By Shandana Minhas, Special to the PUAN News Blog
The International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa is often described as a “United Nations” of writers. I’d agree with this, not least because in our time together we managed to pass several resolutions and had little impact on ending world poverty.
A few days into the residency, I was invited to be part of “Anthology,” an Iowa City reading city that brings fiction, non-fiction and poetry practitioners and students together to meditate on a given theme. The theme being “Never Have I Ever…” I read poetry I’d never read in public before. Nobody threw eggs or shoes, which is always a good thing, and the “farshi nashist,” blankets on the grass, reminded me of kinder days in Karachi.
Early in September, with the weather already a close approximation of a harsh winter as I’ve known it, I gave a presentation during the “Kill The Writers First salon,” on “Pakistan: Everything you’ve ever wanted to know but couldn’t be bothered to ask.” The goal of my presentation being to provide an insight into our national psyche other than the one encountered in international news publications, I spent most of my fifteen minutes talking about cricket, music and our collective love affair with Shahid Afridi.
Later that month, I talked to students of the International Literature Today class at the University of Iowa about my work.
A few days later, I was on a panel discussing censorship at a city library event, along with Lili Mendoza from Panama, Zeyar Lynn from Myanmar, a writer from Singapore, and a representative from the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union).
In early October I left my “room with a view” at the Iowa House Hotel to visit Drake University with Iranian novelist Mahsa Mohebali, Egyptian/Canadian writer and playwright Karim Alrawi and Taiwanese fiction writer Tong Wie Ger to read and explore the idea of “Writing as World Citizenship” for their Writers and Critics series.
This was good practice for my next stab at public speaking, a panel titled “Politics and Prose” at the Iowa City Book Festival in October. The paper I delivered was subsequently published in the News in Pakistan: http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-9-210086-Politics-and-prose.
At the end of October, I screened the Chris Morris film Four Lions at the Cinematheque series.
By that time, the flares of color the dying leaves on the trees sent into the sky mirrored the journey some of us had taken. For more detail on the journey, I recommend Patricia Portela’s seedsofculture.tumblr.com. She was the IWP’s first Community Engagement Fellow, and her notes provide a poetic snapshot of our residency. As do her pictures, for example the ones of trees below that I’ve stolen.
On my last day in Iowa City, I read at the bookstore Prairie Lights, with poet Denes Krusovszky from Hungary and non-fiction graduate Suky Cody from Iowa.
Indian poet Sridala Swami and I did a joint reading at the American University in Washington on one of my last days in the United States. The event, during which we both read the work of poets and writers from each other’s countries, tried to illuminate the way literature transcends borders.
Mirroring the way we’d spent time travelling, for instance to New Zealand as novelist Whiti Hereaka read to us, or to Yemen in poet Sawsan Al Areqee’s short films, that’s what we did in our last few days too. From mid-west to East Coast, we made our way from Iowa City to Chicago to Washington to New York, via bus, train and plane, pursued by an encroaching chill. Snow fell, our last morning in New York, and by the time we were back on our own soil, it was obscuring the ‘imaginary homelands’ we had passed through.
I, for one, found comfort in a line from the prose Egyptian writer Mohammed Abdelnaby had read to us in September in Prairie Lights: ‘This will not be the last time we fight each other; promise me this now’.
About the Author: From August to November 2013, Minhas was a writer-in-residence at the U.S. Department of State’s International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa, along with 34 other writers from 31 countries. Learn more about this unique exchange at http://exchanges.state.gov/non-us/program/international-writing-program-fall-residency.
