SAPPORO ART LABO "SALA" LECTURES PROGRAM
■On June 15, 2024, I gave a lecture in Sapporo. The lecture was about the novelist Kobo Abe, whose 100th birthday is celebrated this year.
Kobo Abe's original place of residence is in the area named "Higashitakasu" in Asahikawa City, Hokkaido, where I live. His parents' home is located here, and Kobo Abe also attended Chikabumi Daiichi Elementary School in Higashitakasu for about a year and a half when he was a child. There is now a monument we built at that elementary school.
Kobo Abe was a writer who expressed about the everyday and the extraordinary, and about the shift in values. Kimibo Abe is a writer who looked at the turning point of the times, questioned the framework created by human beings, and dealt with the theme of human consciousness and social deformation.
In my lecture on Kobo Abe, I talked about the situation in Afghanistan. I also talked about the anthology poetry book NO JAIL CAN CONFINE YOUR POEM that we published last year. The issue of Afghanistan, I thought, was deeply relevant to the question of humanity in the 21st century posed by Kobo Abe.
In January 2023, when the interim Taliban regime in Afghanistan issued a ban on poetry, a courageous female poet in exile in the Netherlands, Somaia Ramish, sent a message to poets around the world, asking them to send her poetry. I was contacted by Mr. Noguchi, editor-in-chief of "Web Afghanistan," and in response, I asked poets all over Japan to send their poems to resist the Taliban's poetry ban through social networking services, and more than three dozen poems were collected from Japan.
In today's Japan, it is unthinkable that the government would issue such a ban on writing poetry, but in Afghanistan, poetry and art are banned, women's basic human rights, employment and educational opportunities are also taken away, and from our perspective in Japan, an extraordinary world actually exists, and our Japan was once a very different world from our current daily life. It made me realize once again that our own Japan used to be a completely different world from the one we live in today.
Somaia Ramish sent out messages to poets around the world and received over 100 poems. Out of those 100 poems, 21 poems by foreign poets and 36 poems by Japanese poets were collected and published in Japan on August 15, 2023, exactly two years after the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. Shibata of Asahikawa Fragile was in charge of editing and publishing the book. It was then introduced in the Hokkaido Shimbun and various other media. It was also reported in the Persian-language BBC and The Independent, and ranked first in Japan in Amazon's new poetry book rankings.
On August 24, an event to celebrate the publication was held at Machinaka Bunkagoya, where poets related to the book gathered for a very successful event. In September, the Japan PEN Club issued a statement of support for our activities.
These efforts were also reported in the Asahi Shimbun Digital, with an article by Mitsue Tamagake (editor-in-chief of Dot World) on Asahikawa's poetry activities, noting, for example, that in the days of Asahikawa poets Hideo Oguma and Dairiki Konno, poems could not be written freely in Japan. Also, Shoichi Tomita, a poet from Asahikawa who experienced the war, continued to publish a poetry magazine for 72 years after the war, providing poets with a place to publish their work. He also writes carefully about this.
In December, KotobaSlamJapan invited Somaia Ramish to Japan as a guest at the national conference. It was also during this period that the symposium, "Intellectual Dialogue between Afghan and Japanese Poets on Freedom of Speech, Status of Women, and Social Liberation," was held in Yokohama on December 19, which was carefully reported by Yumiko Aoki in the June 2024 issue of the Japanese poetry magazine "Poetry and Thought.
These experiences were all part of the year 2023, and although I was supposed to be working in Asahikawa, a cultural area of poetry, by a strange coincidence, a book published in Asahikawa was delivered to an Afghan poet in exile in the Netherlands, something I had never expected, I was surprised, but it was thanks to my involvement in KotobaSlamJapan that I was able to develop an awareness of involvement in matters outside of Japan, where government values are completely different, and I think that learning about Kobo Abe, who has a sense of borderlessness, in Asahikawa was a big part of that.
The activities of "NO JAIL CAN CONFINE YOUR POEM" are very closely related to the literature of Kobo Abe for me. Also, if our efforts could be of use to someone in this world, it was like gaining a new essence from our previous experience.
It was an experience of vast transformation, like experiencing the world of Kobo Abe's novel, in which an unnameable existence with infinite possibilities is led to and transformed into its essence.
I have learned that it is not the end of the process when one's essence is acquired, but rather a kind of kinetic movement that moves forward, creating infinite possibilities that intertwine further restrictions and freedom.
We have been able to carry out our activities thanks to the support of so many of you. I would like to express my many thanks. We will continue to do so. Best regards
This is the first time for me to talk about the situation in Afghanistan and Somaia Ramish in a lecture in Sapporo, and I am very blessed to be able to give this talk at an event organized by SAPPORO ART LABO "SALA". I will continue to tell many people about it. Thank you very much.
You can see the full version of the video of the lecture here.
https://youtu.be/nJCM1eTS91s?si=PKOQSWRFhJpMEQHU
The Japanese version of the transcript is here.
https://fragile-seiga.hatenablog.com/entry/2024/06/18/123535
