I just got home from the last day of the festival, so I want to write everything down while it’s fresh. I’ll organize it by session.

Friday May 2nd, 2008

War and Peace (panel discussion)

Panelists: Karen Connelly, Adam LeBor, Josip Novakovich, Adrian van Dis

This session brought together writers of war, from journalism, fiction and non-fiction. Karen Connelly wrote Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction in 1993. She spoke about her experiences writing this book, and her current work with guerrillas along the Burmese-Thai border. Adam LeBor was a war correspondent during the Yugoslav wars, and just wrote a book about six families enmeshed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: City of Oranges: Arabs and Jews in Jaffa. Josip Novakovich, born in Croatia, also addressed issues arising from the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

I have to admit to listening much more than writing during this, and all panels, so my notes are somewhat scattered good quotes or striking phrases.

In his introduction, Josip Novakovich admitted to feeling “like a war profiteer,” an interesting admission for a war writer. I’ve often wondered whether writers feel like this, feel any sort of guilt from making their living writing about terrible events. Karen Connelly expressed her anxieties about voice appropriation, a white woman speaking for a brown man. But all these writers were convinced and convincing: stories of war need to be told.

Novakovich also spoke of the utter disbelief among citizens of the former Yugoslavia that a people who considered themselves friendly and easygoing could be capable of such violence against each other. Adam LeBor picked up on the idea of normality, saying that the best way to tell the story of a war was to follow people’s everyday lives. While covering the Bosnian conflict, he (in what he admitted was a typical move for war correspondents) wrote about the daily route his interpreter took home, where she had to duck behind walls and the open squares she had to sprint across for fear of gunfire.

In opposition to this factual approach, Novakovich emphasized the power of fiction, allowing us to plunge into someone’s mind, an exploration of subjectivity. Adrian van Dis agreed, terming memories “factories of lies”. Through his travels in Africa, van Dis came to understand stories as a means of escape. Villagers would tell him stories about the gruesome events going on in a neighboring village, women having their breasts cut off, when the same thing had happened in their village just a month before. Their story, they did not tell.

Finally, Josip Novakovich talked about the origins of Western storytelling in accounts of war, as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. His own moral imperative, when writing about war, is to portray wars as idiotic and absurd, to eventually stop war from being an option. Just as most wars start with a sense of outraged justice on one or both sides, these stories seem to begin from a similar outrage.