William H. Gass and Lorin Cuoco here present an edited but uncut record of the proceedings of the first international conference convened by the International Writers Center at Washington University in St. Louis.
The topic—the writer in politics—was divided into three parts: politics as material for the writers’ work ("The Writer in Politics"), politics as a threatening power over the pen ("The Writer under a Politics"), and politics as a viewpoint held by writers ("The Writer with a Politics"). Major addresses were delivered by Breyten Breytenbach, a white South African who was an early critic of apartheid serving seven years in jail before being exiled from his homeland; Nuruddin Farah, the Somali author of a number of internationally recognized novels, including the trilogy Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship, who has also suffered exile; Carolyn Forché, an American poet whose experiences as a Guggenheim Fellow in El Salvador led to her noted second book of poetry, The Country Between Us; Antonio Skarmeta, the Chilean short story writer, screen writer, and novelist whose Insurrection deals with the Nicaraguan Revolution; Luisa Valenzuela, an Argentine novelist and journalist who fled her home country in 1979 and returned a decade later after the restoration of democracy only to find remnants of the former military regime still a legitimate target for her absurdist prose; and Mario Vargas Llosa, the widely acclaimed Peruvian novelist who founded Libertad, the political party under whose banner he unsuccessfully ran for president of his country.
The Writer in Politics also includes edited transcriptions of the panel discussions that followed each of the six major addresses. Panelists included Irish poet Eavan Boland, author of seven books of poetry, including In a Time of Violence; Marc Chenetier, professor of American literature at l’Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and translator of numerous American authors—including Gass—into French; Robert Coover, writer-in-residence at Brown University and author of such works as Origin of the Brunists and A Public Burning; Ron Himes, founder of the St. Louis Black Repertory Company, which produces African American and Third World playwrights; Liu Binyan, former special correspondent for China’s official newspaper and author of China’s Crisis, China’s Hope; poet Eric Pankey, whose books include Apocrypha and This Reliquary World; Anton Shammas, Palestinian Israeli author whose works include the novel Arabesque; and Richard Watson, professor of philosophy at Washington University and author of The Philosopher’s Demise: Learning French and the novel Niagara.