats : Delf Schmidt [ Deutsch ]

Evening programme: Javier Marías [ Deutsch / English ]

International Children and Young Adult Literature : Frank Cotrell Boyce [Deutsch/English]

Opening speech   Die Kunst des literarischen Übersetzens : Frank Heibert [ Deutsch ]

Evening programme: Pankaj Mishra [ Deutsch / English ]

International Children and Young Adult Literature : Patrick Ness [Deutsch/English] [ YouTube ]

Evening programme: Taiye Selasi [ Deutsch / English ]

Evening programme: Liao Yiwu [ Deutsch / English / Chinese / Français ]

Evening programme: Tahar Ben Jelloun [ Deutsch / English / Français ]

Evening programme: Juan Goytisolo [ Deutsch / English ]

Evening programme: Arundhati Roy [ Deutsch / English / Français / Español / Arabic ]

Evening programme: Nancy Huston [ Deutsch / English ]

Greetings : Joachim Sartorius [ Deutsch / English ]

Evening programme: David Grossman [ Deutsch / English ]

Evening programme: Édouard Glissant [ Deutsch / English ]

Evening programme: Carlos Fuentes [ Deutsch / English ]

Evening programme: Antjie Krog [ Deutsch / English ]

Evening programme: Shashi Tharoor [ Deutsch / English ]

Evening programme: Dževad Karahasan [ Deutsch / English ]

Evening programme: Charles Simic [ Deutsch / English ]

Check out the 11 th Karachi Literature Festival Programme

Islamabad Literature Festival Register as a Delegate

Karachi Literature Festival

About Karachi Literature Festival

Karachi Literature Festival (KLF), the first and by far the foremost literature festival in the country, needs no introduction. It has become an integral part of the social and intellectual calendar of this city and, indeed, of the country.

15th KLF Speakers

Iftikhar Arif

Joseph Massad

Kishwar Naheed

Michael Cirelli

Najeeba Arif

Noorul Huda Shah

Selma Dabbagh

Zehra Nigah

15th klf programme, feb 16, 2024, feb 17, 2024, feb 18, 2024, main garden.

Arrival of Guests

Welcome speech by the festival organizer: arshad saeed husain, managing director, oup pakistan.

Remarks by the Guest of Honour Remarks by Sponsors: Ali Habib, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer, HBL and Khalid Mahmood, Managing Director & CEO, Getz Pharma Pvt. Ltd. Keynote Speeches: Arif Hasan and Selma Dabbagh Book Awards: KLF-Getz Pharma English Fiction Prize Award KLF-Getz Pharma Urdu Poetry Award KLF-Getz Pharma Urdu Prose Award KLF-The Little Book Company Readers’ Choice Awards for Best Books in: Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, and Balochi Languages Performance by Nighat Choudhry on Faiz Ahmad Ahmad's Hum Dekhain Gay aur Bahaar Ayee

فیض کی محبت میں

How agriculture can save pakistan, film screening with q&a: gandhi and jinnah return home, book launch: timeless college tales by nadya chishty mujahid, book launch: foundations and form: memoirs of a pakistani architect by mukhtar husain, unraveling south asia, میری دھرتی، میرے لوگ: احمد سلیم اور بابر ایاز کی یاد میں, نثری نظم کا ارتقاء, پشتو ادب کا حالیہ منظر نامہ, urdu shairi kay darakshan sitaray, book launch: development pathways: india, pakistan, bangladesh (1947-2022) by ishrat husain, sustainability in an evolving new world order, book launch: جہاں آباد کی گلیاں, book launch: rolaak by rafaqat hayat, کچھ شعر فقط ان کو سنانے کے لیے ہیں بیت بازی, book discussion: قیدی by omar shahid hamid, book launch: suffocation translated by asma mansoor, خوشبو کی دیوار کے پیچھے by hameed shahid, کلامِ شاعر بہ زبانِ شاعر, the evolving federation: two steps forward one step back, افتخار عارف : یادیں اور باتیں, vlogvolution: content beyond likes, book launches: a life lived with passion: irfan husain (1944-2020) edited by carmen gonzalez and abbas nasir a lifetime of dissent: a memoir by i. a. rehman, passion or profession, نور جہاں سُرور جہاں, book launch: imran khan: myth of the pakistani middle-class by nadeem farooq paracha, the last white man, woven words: under the tamarind tree a novel by nigar alam the idle stance of the tippler pigeon by safinah danish elahi no funeral for nazia by taha kehar, theatrical session by atif badar, الیکشن سے ذرا ہٹ کے, getz pharma eacpe film awards, arab identity in contemporary times, building future skills: the co-existence of local and international examination boards, reforming pakistan: a new social contract, to print or not to print: blended digital face of learning, national youth poet laureate programme, کچھ عمدہ کہانی کاروں کی یاد : shaukat siddiqui, zamiruddin ahmed, ibn saeed, jamila hashmi, feature film screening: moor (mother).

Kishwar Naheed, Ashfaq Hussain, Afzal Ahmed Syed, Tanweer Anjum, Aqeel Abbas Jaffri, Harris Khalique, Fazil Jamili, Ambareen Haseeb Ambar, Salman Sarwat, Waheed Noor, Imran Saqib

Historical Fiction: Capturing the Atmosphere

Reimagining the ustad-shagird tradition in today's music and culture, in pursuit of an ethical state, coming of age: pakistani english language literature, book launch: a history of the baloch and balochistan by mir naseer khan ahmedzai kambarani baloch, پاکستان، تعلیم اور اکیسویں صدی, urban dialogues: decoding karachi's dynamics, اُردو ناول پردۂ زمین پر, jerusalem: a journey back in time: a presentation by iftikhar salahuddin, beyond the seas: readings by michael cirelli, aysha baqir, book launch: awaaz: echoes of freedom & justice, book launch: the monsoon war: a novel by bina shah, book launch: مکھوٹا by najeeba arif, book launch: the whispering chinar by ali rohila, book launch: earth and glimmer by haya fatima sehgal, unveiling the minds: the science of mental resilience, ہنسنا منع ہے, تصوف اور ہماری شعری روایت : mansoor hallaj kay sayay, book launch: qaum, mulk, sultanat: citizenship and national belonging in pakistan by ali usman qasmi, book launch: underground, climate change and sustainability; a discussion on actions with youth and teachers, film: the power of storytelling, book launch: pakistan: search for stability edited by maleeha lodhi, الیکشن ۲۰۲۴ء: ایک نیا زاویہ, interactive theatre and dramatic poetry, goal of higher education: creating professionals or scholars, human rights and wrongs, the big picture: future of pakistan, translations of sindhi classics: from shah abdul bhitai to shaikh ayaz, ceasefire forever, framing reality as comedy, songs of the sufi: the untold story of classical qawwali (screening of film followed by q&a), ladies tailor, by the swaying palms and the mangrove creek: poetry in english, book launch: a world of her own: ada jafarey by aamir jafarey with asra jafarey, book launch: among my own: the untold stories of my people by dr naseem salahuddin, closing ceremony.

Honoring the Literary Legends: Zehra Nigah, Iftikhar Arif, Kishwar Naheed, Muneeza Shamsie - Vote of Thanks by: Maya Inayat Ismail, Chief of Staff to the Chairman and Chairperson, Sustainability Forum-HBL Arshad Saeed Husain, Managing Director, Oxford University Press Pakistan Sufi Qawwali by Qawal Najmuddin Saifuddin & Brothers

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Oxford Debate. Free Speech, Woke, and Cancel Culture SOLD OUT

Justin schlosberg, gary francione and marina purkiss tilda storey law.

Monday, 18 March 2024

Oxford Martin School: Lecture Theatre

Media professor Justin Schlosberg, professor of philosophy and law Gary Francione and political commentator and campaigner Marina Purkiss discuss the issues around cancel culture and free speech.

Cancel culture has been one of the biggest topics surrounding freedom of speech in the last decade. In 2019, JK Rowling tweeted in support of Maya Forstater. Forstater’s employer had declined to renew her contract after she repeatedly claimed on social media messages that transgender women are men. Piers Morgan then described Rowling as ‘showing outstanding moral courage as she stands up to vile woke mob’. Republicans now also talk of a ‘woke mind virus’. Presidential candidate Ron Desantis says ‘We will fight the woke in the legislature. We will fight the woke in education. We will fight the woke in the businesses. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob.’

Who, if anyone, deserves to be cancelled? Is cancel culture the end of free speech? Or is it a way for the public to hold individuals accountable? Is being woke really a ‘mind virus’, or just awareness of prejudice and injustice?

Schlosberg is professor of media and communications at the University of Westminster, co-founder of the Institute for Journalism and Social Change, and Edmund J Safra Network Fellow at Harvard. His books include Disinformation: A Critical Perspective .

Francione is a world-leading authority on animal rights. He is a professor of law and professor of philosophy and was the first academic to teach animal rights theory in an American law school. His books include Why Veganism Matters .

Purkiss is a political commentator and campaigner. She features on Channel 5’s Jeremy Vine Show , Good Morning Britain , T his Morning , LBC, BBC radio, Sky News and Piers Morgan’s Uncensored , and has her own ‘politically charged (but fun)’ podcast, The Trawl .

Discussions are chaired by Tilda Storey Law.

• oxford debates

Bodleian Libraries

Maps show and tell sold out.

The Making of Shakespeare’s First Folio SOLD OUT

Jürgen Renn and Hanoch Gutfreund

The einsteinian revolution: the historical roots of his breakthroughs.

Jem Poster and Sarah Burton

Eliza mace: uncovering the truth.

Gelong Thubten

Meditation workshop.

Pedro Serrano, Justin Schlosberg and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown chaired by Stephen Law

Oxford debate. fog of war: who can we trust, and why, when conflicts arise, typesetting and printing on the hand-press sold out, shakespeare’s first folio: show and tell.

Martin Thomas and Matthew Parker Mary Hockaday

The shadow of empire in a globalised world.

Alicia Foster

Gwen john: art and life in london and paris sold out.

Nikhil Krishnan

A terribly serious adventure: philosophy at oxford 1900-60.

Fuchsia Dunlop

Invitation to a banquet: the story of chinese food.

Ruby Wax and Gelong Thubten chaired by Mick Brown

Hard times and fearless living.

Ken Costa and Colin Mayer chaired by Mary Hockaday

Can capitalism fix the world.

David Wyn Jones interviewed by Gwenan Edwards

The strauss dynasty and habsburg vienna.

Harry Freedman

Shylock’s venice: the remarkable history of venice’s jews and the ghetto.

A C Grayling

Who owns the moon in defence of humanity’s common interests in space.

Lizzie Pickering and Tamarin Norwood chaired by Susannah Jowitt

Perspectives on grief, old school tour.

Netta Weinstein and Heather Hansen

Solitude: the science and power of being alone.

Richard Dannatt

Victory to defeat: the british army 1918-40.

Boris Akunin talks to Maya Jaggi

Mysteries of a russian exile sold out.

Chris Patten in conversation with Tom Fletcher

Chancellor’s lecture. from china to the middle east and ukraine: a world in turmoil.

The Oxford Literary Festival sponsors, donors & partners

Asian American Literature Festival that was canceled by the Smithsonian in 2023 to be revived

A festival celebrating Asian American literary works that was suddenly canceled last year by the Smithsonian Institution is getting resurrected

NEW YORK — A festival celebrating Asian American literary works that was suddenly canceled last year by the Smithsonian Institution is getting resurrected, organizers announced Thursday.

The Asian American Literature Festiva l is making a return, the Asian American Literature Festival Collective said in a statement. It will take place Sept. 14-22 — but without the Smithsonian’s help. And instead of only being in Washington, D.C., the in-person and virtual events will be spread out nationwide.

The Collective and several partner organizations have planned readings, salons, workshops and interactive installations. New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Seattle, Atlanta and Athens, Georgia, as well as Champaign, Illinois, will host events. There will also be gatherings in New Zealand and Australia.

A biannual event since 2017, the festival brings together writers, publishers and others across the Asian diaspora. It has traditionally been done in collaboration with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. Events were held at Washington sites like the National Portrait Gallery and the Library of Congress. But last year, a month before the August opening date, the Smithsonian announced it was calling it off.

Smithsonian officials told news outlets the cancellation was for “administrative/logistical reasons.” It had nothing to do with festival content, which included books by transgender and nonbinary writers.

Cathy Linh Che, executive director of Kundiman, a nonprofit that elevates Asian American writers and readers, said the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center still owes organizers money.

“We would hope that the Smithsonian will show accountability and repair for their past harm, as a way of rebuilding the trust that they have broken,” Che said in a statement.

In its own statement, the Smithsonian Institution said it has not ruled out one day collaborating on the festival again.

“We’re delighted to learn that an Asian American literary festival will take place later this year.”

In response to allegations of outstanding debts, Smithsonian Institution officials said 48 people and three organizations were “paid honoraria” for work completed. Two other people offered to forgo payment, the officials said. Anyone who filled out necessary paperwork received payment, they added.

Writers and literary organizations set to converge say they were blindsided by the decision and left with financial losses.

Organizers say the new approach will allow more people from different communities to participate in the festivities.

final press release

The most important literary festivals in Romania,

alongside the International Literature Festival Odesa

Last night, February 25, the 9th edition of the  International Literature Festival Odesa ended, a traditional event, which became itinerant due to the war and was hosted this year in Bucharest. There were four full days, in which the Bucharest public was able to attend a program of events with an extremely diverse format: from public readings to debates around the most important topics of the moment in terms of world politics, such as the future of Europe or the fight against barbarism.

E.S. also spoke about the architecture of the program of the 9th edition of the  International Literature Festival Odesa and the relevance of the themes. Mr. Igor Prokopchuk, Ambassador of Ukraine to Romania, in his speech on the evening of February 22. His Excellency wanted to express his joy regarding the fact that the festival is hosted in Bucharest, in Romania, one of the leading countries in supporting the Ukrainian population after the outbreak of the war. Also, the Ambassador of Ukraine in Romania urged the public to hold a moment of silence in memory of the victims of the war in Ukraine, which he called “the biggest humanitarian crisis in Europe after the Second World War”.

At the end of the four days that totaled over 20 events, the organizers of the most important literature festivals in Romania sent a few thoughts to the organizers of the International Literature Festival Odesa.

“To be effective against a tyranny or against violence, literature must assert itself and be. That’s it. History has shown us, so many times, that a dictator is more afraid of words than anything. Literature is a universal weapon, because the border of language is illusory: therefore, the imperative to which it submits is an affirmative one, of literary action.

I’m glad that literature won once again, and the  Literature Festival Odesa could continue in Bucharest”, said Ioan Cristescu, president of the Bucharest International Poetry Festival (FIPB) and director of the National Museum of Romanian Literature.

About the power of literature to find ways to reach the public, beyond the power of weapons, the writer Lucian Dan Teodorovici, president of the Iasi International Literature and Translation Festival – FILIT, also spoke: “A festival like this, which moved for a few days Odesa in Bucharest is more than a literary manifestation, it is above all a declaration of freedom. However, as much joy as the festival of literature lovers in Romania could produce, I wish that in the coming years (many and good) I will know that it takes place at home, where it belongs. In complete safety and in complete freedom”.

“I am still shaken by the documentary I watched last night, 20 days in Mariupol, a film which, thanks to the courage and vocation of some journalists, shows how a city turns into an inferno due to the Russian invasion. Odesa is standing, not like Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities that have become ruins, but its life is, well, elsewhere. In order to continue living, the Odesa literature festival had to find a refuge in Bucharest. Solidarity worked again this time, and writers were able to make their voices heard. The world of literature has, in fact, no borders, and the different languages in which it is written are not barriers, but meeting colors. These days, the roads of literature led to Odesa, via Bucharest. I hope that next year the festival will take place where it belongs, at his home, in peace”, testified Robert Șerban, president of the Timișoara International Literature Festival (FILTM).

On behalf of the International Festival of Poetry and Music “Poetry is in Bistrita”, the writers Marin Mălaicu-Hondrari and Dan Coman also expressed their confidence in the power of literature to conquer people more powerfully than bands manage to conquer territories: “Literature sees his way. Even when it seems irrelevant, it demonstrates its strength, as it happened now, from Odesa to Bucharest. Its strength lies not in conquering territories, but in uniting people. The Odesa festival continues, that matters and gives us courage”.

The writer Radu Vancu, who gave the opening speech of this year’s edition of the Odesa International Literature Festival, gave us another thought, this time from the perspective of the cultural manager – as the president of the “Poets in Transylvania” International Festival ” which takes place in Sibiu: “The Odesa Literature Festival took place in Bucharest on the two-year anniversary of the barbaric war started by Russia in Ukraine. Two years of heroism – in which Ukraine was not only not conquered & annihilated, but became a candidate state for admission to the European Union. And fight on for all of us. For the world that believes in freedom & democracy – which will remain so (ie free & democratic) only if Russia is definitively defeated. And it will be. So being with Ukraine today means believing that the human species has a future. Not just as a species – but as a truly human one.”

Founded in 2015, the International Literature Festival Odesa aimed to emphasize the cultural effervescence and international character of the city and contribute to strengthening its ties with other cultural metropolises in Europe and on other continents. The program of each separate edition expresses this desire, both through the selection of invited writers and through the dialogue themes. A particular importance in the architecture of the festival program is occupied by the panorama of the cultural space in the area of Eastern Europe and the Black Sea region. To date, almost 300 writers have taken part in the events of the  International Literature Festival Odesa. Hans Ruprecht and Ulrich Schreiber have been running the festival since its inception.

Cele mai importante festivaluri de literatură din România,

alături de Festivalul Internațional de Literatură de la Odesa

Aseară, 25 februarie, s-a încheiat cea de- a IX-a ediție a Festivalului Internațional de Literatură de la Odesa , un eveniment de tradiție, devenit itinerant din cauza războiului și găzduit anul acesta la București. Au fost patru zile pline, în care publicul bucureștean a putut să asiste la un program de evenimente cu un format extrem de divers: de la lecturi publice până la dezbateri în jurul celor mai importante teme ale momentului în planul politicii mondiale, precum viitorul Europei sau lupta împotriva barbariei.

Despre arhitectura programului celei de-a IX-a ediții a Festivalului Internațional de Literatură de la Odesa și relevanța temelor a vorbit și E.S. Domnul Igor Prokopchuk, Ambasadorul Ucrainei în România , în discursul său din seara zilei de 22 februarie. Excelența Sa a ținut să își exprime bucuria cu privire la faptul că festivalul este găzduit la București, în România, una dintre țările-lider în susținerea populației ucrainene după izbucnirea războiului. De asemenea, Ambasadorul Ucrainei în România a îndemnat publicul să țină un moment de reculegere în memoria victimelor războiului din Ucraina pe care l-a numit „cea mai mare criză umanitară din Europa de după Cel de-Al Doilea Război Mondial”.

La finalul celor patru zile care au însumat peste 20 de evenimente, organizatorii celor mai importante festivaluri de literatură din România le-au transmis organizatorilor Festivalului Internațional de Literatură de la Odesa câteva gânduri.

„Pentru a fi eficientă împotriva unei tiranii sau împotriva violenței, literatura trebuie să se afirme și să fie. Atât. Istoria ne-a tot arătat, de atâtea ori, că unui dictator îi e mai frică de cuvinte decât de orice. Literatura este o armă universală, căci granița limbii este iluzorie: de aceea, imperativul căruia i se supune este unul afirmativ, al acțiunii literare. 

Mă bucur că literatura a invins încă o dată, iar Festivalul de literatură de la Odesa a putut continua la București”, a declarat Ioan Cristescu , președintele Festivalului Internațional de Poezie de la București (FIPB) și directorul Muzeului Național al Literaturii Române.

Despre puterea literaturii de a-și găsi căi pentru a ajunge la public, dincolo de puterea armelor a vorbit și scritorul Lucian Dan Teodorovici , președintele Festivalul Internațional de Literatură și Traducere Iași – FILIT: „Un festival precum acesta, care a mutat pentru câteva zile Odesa în București, este mai mult decât o manifestare literară, este înainte de toate o declarație de libertate. Însă, oricâtă bucurie a putut produce festivalul iubitorilor de literatură din România, îmi doresc ca în anii viitori (mulți și buni) să știu că se desfășoară acasă, acolo unde îi e locul. În deplină siguranță și în deplină libertate” .

„Sunt cutremurat, încă, de documentarul pe care l-am privit azi noapte, 20 de zile în Mariupol , film care, datorită curajului și vocației unor jurnaliști, arată cum un oraș se transformă, din cauza invaziei ruse, într-un infern. Odesa e în picioare, nu ca Mariupol și ale orașe ucrainiene ce au devenit ruine, dar viața ei este, iată, și în altă parte. Ca să poată trăi în continuare, festivalul de literatură din Odesa a trebuit să-și găsească un refugiu, la București. Solidaritatea a funcționat și de data asta, iar scriitorii și-au putut face auzite vocile. Lumea literaturii nu are, în fond, granițe, iar limbile diferite în care se scrie nu sunt bariere, ci culoare de întâlnire. În aceste zile, drumurile literaturii au dus către Odesa, via București. Am speranța că anul viitor festivalul se va desfășura acolo unde îi este locul, la el acasă, în pace” , a mărturisit Robert Șerban , președintele Festivalului Internațional de Literatură de la Timișoara (FILTM) .

Din partea Festivalul Internațional de Poezie și Muzică „Poezia e la Bistrița” , scriitorii Marin Mălaicu-Hondrari și Dan Coman și-au exprimat, de asemenea, încrederea în puterea literaturii de a cuceri oamenii mai puternic decât reușesc trupele să cucerească teritorii: „Literatura își vede de drum. Chiar și atunci când pare irelevantă, își demonstrează forța, cum s-a întâmplat și acum, de la Odesa la București. Forța ei nu stă în a cuceri teritorii, ci în a uni oameni. Festivalul de la Odesa continuă, asta contează și ne dă curaj” .

Scriitorul Radu Vancu , cel care a ținut discursul de deschidere al ediției din acest an a Festivalului Internațional de Literatură de la Odesa, ne-a transmis încă un gând, de data aceasta din perspectiva managerului cultural – ca președintre al Festivalului Internațional „Poets in Transylvania” care are loc la Sibiu: „Festivalul de literatură de la Odesa a avut loc la București în zilele în care se împlineau doi ani de la războiul barbar declanșat de Rusia în Ucraina. Doi ani de eroism – în care Ucraina nu numai că n-a fost cucerită & aneantizată, ci a devenit stat candidat pentru admiterea în Uniunea Europeană. Și luptă mai departe pentru noi toți. Pentru lumea care crede în libertate & democrație – care va fi rămâne astfel (adică liberă & democratică) numai dacă Rusia e învinsă definitiv. Și va fi. Așa că a fi azi alături de Ucraina înseamnă a crede că specia umană are un viitor. Nu doar ca specie – ci ca una cu adevărat umană” .

Fondat în anul 2015, Festivalul internațional de literatură de la Odesa și-a propus să sublinieze efervescența culturală și caracterul internațional al orașului și să contribuie la consolidarea legăturilor sale cu alte metropole culturale din Europa și de pe alte continente. Programul fiecărei ediții în parte exprimă acest deziderat, atât prin selecția scriitorilor invitați, cât și prin temele de dialog. O importanță deosebită în arhitectura programului festivalului o ocupă panoramarea spațiului cultural din zona Europei de Est și a regiunii Mării Negre. Până în prezent, aproape 300 de scriitori au luat parte la evenimentele din cadrul Festivalului internațional de literatură de la Odesa. Hans Ruprecht și Ulrich Schreiber conduc festivalul de la înființarea sa.

“Literature gives the dead a voice and makes them sing”

Ariane von Graffenried, guest of the 2024 Odessa International Literature Festival

Tomorrow, the 22 nd of February , the 9 th edition of the Odessa International Festival of Literature opens at the Goethe-Institut in Bucharest (Calea Dorobanți 32). A beloved and popular project for literature lovers, the festival enjoys consistent support from today’s most important European writers and leading civic voices. For this reason, new names have joined the festival’s public readings, such as Ukrainian writers Andrei Kurkov and Yury Andrukovych , and many others. The current programme of the festival can be found on the official website: http://litfestodessa.com/program-en

Another novelty is that, at the opening event, planned for February the 22 nd , at 17:00, His Excellency Mr. Ihor Prokopchuk , Ambassador of Ukraine will attend the festival.

In anticipation of their arrival in Bucharest, some of the writers invited to this year’s edition of the festival have sent their thoughts to Romanian literature lovers.

“ I think every gathering of international writers is a good opportunity to exchange ideas about literature and politics. I hope we can actively listen to each other. If we believe that literature is a universal tool for understanding, we can use it for discussion, not for fighting,” says Ukrainian writer Vasil Makhno —a multi-award-winning poet, essayist and translator who explores the concepts of motherland and memory in his books, reflecting the polyphonic past of his native land.

“ I believe that if war should come upon them in their homeland, writers must become its defenders when their country is brutally attacked. This is why many Ukrainian writers write literature and essays about war and participate in international festivals. Many of them serve in the army and fight on the front lines. In this moment, literature becomes a voice of these times, because it has to be heard ,” he added.

“ Literature in times of war is both a getaway from the terrible reality and a weapon because it is impossible to not write about war “, said writer Yury Vinnychuk before coming to Bucharest; he is a living legend of Ukrainian literature, tireless critic of the political system, considered the most versatile of contemporary Ukrainian writers.

The Swiss writer Ariane von Graffenried , spoken word author, member of the duo “Fitzgerald & Rimini” and curator of the Basel International Poetry Festival, also talks about the power of writing to give a voice to literature in her advance message to Romanian readers: “ Metaphors don’t work against people with guns. And beautiful verses cannot heal wounds. Literature can create a community here and now, it can offer comfort, it can express anger, and it can witness both what is beautiful and what is hideous. Literature can give the dead a voice and make them sing .”

For Italian writer Ilaria Gaspari , known for her passion for podcasts dedicated to the works of famous writers, this year’s Odessa International Festival is an opportunity to remember the horrors of the two world wars: “ I am coming to Bucharest thinking of two great European authors who lived in different historical moments, but were both touched by the consequences of one of the two world wars. I am thinking of Marcel Proust, who witnessed the collapse of his childhood, whose inexorable decline he had already observed and recorded, with the outbreak of the First World War. Then, my thoughts turn to Ingeborg Bachmann, who in her Austrian childhood experienced the trauma of the Nazi devastation and who would search throughout her life for a way to live in a historical moment in which the self is no longer submerged in history, but history is in the self .”

Is literature an escape? A voice? Or a weapon?

“ It is not a weapon, because literature does not destroy; and it is indeed unequipped and vulnerable in the face of war, but it has the collective force of a voice that transmits words and thoughts. It is not a form of escape, but an open refuge, that is, open as a protection against horror ,” added the beloved Italian writer.

Festival activities will be held in English , Ukrainian , German and Romanian , with translation. Public access to the event is free of charge.

Founded in 2015, the Odessa International Literature Festival aims to highlight the cultural effervescence and international character of the city and to contribute to strengthening its ties with other cultural metropolises in Europe and on other continents. The programme of each edition expresses this aim, both through the selection of guest writers and the dialogues. Of particular importance in the architecture of the festival’s programme is the overview of the cultural space of Eastern Europe and the Black Sea region. So far, almost 300 writers have taken part in the events of the Odessa International Literature Festival. Hans Ruprecht and Ulrich Schreiber have been running the festival since its creation.

„Literatura le dă morților o voce și îi face să cânte”

Mâine, 22 februarie, debutează cea de-a IX-a ediție a Festivalului Internațional de Literatură de la Odesa, găzduită la București, la sediul Goethe-Institut (Calea Dorobanți 32). Proiect îndrăgit și urmărit de iubitorii de literatură, Festivalul se bucură de o susținere consistentă din partea celor mai importanți scriitori europeni de astăzi, voci civice marcante. Acesta este motivul pentru care noi și noi nume s-au alăturat lecturilor publice din cadrul Festivalului, precum cele ale scriitorilor ucraineni Andrei Kurkov sau Iuri Andruhovîci și mulți alții. Programul la zi al Festivalului poate fi consultat pe site-ul official: http://litfestodessa.com/ program-en O altă noutate o constituie faptul că, la evenimentul de deschidere, plănuit pentru data de 22 februarie, ora 17.00, E.S. Domnul Igor Prokopchuk, Ambasadorul Ucrainei la București, s-a alăturat organizatorilor, acceptând să țină o alocuțiune în debutul festivalului. În așteptarea venirii la București, o parte dintre scriitori invitați la ediția din acest an a festivalului le-au transmis gândurile lor iubitorilor de literatură din România. „Cred că fiecare întâlnire internațională a scriitorilor este o bună ocazie de a face schimb de idei despre literatură și politică. Sper că ne putem asculta activ unii pe alții. Dacă credem că literatura este un instrument universal de înțelegere, putem să o folosim pentru discuții, nu pentru luptă”, consideră scriitorul ucrainean Vasîl Mahno – poet, eseist și traducător multipremiat, care investighează în cărțile sale conceptele de patrie și memorie, reflectând trecutul polifonic al locului său de origine. „Consider că, dacă vine războiul peste ei în țara lor natală, scriitorii trebuie să se transforme în apărătorii ei, atunci când țara le este atacată cu brutalitate. Acesta este motivul pentru care mulți scriitori ucraineni scriu literatură și eseuri despre război și participă la festivaluri internaționale. Mulți dintre ei servesc în armată și luptă pe fronturi. În această perioadă, literatura devine o portavoce a acestor timpuri, pentru că trebuie să se facă auzită”, a completat acesta. „Literatura în vremuri de război este atât o evadare din realitatea îngrozitoare, cât și o armă, pentru că este imposibil să nu scrii despre război”, a transmis înaintea venitii la București scriitorul Yuri Vînnîciuk, o legendă vie a literaturii ucrainene, critic neobosit al sistemului politic, considerat cel mai versatil dintre scriitorii ucraineni contemporani. Despre puterea literaturii de a de a da voce literaturii vorbește și scriitoarea elvețiană Ariane von Graffenried, autoare de spoken word, membră a duo-ului „Fitzgerald & Rimini” și curatoare a Festivalului Internațional de Poezie de la Basel, în mesajul său transmis în avans cititorilor români: „Metaforele nu ajută împotriva oamenilor cu arme. Iar versurile frumoase nu pot vindeca rănile. Literatura poate crea o comunitate aici și acum, poate oferi mângâiere, poate exprima furia și poate fi martoră, deopotrivă, la frumos și la odios. Literatura le dă morților o voce și îi poate face să cânte”. Pentru scriitoarea italiană Ilaria Gaspari, cunoscută pentru pasiunea sa pentru podcasturi dedicate operelor unor scriitori cunoscuți, ediția itinerantă din acest a Festivalului Internațional de la Odesa este un prilej de a rememora ororile celor două conflagrații mondiale: „Vin spre București cu gândul la doi mari autori europeni care au trăit în momente istorice diferite, dar au fost amândoi atinși de urmările și consecințele câte unuia dintre cele două războaie mondiale. Mă gândesc la Marcel Proust, care a văzut odată cu Primul Război Mondial scufundându-se și sfârșindu-se pentru totdeauna lumea copilăriei sale, al cărei declin inexorabil îl observase și îl consemnase deja. Apoi, gândurile merg către Ingeborg Bachmann, cea care în copilăria sa austriacă a cunoscut trauma devastărilor naziste și care va căuta de-a lungul vieții o cale a trăi într-un moment istoric în care eul să nu mai fie scufundat în istorie, ci istoria să fie în eul său”. Este literatura o evadare? O portavoce? Sau o armă? „Nu este o armă, pentru că literatura nu distruge; și este, într-adevăr, neînarmată și vulnerabilă la război, dar cu forța colectivă a unei portavoci care răspândește cuvinte și gânduri. Nu este o formă de evadare, ci un refugiu deschis, adică deschis pentru a proteja împotriva ororii”, a adăugat îndrăgita scriitoare italiană. Evenimentele din cadrul festivalului vor avea loc în limbile engleză, ucraineană, germană și română, cu traducere. Accesul publicului la eveniment este gratuit. Fondat în anul 2015, Festivalul internațional de literatură de la Odesa și-a propus să sublinieze efervescența culturală și caracterul internațional al orașului și să contribuie la consolidarea legăturilor sale cu alte metropole culturale din Europa și de pe alte continente. Programul fiecărei ediții în parte exprimă acest deziderat, atât prin selecția scriitorilor invitați, cât și prin temele de dialog. O importanță deosebită în arhitectura programului festivalului o ocupă panoramarea spațiului cultural din zona Europei de Est și a regiunii Mării Negre. Până în prezent, aproape 300 de scriitori au luat parte la evenimentele din cadrul Festivalului internațional de literatură de la Odesa. Hans Ruprecht și Ulrich Schreiber conduc festivalul de la înființarea sa.

WORLDWIDE READING OF UKRAINIAN LITERATURE

The worldwide readings continue! In Copenhagen, Erevan, Calcutta, Milan, Zaporizhia , Berlin and other cities, texts by Ukrainian authors will be read in Bucharest, including those by the poets Volodimir Vakulenko, Victoria Amelina and Maksym Kryvtzov, who were killed in the war. In a film produced especially for the worldwide reading, Yurij Andruchovitch, Svitlana Bondar, Andrei Kurkov, Iya Kiva, Dmytro Lazutkin, Halyna Kruk, Vasyl Makhno from Ukraine, Dan Sociu and Varujan Vosganian from Romania as well as Nora Bossong, Daniel Kehlmann and Jan Koneffke from Germany, among others, will read Ukrainian texts. We would like to thank the Goethe Institutes for their cooperation.

This event can be watched online, also after the festival

YouTube:  https://www.youtube. com/@ internationalliteraturefes7445

Facebook:   https://www. facebook.com/ InternationalesLiteraturfestiv alOdesa

participants:

Time: 16:00 -19.00. (Copenhagen time) Organizers: Ukraine House in Denmark Venue: Strandgade 27B, 1401 Copenhagen Participants: Kateryna Kalytko, Iya Kiva , Halyna Kruk , Oleksandr Mykhed , Iryna Shuvalova Iryna Tsilyk Event language: Danish, Ukrainian Website: https://www.ukrainehouse.dk

Time: 18.30 p.m. (Calcutta time) Organizers: Goethe-Institut Kolkata mit der Unterstützung von Deutschen Generalkonsulat in Kolkata Venue: Goethe-Institut Calcutta Event language: English Website:  https://www.goethe.de/ins/in/en/ver.cfm

16.00 – 17.30 p.m. (CET) Organizers: Association Ucraina Più Milano in cooperation with Goethe-Institut Milano Venue: Goethe-Institut Mailand, Via San Paolo 10, Milano Website: https://www.goethe.de/ins/it/de/sta/mai/ver.cfm?event_id=25420063

13.00 – 14.00 (Kyiv time) Organizer: Zaporizzhia public library

Venue: Zaporizhia public library

Participant: Yaroslava Degtiarenko Event language: Ukrainian Website: https://www.facebook.com/bibliozp

14:00 – 15:00 ( Kyiv time)

Organizers: Suspilne Odesa and Odesa Ukrainian Academic Theatre named after V. Vasylko

The event is devoted to the authors killed in the war.

Venue: Radio Studio of Suspilne Odesa

Event language: Ukrainian

Moderator: Svitlana Bondar

This event can be watched online 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@internationalliteraturefes7445

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InternationalesLiteraturfestivalOdesa

Some of our events can be followed online

• Legal Notice

A Prominent Free-Speech Group Is Fighting for Its Life

PEN America has now canceled its annual World Voices festival, after calling off its literary-awards ceremony last week. Can it survive?

In 2015, PEN America, the organization devoted to defending free speech, chose to honor the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo at its annual gala. A few months earlier, Islamic extremists had murdered 12 people at the publication’s offices in Paris. The rationale for recognizing the magazine seemed airtight: People had been killed for expressing themselves, and PEN America’s mission is to protect people targeted for what they express. For some writers connected with the organization, however, this reasoning was not so obvious. Six of them boycotted the gala, and 242 signed a letter of protest. In their eyes, Charlie Hebdo ’s editorial staff, including those recently killed, embodied a political perspective that was unworthy of plaudits. The magazine frequently mocked Islam (and, in particular, caricatured the Prophet Muhammad), and this was a form of punching down, insulting a population that, as the letter put it, “is already marginalized, embattled, and victimized.”

PEN America defended itself, the gala went on, and Salman Rushdie, a former president of the group and a writer who knows what it means to have his life endangered because of his art , was given the last word in a New York Times article about the brouhaha: “If PEN as a free speech organization can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the name.”

Read: Salman Rushdie strikes back

Rushdie, who helped found PEN America’s World Voices festival two decades ago, had no confusion about what the organization represented. Its role was not to take a position on the place of Islam in France or comment on the French state’s aggressive secularizing policies, which Charlie Hebdo ’s editors had championed through their cartoons. No, PEN America was simply there to protect the right of artists to draw, of writers to write.

The clash over Charlie Hebdo felt, in the moment, like a blip. It was not a blip. The forces that demanded PEN America stand for more—that it fight for issues its members considered to be matters of social justice, as opposed to the squishier but essential liberal ideals of openness and dialogue—have in the past two months managed to bring the organization to its knees. Unsurprisingly, the events of October 7, and all that followed, were the precipitating cause.

This afternoon, PEN America announced that it is canceling its World Voices festival—this year was to be the 20th anniversary of the annual international gathering of writers that Rushdie conceived as a way to encourage cross-cultural conversation and champion embattled artists. A cascade of authors, either out of conviction or under pressure, felt they couldn’t take part. PEN America had already decided last week to cancel its literary awards for the year after nearly half of the nominees withdrew their names from consideration. And its annual gala, a black-tie fundraiser scheduled for the middle of May, also seems hard to imagine right now. The language of the protest, too, has reached new extremes, with the most recent salvo demanding the resignation of PEN America’s CEO, Suzanne Nossel; its president, Jennifer Finney Boylan; and its entire board. Everyone I’ve spoken with there is in a state of high panic and deep sadness.

The existential conflict surrounding PEN America—the letters and counter-letters, withdrawals and statements of principle—captures the enormous rupture on the left since Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel on October 7 and Israel’s deadly response in Gaza. Can an organization that sees itself as above politics, that sees itself straightforwardly as a support system for an open society, be allowed to exist anymore? For the protesting writers, this lofty mission represents an unforgivable moral abdication at a moment of crisis. But if they have their way and PEN America doesn’t survive, where will these authors turn when they need defending?

From my own reading of the various letters of protest, the main demand of the now dozens upon dozens of writers protesting PEN America is this: They want the organization to say the word genocide —for PEN America to declare that what Israel is doing in Gaza is a deliberate effort to wipe out the Palestinian people, and act accordingly. From the perspective of the protesting writers, this interpretation of what has transpired since October 7 is both irrefutable and cause for repeating the charge as loudly as possible. “PEN America states that ‘the core’ of its mission is to ‘support the right to disagree,’” reads the most recent open letter . “But among writers of conscience, there is no disagreement. There is fact and fiction. The fact is that Israel is leading a genocide of the Palestinian people.”

Plenty of arguments exist on the side of those who do not see what Israel is doing as genocide—and they are compelling even for people like myself who believe that Israel has acted recklessly and in a way that constitutes collective punishment. But the writers protesting PEN America do not seem interested in a conversation or scrutiny or trying to contend with what Israel’s post–October 7 motives might be. They seem driven instead by an understandably deep emotional response to a devastating death toll and, like the greater pro-Palestinian movement, have decided to use the word genocide as the most resonant way to describe a conflict in which, according to Hamas’s Health Ministry, more than 33,000 Palestinians have now been killed. It has given them a sense of righteousness that is impossible to contain within an organization built on the “right to disagree.”

To follow the volley of letters and responses from PEN America over the past two months is to get a close-up look at the growing irreconcilability of these positions. The first serious sign of protest came in a March 14 letter from a group of writers, including Naomi Klein, Michelle Alexander, and Lorrie Moore, who declared that they would boycott the World Voices festival this year. Their stated reason was their unhappiness with what they took to be PEN America’s anemic response to the death and destruction in Gaza. They accused the organization of taking too long to call for a cease-fire and then, when it finally did, of demanding that it be “mutually agreed” (a reasonable phrasing given that, according to the U.S. State Department, it is Hamas that has rejected the latest cease-fire proposal). This was not “a clear call,” the writers said. Moreover, why had PEN America, they wanted to know, not joined the movement to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel? Sure, PEN America had put out a number of statements of concern about Palestinian writers and the worsening situation in Gaza (more than 40 statements , actually, since October 7), but where was the “action”?

The letter sought redress; it was not an attempt to burn it all down. And PEN America responded. In a letter that appeared a week later, the organization reasserted its mission without apology: “For some, referencing nuance is moral betrayal. For others, failure to do so is unconscionable. As an organization open to all writers, we see no alternative but to remain home to this diversity of opinions and perspectives, even if, for some, that very openness becomes reason to exit.” The response also included an unambiguous call for “an immediate ceasefire and release of the hostages,” an invitation for open dialogue with the protesters, and a commitment to increase the financial contribution to an emergency fund for Palestinian writers.

An excess of “openness,” the writers insisted in a response , was not their issue with PEN America; rather it was “a series of specific failures to act with urgency and substance in the face of ongoing war crimes, including a failure to use language to name these crimes as such under international humanitarian law.” To uncover what they saw as the bias behind this failure, the writers were calling for “a thorough review and examination of the conduct and performance of PEN America,” on the issue of Israel and Palestine. And they got what they wanted. On April 16, the organization announced to its staff the creation of a working group that would look back at the previous decade of statements on Israel and Palestine, and also make sure there was consistency in PEN America’s public remarks with regards to other conflicts, such as those in Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Sudan.

But things continued to get worse. As PEN America geared up to announce the finalists for its awards, a large group of authors declared that they were taking their books out of contention. In a letter last week, Finney Boylan, a writer who became the organization’s president in December, tried to stanch the bleeding, calling Israel’s actions in Gaza an “abomination” (though not a genocide), arguing for the value of “conversation,” and lamenting that “some authors would rather silence themselves than be associated with an organization that defends free speech and dissent.”

Nothing seemed to convince the growing number of protesters. On April 17, those who had boycotted the awards delivered a letter , one which was then endorsed by the original group of writers protesting the festival. This one had none of the conciliatory tone of the original letter. It accused PEN America of propagating “ahistorical, Zionist propaganda under the guise of neutrality,” of “parroting hasbara talking points,” using the Hebrew word for “explanation” that anti-Israel activists associate with Israeli-government spin. Nossel in particular was singled out as someone who apparently had “longstanding commitments to Zionism, Islamophobia, and imperial wars in the Middle East.” The letter was nasty, absurd in its histrionics, suggesting essentially that PEN America was in cahoots with the Israeli military. PEN America was guilty of no less than “complicity in normalizing genocide.”

The people at PEN America whom I spoke with were left speechless by this letter, but also felt that it confirmed their perceptions of the protesters and their true motives—I understand, for example, why some who read the letter wonder whether the personal animus directed at Nossel is not just because she is the organization’s leader but because she is Jewish. The demand of these writers from the beginning, it now seemed clear, was not about the number of statements PEN America made about Palestinian writers and whether they matched the number made about Ukrainian writers. At question was language. And if PEN America was not willing to use the word genocide , then it existed on the other side of a bright-red line, outside the encampment. The breach was complete. The organization now appears broken in ways that seem impossible to imagine repairing.

When I spoke with Nossel last week, before the news about the canceled awards ceremony and festival, she put a brave face on PEN America’s predicament and insisted that she was staying true to the organization’s mission. Nossel is a former State Department official and was the executive director of Amnesty International USA before joining PEN America as its CEO in 2013.  “We see ourselves as guardians of open discourse,” she told me. “We really believe that we have to bring about a moment when these conversations can be had, and that, ultimately, the defeat of dialogue and the turning-away from dialogue is something dangerous for our democracy. We don’t want to just throw up our hands.” The festival, she said, was supposed to exemplify this philosophy. One of the events now canceled was to be a panel on “The Palestinian Exception to Free Speech,” about threats to those who speak up for Palestinian rights. Recent statements put out by PEN America have criticized the banning of Students for Justice in Palestine on college campuses and the decision by the University of Southern California to cancel the valedictory speech of a pro-Palestinian student.

The fundamental misperception at the center of this conflict is that PEN America sees itself as a free-speech organization, while the protesters see it as a channel to express their political views. I’ve read some of the letters addressed to PEN America from writers who decided to opt out of the festival—some after first saying they would participate despite the pressure—and there is a clear pattern: Many seemed worried about failing a political litmus test, that they would be throwing in their lot with the normalizers of genocide if they took part in a panel on translation or memoir writing . One letter from a prominent author who had chosen to withdraw mentioned “ongoing harassment.”

PEN America has grown enormously in the past 10 years, from an organization with a budget of $2 million to one with $24 million, and a staff that went from 14 to nearly 100 in that time. It has worked on a wide range of issues, from cataloging book banning to reporting on writers under assault in Latin America. Some of the people I’ve spoken with who have had leadership positions at PEN America have wondered, though, if an outsize focus on threats to free speech from the right has unwittingly contributed to the politicization and the current confusion about what PEN is supposed to be for. One of these PEN America insiders told me that he thought 90 percent of the issues the organization had been campaigning for could be construed as progressive causes.

The group’s free-speech absolutism may have become muddied in the process. “I would say that in the end, if we can get out of this situation,” this same person told me, “if we can find a way to come back to the preservation of the essential mission, which is to stand for free speech and free expression, and the proliferating nature of those demands and those challenges in a 21st century, and not be so exclusively wedded to our fights on behalf of the left, then I think we will have made a real step forward.”

Note those if s. At the moment, momentum is on the side of the protest, which will claim the cancellation of the festival as a victory. It now seems entirely possible that PEN America may not survive this episode. But I wonder whether these writers really appreciate exactly who will be most hurt if they achieve their goal. How many organizations exist that raise tens of thousands of dollars to support translators and emerging writers? How many festivals bring to the United States creative people from around the world to talk about their art, to debate and discuss the harsh conditions under which they work? How many organizations keep track of imprisoned authors? Does it really make sense to jettison such an entity without first thinking through what its absence would mean, what a world without PEN, without a defense of expression, whatever form it might take, would actually look like?

Or maybe just listen to the voice of a writer like Aatish Taseer, who turned to PEN America at a moment of need. The prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, offended by a critical article Taseer wrote in Time magazine, canceled Taseer’s overseas Indian citizenship (a special status accorded to Indians living abroad). This left Taseer “completely bereft,” he told me, unable to return to the country and see his family, including his grandmother before she died. He asked PEN America for help. “They pulled every possible lever they could on my behalf to try and bring attention to my case, and to try to bring about a change in my situation,” he said. “I’m sure that PEN has made missteps, but I would rather be able to influence the organization from within than trying to boycott it or shut it down,” he said. Given how much PEN America has done for him, the disappearance of such an organization, in spite of its imperfections, would be a “terrible loss.”

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Lionel Shriver Puts On a Sombrero

By Jia Tolentino

No matter your opinion on cultural appropriation, you can be certain that many people think you are wrong. The novelist Lionel Shriver thinks that fear of it threatens to extinguish literature, and, last Thursday, at the Brisbane Writers Festival, she gave an instantly controversial keynote speech to that effect. She spoke while wearing a sombrero, a nod to a dustup at Bowdoin College, in February, in which a tequila-themed party involving miniature sombreros became a campus flashpoint. Shriver recounted the events scornfully, poking fun at Bowdoin students and administration, and their talk about empathy and safe spaces. “What does this have to do with writing fiction?” she asked. “The moral of the sombrero scandals is clear: you’re not supposed to try on other people’s hats.” That night, the writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied posted a piece on Medium , later republished by the Guardian , about Shriver’s speech. The speech, Abdel-Magied wrote, “dripped of racial supremacy,” and she had been prompted to walk out.

Shriver is best known for her 2003 novel, “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” which is written from the perspective of a school shooter’s mother. In the second sentence of her address, she described herself as a “renowned iconoclast.” The festival had asked her to speak on the topic of “community and belonging,” but she wouldn’t be doing that, she said, “unless we stretch the topic to breaking point.” And Shriver, indeed, was stretching. The Bowdoin incident had been picked up mostly by conservative news sites that wished to mock campus political correctness ; many reported, incorrectly , as Shriver did herself, that two student representatives had been impeached over the party. The Bowdoin Orient also noted, in February, that Bowdoin’s president criticized racial insensitivity on campus generally , rather than the sombrero party in particular, and that administrators had already moved away from the term “cultural appropriation,” discussing bias and inclusivity instead.

In any case, hats, literal or figurative, are most meaningful in context. It’s true that the weight of identity politics is heavy on art and criticism at the moment; Shriver was particularly bothered by its appearance in a bad review she got recently. Her new novel, “The Mandibles,” features a black secondary character named Luella, who is married to a white central character named Douglas. (Shriver talked about the novel with my colleague Alexandra Schwartz in June.) “I reasoned that Douglas, a liberal New Yorker, would credibly have left his wife for a beautiful, stately African-American, because arm candy of color would reflect well on him in his circle,” Shriver explained, adding that, “in the end, the joke is on Douglas, because Luella suffers from early-onset dementia,” and that, by the end of the book, “they’re obligated to put the addled, disoriented Luella on a leash.” A Washington Post reviewer , she said, “groundlessly accused this book of being ‘racist’ because it doesn’t toe a strict Democratic Party line.”

Is this actually evidence of a world in which writers are forbidden to try on different identities? Or is this evidence of a world in which Shriver’s leash situation wasn’t conceived or executed well enough to pass the bar? Not having read “The Mandibles” myself, I can’t say how well or poorly Shriver rendered that particular character (though her explanation for Luella’s presence in the book—that her husband married her to look more progressive, and her mental degeneration is a matter of irony concerning him—doesn’t strike me as terribly promising). But there are all sorts of ways to borrow another person’s position: respectfully and transformatively, in ignorance, or with disdain. It’s one thing to wear a sombrero if you’re Beyoncé ; it’s another if you’re a college kid downing tequila. One of the worst ways to wear a sombrero, I think, is to be a white keynote speaker at a literary festival, saying, “I am hopeful that the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ is a passing fad.”

The debate over cultural appropriation is becoming very abstracted. Speech is often equated with action; oversensitivity and insensitivity can start to look much the same. (Shriver was wearing a sombrero in an attempt to make a statement that wearing a sombrero shouldn’t be much of a statement, etc.) Both Shriver and her targets feel personally stifled, and, as a result, her keynote enacted what it was trying to rebuke—that is, it framed the people she disagreed with as culturally dangerous. They would do the same to her, and, following the speech, they did: the Brisbane Writers Festival, the Times reported , pulled its links to Shriver’s speech and publicly disavowed her point of view.

The festival also organized a “right of reply” session, inviting Abdel-Magied and the Korean-American writer Suki Kim to speak. Both writers brought up the entirely worthy point that white writers can find mainstream success with marginal subjects much more easily than those marginal subjects can find an audience writing about their own cultures and lives. Still, the salve for a bruise left by large-scale inequity won’t necessarily be found in any one writer’s brave decision to shut up. It doesn’t bother me that literary appropriation happens ; as Martha Nussbaum argued in her book “Poetic Justice,” literature develops empathy, and Shriver is correct that “trying to push the boundaries of the author’s personal experience is part of a fiction writer’s job.” It bothers me more that this project, when it is attempted, is so often attempted poorly. Real empathy is obvious in a text, and I wouldn’t expect to find it in the work of authors who request “a few points for trying.” Failure is less the work of political correctness and more the evidence of a morally inadequate imagination from those who already have the stage.

A common lesson in every fight about cultural appropriation is that no one appears to be changing anyone else’s mind. Shriver wanted her detractors to be less touchy, and instead she reinforced their position. The Brisbane Writers Festival’s response to Shriver will, in turn, underline her conviction that free expression is being stifled. On this topic, as on most, audiences self-sort after every flare-up; opposition convinces us, over and over, that we are right.

Shriver spoke about this dynamic in her keynote: “The left’s embrace of ‘gotcha’ hypersensitivity inevitably invites backlash. Donald Trump appeals to people who have had it up to their eyeballs with being told what they can and can’t say.” It’s a familiar point, though the logic of it is backward: it is insensitivity that prompted the conversation in the first place. We might remember, anyway, that there are better ways of expressing an opinion than telling other people how they should react. On Monday night, the model Chrissy Teigen, who is half Thai, tweeted about the “oriental dressing” on her mid-flight salad. “Like if you’re over 50 you can call me oriental to my face but this is a new menu and I’m not a rug ,” she wrote. This is ostensibly, as Teigen acknowledged, a “p.c.” opinion. But, in response, she received a slew of tweets telling her that she wasn’t culturally sensitive enough. “Oriental” is offensive to Asians, her followers told her, so she should be offended, whether or not the term actually feels hurtful to her. They sounded as lonely and lost as Shriver did, telling her audience the opposite.

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