Lannan Literary Symposium

The Lannan Literary Symposium and Festival

Literacy • Literature • Democracy

Georgetown University 6 and 7 April 2010

Georgetown’s 2010 Lannan Literary Symposium and Festival will explore the most vital and purposeful connections across the themes in its title, Literacy, Literature and Democracy; the Symposium welcomes a rich selection of writers, journalists and activists to the Georgetown campus over the two days following Easter break, Tuesday 6 and Wednesday 7 April, to discuss and to demonstrate how universal access to literacy, critical attention to the urgency of the creative imagination and to the power of the written word, and care for the fragility of authentic democracy must all equally concern citizens working for justice in our contemporary world. Guests to Georgetown include noted writers Dave Eggers, Chris Abani, and Uwem Akpan, SJ, journalist, writer and Mother Jones founder Adam Hochschild, social justice activist Mekonnodji Nadingam, poet Thomas Sayers Ellis, and recent Georgetown alums Happy Johnson (COL ’07) and Allison Correll (English MA ’09). Topics across two days of readings, roundtables and performances will include local and national literacy projects like Mr. Eggers’ 826 Valencia and 826 DC, literary, cultural and practical responses to historic challenges like the rebuilding of New Orleans after Katrina, and the ongoing global refugee crisis, with special focus on vulnerable populations in central Africa; the Symposium concludes with a special tribute to the poet Lucille Clifton by former Maryland poet laureate Michael S. Glaser and readings in her honor by Mr. Ellis and Mr. Abani. Participants from the Georgetown Community will include Professors Deborah Tannen, Maureen Corrigan, and Michael Eric Dyson, as well as Professor Carolyn Forché, the Director of Georgetown’s Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. For more information please contact Professor Ricardo Ortíz at ortizr@georgetown.edu.


Preliminary Schedule:

Tu 6 April/7:30PM/Gaston Hall

A Public Reading and Talk Featuring

Dave Eggers

In Conversation with

Maureen Corrigan and Deborah Tannen
Reception to Follow, 2nd Floor Healy

•
Wednesday 7 April 2010

9:30 to 11am Riggs Library

“Writing Beyond Catastrophe: Literatures and Cultures of National Revival in Post-Katrina America”

A Discussion featuring
Michael Eric Dyson, Dave Eggers, Happy Johnson (’07)

Refreshments Served and Books Available in the Presidents’ Room

•
Copley Formal Lounge

“Writing (and Working) Beyond Genocide: Literary, Cultural and Social Activisms in a Changing Africa”


Session 1 • 1 to 3pm

Readings by
Uwem Akpan, SJ and Adam Hochschild

Session 2 • 3 to 5PM

A Roundtable Featuring
Mekonndji Nadingam
Allison Correll (MA ’09)
Chris Abani • Uwem Akpan
Adam Hochschild

Books Available and Light Refreshments Served

Photo of the Week: Esther Iverem

This feature highlights a different photo each week from the 2 Split This Rock Festivals. For more photos from the last festival, check out Split This Rock's Flickr.



Esther Iverem reads at the 2008 Festival during the DC Poets Against the War panel.

Photo Credit: Jill Brazel

Photo of the Week: Carolyn Forché

This feature highlights a different photo each week from the 2 Split This Rock Festivals. For more photos from the last festival, check out Split This Rock's Flickr.


Featured Poet Carolyn Forché reads at the 2008 Split This Rock Poetry Festival.

Photo Credit: Jill Brazel

Post-Festival Thank You Reception Tomorrow

Split This Rock
Post-Festival Thank You Reception

Thursday March 25, 2010
6-8pm
Split This Rock Headquarters
Institute for Policy Studies
1112 16th St. NW
6th Floor
Washington, DC 20036

(Metro: Farragut North on the Red Line or Farragut West on the Blue/Orange Line)

Split This Rock invites you to our Post-Festival Thank You Reception. We'd like to express our appreciation for your significant contribution in making the 2010 Split This Rock Poetry Festival a success. Stop by for some snacks and drinks! This is also a great opportunity to collect your festival t-shirt if you have not already.

Please RSVP by contacting Program Associate Abdul Ali at ali at splitthisrock dot org or calling 202-787-5210.

Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week: Andrea Gibson

This is for the possibility that guides us

and for the possibilities still waiting to sing

and spread their wings inside us,

‘cause tonight Saturn is on his knees

proposing with all of his ten thousand rings

that whatever song we’ve been singing we sing even more.

The world needs us right now more than it ever has before.

Pull all your strings.

Play every chord.

If you’re writing letters to the prisoners

start tearing down the bars.

If you’re handing out flashlights in the dark

start handing out stars.

-Andrea Gibson

Excerpt from “Say Yes” from Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns (Write Bloody Publishing 2008). Used by permission.

Andrea Gibson, a powerful live performer, was the winner of the 2008 Women of The World Poetry Slam (Detroit), and has placed 3rd in the world for the last three years by the iWPS. She won a DIY Poetry Book of the Year and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her first book, Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns. She has been showcased on Free Speech TV, the documentary Slam Planet, NPR, Air America, and Independent Radio Stations nationwide. She has recorded four full-length albums of poetry, the most recently, Yellowbird, in which her poetry is accompanied by piano, global drums, dobro, violin, and music by Kim Taylor, Chris Pureka, and Devotchka. The Denver Westword has said, “If slamming were professional boxing, Andrea Gibson would be the light weight you don’t think much of until she’s knocked you flat on your ass.” www.andreagibson.org

Gibson was featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, March 10-13, 2010 in Washington, DC. The festival presented readings, workshops, panel discussions, youth programming, film, and activism—four days of creative transformation as we imagine a way forward, hone our community and activist skills, and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for social change. For more information: info@splitthisrock.org. Be on the lookout for dates for the next festival in 2012!

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem-of-the-Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

Split This Rock

www.splitthisrock.org
info@splitthisrock.org
202-787-5210

Music is Still the Weapon

A thousand Nigerian soldiers surrounded the Kalakuta Republic and burned it to the ground on February 18, 1977.

As republics go, Kalakuta wasn't very large. Only 100 or so people lived there. But the immensely popular musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti had created this compound, in the Nigerian capital of Lagos, as a joyful and democratic space in an otherwise corrupt and dictatorial country. The sovereignty of Fela's republic was always under threat. And even though the invaders threw his mother from the second floor on that day in 1977, and even though the soldiers cracked his skull, and even though the government jailed him for trying to defend himself, Fela continued to fight back. He used his Afrobeat music and biting lyrics as his weapon.

"Too much sweets will give you rotten teeth," Fela declares in the new musical that recreates Kalakuta on Broadway. "Too much Nigeria will give you broken heads, burned houses, dead students." Fela had about as much of Nigeria as any one person can handle, yet he remained powerfully attracted to the country that his mother had devoted so much of her life to liberating from colonial rule. He put out more than 70 records, toured the world, and shared the stage with other famous musicians. But he always came back to Nigeria, where he hoped one day to become president.

The Broadway show, which is a powerful cocktail of music and dance and politics, doesn't provide much detail about the rotten state of Nigeria. It is, after all, a musical. And Fela's songs, though sharp and critical, tend toward general, even allegorical, indictments. The song "Zombie," for instance, doesn't mention Nigerian soldiers by name but rather critiques their well-known reputation to follow whatever orders they are given. Fela's protests are multi-barbed, and can be easily applied at home and abroad. At one point in the Broadway show, during the song "International Thief Thief," dancers hold up signs accusing not only villains of the Nigerian drama like Shell, but also more universal targets like Halliburton and the International Monetary Fund.

Given the squalor of Nigeria, it's hard to believe that the country is now the world's eighth-largest exporter of oil. "Nigeria earned more than $400 billion from oil in recent decades," writes Peter Maass in his new book Crude World, "yet nine out of 10 citizens live on less than $2 a day and one out of five children dies before his fifth birthday. Its per-capita GDP is one-fifth of South Africa's." This comparison is particularly painful, and explains Fela's comment in the excellent documentary Fela: Music Is the Weapon that even then, during the apartheid era, "the situation here is worse than in South Africa.

"There were actually two Kalakuta Republics. Fela got the name for his little Monaco of music from the time he spent in prison, when he discovered that the prisoners nicknamed his jail the "Kalakuta Republic." In Swahili, "kalakuta" means "rascal." As Fela explains, "If rascality is going to get us what we want, we will use it; because we are dealing with corrupt people, we have to be 'rascally' with them."

The Nigerian poet Chris Abani also uses music as a weapon: the music of poetry. His collection of poems, entitled Kalakuta Republic - named for the prison where he too spent so many days - includes the powerful "Ode to Joy," about a young boy of 14 whom the police torture to death when he refuses to finger an innocent man.

The poem concludes:

an act insignificant
in the face of this child's courage
we sang:

Oje wai wai,
Moje oje wai, wai.

Incensed
they went
on a killing rampage

guns
knives
truncheons

even canisters of tear-gas,
fired close up or
directly into mouths, will
take the back
of
your head off
and many men
died singing,
that night.

Notes caught,
surprised,
suspended

as blows bloodied mouths
clotting into silence.

Chris Abani headlined Split This Rock poetry festival last week here in Washington, DC. It was a mighty gathering of word-warriors from around the world. The festival began during the dreary days of the Bush administration, a group of the most tone-deaf, word-challenged, and brute politicians as we've ever had to endure in this country. We live in more enlightened times, perhaps, when the "Black President" that Fela sang about has come to occupy the White House. But we continue to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. We continue to enrich the Pentagon beyond its most extravagant dreams. And we continue to freeze all other government endeavors because of our deficit (of imagination).

For a few days, however, the poets of Split This Rock created their own Kalakuta Republic here in Washington: a refuge for those who believe that art can transform our world. It is, for the moment at least, a republic as small as Fela's was. The United States "continues to turn up individuals making works of art," writes essayist Lewis Lapham in TomDispatch, "but they traffic in a medium of exchange on which the society doesn't place a high priority." Still, the sounds and the words produced in Fela's Kalakuta continue to resonate in our own republic of letters - on Broadway, in Chris Abani's poetry, and in political music from Springsteen to M.I.A.

- John Feffer, Co-Director, Foreign Policy in Focus, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies

What Festival Participants are Saying About Split This Rock 2010

Doug Carter at the BitLit blog of the Rose O'Neill Literary House[Photo Credit: Jill Brazel]:
The children of American, Vietnamese, or Chinese soldiers, these six rising poetic stars showed us how war extends itself into the domestic sphere of life. The poems demonstrated the curiosity of children who understand “war” is not a dinner-table subject, and the spiritual strength of adults who have the power to imagine the truth. These writers owe not only their creative impetus, but also their lives, to the war. Without the war, Cathy Linh Che said, many of us would not have been poets, we would not have lived in the U.S., and we would not have been born. As one panelist recited poems about her childhood experiences with her father, she came to the line “I don’t like you very much today,” then thanked our crowd and invited the next panelist up to read. She sat in front of me. During the remainder of the reading, I watched the panelist cry. I guess another really awesome thing about festivals like this is how they make you want to write. I foresee a poem in a word document, one about a girl reading a poem. Maybe her mouth will be an almond blossom. Maybe her words will be petals, and her tears, pearls of silk.

From Dan Wilcox, Split This Rock Panelist [Photo Credit: Jill Brazel]:
Time for dinner & a drink & then back to the Bell Multicultural High School for the evening's reading. Mark Nowak gave a reading with slides, touching on the Sago mine disaster & mining accidents in China, in what is being called documentary poetry. Lillian Allen, who lives in Canada, performed her poems in the tradition of "Dub poetry," reggae rhythms & the early roots of hip-hop. She took on the lingo & dance rhythms of the islands, mixing in sound patterns with the words, in such poems as "Limbo Dancer," poems about women in prison, in housing projects & giving birth, even a love poem ("would love to make a revolution with you").

Francisco Aragon's poem were mostly short, evoked the spirit of Garcia Lorca & Ernesto Cardenal. His poems to us "To Madrid," & Rome ("The Tailor"), & a strange slant translation of Rilke, "Torso." Nancy Morejon is from Cuba (& the Cuban ambassador was in the house). She read her poems in Spanish, then in translations done by others, often touching on the Afro-Cuban themes of slavery & oppression, but in the rich, colorful images often found in poetry from the Caribbean.

Patricia Spears Jones, another 2010 Panelist, shared the following thoughts [Photo Credit: Jill Brazel]:
I want to thank Patricia Monoghan and Michael McDermott, the co-founders of Black Earth Institute for inviting me to join this year's panel. Along with Patricia, Annie Finch, Judith Roche and Richard Cambridge, I spoke a panel, Speaking for the Silenc(e)d and of course, being the gentle contrarian that I am I spoke about listening--that we who speak are often speaking to indifferent, hostile or simply deeply ignorant audiences and that we have to start thinking of new ways to open ears. The panel was rich in information and deep connection to a rnage of communities from Annie's talk on collaboration in her Wolf Song project; Judith's work with incarcerated girls; and Richard's discussion of the media's mindset vis a vis our un-neighborly relationship with Cuba. Our audience was terrific--I got to meet Tracy Chiles McGhee and all the way from NYC, Marie Elizabeth Mali and Victoria Sammartino--teachers, arts group organizers, librarians, poets all. Patrica M. opened up the room for discussion and poetry and Victoria read an amazing piece about the incarcerated girls that she has worked with. It was deeply moving.