Anya Achtenberg is an award-winning poet and novelist. Her latest novel, History Artist, grapples with recent Cambodian history. FPIF’s E. Ethelbert Miller talks to her about fighting against social amnesia and the challenge of inhabiting the lives of others in writing fiction.
Like a bad cold that won’t go away, the Kosovo question continues to plague international diplomacy long after it was expected that it would be resolved. If everything had gone according to plan, there would have been agreement by now for a settlement of Kosovo’s status that would have entailed "supervised independence" for the southern Serbian province and a large degree of autonomy for its ethnic Serb population. Instead, the threat of a Russian veto has derailed the Kosovo independence train and Europe is once again facing instability on its doorstep.
The United States and North Korea are negotiating a resolution to the current nuclear crisis. Enthusiasm in Washington for regime collapse in Pyongyang has died down. But the United States hasn’t changed its fundamental approach to Northeast Asia.
After finally receiving $24 million in frozen assets, North Korea shut down its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon in July. The optimists cautiously celebrated the move as the first step toward the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and the eventual establishment of diplomatic relations between Washington and Pyongyang. The pessimists drolly pointed out that we’re back to where we were in 2002, except that now North Korea has a whole lot more nuclear material and possibly a bomb to boot.
The Japanese government is on the verge of abandoning its historic commitment to pacifism. The current prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has made constitutional revision a major plank of his reform agenda. Coming to power in September 2006, Abe said that he would aim for a constitutional revision within five to six years. The central focus of attention is Article 9, in which Japan renounces the sovereign right to wage war. In May 2007, with relatively little fanfare, the Japanese Diet passed legislation to hold a national referendum to revise the constitution and amend Article 9.
This is a tale about politics, influence, money and murder. It began more than 40 years ago with a bloodletting so massive that no one quite knows how many people died. Half a million? A million? Through four decades, the story of the relationship between the United States and the Indonesian military has left a trail of misery and terror. Last month it claimed four peasants, one of them a 27-year-old mother. Unless Congress puts the brakes on the Bush administration’s plans to increase aid and training for the Indonesian army, there will be innumerable victims in the future as well.
The storming of the Red Mosque is not the victory that General Pervez Musharraf and his supporters in Washington proclaim. Rather, it represents the abject failure of the Pakistani president’s policies. The shaky military junta seems to have few answers to the central question of containing religious extremism in the sect-ridden Pakistani society. With a growing number of citizens challenging the authoritarian system, U.S. support for Musharraf is more and more out of touch with Pakistani reality.
David Mura is a poet, creative nonfiction writer, critic, playwright, and performance artist. A Sansei or third-generation Japanese American, Mura has written two memoirs: Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (Grove-Atlantic), which won a 1991 Josephine Miles Book Award from the Oakland PEN and was listed in the New York Times Notable Books of Year, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality and Identity (1996, Anchor/Random). Mura’s third and most recent book of poetry is Angels for the Burning (2004, Boa Editions Ltd.). His novel, Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire, will be published in 2009 by Coffee House Press. E. Ethelbert Miller: As a well known Japanese-American writer, do you find yourself looking over your shoulder at economic, political, and cultural events taking place in Japan today?
Burma has become a favorite choice of novelists looking for an exotic locale with a hint of danger. Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner is set in the colonial period in Burma. A ghost, who accompanies a tour of Burma, narrates Amy Tan’s Saving Fish from Drowning. Karen Connelly’s The Lizard Cage is the story of a fictional activist. Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace describes the last king’s court. These books have placed their authors – some like Tan have been there for a long time — on the bestseller lists.
All my non-Burmese friends who have read these books have liked them, even loved them. But I find them pale and unconvincing, maybe because I am Burmese. In terms of novels by outsiders, I prefer the older generation – the novels She Was a Queen and Siamese White by Maurice Collis and F. Tennyson Jesse’s The Lacquer Lady.