This week our writers bring you the latest literary news from Taiwan, Serbia, and El Salvador! In Taiwan, renowned writer Huang Chun-ming has brought out his latest novel and Chinese novelist Yan Lianke’s new essay compilation, Hers, has just been published. In Serbia, the annual Shakespeare festival, Šekspir Festival, has begun, and the Reading Balkans 2021 programme has launched in collaboration between Goga Publishing House, PEN Centre, and others. In El Salvador, a new blog run by Nelson Alonson, Una Verdad Sin Alfabeto, and publishing house Editorial Kalina have run online debates about Salvadoran writing and diaspora literature. Read on to find out more!
Vivian Szu-Chin Chih, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Taiwan
The autumn equinox has brought drizzling rain to cool Taiwan down from the previous summer heat. During the final quarter of 2020, while hoping our global readers will all stay safe and healthy, several literary and movie events are taking place in Taiwan. With online screenings and live discussions being streamed, it might be the best time for an easy access to Taiwan’s recent cultural events, no mater where you are.
The renowned Taiwanese novelist and playwright, Huang Chun-ming’s (黃春明, 1935-) latest novel (Hsiu-Chin, the Girl who Always Smiles,《秀琴，這個愛笑的女孩》) was just published by Unitas Magazine’s publishing house. The story centers around a village girl from northeastern Taiwan entering the film industry accidentally in the 1960s, when Taiwanese-language films were at their peak. Huang’s novella was featured in our past issue, with the translator Howard Goldblatt’s moving account of his long-term friendship with Huang. At the same time, the Chinese novelist Yan Lianke’s (閻連科, 1958-) essay compilation, Hers (Tamen,《她們》), was recently published by Rye Field Publishing Company in Taiwan, unprecedentedly featuring stories of women the novelist encountered, inside and outside of his own family. Perhaps most unorthodox is the publication from Taiwan Tongzhi (LGBTQ+) Hotline Association of their eight-year project that interviewed seventeen lesbians over fifty-five years old in Taiwan, to be published by Locus Publishing Company in October. This groundbreaking book on the life experiences of “lao-la” (「老拉」) in Taiwan, literally meaning old lesbians, is not only about their personal memories and struggles of being lesbians in the conservative Taiwanese society before the 1990s, but also a literary historical review of Taiwan’s gender equality and LGBTQ+ movements since the 1950s.
Due to the international travel restrictions brought about by the pandemic, many movie screenings and talks have been moved online, including the forthcoming “Live Stream Talk on Film with Tsai Ming-Liang and Lee Kang-Sheng” as part of the University of Edinburgh’s Taiwan Academy Film Festival. Another online movie event entitled “Taiwan’s Lost Commercial Cinema Tour 2020” will be jointly held by UCLan’s Northern Institute of Taiwan Studies, the Taiwan Film & Audiovisual Institute, and Kings College London, to stream six remastered Taiwanese-language films in mid-October. Register online to enjoy Taiwanese films and the related talks at home, or any place with access to the Internet!
Jovanka Kalaba, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Serbia
When talking about the concept of the 7th Šekspir Festival, the director of the festival, Nikita Milivojević, defined this year’s fusion of literature and theatre as an attempt to put a smile back on the faces of people struck by the pandemic. Šekspir Festival is the annual theatre festival based entirely on William Shakespeare’s work and legacy. Following Milivojević’s description, the festival took place from September 12-16 in its usual location, the Villa Stanković in the town of Čortanovci, but this time in the open. It featured, among other content, Shakespeare’s comedies As You Like It and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, as well as Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. As part of the European Shakespeare Festivals Network, the festival has also featured the Moj Šekspir (My Shakespeare) project, initiated in 2019. The project is based on the performances and readings given by the most prominent Serbian actors who, with their experiences and personal understanding of Shakespeare, engage with the public in order to share their view on why Shakespeare is the most performed playwright of all time and why his roles are considered to be the most demanding challenge for actors.
At the same time, the Reading Balkans project, a cooperation project of the Goga Publishing House (Slo), Goten Publishing (MK), Krokodil (Srb), Udruga Kurs (Cro), Poeteka (Alb), Qendra Multimedia (Kos), PEN Centre (BIH), and partners, has announced the Literary Residence Program called “Reading Balkans 2021.” The program is inviting fiction writers, poets, essayists, playwrights, screenplay writers, and comic book writers from Southeast Europe, whose works deal with contemporary themes to apply. Their work should reflect topics of migrations, language exile, reconciliation, as well as the role of culture and dialogue in fighting nationalism and intolerance. In the year 2021, nineteen authors will be awarded residencies that will all last four weeks. All residencies will take place between March 1 and September 30, 2021.
Nestor Gomez, Editor-at-Large, reporting from El Salvador
On September 3 a Facebook Live stream featured Una Verdad Sin Alfabeto, a blog run by founder Nelson Alonso. The moderator, Alberto López Serrano, invited Alonso as well as Salvadoran writers who were featured on the blog such as Lourdes Ferrufino, Denny Romero, and Javier Fuentes Vargas.
Alonso started the blog at the beginning of quarantine, at the end of March. The name of the project, Una Verdad Sin Alfabeto, was a suggestion from a friend. It was a phrase that had stuck with him for many years and that he had kept in order to use for something special. He said he had always felt a need to share poetry as much as possible. The blog simply began as a thought he had while stuck at home in quarantine: Why don’t I publish the poetry of my friends? He had this idea for the blog as a survival guide for the apocalypse, or in this case, the pandemic. The blog was an aid to help people stay indoors despite being separated from writing friends. Alonso admitted that the first writing featured on the blog was singularly focused on the pandemic but after a little bit of time the writing began to change and move on to other subjects; a move that he hadn’t anticipated.
On September 24 Editorial Kalina aired its own Facebook Live stream titled “The North and South of Salvadoran Poetics: Are We One People?” Alexandra Lytton Regalado and Miguel Huezo Mixco acted as moderators for this event which featured Salvadoran writers such as William Archila, Krisma Mancia, Elena Salamanca, Vladimir Amaya, and Susana Marcelo; all of whom are based either in El Salvador or the Salvadoran diaspora.
The conversation began with a question about what books or authors held an emotional connection for the featured writers. Some responded that they admired the Salvadoran greats such as Salarrué and Roque Dalton and more less-known Salvadoran writers such as Hugo Lindo and Pedro Geoffroy Rivas. Others admired other Spanish-speaking, non-Salvadoran writers such as César Vallejo, Vicente Huidobro, and Walt Whitman. One writer felt a deeper connection to non-Salvadoran women writers such as Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, and Gabriela Mistral. Curiously, only the Salvadoran writers based in the diaspora had mentioned writers working in languages other than Spanish.
This led to the following question in the conversation about how poets in the Salvadoran diaspora view the writing of poets in El Salvador and vice-versa. One writer commented that writers in the Salvadoran diaspora wrote about immigration, memory, and nostalgia while writers based in El Salvador wrote about the pain and suffering from staying in the country during and after its civil war. The creation of the two communities—the diaspora and those who remained in El Salvador—can be traced back to the civil war; essentially, the civil war is what forced this break in the literature of El Salvador. In fact, despite this break, Salvadoran writers are united by this shared pain from the civil war. Each community is connected by themes other than nostalgia and pain—things they’d wish they could let go. Other bridges that connect these two communities are abandonment, exile, violence, migration, and those who returned to El Salvador. One writer suggested that Salvadoran writers feel lost, abandoned, and disconnected, as if they are all trying to search for a promised land together; at the very least, one of literature.
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