Photos by Kelly Bedeian
This past March, four writers boarded a plane for the third millennium. There wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about the vessel in which they traveled, but rather the purpose of their journey.
The travelers were literary ambassadors, dispatched to lands that had once embraced the beginnings of civilization, but whose stories are now unsung around most of the globe. These writers ventured to Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan on a creative tour that included readings, lectures and cultural stops along the ancient Silk Road.
Their aim was to encourage collaboration, and their hope was to nurture and inspire authorship and promote readership of lesser-known and, as of yet, un-translated works. “For me [the trip] was a great success,” said Christopher Merrill, Director of The University of Iowa International Writing Program and a traveler on the trip. “Our writers came away enriched, and the reactions of the students we met were thrilling. Both sides began to break down stereotypes and learn about one another’s literature.”
The smiling poet and nonfiction writer went on to note several anecdotes about the journey, including the curious fascination the Turkmens hold for Mayne Reid, a late 19th-century American novelist and author of the Headless Horseman.
This interest in Reid, (who is arguably not as integral to the United States literary tradition as the Turkmens seem to think), prompted Merrill and his fellow travelers to perform an intervention of sorts. “We felt it was our job to mention some other writers,” he said with a chuckle.
Nevertheless, in locales known for authoritarian regimes and glaring restrictions on media freedoms, the fact that such a trip could take place at all might be considered a triumph. Turkmenistan ranks almost dead last on the 2013 Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index, and Uzbekistan is among the top 10 most repressive media climates in the world, according to watchdog organization Freedom House.
“It was a great surprise that we were able to pull this off,” admitted Merrill. But perhaps the larger revelation—at least for some of the trip’s attendees—was that the creativity and artistry of the word has an enduring power, even amid oppression.
Tour participant and bestselling novelist Ann Hood noted that she was struck by the writers she met in both countries. “I was moved by their passion, and by the way literature somehow survives,” she said.
“To have seen parts of the Silk Road, ruins that have gone unnoticed and art and culture that I was unfamiliar with makes me happy to be part of this world,” she said. “But it also makes me consider [the ways in which] people live and write without basic freedoms.”
For Nigerian-born Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Chinelo Okparanta, the strong sense of cultural pride fused with the marginalized literary voices that composed the Uzbek and Turkmen tradition prompted comparisons with her native land.
Okparanta noted that in Nigeria more than 200 spoken languages exist. As a result, it’s rare for written work to make it out of her country and into a tongue that’s accessible to global populations.
“Literature is a preserver of history,” she said. “There are important stories being told, but if only select people have access to them, the world loses a part of itself.”
Merrill would likely agree. Both he and Okparanta stressed the critical import of bringing lesser known literature to the United States and Western hemisphere by way of translation, and in turn, introducing American literature to populations traditionally isolated from the influences of international authors.
In a blog about the trip, the memoirist Steven Kuusisto spoke of the “abiding and peculiar” nature of America itself. He writes that here, “almost everyone comes from someplace else, that we tend as a nation … to value stories that exemplify the struggle for human rights.”
It is not a stretch to assume that literature is a uniting force, bridging cultural boundaries to bring about change and understanding that transcends all kinds of borders. And perhaps that is the abiding principle under which creative endeavors, and the International Writers’ Workshop, ultimately thrive.
