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ISSUE 8: MAKING HISTORIES
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The writers who gather at PEN’s annual World Voices festivals come from many countries on several continents; they’re also citizens of a territory that’s more difficult to map. At the start of the twenty-first century, borders in the literary landscape continue to shift and blur: novelists mine historical archives and use imagination to fill in the gaps, essayists play with fiction’s tone and texture, memoirists turn to poetry, poets turn to reportage. And writers in all of these modes turn to the past to get a hold on the present, inventing histories for themselves and others. In the narratives and conversations collected here, they consider the countless stories, told and retold, which make up the fiction we’ve agreed to call History. Etgar Keret confesses, “I know a lot about the geography and ontology of lying.” Colum McCann quotes William Maxwell: “What we—or at any rate I—refer to confidently as a memory…is really just a form of storytelling” and “in talking about the past we lie with every breath we take.” Laila Lalami says, “We try to get at the truth through the lie of the story.” And one of Grace Paley’s large-hearted characters muses on the ease with which love “glides to solid invented figures from true remembered wraiths.”
Several of the stories and poems in this issue place historical characters in imagined worlds. Wu Ming invents a Cary Grant who is himself the invention of Archie Leach. Ilija Trojanow allows us to listen to the stories of Sidi Bombay, guide to Richard Burton in his search for the source of the Nile. Petr Zelenka’s play Theremin goes on tour with the inventor of a musical instrument that embodied the hopes of the Russian Revolution. Rodrigo Fresán conjures J.M. Barrie and his little boys. Arthur Japin channels Fellini. In verse, Maggie Nelson charts her attempts to write her murdered aunt back to life, and Tyehimba Jess tunes in to Leadbelly as he struggles to be more than a fantasy of white folks, “a fake dream.”
Leadbelly’s predicament is familiar to Abdulrazak Gurnah and Chris Abani, who describe feeling pressured to turn themselves into fictional characters, performers of pain. “A tricky thing happens to writers from non-Western countries,” Abani remarks. “The West wants you to be a good African, and there’s a little dance you have to do. You are supposed to play the role of native informant.” Caryl Phillips talks about finding a form that does justice to our unsettled world: “People who leave places, who can’t depend upon yesterday leading comfortably to today and today leading comfortably to tomorrow, have to find a narrative form to put this uncertainty across. It’s inevitable that there will be fracture and dislocation.” In one World Voices discussion, Colum McCann asks, “Do you think fiction writers might be the unacknowledged historians of the future?” In another, Daniel Alarcón responds. “Literature,” he says, “is doing the work that historians and politicians have neglected to do.”
—M Mark, Editor
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MASTHEAD
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>> Who's who behind PEN America 8 |
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Selected excerpts from PEN America 8 are now available below. Buy your copy of the journal today to read the full issue, with fiction, poetry, essays, and conversation from Chris Abani, Eve
Ensler, Etgar Keret, Marilynne Robinson, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette
Winterson, and many more.
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Inventing the Past
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With Arthur Japin, Colum McCann, Imma Monso, Laila Lalami, and Michael Wallner
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Imagine That!
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George Saunders & Etgar Keret
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The Messiness of Now
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Ilija Trojanow & Amitava Kumar |
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POETRY
How She Penetrates
By Maggie Nelson
ESSAY
Realist Fiction
by George Saunders
FICTION
The Acrobat
by Wu Ming
Bwana Burton's Binoclars
by Ilija Trojanow
Myth Milk
by Etgar Keret
I Invented Rome
by Arthur Japin
>> View the full Table of Contents
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