Writing Towards Hope: Literature, Art, & the Struggle for Human Rights
Contributors include Mahnaz Afkhami, Marjorie Agosín, Meena Alexander, Diana Anhalt, Ruth Behar, and Judy Dworin.
One of the twentieth century’s most salient characteristics is that of memory, nostalgia and a special longing for a homeland, real or imagined, desired or neglected. This passion for seeking a home can be translated as a human need to belong in the collective imagination of nations, languages and shared memories. And yet, it is because we have lived through massive displacements in terms of human populations – crossing borders as refugees, exiles, fugitives and dreamers – that the longing for home and the nostalgia for our origins is a prevalent characteristic of the arts in modern times.
The great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova always spoke about writing and feeling as if she represented her entire generation in Stalinist Russia. I also feel part of what has been called the Disenchanted Generation, a generation of people from Latin America forced to live in exile, remembering their long-lost friends and the disappeared. To write during political turmoil is a form of resistance. It is a way to create human narratives in an inhumane world as well as making sure that the residues of obstructed lives are not forgotten.
Through the power of the imaginative spirit, as well as the courage this spirit brings, artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have become the chroniclers of history and unaccounted-for lives and the guardians of memory. Thus, they are the narrators of a new history that is not documented and full of statistics, but rather a history that brings to the forefront human emotions and passions as well as the fears that the official and patriarchal history have so cleverly disguised.
The artists in this special issue write about the future and about hope because to remember and to revive memories is a form of resistance. They explore the fundamental questions that are embedded in our century. It is through the detailed narratives and gestures that configure human emotion that the artists included in this issue address the complexity of exile, censorship, violence and the loss of language which is the loss of being.
Each of the artists featured in this journal systematically addressed the constant feeling of being uprooted as well as the loss of a cultural context that allows them to find their true identities.