Jonathan Miller talks with Pedro Molina, Nicaraguan Cartoonist, City of Asylum Participant, Ithaca, New York

JM: Pedro Molina, thanks very much for doing this.

I want to start at the day that you left Nicaragua. Bring us to the airport there.

PM: It was December 25, which means Christmas Day. Not even all my family knew that I was leaving. None of them knew where I was going. The only thing that they knew was that I was going to leave Nicaragua for a while.

I said, “goodbye.” I already had my suitcase in the car and then a brother of mine drove me to Managua to the airport. We were not able to bring a big suitcase. We had to bring only the kind of bag that they let you in the cabin with because we said that we were going to spend New Year’s with friends and then come back. I left with three pants and four shirts and nothing else except my iPad which is the one that I use to draw when I am out of the office.
           
We took the plane. It was a very, very long flight. We were all very scared about if we made the right decision to come here.
           
We came into Ithaca and even when we were very, very tired and wanted to go to sleep, I brought the iPad with me, and I drew a cartoon to send to be published the next day.
           
It was a great feeling to know that what we were doing had a purpose, for me to be able to keep doing my work. It was a great feeling in the middle of all the other things that we were feeling at that time.

JM: That’s such an interesting point; you left your country less out of fear for your safety and more out of some sense that you needed to keep doing your work.

PM: Oh yes, yes. There were two factors that for me were the most important. One was the safety of my family and the other one is what I do, my work.
           
What makes me different than others is that I have a voice that I can use to talk about what was happening down there. I was thinking if I kept doing this inside Nicaragua, two things can happen. One is that I would have to censor myself and stop talking about the bad things that were happening in the country. The other would be that they would put me in jail.
           
In order to guarantee that I would be able to continue to do my work, I took the decision to leave.

JM: You have continued to produce cartoons every single day that you have been away. Is that true?

PM: Yes, every single day without stop. I publish stuff in Nicaragua seven days a week. It’s a great thing that I have been able to keep that freedom and also do some other things on top of that. I think it’s great.

JM: Do you feel that you have had an impact on Nicaragua or on the debate in Nicaragua during the time that you have been here?

PM: Oh yes, I do think so, especially because the situation for independent journalism in Nicaragua is much worse right now than when I left. Fewer people are talking inside Nicaragua about what is happening there. Everybody is in fear that they will be put in jail. People really want to keep themselves informed. We have found out that we are important for that reason.

JM: You came here as a person in your 40s with a family, two kids, two boys, a wife. You had a home. You had a car. You had a job. You had a life. You arrived here and you really had nothing, but I suppose the fact that there were people here who were prepared to help you was important.

PM: Yes. I can tell you that if I didn’t have the help of this many institutions and people, I would have stopped doing cartoons. Just to think about that, it’s so depressing for me because then what are you useful for if you can’t do what you are good at?

JM: Just to reintroduce you here, this is Peace Talks Radio and we’re talking with Pedro Molina, a political cartoonist who fled Nicaragua along with many other independent journalists in 2018.

I’m Jonathan Miller and I know Pedro because I volunteer with a group called Ithaca City of Asylum. We help arrange residencies for writers and artists who can no longer safely work in their home countries.
           
Many of the images in your cartoons are of doves and of olive branches and things that suggest that you are a peace-loving person. Can you speak to that a little bit?

PM: I come from Nicaragua. If you know a little bit about the history of our country then you realize that arms and bullets are not the answer, never. We had a right-wing dictatorship for 40 years in my country. Then there was an armed revolution. That revolution overthrew the dictatorship, but then it ended up becoming another dictatorship. There are thousands, thousands of dead in my country because of revolutions and civil war.
           
They haven’t solved anything. We are in the same spot that we were 60 or 70 years ago. This is something that I have learned the hard way as a Nicaraguan, weapons are not the solution. Then when I say this, people ask me, “Then what is the solution?” I don’t know. We have to find a new one and we have to find it altogether. We have to learn new ways to deal with our problems without having to use guns.
           
I must say that we have a whole generation of Nicaraguans that understand that because when the birth began in 2018, you did not see violence on the side of the people. People really understood that they wanted to make a change in a civic way. We still believe in that.

JM: When you left your country, you became an exile. Did you feel then like you became part of a larger world of people in exile all over the world who fled other places?

PM: Oh, yes, yes. Every time that you get to talk, not just with another Nicaraguan, but with people from Myanmar or people from Russia or people from Chili who had to leave Chili many, many years ago or Cuba or countries around the world, we all share the same story.
           
Cubans know exactly how we feel, how our families feel there and how our families feel here. Journalists who had to leave Myanmar understand what we’re dealing with, and you empathize with that.
           
You find out that dictatorships are the same all over the world. Altruism is the same all over the world. It doesn’t matter the language. It doesn’t matter the ideology. You may be forced to leave your country because there is a right-wing dictatorship or a left-wing dictatorship but, in the end, you realize that they are both the same thing.

Jonathan Miller talks with Henry Reese, Cofounder and former Director of City of Asylum, Pittsburgh, PA

JM: Henry Reese, thank you so much for joining us today.
           
You and your wife, Diane Samuels founded City of Asylum in 2004. What was your motivation? Why did you do it?

HR: Well, in 1997 we went to a talk of Salman Rushdie who was just beginning to become public after the fatwa from The Satanic Verses.
           
In the middle of the talk, he mentioned a program in Europe called Cities of Asylum which had been started by the International Parliament of Writers which was a group of very well-known writers. He began to talk about the program a little and my wife and I, we sort of kicked each other underneath the chairs actually and said, “This is for us.”
           
At the time, we had a house that we had acquired that had a crack house a couple doors down from us. Our neighborhood was a rundown neighborhood. We thought what could be a better use for this home than for a persecuted writer?

We reached out to the people in Europe and eventually, it became real.

JM:  Why writers and artists? There are millions of refugees around the world. Why focus on writers?

HR:  Well, my own background was in literature. I had been pursuing a PhD before going into business. Diane is a visual artist. We were both very much committed to the arts.
           
We felt that literary writers in particular had no protection. Journalists had commercial entities, newspapers or TV and associations that often were formed to protect journalists because of the obvious dangers whereas literary writers had advocacy organizations like PEN but no protection organizations.
           
We felt that if there was something that we could do, we should really try to protect the least protected, the most naked. That was our mission.

JM: In general, when you make an offer and reach out to a person who has been referred to you, what do you offer them? What can you provide them?
           
Let me just interrupt myself because I remember when I visited your program in Pittsburg, you told me about your first writer who needed surgery. That’s obviously not on the list of perks people get when they become writers in residence but tell me what you can offer to the writers who come.

HR:  That writer you mentioned needed to have dental work done and have a bridge put in. At our first meeting in public, a dentist volunteered to do all the dental work for our writers. The first time that he actually got the bridge in was at a public performance and he got very afraid that he was going to spit the bridge out and hit someone and kill them with his poetry reading.
           
This has evolved over time, but with the first writer, we committed to what all the cities in Europe committed to which was making sure that the writer has two years of a living stipend, which, depending on the family structure varies between $18,000 and $35,000 with medical coverage and a furnished rent-free house.
           
We discovered with the first writer that it was very difficult to meet our mission, which was to make sure that the writer could continue to write while in exile and if necessary, to remain in long term exile in the United States to be able to become independent and financially stable. It became obvious that it would take longer than two years.
           
We decided that we couldn’t continue to fund the stipend forever but could provide rent-free housing until the person has a stable position because otherwise, this becomes like a hopscotch of sanctuaries because the minute people arrive, they have to look for another place, so we got into the housing development business.
           
We have had to secure scholarships for children going to college, occasionally to private schools as youngsters and legal services. It was essentially a 360-degree turn saying that we were here to solve the problem of long-term stability with the ability to write and what it takes to do that.

JM:  We’ve talked a bit about what you offer to the people who come and stay with you. What do they bring to the community?

HR: Well, when we first started, we thought it was really simple. Writers would sit in houses and write, and nobody hears from them until they’re done. The first writer turned out to be both charismatic and public.
           
He began to perform his work out on the street. He did calligraphy on the outside of the house, and it became a landmark. Actually, within a couple months, he knew more people in this community than Diane and I did and we’ve been here since 1980.
           
We found out that what we thought was a gift to a writer was actually a gift back to us just as much. It taught us as a community that in making a home for this writer in exile, we were actually making a better home for ourselves. We were building bonds within our community that we didn’t know existed all through this creativity that began to inhabit our community.
           
As the program grew, it became very essential to the identity of the community and very much reminded us of a lot of core values that sometimes people take for granted that are certainly very much at issue today; the right to speak, the limits of speech, empathy, democracy those are all live issues that have been going on here since the first writer arrived and have taught us a lot of valuable lessons.

JM: I want to reintroduce you briefly. This is Peace Talks Radio. We’re talking to Henry Reese, Cofounder and former Director of City of Asylum Pittsburgh. City of Asylum I offers housing and other support for writers who have been forced to flee their home countries. I am Jonathan Miller.
           
Henry, Peace Talks is a show about peacemaking and conflict resolution. Do you see a connection between what City of Asylum does and that?

HR: There is a deep connection that is based on the idea of empathy and understanding. Reading itself is a core act of inhabiting another consciousness. It can be challenging. It can be friendly. But whenever you read, you’re often inhabiting multiple consciousnesses, that of the writer, that of the characters and that’s at the core of social relations.

There is something Richard Powers once said which I think actually gets to the core of this which is, “No justice, no peace, no kinship. No justice, no empathy, no kinship. Reading and writing are exercises in empathy.”

I think it’s a big circle. If you don’t have that practice and your muscles aren’t being used empathetically and you can’t get outside yourself, which is not so say that you don’t evoke your own identity because that’s critical to know who you are in the context of others.
           
But as we have evolved, what we have seen is that we have tried to give voice and open ears. We have a lot of programming now that has evolved from various activities that we do. Core to that programming is having audiences who themselves are very diverse as we can make them so that people who experience the programs are experiencing people who they often don’t experience at cultural events.

You’re hearing from someone on a stage speaking about something that is very much evoking empathy and understanding of another, but at the same time, the people you’re experiencing with, you’re experiencing in the context of otherness. That’s been enlightening to us. We didn’t understand all that. It has happened a little bit at a time.

JM: Wonderful. Henry Reese from City of Asylum Pittsburg, thank you very, very much for being with us today.

HR: Thank you Jonathan.

Jonathan Miller talks with Elisabeth Dyvik, Program Director for the International Cities of Refuge Network / ICORN

JM: Elisabeth Dyvik, welcome. Thank you very much for being here.

To begin with, tell me a bit about how ICORN came to be.

ED: It was writers who got together thinking about especially all that happened in Algeria in the beginning of the ‘90s when journalists had to flee and also the Salman Rushdie case. I think Rushdie himself said that it would be nice to have a place to live and work where it was safe and peaceful, so the idea of the city of refuge or the city of asylum was born with a parliament of writers that gathered in Paris in the mid-‘90s.
           
Unfortunately, this network had financial problems in the beginning of the 2000s and was about to collapse, but some of the cities said that this work is far too important to stop, so some of the cities got together and in 2006, ICORN was established as a project and in 2010 we then became an independent organization. Since then, we have been totally financially independent.

JM: It’s interesting that you talk about cities as the primary unit. Over here in North America, our cities of asylum and cities of refuge tend to be community groups, volunteer groups, but in Europe the ICORN cities really are cities. There will be a coordinator at the local library or in the local refugee office.

ED: Yes, exactly. We don’t have one model that we say this is how you should organize it in your city. We also see that there are corporations between a city that will bring some money to the table and the local organization, be it a Pen Club or another community group or a human rights organization or literary organization, but especially in the Scandinavian countries, it’s often a public employee that is the coordinator.

JM: People hear about ICORN and appeal directly to you for help. There is an application process. Can you just explain a little bit about how that works?

ED: A lot of the people who contact us have either heard about us from other organizations or from colleagues be it journalists or writers or artists. Many of them are already on the run. They are in a neighboring country from where they used to live, or they are in other ways sheltering or in hiding often.
           
But we have quite a rigid application system since we work with a lot of municipalities who use public money. They have to be quite certain about who they are inviting. It’s also that we can find a city of refuge that can fulfill this person’s needs so that this person can continue their work. That’s the main goal that we have; each person who comes to a city of refuge should be able to continue their work and mainly towards their home audiences from the countries where they came from where they can no longer work.

JM: Why is there a focus in ICORN on writers and artists?

ED: Well, the writers and artists, also including journalists are often first and soft targets to be hit when regimes strike down on their own populations or they try to grab power.
           
Also, the writers and the artists are working with what we call the human condition. That can be highly dangerous because often they go into often taboo areas like sexuality, like religion, the everyday life of a household.
           
That doesn’t seem very dangerous to us when we sit in our armchairs and read a novel, but we can remember that quite a lot of books that have been published in the U.S. have been banned or cut out from schools.
           
They are very soft targets. They have very little protection because many of them work individually. They are not in big unions. Very often they are easy to suppress or to silence.

JM:  One thing that has impressed me in my work in this area is this combination of the big ideas, this overarching goal to support free expression and a thriving civil society and to support people so that they can participate in their home countries and the really mundane day to day needs that the people have when they arrive. That is often made more challenging by trauma. Tell me a bit about what people tend to need when they arrive on the doorstep of an ICORN city.

ED: Well, the first thing many say that they need is a good night’s sleep. They need a place where they can feel safe.
           
Then they need of course to know how to navigate the new society that they are in. That can be anything from getting their driver’s license to getting their children back and forth to school safely. It can be very practical.
           
Almost all of the people that we bring into our network or into a city of refuge, they are desperate to continue their work, so they need some way to connect to their peers, to their colleagues. Internet connections and practical things like that are also extremely important.

JM: Let me just reset for a moment. You are listening to Peace Talks Radio. We’re talking to Elisabeth Dyvik, Program Director for the International Cities of Refuge Network or ICORN. ICORN is based in Norway. They are at ICORN.org. I am Jonathan Miller.
           
Elisabeth, you have studied conflict resolution and peace. How do you connect that interest with the work that you do with ICORN?

ED: I don’t feel that we are doing conflict resolution as such in ICORN, but we are enabling those who come to us because they are the actors in their own communities who can change things there. The change has to come from within, I think. It’s very difficult to start that from the outside.
           
Conflicts can escalate or they can diminish based on how the different actors in the conflict are acting within that conflict. I think that the most important thing is to enable a civil society, be it from abroad, to have a voice and to be able to oppose the powers that be who are suppressing their own populations.

JM: Elisabeth Dyvik, you have been involved in this work for about 25 years. What have you taken from this work yourself personally?

ED: What brings me forward every day is mainly my passion for freedom of expression. I grew up in a country in Norway where we have freedom of expression, and I can’t imagine what it’s like being hunted down if you are a journalist or if your newspaper is being closed down. I find that so difficult to imagine.
           
But to see people who I know now personally who have come through ICORN through a safe place, some have gone back, some are still working in their cities of refuge many years after they arrive here and to see the fantastic work that they are doing is absolutely amazing.
           
Be it organizing women’s groups in Iran or criticizing the Chinese government or Honduran government or whatever it is they are doing to improve their communities, their countries, their societies back home, it’s amazing and it gives me a lot of joy actually to see that.
           
I think that each city of refuge should be really proud of the work that they do. It might seem, as you say, that there are a lot of mundane things like the internet not working or how to get kids to school, but it really changes the world.

JM: Elisabeth Dyvik, Program Director for the International Cities of Refuge Network or ICORN, thank you so much for talking with me and with Peace Talks Radio today.

ED: Thank you so much for inviting me.