J ust Buffalo Literary Center has turned a corner this year with Babel, a dramatic upgrade to the previous If All of Buffalo Read the Same Book reading series. With four internationally prominent authors on the bill—Orhan Pamuk, Ariel Dorfman, Derek Walcott and Kiran Desai—including two Nobel Prize winners (Pamuk and Walcott), Babel promises to vault Just Buffaloto the level with UB’s Distinguished Speaker Series.

According to artistic director Mike Kelleher, “The idea of the series is really to bring global perspective to the literary discussion in Buffalo.” This is much-needed perspective, especially as we approach the six-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. In those years, our nation’s foreign policy has grown increasingly aggressive and antagonistic, its people more xenophobic under the guidance of the Bush administration. But globalization will only force us into more and more frequent, and undoubtedly uncomfortable, encounters with the wide, unknown world. Kelleher offers this: “You can and should read history, and you can and should read the newspaper, but literature brings experience down to the personal level, and you, as the reader, see events from the inside through the eyes of a character. I think that’s a crucial experience, in terms of learning to understand other cultures.” Seeing the world through the eyes of other cultures by reading their greatest writers is a first step in that direction. Just Buffalo has recruited four such renowned writers, and they make up the Babel reading series.

The series’ title recalls the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, in which all of humanity, united in language and purpose, attempts to build a tower to the heavens. When God witnesses man’s arrogance, he resolves to confuse the uniform language of the earth so that humans can not understand one another, thereby preventing future attempts to build such a tower. He scatters the people across the globe, and the tower is abandoned. (A footnote: The tower is said to have been built in ancient Sumer, which many historians believe to be Biblical Shinar in modern Southern Iraq, today the world’s most visible stage for cross-cultural misunderstanding.) The Tower of Babel has popularly become a representation of human beings’ separation from one another by way of language (the Hebrew verb balal means “to confuse or confound”) and culture. At the same time, it suggests the possibility of their coming together once again, which is where Just Buffalo’s Babel series steps in. The four authors in the series could be said to be united by a single factor: duality. Each of them straddles multiple cultures, multiple ways of seeing and understanding the world.

Though he’s never left the wealthy district in Istanbul where he grew up, novelist Orhan Pamuk has been straddling worlds his entire life—Europe and Asia, wealthy and poor, secular and religious, popular and avant-garde. Such is the nature of life in contemporary Turkey, which for the past century has been experiencing a rocky transition from the Islamic Ottoman Empire to a secular, westernized democratic republic that began with the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the 1920s. While it’s that new political system, along with its accompanying shift in values, that made his family rich (his grandfather built railroads in the 1930s), Pamuk has been openly critical of the government’s suppression of free speech, as well as its violent civil war against Kurdish separatists and denial of the Armenian genocide of World War I. These radical ideas have landed him in hot water from time to time, most notably in 2005 when he was tried by the government for “blatantly belittling Turkishness.”

Pamuk has published seven novels, a screenplay, a book of essays and a memoir entitled Istanbul: Memories and the City. Snow, published in 2004, and the book chosen by Just Buffalo for his presentation, tells the story of Ka, a poet and political exile who’s returned to Turkey for his mother’s funeral. While in country, he travels to Kars (kar is Turkish for “snow”), a remote city in Anatolia, in search of Ipek, a beautiful woman he knew as a student who is recently divorced. Kars is isolated by a snowstorm, during which Ka investigates the recent suicides of girls forced to remove their headscarves by an occasionally brutal secular regime. Through this lens Pamuk dissects and examines the ongoing conflict in Turkey, and arguably the world beyond, between the forces of “Westernization” and fundamental Islam. Pamuk reads on Thursday, November 8 at 8pm.

Argentinian-born Ariel Dorfman also operates at the borderlines, focusing much of his work on exploring the intersection of art and human rights. He has spent much of his life on the run from repression. Born to Jewish immigrants in 1942, his family fled to the US in 1945, due to anti-Semitism and political intolerance in Argentina. In 1954, however, in the age of McCarthyism, Dorfman’s father was targeted as a communist threat, and the family fled once again, this time settling in Chile, where he gained citizenship. The peace he found there wouldn’t last, though. On September 11, 1973, the American-backed General Augusto Pinochet led a violent coup against the democratically elected government of Marxist Salvador Allende. Dorfman, media adviser to Allende’s chief of staff, was forced to run for his life, and he lived in exile in Brazil and Europe for 17 years. Many of Dorfman’s friends and political allies, however, didn’t make it out of Chile. Their fate—torture and death—has shaped much of Dorfman’s ongoing examination, and condemnation, of human rights abuses worldwide.

As the political winds have blown Dorfman’s life from exile to exile, he’s had to struggle with reconciling his dual identities. Through the writing of countless works spanning nearly every genre (novels, plays, a memoir, a travel narrative and collections of poetry, short stories and essays) Dorfman has come to highly value that duality. By living in two worlds and borrowing from their “linguistic rivers,” he believes he can unite distant communities. He strives to do this, just as he strives to keep human rights abuses at the forefront of the reading world’s mind. His play Death and the Maiden tells the story of a Chilean woman who kidnaps the man she believes tortured her during the rule of Pinochet’s regime. Dorfman reads Friday, December 7 at 8pm.

West-Indian poet and playwright Derek Walcott has spent his career examining the conflict between the heritage of European and West Indian culture. Walcott was born in 1930 in St. Lucia, a small windward island in the Lesser Antilles that was then a British dependency. St. Lucia has been variously influenced by its original Amerindian inhabitants, 400 years of colonial rule by England and France, and by the African slaves brought over by the Europeans to work on the sugar cane plantations. Walcott, who is of mixed heritage, has dealt with his own duality partly by writing his plays in a mix of English and Creole patois, but is still defining his own role in the complex culture and history of St. Lucia.

Walcott’s poetry suggests an inner exile from both European and African cultures. Divided between the two, he can be accepted by neither. He is a nomad between cultures, trying to find the meaning of home, a way to reconcile the two. One of his first plays, Henri Christophe, is typically themed: The freed slave Henri Christophe helps Toussaint L’Ouverture liberate Haiti from French rule, but then himself becomes a despot. Walcott has published dozens of plays and numerous poetry collections in his time, and was awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He reads Thursday, March 13 at 8pm.

Indian-born author Kiran Desai is a permanent resident of the US. At the relatively tender age of 35, she’s also the youngest woman ever to win the Man Booker Prize, the highest honor bestowed upon a citizen of a British Commonwealth country. It’s an honor that’s somewhat ironic, given that the book which was awarded with the Booker, The Inheritance of Loss, is a sprawling examination of globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality and fundamentalism. Much of this is seen, however, through the window of the postcolonial chaos and despair left by Great Britain on her homeland. A wide cast of characters is united by their common humiliation at the hands of the economic and cultural power of the West.

For Desai, who affiliates strongly with both India and America, the book “was a return journey to the fact of being Indian, to realizing the perspective was too important to give up.” She insists, however, that literature “is located beyond flags and anthems, simple ideas of loyalty. The vocabulary of of immigration, of exile, of translation, inevitably overlaps with a realization of the multiple options of reinvention, of myriad perspectives, shifting truths, telling of lies—the great big wobbliness of it all.” It is a complex situation, being of two worlds, and perhaps the only way to sort it out is through writing. Desai will continue to do that. She reads Thursday, April 24 at 8pm.

For subscriptions, visit Just Buffalo Literary Center’s Web site at www.justbuffalo.org or call them at 832-5400.