blueprints

136 | Christopher merrill
are issued permanent resident visas each year to the United States and a
handful of other countries; it is equally difficult to secure one of the few
university slots available. But perhaps it was better to jaw-jaw than to warwar,
as Winston Churchill famously said. I hoped that in the scheme of
things some good might come of our attempts to describe what it feels like
to engage in the creative process.
Thus in each workshop Eliot cited the example of Chinese poets’ taping
their writings to communal walls during the Cultural Revolution;
Terese read her translations of Sudanese poems; and Tom praised the heroism
on display in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir, Hope Against Hope,
recounting how she and Anna Akhmatova kept alive the poems of Osip
Mandelstam, a victim of Stalin’s gulags. I told a story about the Greek poet
Yannis Ritsos: how he had prepared for his looming imprisonment during
the military dictatorship by removing the stuffing from a winter coat and
then writing poems on cigarette papers, which he hid inside the hollowedout
coat. When he was released after a year, he gave the coat to his editor,
instructing him to publish all the poems because he needed the money to
pay for his daughter’s wedding. In short, each of us felt called to invoke the
witness of writers who had testified to some of the darkest chapters of
human history, for this was what our students faced in Dadaab.
what could we offer besides anecdotes about writers
bearing witness to oppression, imaginative exercises,
and encouragement to read and write?
There came a moment in each workshop when a student would ask
what we would do for him or her. The students were accustomed to wellmeaning
foreigners promising them this or that. But what could we offer
besides anecdotes about writers bearing witness to oppression, imaginative
exercises, and encouragement to read and write? Eliot said that as writers
we could barely tie our shoes—a line that always elicited stunned silence
and then general laughter, which changed the dynamics of our encounter.
The atmosphere lightened as we found ourselves to be on more equal footing.
We suggested that they translate literary works from English into Somali
and vice versa. (All the students were bilingual, and some were fluent in