DARK MATTER

A panel earlier this week at the New York Public Library addressed “Confronting the Worst: Writing and Catastrophe” as part of the PEN American Center New York Festival of International Literature.

Ukraine-born Svetlana Alexievich spoke first. Some of these disasters exceed our ability to imagine, she said. “Words and language are always smaller than the event,” she said. “I’m not interested in information. I think that information has discredited itself as a way of knowing human beings.” Ms. Alexievich uses a melange of reportage and oral history in her writing; her genre, she said, is the novel of voices.

Ms. Alexievich said she is interested in human feelings amid human turmoil. When the Chernobyl disaster happened, she said, books filled with facts and medical information were published. But “the most important things we needed to learn from that event took more time to emerge.”

All of humanity – “all of us” she reiterated – found itself in terra incognita. She described a policeman who followed a woman carrying eggs. He wanted to make sure she buried them. “They bury milk and bread – an endless funeral procession for inanimate objects.” Regarding top layer of soil, “they took ground and they buried it in the ground.”

Everyone who was involved in the cleanup of Chernobyl turned into a philosopher. “There was nothing in our past,” she said, “that allowed us to deal with it.” The bees that didn’t come out of their hives; the bees understood, she said. Humans watched television.

Ryszard Kapuscinski said that, in discussing earthquakes, there is a nexus between disaster and poverty: Most of the victims are poor. Not often noted, he said, is the corruption in areas of high seismic activity. Contractors build cheaply. Governments often play down catastrophe so as not to tarnish their image, and the travel industry wants to clear the scene and show the world that nothing has happened. Mr. Kapuscinski said there is a prevailing “law of short memories.”

Elena Poniatowska vividly spoke about the 1985 earthquake in Mexico. One image she evoked was that of the clackety-clack of clerks typing up death certificates. Francois Bizot, ethnologist of Cambodia and historian of Buddhism, described being caught by the Khmer Rouge in 1971 and interrogated by a young man.

His 27-year-old interrogator chose not to beat Mr. Bizot, and after a few weeks, they started to know each other quite well. The interrogator was a small monster, Mr. Bizot said, and it was all the more frightening to be near him, because he had no long fangs or claws. He was an ordinary person.

Carolin Emcke said she was interested in the relations between violence, trauma, and the loss of language. While some lose the ability to describe what actually happened to them, she said, she never met victims of violence who lost the memory of what happened to them. “The first thing you lose is the trust in the world.”

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WAR’S MAELSTROM

New York Review of Books co-editor Robert Silvers moderated a panel Tuesday at New York University entitled “Writers and Iraq.” Presented by the NYRB, the event is part of PEN American Center’s weeklong New York Festival of International Literature.

Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail, who resides in Michigan, said that the only true survivor in her country is disaster itself. Paraphrasing a late Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai, on the paradoxes of compassion, she reminded her audience that a God full of mercy leaves little mercy left over for this world. She spoke of the Saddam Hussein years as a “tsunami in slow motion.” Her book, translated by Elizabeth Winslow, is called “The War Works Hard” (New Directions), which was supported by a grant from PEN Translation Fund.

Mark Danner, the New Yorker journalist, described the “real Iraq” as “standing behind a concrete veil – a place increasingly bewildering.” Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi dissident and human-rights champion, insisted that the current insurgency, fomented by former mid-level Baathist military types, not be mistaken for “resistance.” It is a war, he said “conducted by thugs.”

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PEN GALA

Underneath a whale and near walruses at the American Museum of Natural History, a very literate crowd gathered Wednesday evening for the 2005 PEN Montblanc Literary Gala. Seen were James Atlas; K. Anthony Appiah; Bernard-Henri Levy talking with Daniel Menaker and William Murphy of Random House; Paul Auster; Lewis Lapham; Lawrence Weschler of the New York Institute for the Humanities; Russell Banks talking to Breyten Breytenbach; Edward Hirsch; Oscar Hijuelos, whose Broadway show “The Mambo Kings” featuring Billy Dee Williams and others begins previews in July; Daphne Merkin; Erica Jong; Perri Klass; Sidney Offit; Joel Conarroe; Grace Paley; Daniel Simon of Seven Stories Press; Luc Sante; Marc Strand; and many others.

The 2004 PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award recipient – the first to be presented posthumously – went to independent newspaper publisher Deyda Hydara of Gambia, who in December 16, 2004, was shot in the head and chest by unidentified individuals. This occurred two days after the Gambian National Assembly passed legislation imposing prison terms for published work deemed to be seditious or libelous. The day before he was killed, Hydara published an editorial denouncing the legislation. In a note of hope about the success of the program, Ms. Goldsmith noted that, of the 29 award recipients who were in jail when they got the award, an amazing 27 have been since released. She said that the awards “keep a spotlight on” the plight of individuals who struggle for freedom to write in the public domain.