Words Without Borders

I just started a new book, Words Without Borders. Below is an excerpt from the introduction.

In November 1979, I was living in Austin, Texas, when Iranian students in Tehran overran the American embassy, and the hostage crisis began. In those early moments of what became a 444-day standoff, young white men from Houston and Dallas cruised the streets in their late-model cars, stopping to beat up any man or boy who looked even remotely Iranian. Among the battered were Sudanese, Italians, El Salvadorans, Egyptians, Ethiopians, and quite a few Mexicans. The were called "sand nigger" and "camel jockey" and told to go home. Go Home.

Twenty-two years later, on a clear blue morning in September, we were attacked by a handful of men from a fundamentalist cult of a militant arm of an ancient religion, and we answered those attacks with attacks of our own, one of which was the beating of an elderly Sikh on a bus in Boston. Three men took him for Middle Eastern because he wore a turban, which somehow meant Muslim, which then meant terrorist, and they pummeled him.

We are, of course, a country of immigrants. We come from the very cultures we no longer seem to know. A recent National Geographic study tested 18-to-24-year-old Americans, 83 percent of whom could not find Afghanistan on a map. Seventy percent could not find Israel or Iran. Only 37 percent could locate Iraq. When asked the religion of India's majority populations, nearly half answered Muslim when it is Hindu. A full 80 percent of Americans do not have passports, and there is this alarming statistic from Words Without Borders: "50 percent of all the books in translation now published worldwide are translated from English, but only 6 percent are translated into English." Our own president has publicly referred to Slovakia as "Slovenia," has called Kosovars "Kosovarians," Greeks "Grecians," and East Timorese "East Timorians." When he was running for office in 1999, he was quizzed by a reporter and could not name the president of Chechnya, the general who had taken power in Pakistan, or the prime minister of India.

There are theories as to how we've become so ignorant of other cultures around the world: geography and foreign languages are no longer taught in schools; U.S. media companies have cut back on world new coverage; we are isolated between to oceans and have friendly neighbors to the north and south and can afford the luxury of being provincial. The real reasons for out collective ignorance are probably more complex, but whatever the roots, the consequences are dire: we have never been less isolationist in the variety of goods and services we consumer from around the world, and never have we been more ignorant of the people who produce them. This is, if nothing else, fertile territory for misunderstanding, unresolved conflict, and yes, war.

The translation and publication of this volume, therefore, have never been more timely or necessary. Yet there are rewards here that go beyond politics and even age-old questions of war and peace; to go more deeply into the experience of the other - no matter how "foreign" - is to go more deeply into our own experience as well. Leo Tolstoy wrote: "Art is transferring feeling from one heart to another." In this essential collection of stories from around the world, genuine feeling and more are transferred from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East. The emotional landscape of many of these is hardship of some kind: drought, war, poverty, living under totalitarian rule. In each, however, is the affirming cry of human expression.

- Andre Dubus III