Minae Mizumura - The Fall of Language in the Age of English

THE INTERNATIONAL WRITING PROGRAM

This was my first visit to the real American Midwest.

The American Midwest, particularly the state of Iowa, is a symbol of rural America, known for its endless stretches of cornfields. Iowa City, located right in the middle of those cornfields, is a college town centered on the state university, the University of Iowa. Of the city’s population of seventy thousand, nearly half are students. What became clear to me as I stayed there, however, was that Iowa City is not exactly your typical rural college town. Streets both on and off campus are lined with fine establishments — libraries, museums, theaters, and an array of restaurants representing all kinds of cuisine. Particularly unusual in the middle of rural America is the thriving presence of small, independently run bookstores and coffee shops that would look at home in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. It all started from the university’s creative writing program, called Iowa Writers’ Workshop, or IWW, which shaped the town into what it is today — a lively literary community distinct from any other rural college town in the United States.

IWW, founded in 1936, was the first workshop of its kind in the country and is still considered to be the best. If teaching there is an honor, studying there is an honor no less. Every year about fifty students — aspiring novelists, poets, and a few translators — are admitted into the two-year program. Like many writers, I had never seen much significance in creative-writing programs beyond providing those who already know how to write a means to make a living; however, seeing those earnest students changed my mind. They live a life in which they write every day for at least two years. To be sure, not all graduates will succeed in earning their living by writing, but they all make it their goal to make use of their training at some point in their lives. Students with such commendable aspirations gather from all over the United States in this little place. (In 2008 Iowa City was designated as a UNESCO City of Literature, the only one in the United States.)

In 1966, when the respected poet Paul Engle stepped down from his twenty-five-year tenure as the director of IWW, his future wife, Nieh Hualing, a Chinese writer in her own right, suggested to him the idea of creating a program that would bring writers from across the nations to Iowa City. Together they founded the IWP. Since its inception in 1967, the program has invited over 1,400 writers from more than 140 countries. While IWW is widely known in the United States, its offspring, the IWP, is not as well recognized. Outside the United States its name recognition seems to vary: virtually unknown in some countries, it is an important stepping-stone in a writer’s career in others.

The faculty of the imagination is indeed cruel. My dream of a restful sojourn at a resort dissipated into thin air the minute the airport taxi pulled up in front of the university-owned hotel. For me, the sine qua non of my fantasy was not just that I would be freed from daily chores but that, even if not exactly wallowing in luxury, I would at least lead an aesthetic life. From outside, the hotel was nothing more than a plain concrete apartment building. Inside, what could nominally be called an entrance and lobby greeted me. I knew by then that the room I was being escorted to would be nothing like what I had envisioned. The IWP brochure had implied that we would each be given a suite overlooking the Iowa River. What I got was not a suite but a room, and not even a very spacious room at that, considering this was the American Midwest and not Tokyo. Furnishings included a double bed, an office desk and chair, a chest of drawers with mirror, a television, a tea table, and an armchair. “Modern” would have been a generous adjective to describe the decor, consisting of a set of standard furniture manufactured with no other goal than durability, the sort one finds in any basic accommodation in the United States. The Venetian blinds covering the windows had dented ends and fell below standard. As for the Iowa River, all I could see from my window was the back of what looked like an annex. I could hardly see the sky. Perhaps because I arrived late, I may have been given the last remaining room; but if this room was for rent, I thought, it would certainly be among the cheapest anywhere.

Within a few hours of my arrival, I was also dismayed to find that what the brochure claimed was a “restaurant” inside the hotel was more like a cafeteria in the middle of nowhere. Not only did we have to serve ourselves, but the menu was shockingly limited and the food plainly unappealing, especially to someone coming from a gastronomically sophisticated country like Japan. After a moment’s hesitation, I turned my back on the so-called restaurant and ended up buying my first meal in the basement of the student union next door. There I found an impressive range of offerings: fresh fruit, vegetable sticks, a variety of hot soups, and, to my pleasant surprise, sushi rolls sky-delivered daily from California — but after all, they were meals meant to be eaten out of plastic containers with a plastic fork. It was a “feast” not very different from those I remembered from my too-long graduate school years in my too-long life in the United States.

The program, however, was designed to give foreign writers a taste of university life in America; I had no right to complain like a spoiled child. For a younger writer, or one whose opportunities were limited, the IWP might well be a godsend. By the next morning, resigned to forgoing the aesthetic life that had seemed an absolute prerequisite for my therapy, I just looked forward to securing a good rest away from home. In the afternoon, I took a walk by the Iowa River, which runs through the campus. Though the narrow waterway did not remotely resemble the Swiss lake of my imagining, I would surely be able to take daily walks by it and rest my mind: as nightfall of the second day approached, my dream had already shrunk to these humble proportions.

And yet not even that humble dream was to materialize. It just so happened that I had joined the IWP at a critical juncture. Several years before, the university had decided to terminate the program because of financial difficulties. Unexpectedly, students and citizens rose to demonstrate against the decision and the IWP was miraculously saved. When I arrived, the entire staff under Chris Merrill, the new director, was frantically working to rebuild what once lay in shambles — or so I understood. The turmoil and excitement necessarily affected all the participating writers.

In the United States even cultural enterprises must be results oriented, and in order for the IWP to raise its operating funds, which come from State Department grants and private donations, it needed to publicize its contributions to society. For those writers who had some command of the English language, talking about their work, their language, and their country’s literature in university classes and public libraries, at social gatherings and bookstore events, or even on radio and television became an important part of their routine during the residency. Given my inadequate English, I ended up spending a ridiculous amount of time drafting my talks, though since writers’ presentations usually lasted no more than twenty minutes, I’m sure the people who hosted these initiatives had no idea. I could have declined, but that would have seemed like refusing to do my share in rebuilding the IWP, and when I thought about all the people working untiringly under Chris, I didn’t have the heart. Thus to audiences who had never seen or heard the Japanese language, I explained that though Japanese people use Chinese characters in their writing, the two languages come from entirely different linguistic families; that written Japanese combines Chinese characters with two kinds of phonetic signs the Japanese themselves developed, katakana and hiragana ; and that, as unbelievable as this may sound to the users of Western languages, Japanese sentences do not require a grammatical subject. Even when strolling along the banks of the Iowa River, I kept thinking about what to say. Remarkably, my health didn’t break down completely. To keep myself going, I took stronger doses of medication that left me uncomfortably bloated.