PEN America's events can add diversity to American publishing.
In 2017, the PEN/Jean Stein’s Oral History Competition accepted my work-in-progress about tracing my African American ancestry. I used our family nicknames that were passed down over 400 years and our elders’ folktales to search. I found our colonial Caribbean rebel ancestors, our colonial Virginian ancestors, our pre-colonial Ghanaian warriors and farmers, and our Scottish noble ancestors who were abolitionists and slaveowners. I even found a colonial New York ancestor. They had very different voices, stories and memories.
The winners of the 2017 PEN Oral History Competition were
novelist, essayist, and critic Aleksandar Hemon for his oral history of Bosnian migrants, How Did You Get Here?: Tales of Displacement, and novelist Helen Oyeyemi for her debut story collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. I was thrilled to be among such international voices.
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Here in Canada we have PEN International where historian writer, philosopher John Ralston Saul was twice elected the head of PEN. I live on both sides of the wall between the USA rest of the world.
When I look at Reporters Without Borders annual index of Press Freedom I realize the USA has has gone from the top 25 to an amber coloured 48th.
https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table
For me Press Freedom confirms my normal narrative that Donald Trump is not a danger to Press Freedom he is the result of the steady erosion of Press Freedom. In 2002 the USA was between Switzerland and the then newly reacquired by China, Hong Kong today the USA is between Senegal and Romania. Reporters Without Borders does a fine job of defining Press Freedom as does PEN but the USA uses ancient history and theology to convince itself that a core philosophy of neoliberalism would even permit a Free Press.
Funny how well the index seems to indicate that the healthiest, wealthiest and best educated nations have the freest press. Only Jamaica seems to live outside the correlation and I am searching for an answer but expect they get their news from London and Toronto.
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