THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, October 7, 1995 TAG: 9510070242
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Charlise Lyles
LENGTH: Medium: 73 lines
M. Evelina Galang promised a party, and delivered. Big time.
Old Dominion University's 18th Annual Literary Festival could've been a stuffy gathering about li-tra-tuuure, pronounced with pinky up.
Instead, folks were full of mirth, dancing carefree, purling like colorful ribbons. Yes, wine was involved. But not to a great extent.
Kids, adults, young and old, black, white, yellow - the whole community was invited: the Pan Parrots, a steel drum band of Portsmouth teenagers; and the United Ilocano Youth Dance troupe, a company of Filipino-American youth who perform traditional folk and cotillion dances.
That's the way Galang, this year's festival director, wanted it. The theme, ``World Voice,'' wouldn't have worked any other way. The three-day program brought a potpourri of far-flung writers to good old Norfolk. Among them, Kashmirian poet Agha Shahid Ali, Irish poet Eavan Boland, and Fiona Cheong, a native of Singapore.
The theme was especially fitting because ODU recently became home of the Associated Writing Program's International Writers Center. Headed by Ron Wray, it serves as a resource hub for voices from afar.
ODU professor Galang, an American born of Fe there is music and fluid movement we are better able to listen to one another's hearts. Often, we are more willing to listen to one another's music than one another. To wit: reggae, salsa, Australian rhythms, religious chants.
Literature can be a difficult portal. And dialogue more difficult still.
``It is our differences, our many points of views, our backgrounds - socioeconomic and otherwise - that make up our voices,'' said Galang at the close of the festival on Thursday night at Chrysler Hall. ``. . . We must recognize, we are not the same, we are different. We come from different places and this affects not only how we speak, but what we speak. And there is beauty in this: That you and I can look at the same ocean, or the face of a child, and see something different.
``There is beauty in knowing what I cannot see, you can, and (that) maybe you will point this out to me. I guess the trick is, I better listen to you, if I'm going to see it your way. I better try. I better walk away from where I am standing, for just a little bit, and see where you are coming from.''
Poet, novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman gave the festival's final reading. Born in Argentina, Dorfman was once an exiled Chilean citizen. Now the professor at Duke University calls Durham home. In unaccented English, he read of facelessness, fetuses refusing to be born, fire in the house, all as symbols and metaphors for the oppressive dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Dorfman read in a way that made me appreciate American freedoms. In a way that reminded me that, as divided as we are sometimes, we've got this democracy thing down better than most of the globe. In a way that reminded me that we still have much work to do.
Afterward in Chrysler's Huber Court, those Pan Parrots took to instruments that look like giant silver spoons. They conjured a calypso sound that made many feet so light that feathers flew by in envy. Swaying, shimmying, switching and swirling beneath the high, vaulted ceiling, we were dancing, dancing despite our differences and because of our differences. by CNB