Posts filed under 'peace'

An Ocean of Myth and Lotus: Robert Wood on Portside Review and Writings from the Indian Ocean

January 17, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

The journal is a simply a simple example of peace in our time for people who wish to see it, in all their diversity, opinion, reflection.

Since 2021, Portside Review has published contemporary writings from the Indian Ocean that transcend beyond J.M.G. Le Clézio, Amitav Ghosh, Lindsey Collen, Monique Agénor, and Marie-Thérèse Humbert. Celebrating the coastlines, hinterlands, sea routes and port cities from Cape Town to Bangkok, from Bombay to Northbridge, this quarterly digital literary journal is funded by the Australian government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries, Creative Australia, and the Centre for Stories. “[W]e are not a journal of critique and review, nor of scholarship and journalism, nor of doctrinaire reference,” wrote managing editor Robert Wood in the journal’s latest issue.

In this interview, I spoke with Dr Wood on the impetus behind Portside Review, new writings from the Indian Ocean, and running a digital literary journal.  

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): What’s the story behind Portside Review? Why is there a need, now more than ever, for an online literary journal on writings from the Indian Ocean?

Robert Wood (RW): Founded in February 2021, Portside Review is a quarterly online literary journal that publishes short stories, essays, poetry, interviews, and activism in written, audio and visual form. Based in Perth in Western Australia, we have had editors in Melbourne, Singapore, Bali, Penang, Mumbai, Cape Town, Myanmar, and elsewhere. We started it as a project through our parent organisation, the Centre for Stories, which teaches the craft of storytelling for social impact.

There is a need, as always, for the proliferation for artistic excellence that supports an ongoing peace, all with a sense of ecological attention, material place and geographic location. Our vision has been to see the Indian Ocean as a home of many languages, many interests, many sovereignties, and to reflect that through a journal focused on the English language without centering it. It is a project that allows us to connect laterally rather than vertically, that re-routes where and when we have come to be in the ports we call our own. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

April 29, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by José García Escobar and Thuy Dinh

We report from Guatemala and Vietnam in this week’s literary round-up!

In this week’s dispatches of literary news from around the world, the struggle of Vietnamese refugees is commemorated in text and art, a new documentary celebrates Thích Nhất Hạnh, and a new Guatemalan award honours the country’s female writers. Read on to find out more!

Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Vietnamese Diaspora

Besides T.S. Eliot, April also seems problematic for refugees of the former Republic of South Vietnam. On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese Communist forces captured Saigon—the capital of South Vietnam—ending the Vietnam War, yet triggering a mass exodus of South Vietnamese who fled their fallen nation for political asylum in the West. In recent years, descendants of these refugees have pursued creative efforts to redefine/translate “Black April” as a time of remembrance and rebirth. For example, the traveling exhibit Textures of Remembrance: Vietnamese Artists and Writers Reflect on the Vietnamese Diaspora, curated by the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN), and currently shown at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, in Oakland, California, introduces a spectrum of “textured” responses to April 30 via visual media, poetry, and prose, to construct an intimate yet diverse composite of the diasporic experience that has been collected, recollected, and reimagined since 1975.

The theme of remembrance and rebirth also manifests in a new Vietnamese translation of The Song of Quan Âm (Quan Âm Tế Độ Diễn Nghĩa Ca), about the life of Avalokiteshvara—the bodhisattva of compassion—known commonly as Quan Âm, who is endowed with the ability to see (quan) and hear (âm) all human sufferings. Translated and annotated by scholar Nguyễn văn Sâm, this anonymous 7,228-line poem—the longest poem originally written in Nôm or the Southern script—vividly illustrates Buddhist concepts such as karma, reincarnation, and filial piety. The book’s magisterial scope, only the second translation since 1925, also reflects the translator’s fervent wish to preserve Nôm—a writing tradition adapted from Chinese ideographs and containing a wealth of premodern Vietnamese thought—yet is mostly neglected today due to the adoption of the Romanized script.

Compassion, inextricably linked to remembrance and rebirth, is eloquently evoked in A Cloud Never Dies, a twenty-seven-minute documentary on the life and teachings of the late Zen Master Thích Nhất Hạnh. Released on April 2 by the International Plum Village Community in response to the war in Ukraine, the film highlights Thích Nhất Hạnh’s philosophy of engaged Buddhism­ that combines meditation with antiwar activism. Articulated in his 1967 book Lotus in a Sea of Fire (Hoa Sen Trong Biển Lửa), Thích Nhất Hạnh’s practice lent moral support to Vietnamese during the war who refused to take sides and simply wanted the bombing to end. This perspective, however, resulted in his thirty-nine-year exile in the West. READ MORE…