Gates of Reconciliation:
Literature and the Ethical Imagination

Series Editor Frank Stewart.
Guest Editor Barry Lopez.

In this collection of essays, fiction, and poetry set in South America, Europe, Australia, the Middle East, Asia, the United States, and elsewhere, a diverse group of writers explores the role of literature in confronting the most pressing issue of our time: how individuals, communities, and nations can reconcile differences and grievances and forge a future with a renewed sense of dignity and mutual respect.

In these works, past and present conflicts — some resolved and some not — are illuminated by literature, uncovering the complexities, subtleties, gestures, and necessary deliberations of forgiveness and healing. The urgency of such deliberations is captured by guest editor Barry Lopez when he asks, “Who will heed the plea of Everychild for a less brutal future?”

Contributors to this volume are John Luther Adams, Aku Wuwu, Margaret Atwood, Christopher Cokinos, Jorge Edwards, Hwang Sun-Won, Barry Lopez, Taha Muhammad Ali, Alexis Nelson, Lydia Peelle, Samih al-Qasim, Santiago Roncagliolo, Davide Sapienza, Aharon Shabtai, Rebecca Solnit, Sasson Somekh, Lysley Tenorio, and Mark Tredinnick. Translators are Mark Bender, Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, Nazih Kassis, Peter H. Lee, Gabriel Levin, Laura Ponce, and William Tydeman.

Linda Connor contributes photographs of sacred sites around the world, and Kate Joyce an essay and selections from her “Threshold of Human Touch” project.

Extracts

Lanssiers listened to all those who spoke, and asserted that all the cases would be examined but that those who had committed violent crimes would not be freed. He did not say it in defiance. It was simply the truth. But he said it looking into the eyes of Comrade Ramiro and the other prisoners whose crimes he also knew. What caught my attention was the degree of respect Lanssiers manifested, even for these men, the murderers, as he fixed his eyes on their pupils. Later I would discover it was the same gaze he directed at policemen, functionaries, and attorneys. It was a blue gaze of stone that gave recognition to human beings. No more, no less.
—from “The Dogs of Deng Xiao Ping” by Santiago Roncagliolo, translated by Luis Verano

Dorothy: I look out across the bay, the bay you consecrated with your body, on a too-warm February day. The few fishing boats left in the harbor are docked, held off from the stripped waters of Georges Bank. Another development is rising in the wetlands to the north. When you arrived, these waters were crowded with the gleaming backs of whales as they followed the innumerable cod, the plankton blooms, the teeming sea. Now, what are we left with? Or rather, what have we left to ourselves? What are we leaving those to come? What reason are we leaving for a child to stumble and fumble his or her way into this dangerous place? What promises
can we now make?
   I look out across the bay—your bay, Dorothy, in a way—and think, What wouldn’t I give for a new world. What wouldn’t I give for a promised land.
—from “Stellwagen Bank” by Lydia Peelle

192 pp., summer 2008 (20:1), $20
ISBN 978-0-8248-3320-6
Project Muse
JSTOR