Maps of Reconciliation:
Literature and the Ethical Imagination

Series Editor Frank Stewart.
Guest Editor Barry Lopez.

“The ice is melting in the north,” writes Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper, Turtle Clan, Onanadaga Nation, in an oration to world leaders that begins this collection. His words are a call for humanity to heal a wound in our relationship to the natural world. They are also a powerful metaphor expressing the fragility and uncertainty of the future in general — the result of global declines in justice, equality, and civility.

In this collection, the editors turn to some of the world’s most thoughtful authors — in fiction, essay, poetry, drama, and parable — to ask important questions about the future, to give us moral direction, individual courage, and a map toward reconciliation. In many voices and dialects, they urge us to be attentive and compassionate — somehow, as guest editor Barry Lopez writes, to bring hope to bear on the things that confound us.

Among the contributors to Maps of Reconciliation are the playwright Catherine Filloux; poets Kazuko Shiraishi, Ann Hunkins, Chris Merrill, and Luis H. Francia; fiction writers Yan Lianke, Tony Birch, Wang Ping, Prafulla Roy, and Galsan Tschinag; and nonfiction writers Julia Martin, Wayne Karlin, and Alberto Manguel. Translators include Chen Zeping, Karen Gernant, John Hood, Katharina Rout, and Yumiko Tsumura.

Three dramatic portfolios by photographer Franco Salmoiraghi depict exemplary struggles for reconciliation in Native Hawaiian culture. Accompanying the photographs are short prose pieces by Meleanna Aluli Meyer, John Keolamaka‘ainana Lake, and Mahealani Perez-Wendt. The issue also includes images from the notebook of Hoang Ngoc Dam, a young Vietnamese medic who is one of the subjects of “Wandering Souls,” a nonfiction piece by Karlin.

Extract

[Homer Steedly‘s] ears rang continuously—the result of a 105-mm shell that had landed in his fighting position and splattered him with the blood of the two sergeants with him—a thin, constant scream in the center of his mind that has never gone away. There were certain images burned into his brain, certain smells seared into his nostrils, certain tastes still on his tongue, and he felt they composed a wall between himself and those who had not seen, felt, smelled, heard what he had. He was afraid that difference made him monstrous. He was afraid that he would turn anyone with whom he truly shared those tastes, those sounds, those sights into himself, and because there were some people he loved and wanted to protect, he remained silent.
—from “Wandering Souls” by Wayne Karlin

240 pp. winter 2007 (19:2), $20
ISBN 978-0-8248-3268-1
Project Muse
JSTOR