2014.10.31 匹兹堡的庇护之城

shiyi18

Pittsburgh's City of Asylum
In the City of Bridges, an eclectic community embraces writers in exile.

By Deborah Fallows

Exiled writer Huang Xiang at City of Asylum 10th Anniversary  (Renee Rosensteel)
OCTOBER 31, 2014
SHARE
China let go of a bold and brilliant genius when Huang Xiang left the country. But actually, the story is darker than that.

Huang Xiang (sounds like Hwang Shang) was born into a landowning family in China in 1941, eight years before Mao Zedong assumed power. Huang’s father, a general in the nationalist Kuomintang army, was captured by the Communists and executed in 1951. For the sins of this heritage, young Huang was barred from school at age 11. Instead, he stole into the family attic and devoured the books of Chinese masters he discovered there: Lao Tzu, Li Bai, Du Fu, as well as translations of Western equals, the likes of Emerson, Whitman, Lincoln, Freud, Kant. Somehow still a dreamer and free spirit, he began to write poetry.


Huang says in the Youtube video embedded below that it was a bit of romanticism in the poetry he wrote as a teenager, the innocent-sounding story of a “meeting a shepherd girl, who had come down from a snowy mountain, while singing a song” that earned him his first sentence to prison. That was 1959, and the first of 6 different imprisonments totaling twelve full years between then and 1995. “I lost both freedom of expression and physical freedom because of my dreams,” he says in Chinese in the video.


Democracy Wall 1978 (Wikispaces)
By 1968, Huang’s poems became darker and wilder. One was in fact called “Wild Beasts”; its translated text is below.

In 1978, Huang and three of his friends traveled from his hometown in Hunan province to Beijing. The Cultural Revolution was over, but in a moment that Huang describes like an epiphany, he felt he must “let the whole world hear his roar.” He painted an image of a huge torch on a wall in Beijing and wrote the character for “Enlightenment.” Then, physically protected by a spontaneous young crowd that had encircled him, he began reciting his powerful poems.

City Makers: American Futures
The people, organizations, and ideas reshaping the country
Read More
People reacted. The Communist Party reacted. (They sent a plane to fetch his files from his home in Hunan.) It was the beginning of a nationally changing mood and a movement called the Democracy Wall Movement. Huang became, in too-sterile words, an advocate for democracy and human rights. In 1986, Huang was sent to a forced labor camp for 3 years for “disturbing social order.”  In 1997, fearing more imprisonment, he managed to leave China with his wife, Zhang Ling. Through his years of imprisonment she had safeguarded his poems, none of which have ever been published in mainland China. The years of hardship and punishment had cost him broken bones, much of his hearing, and his teeth.

Huang Xiang was granted asylum in the U.S., and that is how he ended up in Pittsburgh, in a place called the City of Asylum, which I first heard about from our friends at ArtPlace America.  There are Cities of Asylum all around the world, founded about 20 years ago to provide sanctuary for exiled at-risk writers. A couple from Pittsburgh, Henry Reese and Diane Samuels, happened to hear Salman Rushdie speak in town. When he happened to mention the Cities of Asylum in Europe, they were interested. To say “interested” is an understatement.


City of Asylum/Pittburgh
For six years, Reese and Samuels asked the network in Europe to let them create a Pittsburgh City of Asylum. One day they got a call back: yes. The Pittsburgh agreement would be unusual, as other centers were organized with institutional sponsorship, mostly universities. Pittsburgh, as a community, would go it alone. Reese, who had run successful businesses involving coupon books, telemarketing, and call centers, and Samuels, who is a visual artist, pulled together a group of friends and donors to give it a try for two years. They would need to raise money to provide housing, medical benefits, a living stipend for the writer.

They bought a former crack house on a small lane called Sampsonia Way and fixed it up. The lane feels like a Midwest version of a hutong in old Beijing. It sits in the close-in north side section of Pittsburgh known as the Mexican War Streets (with street names from battles and generals from the Mexican American War), a kind of gentrified Bohemian row-house neighborhood with many writers, artists, eclectic personalities and interesting people. Reese and Samuels live there, too.

Huang Xiang and his wife, Zhang Ling, arrived. Then the magic began to happen. No one had any rules for how this was supposed to work, so they all learned from one another.

Huang Xiang was full of ideas and energy. As Reese describes it, Huang was fairly bursting to let loose with all that had been pent up for so many years. Huang didn’t just recite a poem, he danced, shouted, waved, and lived that poem with his entire body and spirit. He was a master of performance.


Huang Xiang creating House Poem (City Of Asylum/Pittsburgh)
Reese’s and Samuels’s default was to say yes to everything. When Huang saw Pittsburgh's Mt. Washington and said he'd like to carve a poem into the mountain, in the tradition of Chinese poets, Samuels didn't blanch but suggested he might paint his poems on the outside of his house instead. So they set up scaffolding around the frame house and Huang went to work, painting his poems in his own "grass style" calligraphy. He was “writing his house” as they now describe it. People could not help but notice House Poem. Before long, neighbors who didn’t even understand a word of Huang’s Chinese poetry, began to slip notes through the mail slot, with poems they had written themselves.


The aura of being around the City of Asylum is so unusual that I kept going back several days in a row, just to take it all in. For starters, it looked unlike any street I had ever seen, except one: When our children were small, they had a storybook about an eccentric man named Mr. Plumbean, who in a fit of creativity painted his house with an explosion of color and a jungle of wild animals. At first, his neighbors were outraged, but Plumbean said to them:

My house is me and I am it. My house is where I like to be and it looks like all my dreams.

Then, you guessed it, one by one Plumbean’s neighbors began to paint their houses to reflect their dreams. And of course the message spread. Visitors to the street were puzzled, but the people of Plumbean’s street always answered it the same way.

Our street is us and we are it. Our street is where we like to be, and it looks like all our dreams.

In a simple way, this is the story of Sampsonia Way. Their message has spread all around Pittsburgh, which has embraced it and I would say, even become part of the dreams of the people who live there. The poetry house was followed by other houses designed with text-based art, including the colorful Jazz House and the Pittsburgh-Burma House, which looks very much like Mr. Plumbean’s house!


House Poem, House Permutation, Pittsburgh-Burma House, and Jazz House (City of Asylum/Pittsburgh)
The City of Asylum programs began to grow and thrive. There were concerts and readings by more than 250 artists, inside Reese’s and Samuels’s living room, and on the streets, and in outdoor tents or on vacant lots. All are free to the public.


Some artists have stayed on to be short-term “artists in residence”. People gave money, and now Pittsburgh’s many and generous foundations give money. There are plans afoot for a neighborhood literary center for more performances, a café, a book store. There is a reading garden under construction, where people can come and sit outside to read in a peaceful place. In the middle of it all is, fittingly, an avant-garde museum called the Mattress Factory. There is a City of Asylum online journal, Sampsonia Way. Their press has published English translations of their five exiled writers.


City of Asylum's Jazz-Poetry Concert (Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo/ArtPlace America)
In another creative venture, the Venezuelan writer and poet Israel Centeno, a City of Asylum writer now, worked on the River of Words, a public art installation within the Mexican War Streets. He chose 100 words, relevant in some way to Pittsburgh. Neighbors were invited to host a “word in residence," meaning that they would display a representation of their word, designed by Venezuelan artists Carolina Arnal and Gisela Romero, on the wall, or door, or window of their houses. River of Words was wildly popular. “Vortex! I need to have vortex,” claimed one neighbor. “Baseball!” claimed another. “Fear, talent, thought.” The list went on. If you walk the streets around Sampsonia Way, you can spot the words, some bold, some inconspicuous, stenciled on garage doors, or sitting above garden gates.


I finally understood that the City of Asylum is about more than giving an exiled writer a place to live and work. It is about building a community around them that participates with the poetry, or art, or music that is being created in that living space.

Placemaking, as this kind of endeavor came to be called in the 1970s, of the City of Asylum is working in Pittsburgh. On our last night there, we were lucky enough to go to a 10th anniversary celebration of the City of Asylum. The tent was packed with people from all over town. The exiled writer alumni came back to do readings.

Huang Xiang returned from his home in New York for a stellar performance of his work (see first photo), A Promise to Meet in This Life. He flashed the biggest, brightest smile in the world, courtesy a generous Pittsburgh dentist who took two careful years to make Huang’s new teeth. Horacio Castellanos Moya, of El Salvador, performed via Skype from Chile, where he was receiving an award for his fiction writing from president Michelle Bachelet. Burma's Khet Mar stopped en route from Washington, where she now works for Radio Free Asia, to a month’s visit to Hong Kong. The night inside the tent ended with celebratory cakes and audacious sparklers, a fitting launch for the next ten years of Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum.


Here is the list of the writers in exile who have spent time at Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum:

2004-2006: Huang Xiang (China)
2006-2009: Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador)
2008- 2011: Khet Mar (Burma)
2011- present: Israel Centeno (Venezuela)
2013 – present: Yaghoub Yadali (Iran)



匹兹堡的庇护之城
在桥梁之城，一个兼容并蓄的社区接纳了流亡作家。

作者：德博拉-法洛斯

流亡作家黄翔在庇护之城十周年庆典上（Renee Rosensteel）。
2014年10月31日
分享
当黄翔离开中国时，中国放走了一位大胆而杰出的天才。但实际上，这个故事比这更黑暗。

1941年，黄翔（听起来像黄翔）出生在中国的一个地主家庭，在毛泽东掌权前八年。黄翔的父亲是国民党军队的一名将军，被共产党抓住，并于1951年被处决。由于这一遗产的罪过，小黄在11岁时被禁止上学。相反，他偷走了家里的阁楼，吞噬了他在那里发现的中国大师的书籍。老子》、《李白》、《杜甫》，以及爱默生、惠特曼、林肯、弗洛伊德、康德等西方名家的译本。不知何故，他仍然是一个梦想家和自由精神，他开始写诗。


黄晓明在下面嵌入的Youtube视频中说，他十几岁时写的诗中有一点浪漫主义色彩，一个听起来天真无邪的故事，即 "在唱歌时遇到一个从雪山上下来的牧羊女"，这使他第一次被判入狱。那是1959年，也是从那时到1995年期间6次不同的监禁中的第一次，共计12年整。"他在视频中用中文说："因为我的梦想，我同时失去了言论自由和人身自由。


1978年的民主墙（Wikispaces）
到1968年，黄胄的诗变得更加黑暗和狂野。其中一首实际上被称为 "野兽"；其翻译文本如下。

1978年，黄胄和他的三个朋友从湖南省的家乡来到北京。文化大革命已经结束，但在黄胄描述的一个像顿悟一样的时刻，他觉得他必须 "让整个世界听到他的怒吼"。他在北京的一面墙上画了一个巨大的火炬图像，并写了一个 "启蒙 "的字样。然后，在包围他的自发的年轻人群的保护下，他开始朗诵他强有力的诗篇。

城市缔造者。美国的未来
重塑国家的人、组织和思想
阅读更多
人们做出了反应。共产党也做出了反应。(他们派了一架飞机从他在湖南的家中取走了他的文件。）这是全国性情绪变化的开始，也是一场名为 "民主墙运动 "的运动。黄晓明成为了，用太过生硬的话说，民主和人权的倡导者。1986年，黄晓明因 "扰乱社会秩序 "而被送入强制劳动营3年。 1997年，由于担心更多的监禁，他设法与他的妻子张玲离开中国。在他被监禁的这些年里，她一直保护着他的诗作，这些诗作从未在中国大陆出版过。多年的苦难和惩罚使他骨折，听力下降，牙齿也被打掉。

黄翔在美国获得了庇护，这就是他在匹兹堡的结局，在一个叫做 "庇护之城 "的地方，我第一次从我们美国艺术中心的朋友那里听说这个地方。 世界各地都有庇护之城，大约在20年前成立，为流亡的高危作家提供庇护所。一对来自匹兹堡的夫妇，亨利-里斯和戴安-塞缪尔，碰巧听到萨尔曼-拉什迪在城里的演讲。当他偶然提到欧洲的庇护城市时，他们很感兴趣。说 "感兴趣 "是一种轻描淡写的说法。


庇护之城/匹兹堡
六年来，里斯和塞缪尔斯要求欧洲的网络让他们创建一个匹兹堡庇护之城。有一天，他们得到了一个回电：是的。匹兹堡的协议将是不寻常的，因为其他中心是在机构赞助下组织的，大多数是大学。匹兹堡，作为一个社区，将单独行动。曾经成功经营过优惠券书籍、电话营销和呼叫中心的里斯，以及身为视觉艺术家的萨缪尔，召集了一群朋友和捐助者，准备在两年内进行尝试。他们需要筹集资金以提供住房、医疗福利和作家的生活津贴。

他们在一条叫Sampsonia Way的小巷子里买下了一栋曾经的裂缝房，并将它修好。这条巷子给人的感觉就像老北京胡同的中西部版本。它坐落在匹兹堡北边被称为 "墨西哥战争街"（街道名称来自美墨战争中的战役和将军）的近郊区，这是一个有许多作家、艺术家、不拘一格的人物和有趣的人的波西米亚排屋区。里斯和塞缪尔斯也住在那里。

黄翔和他的妻子张玲到了。然后神奇的事情开始发生了。没有人对这一切应该如何运作有任何规则，所以他们都互相学习。

黄翔充满了想法和能量。正如里斯所描述的那样，黄翔非常想把这么多年来积压的所有东西都释放出来。黄翔不只是背诵一首诗，他还跳舞、呼喊、挥手，用他的整个身体和精神来实现这首诗。他是一位表演大师。


黄翔创作的《房屋诗》（City Of Asylum/匹兹堡）。
里斯和萨缪尔的默认是对一切都说 "是"。当黄翔看到匹兹堡的华盛顿山，说他想按照中国诗人的传统在山上刻一首诗时，萨缪尔斯没有脸红，而是建议他把诗画在他的房子外面。于是，他们在框架房屋周围搭起了脚手架，黄晓明开始工作，用他自己的 "草体 "书法画出他的诗句。正如他们现在所描述的那样，他正在 "书写他的房子"。人们不禁注意到 "房屋诗"。不久之后，那些对黄宗智的中国诗词一窍不通的邻居们开始从邮筒里塞进他们自己写的诗词。


庇护之城周围的光环是如此的不寻常，以至于我连续几天都要回去，只是为了把这一切都看在眼里。首先，它看起来不像我见过的任何街道，除了一条。当我们的孩子还小的时候，他们有一本故事书，讲的是一个古怪的人，名叫梅豆先生，他为了发挥创造力，把他的房子涂上了爆炸性的颜色和野生动物的丛林。起初，他的邻居们都很愤怒，但梅豆对他们说。

我的房子就是我，我就是它。我的房子是我喜欢的地方，它看起来像我所有的梦想。

然后，你猜对了，梅豆的邻居们一个接一个地开始粉刷他们的房子，以反映他们的梦想。当然，这个消息也就传开了。来到这条街的人都很疑惑，但小豆子所在街道的人们总是以同样的方式回答这个问题。

我们的街道就是我们，我们就是它。我们的街道是我们喜欢的地方，它看起来像我们所有的梦想。

从简单的角度来说，这就是桑普斯尼亚路的故事。他们的信息已经传遍了匹兹堡，匹兹堡已经接受了它，我想说，甚至成为住在那里的人的梦想的一部分。在诗歌屋之后，还有其他用文字艺术设计的房屋，包括色彩斑斓的爵士屋和匹兹堡-缅甸屋，它看起来非常像梅豆先生的房子


房屋诗、房屋排列组合、匹兹堡-缅甸屋和爵士屋（City of Asylum/匹兹堡）
庇护之城的项目开始增长和蓬勃发展。有250多位艺术家的音乐会和朗诵会，在里斯和塞缪尔斯的客厅内，以及在街道上，还有在户外帐篷或空地上。所有的活动都是免费向公众开放的。


一些艺术家留下来做短期的 "驻场艺术家"。人们给了钱，现在匹兹堡的许多慷慨的基金会也给了钱。有计划在附近建立一个文学中心，提供更多的表演，一个咖啡馆，一个书店。有一个正在建设中的阅读园地，人们可以来到这里，坐在外面，在一个安静的地方阅读。在这一切的中间是一个前卫的博物馆，叫做床垫厂。有一个《庇护之城》的在线杂志《Sampsonia Way》。他们的出版社已经出版了他们五位流亡作家的英文译本。


庇护之城的爵士-诗歌音乐会（Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo/ArtPlace America)
在另一个创造性的冒险中，委内瑞拉作家和诗人Israel Centeno，现在是City of Asylum的作家，致力于 "文字之河"，这是墨西哥战争街道内的一个公共艺术装置。他选择了100个与匹兹堡有某种关联的词语。邻居们被邀请主持一个 "居住的词语"，这意味着他们将在自己家的墙上，或门上，或窗户上展示由委内瑞拉艺术家Carolina Arnal和Gisela Romero设计的词语代表。词语之河 "受到了极大的欢迎。"漩涡！"。我需要有漩涡，"一位邻居说。"棒球！"另一位声称。"恐惧、天赋、思想"。这个名单还在继续。如果你走在桑普索尼亚路周围的街道上，你可以发现这些词，有些是大胆的，有些是不显眼的，印在车库门上，或坐在花园门上。


我终于明白，庇护之城不仅仅是给流亡作家一个生活和工作的地方。它是关于在他们周围建立一个社区，让他们参与到在这个生活空间里创造的诗歌、艺术或音乐中。

正如这种努力在20世纪70年代被称为 "庇护之城 "的地方制造，在匹兹堡正在发挥作用。在我们在那里的最后一晚，我们有幸参加了 "庇护之城 "十周年的庆祝活动。帐篷里挤满了来自全城的人。流亡作家校友们回来做朗诵。

黄翔从纽约的家中回来，为他的作品（见第一张照片）《今生相约》做了精彩的表演。他露出了世界上最大、最灿烂的笑容，这要归功于一位慷慨的匹兹堡牙医，他花了两年时间精心制作了黄翔的新牙齿。萨尔瓦多的霍拉西奥-卡斯特利亚诺斯-莫亚(Horacio Castellanos Moya)在智利通过Skype进行表演，他在那里接受了米歇尔-巴切莱特总统颁发的小说创作奖。缅甸的凯特玛在从华盛顿前往香港访问一个月的途中停了下来，她现在在那里为自由亚洲电台工作。帐篷内的夜晚在庆祝的蛋糕和大胆的烟火中结束，这是匹兹堡庇护之城未来十年的合适启动。


以下是在匹兹堡庇护之城待过的流亡作家名单。

2004-2006: 黄翔（中国）
2006-2009: 霍拉西奥-卡斯特利亚诺斯-莫亚（萨尔瓦多）
2008- 2011: 克特玛（缅甸）
2011年至今。Israel Centeno (委内瑞拉)
2013年至今。Yaghoub Yadali (伊朗)