A MAP UPSIDE DOWN

...Both Brutus and Dangor argue for its use...

...Two decades ago, the Third World was a favorite radical cause in the West...

...It made the right-wing watchdog group Accuracy in Academia furious, precipitating a denunciation in the student newspaper...

...Art can make people optimistic—they can confront the human condition, which is not the same thing as wallowing in angst and misery...

...Elena Poniatowska, a Mexican journalist and fiction writer (her Dear Diego was recently published in English), calls her work "giving a voice to the voiceless...

...For him, as for Brutus, the notion of artistic expression politely separated from social conflict makes no sense...

...For some, exile has become the culture, as Edward Said explains of Palestinian reality...

...Little can be more interesting than money and glory...

...At the unusual get-together at Duke, the role of artists in shaping consciousness took center stage...

...Instead, he reads a hilarious section from a novel originally written in Kikuyu and available in English...

...We have imported them...

...His newly released novel, The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, puts the experience of exile at the center, using in different segments the language of fairy tales, comic books, and dialogue between two exiles in Paris...

...He does believe the turmoil of politics and art are related...

...Tahimik's film work, like the readings of the writers at the conference, demonstrates both the challenge and the power of art in an international era...

...When he finally gets the chance to go to Paris, he sees that Filipino culture is shaped by the world that sends rockets to space but is also a source of strength to resist it...

...he would lose his audience...

...Battling his rusty English, Oe shares his sense of decay in postwar Japanese literature...

...These days, Mao caps are gathering dust while China tries capitalism, and Cuba-bashing and Sandinista-sneering are the new fashion among repentant radicals...

...The writing of our generation," he says, "was an attempt to reach a language through letting surface the diversity of voices, exposing writing itself to the traditional cultural experience, through the creation of an unfinished text in the hope that within a few years we would discover that text...

...Ariel Dorf-man, exiled for more than a decade from Chile, describes the feeling of living in limbo: "Reality is somewhere else...

...No one expresses that better than Filipino filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik...

...The film wryly charts this journey from the viewpoint of the slave...

...The Lebanese have resisted Israeli occupation, but we have not been able to reorganize a new society...

...Rather it is aesthetic expression within a brutally politicized reality...

...After reading from a novel in which a foreign priest attempts to understand the social factions of Lebanon, Khoury says that writers of his era "were hoping that literature would discover the culture...

...CULTURE A MAPUPSIDE DOWN Third World artists explore their territory BY PAT AUFDERHEIDE The map of the world, drawn by a Turkish cartographer in the Seventeenth Century, looks upside down—until you notice that the little boats decorating the oceans are right-side up...

...ering...

...He runs through a checklist of major historical events regularly ignored in Japan today: the invasion of China, the annexation of Korea and today's discrimination against Koreans, an entire class of untouchables...

...Dangor's writing today, in such work as his poetry collection Exile from Within, employs a peculiarly South African populist version of English that, in its multiplicity, also expresses the cultural clashes of the moment...

...Tahimik's film-in-progress, Memories of Overdevelopment, is the story of the first phase of European expansionism, seen from a world-upside-down point of view...

...Auden, followed by his recent work, influenced by Pablo Neruda...

...Awkwardly residual as it may be to define the "Third World" of underdeveloped nations in terms of the superpowers, the relationship is an international reality that helps shape culture...

...Dennis Brutus, the majestically dignified South African poet whose most recent work is Listening to the Radio at 1:35 a.m., begins the conference with a reading of poetry he wrote when he was in his twenties, deeply influenced by W.H...

...Dorfman also warns the Third World artist of this pull off-center: "In exile, we are constantly subjected to the temptation of appealing to the center," politically as well as aesthetically...

...He reads a passage from the series in which a man explains why he is outraged at the notion that the English have "given" them independence...

...Yes, English is the language of the oppressor," says Brutus...

...But Dangor has come to feel "that my own language has no future—it was also the language of death...

...When Ngugi wa Thiong'o, a Kenyan writer who has announced he will no longer write in English, gets up to speak, many expect him to launch into an anti-English diatribe...

...South African writer Achmat Dangor, born in 1948 (the year apartheid became national policy), grew up under different pressures...

...In his charming but devastating Perfumed Nightmare, Tahimik plays a Filipino entranced by the technocratic wonder of the First World...

...Ask a poet, novelist, playwright, or filmmaker in a country where economic and political existence is conditioned by superpower clout, who is struggling to find the subject and mode of expression for his or her art...

...On the road, you can discover just how far you were—even at home—from the culture of the great majority, Dorfman explains with agonizing frankness...

...Such art has not only the job of creation but also of transformation...

...South African writers sit on the hot seat of African debate over the use of English...

...Magellan, known as the first man to circumnavigate the globe, died halfway through the trip...

...The artist must meld the elements inherited from dominant or colonial cultures and the social conflicts of the moment into a positive reality...

...Nelida Pinon, a Brazilian novelist whose best-known work is Fundador, claims that having been in the shadow of Spanish-speaking authors may actually have sheltered Brazilians...

...He spoke a people's Afrikaans as a child, and his first work was in that language...

...Author of the text for the photoessay book After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, Said says the very notion of "Palestinian" is becoming more commodity than concept in the absence of a stable community...

...Oe's despair comes from his sense that Japanese artists refuse to recognize this...

...Art that turns the world upside down cuts through compassion or contempt and permits the imagining of a mutual future...

...For any Third World artist, living in the middle of the cultural bridge is a perilous, if unavoidable, enterprise...

...Oe believes Japanese culture suffers a double burden...

...George Lamming, the Caribbean writer who has experienced a life of exile, has written a series of semi-autobiographical novels, beginning with In the Castle of My Skin...

...It is a challenge that Lebanese writer Elias Khoury, whose fiction has appeared in Arabic and French, knows well...

...And in that crisis, he argues, South Africa is a cauldron of creativity...

...We write," she says of Latin American authors, "to explain ourselves to ourselves, to understand what we do not understand, to claim a space, to be seen, to be part of the vision of the world—so as not to disappear...

...Among her voiceless she includes writers, as people who live in a society where silence is an enemy of creativity...

...There are countries that produce cultural theories," Oe says, "and those that import them...

...The struggle not to disappear, t6 create an existence by naming in art, can be threatened by the most glamorous kind of success: recognition by the First World...

...But frequently it is also the language in which the oppressed are communicating with each other...

...But that doesn't mean Brutus sees his work as instrumental, as "political art...

...Do we exist...

...To write from a 'purely personal' perspective would be to write into a vacuum," he says...

...The Spanish writers are living a very dangerous moment," she says...

...Fantastic, allegorical, descriptive, militant—the many forms of expression all have in common the struggle of naming...

...When national culture is under the aegis of a neocolonial state, Ahmad explains, you get the "festival syndrome"—the endless round of culture as patriotic folk expression or international conference...

...And Ngugi, charting Jhe history of his decision to write in Kikuyu, says, "I had to ask myself, who was I writing fof...

...Then he reads from a punchy, didactic play explaining class relations, staged for villagers in Kikuyu...

...The language we write in is universal," says this man whG writes in a localized polyglot...

...Profoundly distinct in style, the poetry is linked by the theme of social conflict...

...Artists—primarily writers—from Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia came together for a simple mission: to display their art, and to tell why they make it, to a First World audience...

...That done, he doesn't really need to explain that he decided to write in Kikuyu because he wanted to reach Kenyans who don't speak English, not for the pleasure of ideological debate...

...When home is the basement of the imperial house, you can never ignore the landlord...

...Dangor rails against the pressure to produce works that "translate" well...

...The world turned upside down—that was the focus of a recent conference, advertised in a poster featuring the Turkish map, at Duke University's Center for International Studies...

...Called Devil on the Cross, it's an allegorical tale of good and evil in a West-dominated Kenya...

...The meaning of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the struggle to live in a world without the emperor system are, for Oe, themes that inform and deform daily life...

...Our challenge from the West must be answered from within ourselves," he says...

...While Japan may be authentically Third World in being an "other" culture to the West, Oe also believes that the Japanese people share with Americans a blindness that is the self-protective armor of the powerful...

...But only when it is 'exportable' is it 'literature' to international publishers...

...If ever I give you freedom, then all your future is mine...

...Or, as he put it in a poem, "This [Afrikaans] used to be my mother tongue...

...Bruckner would have been amazed by much of what was said at the Duke gathPat Aufderheide, a senior editor of In These Times, writes frequently on cultural affairs for The Progressive...

...If angst is on display here, it is in the performance of renowned Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, author of A Personal Matter and recently of The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath...

...Suppose your son say to you, 'Dad, you free to call me son...

...Nobel prizes for the likes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Wole Soyinka testify to the creative strength of art at the edges of empire...

...He accuses Japanese critics and artists of First World flunkyism, of being on the "U.S.-European cultural conveyor belt" in adopting as their culture heroes such figures as Michel Foucault and Jacques Der-rida...

...But what the conference put on display was not political bias but a process of cultural creation that acknowledges political realities without being reduced to them...

...The recan-ters even have their own manifesto, Pascal Bruckner's The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt (a succes de scandal a couple of years ago in France, and just issued in translation here by Free Press...

...Some of these artists had first-hand experience with government suppression at home—and not always at the most obvious level of police repression...

...These artists are often in opposition not only to international pressures but also to oppressive forces in their own societies...

...I think for Africans to opt not to write in English may well cost them more than they can gain...

...Social scientist and political activist Eqbal Ahmad, a lifelong exile from Pakistan, sketches out the unenviable choices for the artist in post-colonial states: cooptation, opposition, or exile...

...If Bruckner's critique takes accurate aim at the political fashions of another time, it also recapitulates the error—in reverse...

...If daily life is structured as a broken narrative, then art itself presents an awesome challenge...

...But Khoury is not about to say artists have succeeded where politicians failed...

...Freedom is not a state but a struggle, often waged by an artist outside his country of origin...

...We are today in the midst of a crisis," says Brutus, "a crisis in literature, in the humanities, in Marxism itself, and we see the lack of a clear direction...

...But to raise them openly is to become an aesthetic embarrassment—as Oe himself is to many Japanese...

...We must restore ourselves to ourselves," Said says, "but is there anywhere that fits over our memories and experiences...

...And exile imposes new problems on the artist looking for that intimate relationship with an audience...

...Furthermore, he says, "I consider that my political activities themselves are creative...

...Bruckner has decided, along with so many others, that First Worlders have nothing to be ashamed of: that underdevelopment is a grass-roots problem in somebody else's yard, and that substituting arrogance for contemptuous compassion will abolish the problem of figuring out how to be a responsible international citizen...

...his Filipino slave is the true owner of Magellan's fame...

...Bruckner, who as a Parisian student was a Third World groupie, now charges that ardent passion for the foreign underdog was mere pretension...

...As for the artist turned pet-of-the-state, "You lose nothing except your soul, the respect of others, and a place in society...

...He speaks of staging his plays in villages: "I was moved with the pride with which people walked out...

...But there is a liberating energy in the very struggle to name a reality that leaps across national boundaries, an energy that crosses boundaries as well...

...The loss of self under neocolonialism can put a people in exile from its own identity...

...Those little boats are your tipoff that the mapmaker saw the world from a different angle than the one we're used to...