U.S. Gathering Lures Third World : Writers, Editors, Critics Ponder the Meaning of Culture

Normally at this time of year, the marquee at the Hilton Inn opposite Duke University here might be expected to carry a message suited to the season, something, perhaps, like “Go, Blue Devils.”

Instead what the marquee read was this: “Welcome, Third World Writers.”

From Africa, Asia and the Americas--parts of the world, as Charles Bergquist, director of Duke’s Center for International Studies, defined it, that were “transformed and unified” as a result of the expansion of Europe--17 writers, poets, editors, critics and film makers gathered here last weekend to scrutinize the meaning of culture: their own, each other’s, and the peculiar way Third and First World cultures do and do not interact.

Early morning breakfasts of coffee and grits were peppered with talk of allegory and alienation, truncated only to hurry off to 10 and 12 hours of meetings and presentations that began each day at 9 a.m.

Subject None Could Ignore

With no official affiliation, the participants were saddled with no internal politics, focusing intensely, urgently, on a single agenda. On the other hand, politics--the role of government in the life and work of the artist--was a subject no one could ignore.

Meeting to consider “The Challenge of Third World Culture,” these artists in turn attracted scholars and students from more than 100 U.S. colleges and universities. For three marathon days, Duke University students and faculty joined these visitors in crowded lecture halls to discuss exile and cultural identity; democracy and cultural freedom; gender, politics and literature; storytelling, parable, parody; of writing not for immortality, but for mortality.

“We write the way men leave their names carved on the walls of their cells,” Mexican novelist/journalist Elena Poniatowska told a hushed audience packed into a stuffy auditorium. “We write in order to explain to ourselves what we cannot understand. We write to leave evidence for our sons.

“We write in Latin America because it is our only way to leave evidence behind. We write so as to be seen, so as to be part of the human vision of the world, so as not to be erased so easily.

“We write,” Poniatowska said, “so as not to disappear.”

Far from international literary superstars, these writers were not widely known in this country. “Protest” is too narrow a genre to encompass these chroniclers of love and myth and war and peace, and yet their voices do inevitably speak of turmoil and transmutation.

Momentarily Amused

Challenged, for example, to elaborate--don’t all writers write to be remembered?--Elena Poniatowska was momentarily amused at the naivete of the question. Just that morning, at breakfast, Columbia University professor Jean Franco had idly inquired as to how many people at the table had been imprisoned. Nearly all those present said yes.

“Here, for instance, in the United States, I think there is not so much danger that you will be thrown into jail,” Poniatowska said. Thus her reference to disappearance was not figurative. “I meant,” Poniatowska said, “ literally disappear.”

As a rule, literary and cultural critic Frederic Jameson, now professor of comparative literature at Duke, explained, Western literature “tends to repress the political by emphasizing the personal.” By contrast, Third World writing “rejects that dichotomy, insisting on a coincidence of the personal and the political.”

Dennis Brutus, a poet exiled 20 years ago from his native South Africa, agreed: “One sees oneself as a social being, and creativity and political activity are both seen as simply facets of the same social being.” In non-Western cultures, Brutus said, “one does not compartmentalize one’s existence or one’s activities.

“I argue that my political activities are themselves creative.”

“It is impossible to divorce the political from the social,” fellow South African Achmat Dangor, also a poet, concurred. “If you consider that we grow up into a society where politics is fed to us very brutally, from a very early age.

“The politicization begins with children’s songs,” Dangor said. In South Africa, he said, those youthful melodies are marked by “an inability to distinguish between their private lives and what they see outside,” so much so, that by adulthood, the two have merged.

“In a nutshell,” Dangor said, “I find myself unable to distinguish between the personal and the political sides of my work.”

Recently, the dichotomy was posed as a question to Chilean exile Ariel Dorfman. “Aren’t you too political?” the novelist/essayist/journalist was asked. In Durham over the weekend, Dorfman recalled how he flared at that possibility. “I said, ‘Look, they’re burning kids in Chile. Do you expect us to ignore it? Not put it in our novels?’ ”

“Sons and husbands disappear,” Elena Poniatowska said. “Hundreds of men end up in jail. We have to admit that this is one of the realities of Latin America.”

“I try to demonstrate my own experience, living in Beirut, and to put this experience inside the structure of modern Arabic literature,” novelist/critic Elias Khoury said. Living in Beirut, he said, “the city where times are mixed and wars are lived,” writing helps “establish the new on the basis of the past.”

In a time and place of revolution, Khoury said, “writing becomes a part of the revolutionary process of society,” placing writers in a key role in “the game of double death: real death and cultural death.”

“It is not rhetoric,” Dorfman said, “that we write in the threat of death.”

‘Necessary to Do Something’

It was Dorfman, now serving as a visiting professor at Duke, who first proposed the idea of a conference on Third World culture. Initially, Dorfman said, “I felt it was necessary to do something on exile.” Since “half of the people who are here, in this conference, have at one time or another been exiles or expatriates,” the theme seemed to Dorfman unavoidable.

“All of us who are gathered here share an obsession,” Dorfman said. “We want a journey not away from, but back to our own savage, native parts of the world.

“It has often been stated that exile is a voyage of discovery. But it is above all else a territory where pain is inflicted.”

Dorfman often chooses to relate that pain through irony or satire. His most recent novel, “The Last Song of Manuel Sendero” (scheduled for publication in this country in February, from Viking), is the story, essentially, of fetal revolution: of babies who refuse to be born until the grown-ups of the world straighten the place up.

Spilling over into the aisles of what is usually a big chemistry auditorium, an enthusiastic audience ignored the Friday night football game and braved a room so steamy that many accused it of imitating the Third World to hear Dorfman, along with Barbadian poet George Lamming, read from their works.

Lamming, with his booming voice and corona of snow white hair, began by reminding his audience that “what we call knowledge has always been influenced by the context in which it takes place.” For the Third World writer, said Lamming, what this fact presents is “a conflict between the pursuit of knowledge and the exploitation of human beings.”

Still, that conflict seems in no way to have curtailed the Third World’s burgeoning literary development. As critic Jameson noted, “what was once a little shelf full of Third World classics has exploded into an immense collection, and the expansion gives no signs of having any limits.”

While publication in the West continues to bring credibility to Third World artists--”they get clout,” Columbia University professor Franco said, “from translation outside their own national circle”--these writers, poets, film makers also have come to command assessment and evaluation on their own terms, so much so that as Filipino film maker Kidlat Tahimik put it, “phrases like ‘cottage industry,’ ‘primitive’ or ‘native art’ are positive, not condescending.”

‘Different Set of Standards’

Asked Tahimik, “Are we judging Third World culture with the same filters that we use in judging Albee, or Shakespeare? It has to be a different set of standards. I like the word primitive .”

Among many Third World artists, Jameson concurred, “ ‘technical imperfections’ mean explicit refusal of the myths of perfection and of commodity consumption; resistance to multinational or imperialistic technology.”

But that very adherence to local style and substance may mean an automatic limiting of the artist’s audience. “The more you attempt to be universal,” Franco said, “the more you abstract yourself from local debates.

“Some writers have made that choice, and these are the writers we don’t know about in this country: writers who are writing about a local situation.

“That is one of the problems when we talk about ‘Third World literature’. What we mean is, Third World literature that we are familiar with here.”

A variation of that dilemma may afflict writers within their own Third World cultures as well. The debate over language rages, as artists argue among themselves over whether to write in local tongues, or to broaden their arenas and write in English.

South African poet Dangor, for one, has chosen to write in English. “There is tremendous pressure on us to become more universal,” he said. “I am writing for a South African audience, but in South Africa, virtually everyone can understand what I write. The melting pot of languages has enabled everyone to understand.”

In Africa in particular, poet Brutus agreed, “this issue is bound to cause a great deal of debate and controversy. But my inclination is that the debate is actually fanned by non-Africans.

“I think the crux of the matter is going to become the contention that English is the language of the oppressor--and it seems to me that that in itself is a highly debatable contention. I think that for Africans to opt not to write in English may well cost them more than they would gain.”

Ironically, these same linguistic limitations may hamper understanding within the Third World as well as outside it. Pakistani political theorist Eqbal Ahmad, now teaching at Hampshire College, said he had been talking about the conference with his new friend Elias Khoury. “It was the first time Elias had heard a South African poet,” Ahmad said. “He was struck by the fact that the poetry of Dennis Brutus was rather similar to two contemporary Palestinian poets.”

The observation prompted Ahmad to draw parallels among writers in Third World countries, concluding that “the modern Third World writer is forced to choose between three things: co-optation, confrontation and exile.” For the writer who takes the former path, Ahmad said, “you lose nothing, really, except your soul, the respect of others and a place in history.”

Much of the discussion, certainly, focused on cultural matters, but the interchange last weekend at Duke extended as well to issues of political diplomacy. A resolution supporting U.S. economic sanctions against South Africa passed--”an expression of the concerns of the conference translated into action,” Dennis Brutus exulted--and the group voiced overwhelming support for a telegram sent to Secretary of State George Shultz protesting the government’s refusal to issue a visa to Cuban film maker Tomas Gutierrez Alea.

But politics could not dim what Dorfman, for one, saw as actual and tangible benefits of this meeting of writers and artists. “You have people from some of the real hot spots, and they are not shooting at each other, and they are not shooting at the public,” Dorfman said. “The general vision of the terrorism only coming from the Third World is certainly belied.”

“It has been fruitful,” Eqbal Ahmad said, “for once to see the action of Third World writers, to hear them say very clearly where they stand, and to hear the almost confused reaction of the people in the First World.” Perhaps, Ahmad suggested, “they should have named the conference ‘the challenge of First World culture.’ ”

Maybe so, Dorfman said, warning gravely that “I will tell you this, your culture--American culture--is in crisis, more than any culture here is in crisis. I think that literature in the United States is riddled with doubts about its significance, and I would say it does not have in general the extraordinary tone that we find here at this meeting.”

And then Dorfman returned to what was a major theme of this gathering: “I know,” he said, “that the words I am writing are fundamental to the building of my nation.” As writers of the Third World, he said, “we know we are creating something and that the intellectual is absolutely essential to that nation--so much so that he is exiled, so much so that he is subjected to death threats.”

With such a meeting, Dorfman said, “we are opening doors. The point is, there are so many doors, you don’t know how many of them are going to stay open.”