Andrew Solomon: Far and Away

good afternoon thank you all for coming out and this wonderful November day in Chicago I have a great honor and pleasure to be in the position of asking Andrew Solomon to tell us stories from all these travels I have not seen the video before but this is it completes the book in so many ways it's different imagining you covered in ram's blood and then seeing you actually are you going to work on a longer documentary is this a trailer for a documentary I would be delighted if anyone there is a documentary maker and would like to engage with that project you are warmly welcome at the beginning of the book you start by telling about a time when you first learned about the Holocaust can you tell us about that I was I think about six years old and I was in the car with my father we were driving to her from something-or-other and he made a passing reference to the Holocaust and it was clear that he thought I knew what he was talking about but I didn't no one had ever mentioned it to me and when I asked him he began to explain that the Holocaust and I couldn't make sense out of it and I kept asking him questions and asking him to repeat himself and understanding that his Jews we were the sort of people who had been targeted and that if we had been there then it would have happened to us and finally he said it was pure evil as a means of ending the conversation and I had one last question they said but why didn't those people just leave when they realized what was happening and my father said they had nowhere to go and I remember thinking when I was six years old and he said that that that was not going to happen to me and I thought you always have to have someplace to go though I had already in curious about the world and remained curious about it for other reasons it was in that instant that I thought I want to have friends everywhere and I want to know that if the Soviets attacked with the nuclear bomb or if the fascists take power in the eastern seaboard then I'm gonna have untold other possibilities and places where I will be welcome and that isn't the whole reason that I became a traveler I was also interested in and attracted to the world but that piece of fear I think was one of the strong motives of the way that my identity developed this also suggests that and this bears out in the book entirely that you do not think of yourself and do not operate as a tourist but as a traveler which is I like to think different um do you think there's a difference that you used to see yourself as more than a tourist well more certainly as other than a tourist I mean I think the idea is the tourists are people who have essentially gone to see a place and remain very detached from it we've gone to look at it but not to engage with it and the travelers are people who have gone to try to understand another society and to become involved with and engaged in its dynamics now I don't think anyone is purely one or purely the other I think even people who are honest that if a group tour to a town in Mexico are going to have a certain amount of thinking oh this is quite different and rather interesting and talking to people and even people who describe themselves as seasoned travelers have their moments of tourism in which they think gee this is an amazing thing to see but I I can't quite put myself into it but I had grown up with parents who were interested in tourism and part of my quest and part of the quest that this book described is the mission of attempting to be I'm a traveler instead your first travel at least the first one in the book was was to the Soviet Union what took you there this was in 1991 88 I was working for a British glossy magazine and Sotheby's was having a sale of contemporary Soviet art in Moscow and I was rather intrigued and then I looked at the catalogue and I thought the art is terrible and they're getting all of these rich and fancy people to spend an enormous amount of money to go on this ridiculously overhyped tour I had always wanted to go to Russia so I persuaded the editors of the magazine that I would do an expose of all of these manipulated people and their ludicrous excursion and then I got to Russia and my second day there I was supposed to interview a group of artists and the translator I had been promised by the Ministry of Culture failed to materialize and I thought well I can't just leave them there expecting me and so I went to apologize and explain I couldn't stay none of them spoke much English they spoke enough so I could get that point across one of them said that a friend who spoke a little English and a little French would be coming later on and so I stayed that whole day watching them in their studios and it was an amazingly revealing experience because they showed one another these works of art that looked not very interesting to me and they burst into laughter and they broke into tears and I soon understood that these artists had worked in secret for many years making work constructed in a way that appeared banal so that it would not attract the unwelcome attentions of the KGB but that it was full of encoded meanings that they had anticipated showing it only to one another and the key to those encoded meanings was knowledge of the artists themselves and over time make him to understand that they believed that that undertaking had a great high moral purpose that they were somehow in the process of keeping truth alive in us zion.t that wish to annihilate truth itself and suddenly they were confronted with a Western market and as one of the Nikita alekseyev said to me you see we have been in training to be not artists but angels and now all of a sudden it is a Western art world we are entering and what they want is the things we've made the works of art and then you returned in 1991 around the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union and you witnessed it in the company of some of those same artists I returned in 1991 without knowing that I had come for the breakup of the Soviet Union I wasn't scheduled indeed I had a little bit of a rough spring my mother had died and so on I thought I just want to get away I finished my book about these artists it was my first book I thought I will go and have a nice relaxing time visiting them in Moscow and just hanging out so I did have three relaxing days and then on the fourth day Gorbachev was kidnapped and the right-wing extremists created the palace coup in which they took over the Kremlin and I was with all of these artists and they said that we have to go and see what's happening and we must help to build the barricades and they gave me a kind of look of are you still with us or did you just come to get our stories and now you're going to go and I thought well I guess I am with them so there were many many episodes that are of note I was particularly taken by the fact that at that point many people in Russia wore t-shirts with Western writing on them without knowing what they said and in building the barricades there was a woman who had had a big Soviet aggressive looking woman who had jump-started cream that she clearly didn't know how to operate it was trying to help build these things was ordering people around while wearing a t-shirt that said I'd rather be playing tennis but on the third day of the coup but I was with a few of the artists and we had gone up to Smolensk I aware some people had been killed the night before and there were flowers on the ground and old women speaking about tragedy and suddenly this young man came running up and said there are tanks approaching the barricade you all have to come help defend the barricade and we kept hearing about tanks and we really hadn't seen very many and we didn't take it terribly seriously but we sauntered up there we ranged ourselves in front of the barricade hand-in-hand and a few minutes later a column of Tanks rolled up and I thought this is not what I had in mind when I became an art critic and the soldier on the front tank said look we have been given unconditional orders to destroy this barricade he said if you'll get out of the way there's no reason to hurt any of you but if not we'll have no choice but to run you down and the artist I was we had said give us just one minute give us one minute to tell you why we're here and the soldier folded his arms and kind of looked down at us and they locked into this incredible discourse they talked about how these soldiers were young and didn't remember what real tyranny felt like but they had lived in an era of real tyranny and they could say how terrible it was and they said you say you are only following orders but if you followed these orders who have made a choice to follow them the choice resides with you and they launched into a kind of panegyric a great praise of democracy that those of us who live in a democracy would be very hard-pressed to come up with and when they finished we stood there wet bedraggled in the rain and this soldier looked at us for another full minute and then he said what you've said is true and we must bow to the will of the people if you'll clear enough space for us to turn around we'll take our tanks away and we'll leave you your barricade and the crew failed that night and it didn't fail because of that episode but possibly because of many any episodes like it and I had always wanted to think that being a writer or being an artist was serving some great splendid ideal and I had always been told that it was really nothing much more than entertainment and in that instance I thought if you can only articulate the things that matter clearly enough if you've worked on them for all of those years in that quiet privacy of showing work to your other friends then you can be equipped when you get to the crossroads of history to have some tiny effect in shifting it away from where it might otherwise have gone would you say now that that experience changed you that you had you had you not had it would you have had a different career a different way of thinking about art and writing and freedom and and language it changed me utterly and profoundly I mean on the one hand it made me think having been a kind of frightened anxious child I thought I can engage with the world and when I do it's a gratifying thing to do but more profoundly it gave me a sense of the purposefulness of writing there's so much evidence that what journalism entails is that neutrality there are so many people arguing for journalistic neutrality and I thought actually what I think one wants as a journalist is engagement and and to be within rather than simply standing beside and what happens I hadn't known it was possible to do that and it determined almost everything that I did in the years that have followed this story and then other stories in the book there's a recurring theme of the intersection or interaction between art and politics in ways that are different from the ways in which art is distributed or experienced or appreciated in what we could call a free society it starts in the book it starts with your experience with Russian artists but also you write about China and Taiwan and South Africa and we've changed some we talked about it in email preparing for this conversation but I would like to hear you talk about a difference in which art and politics operated in such contexts such context rather and the way the Opera is here where it was what is that is overlapping between those two concepts and what is entirely different right well I mean there's some of it in that idea of not artists but angels but also in many of the societies I've written about there was an enormous suppression of artistic expression now the purpose of that is that art should all serve the propagandistic version of events for the state that was true in Russia it was true in China in in Afghanistan where I also wrote about orders or was simply to be repressed entirely because it represented a kind of freedom that the Taliban didn't want to endorse my finding is that when you say art is forbidden which were employing is that art is powerful our system in which nothing is forbidden and you make any kind of piece of art you want and show it wherever you want to hang it more or less is one in which art is relatively disenfranchised but I also think that a lot of the time people who are engaging with societies abroad especially journalists engaging with those societies engage with two categories of people they engage on the one hand with politicians and business leaders most of whom have an agenda and are giving rather predictable and rather purposeful responses and then they quote the so-called common man they say you and then my taxi driver said so-and-so or the guy who got my hair or the person who served dinner at my hotel and I really believe that there is a kind of layer of people who are engaged in and who are thinking about their societies and that especially in these oppressive societies many of them become artists and they're becoming artists is something full of politics and determination and very complicated content so I think for example the work that was done by a Chinese artist named John Paley John Bailey had become obsessed with the fact that everyone in China heard news of what was happening from the woman who was the newscaster on Chinese television and after she had reported in so forth it was reported on what happened at Kinnaman Square and he thought whoever controls the words of this woman controls China and he thought I want to get her to say something of my choosing and he did some research about her and discovered that she loved flowers more than anything else so he wrote to her and said I'm doing an exhibition which is of flowers and in it there will be a waterfall and he thought I have to come up with the text that is neither heard nor mind that is somehow neutral and he chose the Encyclopedia entry about water and he said to run in the background of my flower exhibition I would like to record you doing this that he offered her money to do it and she agreed so if you came to the exhibition and you didn't know anything about drunk Bailey or about what he was doing it was an exhibition of flowers for the video in the corner that had a lady talking about water but if you did understand the messages of the avant-garde you understood that for that brief moment through the use of money and determination Jean Paley had determined what China's primary newscaster was saying and even than what she was saying was not significant he had thereby approximated the position of Deng Xiaoping now there were many people who came and only saw flowers but there were many people who came and saw that and it gave them a ton of confidence and a feeling of power and an energy to drive forward in the process of reform that would never have existed without that kind of artistic expression and manipulation wow that's a great story there's also a great story you tell in your piece about borma yanma about an artist a person he was not an artist when he went to jail but in jail he started painting he discovered painting and then through incredible incredible difficult circumstances he found ways to actually paint required reconfiguring the uses for certain things and then he also became friend with one of his guards could you tell us the story yes the artist is named Chen Lin and he had learned a little bit of drawing he was in the student protest he then got put in jail and when he was in jail he had a guard and he started telling him about art this guard had never heard of art he had never seen a painting and 10-lane eventually said well you know I could make you some art and he was just a way to engage with the guard and a way to have something to do and when he did was the prisoners in that prison were given strips of cloth but they were intended to use as toilet paper and he saved half of this a braided cloth from old prison uniforms and he had a cigarette lighter that had a wick and he pulled out the wick and he got this guard to bring him house paint and he began doing painting and bit by bit he arranged for those paintings to be smuggled out of the prison so that they could be collected elsewhere and they're the most unbelievable arresting ly beautiful drawings and sometimes they got confiscated people thought he was making a map of the prison as a means of escape which was not the case they were smuggled out to his family his family managed to give them to the British ambassador Vicky Bowman when he got to the end of his imprisonment and when he was finally let go as reform began to take hold in Myanmar all of the paintings were shown at an exhibition in Yangon and he invited that prison guard who had brought him the house paint to come and be a guest at the opening and he was and then he married the British ambassador I mean tinleigh married the British a mess the guard near the first secretary those are wonderful stories because it reminds us reminded me of a you know how powerful art is the disenfranchisement by way of censorship so of course it's not an argument for censorship it's an argument against censorship in some ways because the art as the desperate act of dignity is you know it was very noble but the same at the same time you do not want to have people committing desperate acts of dignity you want them to have access to dignity all the time we also talked earlier Andrew Sullivan is a president of pen America and part of the mandate of pennies to fight for freedom of expression in this country and all over the world supporting free expression can you tell us about your work as pen president and how that complies with what we've just talked about I can and I'm going to start though with an anecdote also from China that relates to the larger point that you were making and that is that I was talking to a group of artists in China about gen'l'men and I was there in the early 90s oh fairly soon after the events of 1988 and one of the artists who had been among the protesters of Kinnaman and had been shot at said to me of course he said we were fighting for what we believed in he said but in many ways it's a good thing they reacted as they did because they hadn't there would have been revolution in the streets and there would have been chaos and hundreds of thousands of people would have died and I said but surely what you wanted was to move toward democracy and to fight toward this and one of the other artists said idealism at the hands of an artist is a beautiful thing that's our right said idealism in the hands of a leader is terrible these contradictions that trouble you Americans don't trouble us so much here at all the question of what constitutes freedom is very widely defined and one of the grave mistakes that has been made by many people including a recent President of the United States who went into Iraq is the belief that somehow freedom is the natural state that occurs when you lift the constraints against it that it automatically emerges in the work I've done it pand what we've seen over and over again is that when you remove the constraints that are around that freedom when you rule the constraints around free expression you get an interesting and engaged society in which people are able to communicate well with one another but when you remove the constraints that there are around freedom in general what ensues is chaos and you can't knock out an ugly system and expect that a beautiful one will somehow rise by itself in its place so a pen we're constantly working on this issue of freedom of expression how do we ensure freedom of expression were fighting back when the Saudis decided to imprison a Palestinian poet on grounds that his poems constituted an incitement to atheism and sentenced him to death we worked to commute that sentence which is now just many years in jail which is an improvement of sometime we look at all of the times when voices are silenced and if the ways in which societies become depleted when those voices are silenced to him were always trying to give people the freedom to express themselves I was saying backstage that I think there is a sense in which we have you know a kind of obligation there's the old obligation that a wealthier nation should help a poorer one but there's also an obligation that a country in which people are free to speak should help a country in which they are not and I always come back to on songs hoochies them the beautiful line which used in an article she wrote some years ago for the New York Times she said please use your freedom to promote ours and Penn is about that obligation one of the great things in the book is that covered covers a range a historical range a circle period in during which many things happen from the nice of the Soviet Union to social changes and you have this knack for being there for that but also after the the original text is read there is a comment afterwards about the aftermath of those things and it's not always encouraging to see that some of the promises that you were recognizing in the originally published texts were not fulfilled I wonder how how do you look at that I wouldn't call it it I wouldn't say that hope is extinguished but it it goes to show that that it's not always not all of the promises are fulfilled the promises of the the end of the at the end of the Soviet Union the promises in South Africa the promises in in Burma have not been fulfilled for me how do you handle that how you as a person here's a writer and you as a president of ten how do you keep working toward a goal that might be unachievable well there are two pieces to that and and we were talking about it a little bit in relation to your own experience with Bosnia the first is to say that all of the hopes are never fulfilled all the folks are not fulfilled anywhere all that the hopes are not fulfilled here and that doesn't happen so you have to go in and understand that hope is hope it is not prediction and that things will not unfold in a smooth and easy way but I also think I mean funny enough two of the societies you mentioned South African Myanmar there are terrible problems the problem with the treatment of Muslims in the Rohingya in Burma is horrifying and there are many many issues in South Africa but those societies are both better than they were when I first engaged with them Russia on the other hand has said back to a point at which it is effectively a dictatorship again many other societies have these are broad generalizations I don't want to kind of spend the next hour and a half parsing the distinctions many of them have not actually become become better I think one has to recognize life and thinking that exists in the present tense and I think of one of the Russian artists Andre Reuter to whom I said when we were talking about the book after I had finished it though I then squeezed his remark into the final Edition and I said remember what that time was like and he said oh yes that time when we had so much hope and I said do you regret having allowed herself to hope so much when what ensued has been so gruesome and he said even if all of the hopes had been completely disappointed he said and some of them were not disappointed but he said even if they all had been I would have had that moment of hope and that's something I would have carried with me for the rest of my life and I have carried it and it informs every painting I make and every interaction I have and I came to think that having had hoped is like having a happy childhood it does not mean you will have a happy adulthood but it equips you better to deal with the difficulty and while some people when their hopes are disappointed become cynical many people who have had that experience of hope go on formulating new hopes different hopes perhaps lesser hopes it's the only way that major social change actually occurs is through that repetitive hope and a lot of the time that hope is not only a matter of someone sort of having a spirit which is inclined toward it it's also a matter of discipline it's a matter of saying if we give up on hoping if we don't hope for anything anymore other than what we already have then we will never have anything and so hope itself becomes a deliberate and I think a very political act Tennessee Coates writes in his book proposing the concept of struggle which I think I think is a little more opposed to hope but I think that hope and struggle complement each other in the sense that you were talking about so that better than being disappointed for not fulfilling the hope about not fulfilling the hope it is just a means of struggle to keep finding new goals new things to achieve one of the great things about the book is that it talks about history and and human experience in its most extreme ways in its most extreme examples both on the good hand pedals on the bad end so you've visited Cambodia and talked to women and people who were extremely traumatized by the genocide in Cambodia but also you had splendid locations which including a culinary vacation in China and a sailing in Turkey that made me want to reconsider my summer plans and I like one of the great things about the book is precisely there's that the world is both things it is not just reports from the killing fields but also there are these things to enjoy and things to to appreciate the whole range of it but you also say that authenticity is a holy grail of the traveler so in those extremes are there are the authentic things are they different or do they complement each other or is the experience of an authenticity necessarily combining both of those extremes I wondered as I was putting the book together whether I should include the fun travel pieces and some reviewers seem to be very pleased idea that a couple of reviewers seem to think that it's bizarre to go from luxury hotels to the killing fields my point of view is that these are all ways of engaging with the world that I wanted to remain as engaged as I could I found that often when I went off to do what was effectively a travel story that there were little surprising moments of authenticity that would creep in in one way or another but I also believed that there is an authenticity in one's own experience and that assignment to write about Turkey which was my first from a Travel Magazine Travel and Leisure where I then did a lot of writing that was an exhilarating and wonderful experience and I think if you're trying to paint in some measure I mean in two parts you can in a few hundred pages are portrait if the world is you see it it can't just be a portrait of heroes and tragedies it has to be a report also that there's a love in the world that's very beautiful and a lot in the world that's very exciting that sense of authenticity am i seeing the real place came up for me over and over again I'd always wanted to have the real experiences I wanted to have them but really from quite early in my life and my favorite I think of the ones that are in here is when I was in the Solomon Islands where I have gone because after all the true name is Solomon you want to see in the Solomon Islands so leaving a trend in eponymous travel off I went and I went with a high school friend and her husband and my husband the four of us together and my high school friends husband worked for Conservation International and he said well there's someone who works for us he's been living on the ground and married a bush woman she said he said if you really want to have authentic experiences he could take you up into the heights he said people don't generally go there and I said well that would be great one thing you should know about the rainforest is that it rains all the time there but we had a two-day trek through all of this mud and we came to this small village and we have the city of grieving ceremony and so on that comes whenever anyone comes they haven't seen but foreigners other than the person leading us for many years that late that night and we were just getting ready to go to sleep and we suddenly heard the sound of music and we looked out and they had taken out their various kinds of pipes and a kind of drum that they played with the souls of rubber flip-flops and they were playing music for us and they played this beautiful music and it was so enchanting the rain had cleared there was a full moon we're assuming they're bathed in moonlight and there was this uncanny music coming toward us well they finished and they said we were so moved and one of them said do you have music in your society we said yes of course they said sing us something we looked at one another we thought ok and we came up with Oklahoma and make up farewell and America the Beautiful so after he'd done that they said what about dancing so they went back to playing their music and my high school friend and I who had fortunately done it many times before mister their swing dancing in the middle of the jungle on top of a mountain under the full moon in the Solomon Islands and I thought travel is always always always about reciprocity and the time when you get to know other people is frequently not when you are sitting there asking them peppering them with questions but in those moments when you say if you'll show me your authentic self I'll show you mine all that well dancing I well one of interesting think I think this is the most compelling thing about the book you are so good at paying attention to other people and not just being observant and noticing details that are very memorable but listening the book is full of stories and testimonies of other people clearly you listen to others well what is interesting to me is that in some ways it's a it provides a continuity to the situation of depression and of course famously greatly brought about in the noonday demon so is it travel in some ways the opposite of depression that the total engagement of the world as opposed to you know painful disengagement that comes with depression that's a fascinating question I've never thought of it in quite those terms my usual line would just be that the depression book was about resilience how do people take experiences of great pain and turn them into occasions for dignity and that this book is also about people whose pain came primarily from external rather than internal sources but who also managed to find a lot of dignity but I think you're right that there is a real opposition there because my city of trademark line on depression is that the opposite if depression is not happiness but vitality and travel is a matter of enormous vitality thank you for your words without listening my mother used to say when I was growing up a good listener is always more interesting than a good talker despite the fact that I'm talking away at you right now I think there is a sense in which yes one of the central symptoms of depression is that everything becomes too frightening into overwhelming so that I can barely talk to my husband and children much less talk to a large group of people or go into an alien circumstance and travel and the work I've done with travel is about being as fully engaged with the world as it's possible to be and it is a kind of counter narrative to the depression thank you for that gift you've given right oh thank you one thing I want to ask you while reading this book wait haven't you been there is where would you like to go do you have plans is there is there new territory for you to explore I'm going to Sri Lanka in August for a Travel Magazine slightly with the feeling of but I finished my book I don't have to go anywhere but maybe I will anyway the place that I lack most centrally is the Gulf State so I've been in various parts of the Islamic world I reported from Libya from Afghanistan from Kazakhstan from Turkey but I haven't done the the Gulf states in the central part of the Middle East and there's so much history going on there right now I recently said to my son who was then six and it's just turned 7 I said George I said if go anywhere in the world anywhere in the world I said where would you most like to go and George thought for a minute and then he said Syria and I said Syria George why would you want to go to Syria and he replied using a phrase that I'm afraid has come up often in our household someone has to tell those people about inappropriate behavior someone does as one friend said when I recounted that story perhaps you'd like to visit Washington DC well I was wondering also let's imagine situation where someone like you is visiting the United States coming from some remote place with some you know knowledge but not all of it what would they see can you counter project yourself into someone else's position if they were visiting United States these days looking at things what do you think they would see well I think the United States is not a very singular place what they would see are these divisions which have become so evident in the current electoral process they would see that there is on the one hand a society of greater acceptance than there has ever been really more or less anywhere in the world and on the other hand that there is a society of gross intolerance and demagoguery and anger and range I know they would see the social inequalities which have become so pronounced and which are so visible all around us I think that they would see that we are a country in which there is a constant supply of hope that people here really believe that things can change I was very struck when I was doing my previous book by a difference between European psychoanalytic texts and American ones the European ones tend essentially to say the purpose of this is to recognize your limitations and adjust to them and the gist if the American ones was the purpose of this is to recognize her limitations and transcend them and that it was a real divide and I think for all that is broken in this society at the moment and I could talk for the next four hours about that I think there is still a sense people have of having some volition and that not only in what they do but in who they are and how they live that sense of agency is something we cherish in this country too but it's also a kind of agency that can be practiced in writing and storytelling including the agency to to listen to others and give them voices like seriously in that spirit I am now going to open the floor to you the microphone is there for your questions and comments and ideas thanks for coming here so I wanted to kind of ask you I think it's not so difficult to be a traveler so like for me I've been to Syria I've been to Sri Lanka I've been to Bosnia I've been in a lot of places what's interesting to me is how do you become a chronicler of that how do you communicate all these places that you've seen and and be successful at it oh I wanted to tell you in the Gulf you should go to Oman excellent thank you I mean chronicling is sort of the way that I engage with the world so I write notes through whatever I'm doing and whatever is happening yet also the fact that I am going to chronicle something forces me to try to see it clearly and not to be distracted by the easiest or most pleasant narrative so I think the fact of writing has a very strong effect on the fact that I will be writing has a strong effect on the way that I travel and I wouldn't travel the same way without it and then I think it really is just trying to talk to people I mean I said before there is that middle stratum of people I feel like all of you who are here today in the Art Institute of Chicago some of you might actually be in government and some of you might actually be struggling at the bottom of the social ladder but most if you are probably somewhere in the middle and are probably quite interested in what is happening in this country in the world how we understand and explain it and I feel like there is a vast swath of people who get very little written about the more said about them who have really interesting witty engaged insightful things to say when I go someplace I find you meet a few people and then you're suddenly in a network but then you think what if this isn't the real networking you have made some other people and allow that to expand into its own network and that process of engaging with more and more and more people which I will say I still find intimidating when I arrive somewhere I'm still anxious and I feel always have my first few days me and more where I went just a couple of years ago I felt crazy at the beginning and I thought it's too complicated I will never understand them but if you talk to enough people bit by bit it said it comes clear and and people then suddenly begin materializing I mean when I was in Afghanistan I went to Afghanistan in February of 2002 in the late stages of the invasion of that invasion and I was terrified to go and I thought it would be a fascinating but unpleasant experience and I loved Afghanistan I have not loved every place I've been but I loved Afghanistan and I was walking one day with my translator I said I wanted to get one of those perhaps like the ones that Carlton they could the cars I always wore I'd wanted to get what if those perhaps like the ones the cars I always wore and I tried Center it said whether we must go to the street at mapmakers in order once we ordered one and we went back the next day to get it and we were walking back to a crowded market most of the foreigners who were based in Afghanistan at that point we're either military or UN and they were forbidden to sort of go and mix in the streets my translator said it's just a market nobody is expecting a foreigner it's perfectly safe and as we're walking through the market he said put on your hat and I said oh Farooq I think foreigners going native look silly and he said no really put on the Hat I said alright I'll put on the Hat and I put on this hat and everyone around us burst into applause I didn't understand what was happening and someone stepped forward and he said you are a foreigner I think you are an American but you are in our city you are walking among us and you are wearing a real Afghan hat in the Afghan way and we want you to know that you are welcome here and it was one of the most touching things I've ever experienced because it wasn't an interview I'd set up and it wasn't anyone whose name I even was going to get I find that when you get to places and you begin engaging in that way the narratives begin to emerge and then I just write them down I did master's degree in English and a PhD in psychology and I'm successful at it only because I have pushed endlessly to get my words out into the world in a way that I'm sure is frequently obnoxious but that's the key to success mr. Solomon I really enjoy all of your thoughts I have a request I am from not East part of India people don't know much about us not even non-indians Indians don't know about us my part is in between Bangladesh and Burma that's where we go grow tea and we treat women much better than the other parts of India and I'm proud about that but you know recently done a lot of things happening you know people are killing people's thinking about their the witches and all so people don't know about all those and we are very famous for one horse rhinos are awesome beautiful place but people are killing the Rhinos you know so I think through you maybe we can get some awareness and somebody would like to know about it and start something against it this is just my appeal to you because I love your books thank you thank you very much I have been in India number of times but I have traversed only a tiny part of it I feel like it's so there's so much there to see and now I would love to do that I'm very interested in the natural world there are a number of essays in the book that are about animals and about the natural world the decimation of the Rhino population is extremely alarming and altogether heartbreaking and you're telling me that the food is really good will go down very well with me I would just say parenthetically that the China story that Alexander mentioned in which I was writing about I was a culinary tour of China at the end of it having spent almost a month eating enormous meals all day every day I went into a store in the fashion well 790 too strict in Beijing and I said I really love the jacket you have in the window would you have that in my size and the very polite Chinese saleswoman looked at me and she said oh no we make clothes for thin people here yes microphone 2 how do you engage your translator so you don't miss that deeper meaning the difference between having a good translator and having a not very good translator is enormous and I have had the very frustrating experience of being with translators who didn't seem to be able to get across the questions I was asking or the answers that I was receiving and it can be very very very frustrating and difficult I often try to ask people who are within the community that I'm trying to address whether they would be a translator for me you know you are a painter here in China I know your job is to be an artist would you consider working with me for a few weeks while I do these interviews because you will understand not only the language but also what the ideas are that are being thrown back and forth but when you have something translated whether it is in writing or it is in the course of speech there's always the question of what is getting confused or getting lost when my book about depression had been published in several Asian language as a friend who speaks those languages looked at a few of the translations and said in Taiwan you've written a medical textbook in Japan you've written a book of poems and in mainland China something between the two so I'm always very aware and I'm not good at languages and it's very frustrating to me that I rely so much on translators I sometimes try to come back to people and I try to choose the translators very carefully it's surprising how quickly you can figure out that you aren't getting all of what someone else is saying or that they don't understand what it is that you're saying but it's a big challenge question over here have you been the kind of traveler that you've been overseas have you been that kind of traveler in this country in communities that are very foreign to you and if so what's the difference you you know I've traveled a lot within the United States I've traveled a lot especially because I get sent on sort of book touring and so on to various places or lecturing and also I have a daughter with a college friend mother and daughter live in Fort Worth and so I go down to Texas quite a lot and my husband is the biological father of two children with some lesbian friends in Minneapolis and we're in Minneapolis a lot which is where my husband was living when we met so I've had a lot of time in those areas of course I loved coming to Chicago the exotic aspect of travel in America in my experience mostly has less to do with the location I mean some of the locations are beautiful and some of them are less beautiful it has more to do with trying to understand the politics of people who have different points of view and trying to engage across the socio-economic spectrum and I did a lot of that in my last book for from the tree we interviewed many many families who were struggling and who our children resented various kinds of challenges and special needs and it often felt to me as though it was a good thing that I thread time in South Africa and Peru and Brazil because it prepared me for going into a context in which the way of living was so very different and I have certainly met people whose experiences were very troubling I've often been humbled by the breadth of the perception that they have been able to establish in lives that have been very constrained and that's really been the gist of that that experience of travel time from there hi I was wondering how all your travels have changed your sense of home and what it is that you want out of being home or how it's changed the kinds of places or what you call home now the experience of travel strengthens I think the sense of home I have a theory that if everyone in the world were required before the age of 30 to spend two weeks in a foreign country no matter what country and no matter what they were doing there that half the world's diplomatic problems would go away because I think people have so little sense of other Ness and so little sense of the idea that other people aren't just us with you know funny accents and different hair other people have other systems of values and other ways of doing things and furthermore they don't want to become us they may want to change things in their society but not in that in that regard so I think that's sort of that's that's central to the conversation and then I think I think the travel is for me has been a way of being distilled I mean travel is both the window and a mirror when you go to another place you see things that you've never seen before that's the window part but you're also stripped of a lot of the things that are signifiers in your usual life you no longer have people who understand the meaning of your education or your clothing or your sort of location and what you get stripped back to is attended essential cells and for me it has been very helpful not to turn this all into an ego exercise but to find out who I really am by going to those other places and then when I come back home to be able to think now I'm home and some of the things that I thought were necessary for me to be myself to turn out to be expendable I was kind of an Anglophile growing up I eventually went to graduate school in England and I stayed there for a number of years I took a second Passport a virtual national a lot of my closest friends are Americans who live in London or English people who live in New York because I think if you do a lot of travel what you ultimately end up with is a sense of permanent displacement and you must as well Alexander and you end up feeling you have something closely in common with other people who are somewhat displaced but since having children and since having the full-time experience of being a parent at home I've developed an affection not only for the United States which for all its ups and downs is a country that I love but also for my own experience of home and the rootedness it brings and I used to think I would get melancholy during takeoff in airplanes and I know that when you go to higher altitude it changes the way your tastebuds function and that there are all of these other explanations I had looked at and I kept trying to figure out the physiological reason why often as the plane takes off and in its first hour in the sky I feel kind of fearful and I finally realized that it's not a physiological response it's that I find those departures painful I find departing from home increasingly painful then I get somewhere else and I find arriving someplace joyful but that underlying little piece of me that yearns for the place I came from and the place where the people I love the most are all together that never goes away and I understand it in a way I never would have for that travel well we have to we have to send you to the place you came from you have to catch the plane we always welcome to Chicago thank you thank you for myself and for all of the Chicagoans who are here today come back any time we'll arrange better weather thank you all

Channel: Chicago Humanities Festival

Views: 2,299

Rating: 4.826087 out of 5

Keywords: chicago humanities festival, chf, humanities, chicago, festival, Andrew Solomon, Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change, journalism, non-fiction, literature, books, Soviet Union, Afghanistan, art, history, freedom, Aleksander Hemon, PEN America

Id: 7-OkEEBLlTw

Length: 54min 21sec (3261 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 09 2016