Episode Three: Refugia CL: From Public Radio International…I'm Christopher Lydon…this is the Whole Wide World. We're venturing into a churning stream of refugee stories… from boat people, stowaways, orphans of war, famine and politics, witnesses to almost unspeakable suffering, tellers of heroic adventurers, if only we'll listen. Peter Sellars is showing us how to listen. He's the stage director who's revived an Athenian play from 25 centuries ago, maybe the oldest refugee drama there is, about the banished, homeless children of the strongman Herakles. Peter Sellars' signature trick is infusing classic frames with contemporary reality. So there's a mix on his stage and on this radio show: old play by Euripides, fresh tales on the run from Bosnia, Haiti, China, Somalia. The question under all: who are these global refugees to us, in this free nation of immigrants. Refugee stories are next…on the Whole Wide World…. [Music] CL: I'm Christopher Lydon and this is the Whole Wide World…exploring this hour the living limbo of a globalizing world: the unlit and usually invisible zone of human displacement, the world of refugees. [Montage] Niyazi: …we didn't even have half an hour to leave; they told us we have five minutes to leave… Balkan: …you cannot know how it is…how you can feel…just overnight you are nobody… Sareth Sak: …I was persecuted and bombed by America, tried to [be] killed by America; yet, I was saved by America… CL: We're drawing on the magic of the theater director Peter Sellars, who has just restaged a 2500-year-old Greek play about refugees, "The Children of Herakles," by Euripides. Part of Peter Sellars' purpose was to let us see and hear the refugee stories that lie mostly hidden in plain sight in the news of our day. [Montage] Afghan: I left my native country because my life and my family's life were in danger. I lost everything… Dijana: I was in a war. I experienced everything that one woman can experience… Woman from Sarajevo: I was waiting for a bus at the side of a bus stop. A mortar fell next to my husband and me. My husband was instantly killed – blown in half – and I was badly wounded… Tony Lewis: I think governments, and particularly the United States government, can be moved by human considerations. I don't think it's only politics… [Music] CL: The Whole Wide World is the radio series that tracks symptoms of globalization: trends in finance, culture, and conflict that are pulling this shrinking planet together in new ways, or tearing it up, or both at once. This hour we're venturing into a teeming terrain of refugees, a sort of underworld of globalization. It's the outward evidence, you could say, of failed politics and economics, but it overflows also with energy and hope. I call it "Refugia" now, this new global nation of refugees. Thirty million displaced people, roughly the population of Canada, though of course there's no map of this nation: Somalis in camps in Kenya; Afghans in Pakistan; Palestinians in the Gaza Strip; Sudanese and Liberians displaced in their own countries; people on the road, on the run, in treacherous boats, hauling a mighty freight of suffering and heroism and stories of our time. There are three layers to listen for here: the reality of refugees, first; but then the use of an ancient Athenian play and modern stages in Europe and the States to reset the refugee stories; and third, the alchemy of Peter Sellars' art, using "the technology of the sacred," as he calls theater, to make you think anew about democracy, theater, and public media in general. PS: …learning to listen differently, recognizing the path that different people take to get to their reality…I think that's part of sharing the planet. We tend to…as Americans, we like people who are like us, and people who are not like us make us nervous, and one of the things that I am so excited by with the young people on stage is: we're not going to be like us for long. We're all going to be different, that's gonna be wonderful… Ayisha: The war started around '91, when I was seven and a half turning eight. The gunshots rang out. Rebels came to our house and told us to leave. My mother didn't think twice and…asked us to pack our necessities and "It's time for us to go"… CL: That's Ayisha. She was one of scores of real refugees who told their stories before each performance of "The Children of Herakles" at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts this winter. Ayisha left home in Somalia when she was 7, and lived for years in a refugee camp in Kenya… Ayisha: There are angry people and there are people at peace with everything that happened. The anger that [is] in the angry people is a revenge. That's what they feel. They don't think about anything else but revenge. They want to get that person back who did whatever it was to him or her. Then there are people who are at peace, who believe that whatever happened to them happened for a reason. That's what basically got me through…my mother. My mother was a woman who was very peaceful, with herself first. Then she raised us…she raised us all on her own. Our father left us when I was two years old. And when we were fleeing, women were raped around her. She was probably one of them; she just wouldn't tell us. Probably…but…she kept us in a positive mode…she kept us alive… CL: She's now 20, a graduate of high school in America, studying carpentry. She carries the tool of her new trade, a shining Stanley work hammer, on the bib of her overalls… Ayisha: I received a letter from the INS saying that I could stay in the USA until they decide my status here. So, I'm basically hanging here on a thread. I believe I'm free here in America. When I was back home, I could not wear pants; I wear them here. When I was back home, I could not work; I can work here. When I was back home, you can never, ever speak your mind against a dictator or some sort of a leader. You will be dealt with. Over here, you can go on "Saturday Night Live" and insult George Bush, and it's all good. [The] USA has given me the chance to become a carpenter. You will not see a female carpenter in Africa. CL: When you get hooked on these stories, and I have, you can conclude that maybe only refugees are entitled, really, to tell the epic of whatever it is the world is going through. And then we need democratic, public spaces to air these often disquieting histories… PS: …that's why the Greeks invented theater…because they knew no one would be safe until we find a way to talk about these things that we're carrying around with us everyday, that are eating us up inside, that are having us live with fear, having us live with not being able to deal with the other, the foreigner, whether that's your daughter or whether that's a Persian, who is this famous "other," who's very existence fills you with fear… CL: In the refugee stories, Peter Sellars was presenting people that the news often turns into wallpaper – what television calls "B-roll" – of Somalian women, say, sitting with kids in front of tents. Peter Sellars wanted to let the wallpaper talk. So just listen to Xiao Qiang from China, Emir Kameniza from Bosnia, Torli Krua from Liberia: Xiao Qiang: Those Chinese immigrants worked every week, every month, for months and months – couldn't see the sun, almost – and this [is] what they do every month. They came to Port Authority, they spent $10 to buy this stolen phone card, and they call their village. So here is the scene: this guy, he didn't even say much; he just simply cried. And they do this monthly, crying out on the telephone for the need of some human connection to their own people. And then they went back to their restaurant… Emir Kameniza: The woman that lived in the apartment right above mine, who I knew well, who had had coffee in my living room many a time, was the woman that organized the rapes in my high-rise. Umm…for me, the hardest thing was, and still partly is, [is] to construct the world once you recognize that people that you interact with every day are capable of committing atrocities. Umm…I mean, on a logistical level, you can just say that, you know, Milosevic and the people that controlled the media somehow made this happen. Fifty thousand women were raped and, you know, five people don't rape 50,000 women. Umm…it takes, just logistically, a lot people capable of committing the type of things you don't think will happen… Torli Krua: I was working in the consulate, where people were coming every day to try to get a visa to come to the United States, where they had their relatives. Umm…and, in this place where I was working, I was not part of the visa-issuing crew, but I was working on a computer, and my back was faced towards those people, but I could hear the conversation. People were coming one after the other: " I have my son in the States. He has a home. I can go there and I can live and…may I get a visa?" And the answer was: "No!" And one person after another…the answer was: "No! No! No!" Until this certain person came in…it was a woman, and she had a little baby (about one and a half years old) and she was saying: "Everyone is dead now. We are the only two that survived. I have money in the States, in a bank in America." She went to school here in the United States of America, and she left to go back to Liberia. Her son was here, and her son was in the military. They had [a] home. She wanted to come here. And they told her: "No. We're sorry. You can't go to America because, if you go, you won't come back." And she was just pleading…and she was crying…she would not leave. And they said: "Well, we're gonna get security to get you out of here because we have to deal with other clients." She continued to cry, and the security came to pull her away and drag her outside. And while they were trying to get her outside, a little baby screamed so loud that I just had to turn around this time…and when I saw this baby was all bone…skeleton!…I could see the sockets in the eyes of the baby and…I mean, it was horrific! CL: Now here's another refugee voice that Peter Sellars has put on stage this winter: Iolaus: When Herakles was dead and gone, Eurystheus decided to eliminate us, too…Our home is gone; and now we stand condemned to keep on wandering from state to state… CL: That's the old warrior, Iolaus, in a play that's 25 centuries old. [Music] Iolaus is begging the city-state of Athens to give refuge to the homeless children of Herakles. The play tells the story of the banished sons and daughters of the tormented strongman Herakles – another name for Hercules – of the many labors. The bad king of Argos has put the word around Greece: it's war with me if you take in this refugee family. Copreus: …if their artful talk and wailing move your pity, that can only mean one thing: total war… CL: The issues in the play were echoed in the refugee interviews I did on stage before every performance. What does a free democracy like Athens, or the United States, owe to the helpless and the homeless? What's the kinship here? Can you count the degrees of separation between the refugees and us? What's the price of their resettlement? And who pays it? Demophon: To hell with you! And you won't drag these refugees away with you and shame us… CL: That's Demophon, the president of Athens, who embraced the refugees and fought a war to defend them. But to enlist the gods and win the war, the high priests and oracles told Athens that a virgin girl must be sacrificed… Demophon: They order me to sacrifice to Persephone a victim…a young woman of noble birth… CL: It is Macaria, one of the refugee daughters of Herakles, who volunteers to sacrifice her life; and then she dies on stage in a ritual throat cutting, in order that her brothers and sisters can become Athenians. In fact, Peter Sellars once imagined dressing Macaria in the exploding belt of a Palestinian suicide bomber – that's how modern he wanted this ancient play to feel…and how jarring, almost excruciating… PS: The staging of this play is very, very, very simple: you just have to sit there for 90 minutes while nothing happens…and people stand at microphones…and talk…and you have to listen. And it is just a giant exercise in listening and concentration, and it goes very slowly. It is not entertaining; it is maddening for the audience; it breaks every bone in their body and forces it to be reset. And it is unendurable but, you know, like any 12 step program, [it is] eventually liberating… CL: The unforgettable scene in the play is the death of that girl, Macaria. [Interviewing PS:] Explain this central moment in the play...a very long, almost silent moment…in which Macaria, the daughter of Herakles, says: No, she will take the fall; she will give her life to save her brothers, to satisfy the Athenian gods, and…bring her people home… PS: For me, one of the most important images was the young woman who sacrifices herself…teenager, 14-year-old girl…And I did stage it. You know, in the Greek plays, you never show violence on stage; that's one very, very important point of departure between the Greeks and Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorcese, but it's…violence must not be shown. I violated that, and I do stage the sacrifice, although I…the staging is not very violent; it's…it's horrifying, but done with a theatricality that's very abstract. Nonetheless…in fact, that's probably why it's so horrifying, because it's not a whole special-effects department…umm…because we laugh when people get their heads blown off in a movie. And the…umm…in fact, for me, one of the invisible parts of the society we live in is, you know, we announce we're going to invade Iraq, you know, for freedom, and, you know, liberation and this and that, and…who's gonna actually pay the price for that? Children…children were the main casualties of the first Iraq war, and they will be the first and main casualties of the next one. And that is constantly, constantly kept off- stage from the American public. And, so, for me it was very important to show a small girl in a body bag, and for people to just look through the clear plastic at little bloody feet just sticking out, and just thinking: that's really what we're doing, and that's who will pay the price. [Music] CL: When we come back: Peter Sellars is not just about staging. He's trying teach us to listen differently… I'm Christopher Lydon…this is the Whole Wide World, produced in association with WGBH Radio Boston, from PRI, Public Radio International. [Music] CL: I'm Christopher Lydon and this is the Whole Wide World…listening to refugee stories with the theater director Peter Sellars. Peter Sellars has many ways of saying that theater is a magical, semi-sacred space, an imaginative place, unlike a classroom or a Congressional hearing, where people can say things they've never framed in words before, where audiences can hear what they have never been told but know to be true. PS: You know…that's what theater was invented to deal with…and to, you know, in a "shamanic" circle, bring the ancestor spirits back and ask them to hold our hand and take us through some dangerous territory… CL: I watched the transformation of Niazi on stage as a case in point. Niazi is a burly teenager from Albanian Kosovo. Three years in this country, he's got American language down and a carefree American style…until the moment when Peter Sellars asked him to tell his story to a spellbound theater: Niazi: At those times, everybody, even [as] grown men, were terrified and scared…and my dad was trying to tell me that there was nothing wrong. I was trying to explain that to my little brother, telling him that it was all right, but even inside me, I was scared myself. I was trying to tell him that…just, you know, a bunch of fireworks and, you know, the gunshots. I would tell him everything would be all right, but…I was trying to keep it inside…the pain that I felt and, you know, I'm the oldest in my family, you know, and for me to start crying, you know, it was hard for me…and I kept it inside, all the pain and all the…I still have these horrible traumas that I saw before. One of the most shocking images I saw was with my younger brother, holding him, and then…there was another pregnant woman, which…I'm not sure in which month was she, but…umm…I saw that they took a knife and took the baby out of her stomach…and…every night, when I go to bed, right before I fall asleep, this image comes up and wakes me up. It happens every night and…I just can't seem to get over that image…and there're all the things that happened, but this image…when I saw the woman bleeding…it was the most horrible thing that I ever saw in my life… CL: Let's talk about Niazi. I mean, here's a fifteen-year-old kid from Kosovo, son of a policeman, relocated to Lynn, Massachusetts…he's a football star, he talks the lingo, he's picked up everything about this country, glad-hander, wants to go to Harvard or Yale, be a politician or something, and suddenly his moment to testify, to come out of the crowd of the children of Herakles, and to talk about himself…and he was a new person and he went to places this morning I'm not sure he'd ever been even by himself. That's what I want you to unfold… PS: He hasn't been there before; he's arriving there now; that's what we just spent the last hour crying together and holding each other, and…you know, the kind of tears that are cleansing, liberating, and tears of joy. You know, the one thing that's really important for me is, you know, just understanding the different kinds of tears. There are some tears that are just tears of me the victim, selfish tears, tears that permit me to stay where I am and my inertia and tell everyone "Stay away from me!"…tears of self pity. Then there are tears of repentance, tears where you actually see so clearly through your life what you did that you shouldn't have done, and those tears are about deciding never to do it again and changing your life. And then there are the tears that are evoked in the children of Herakles by Euripides which is: you weep when people do the right thing, something so beautiful, something so generous, something that we're all starved for, something we've all been waiting forever to see one person do one right thing in public, something that took courage, something that gives us courage, something where you watch somebody face down their own worst demon and rise above it and through it. This young man, who is a football player – his dad is a cop, he's from a family of leaders, of strong men, of people who have no fear – to watch him break down and confess to what he's afraid of was so empowering for everyone in the room. Because the strong man is the person who can confess his weakness, and that is the strength that breaks the cycle of violence; that's the strength where you just do not do unto others what they did unto you, where you have the courage to say, "I was really hurt, and therefore I am going to commit to not hurting anybody ever again even in revenge." CL: In Sellars-speak, this is where theater resembles therapy; theater becomes an open 12-step detox center for democracy. PS: Do we understand that hurt? Do we understand the grace of that hurt? Do we understand the empowerment of that wound? Do we understand how much light comes from this area of darkness? You know, in this production we've had testimony from people who have lived through so many atrocities, and when they come to America, they can really say: "Please don't do that, don't do that, and don't do that. We have survived in order to tell you. Many of the friends we grew up with are no longer alive. Of the people in my neighborhood, I'm one of two or three to have survived to now tell you the tale and ask you, please don't do this." When our Bosnian refugees here come to America and say the killings began exactly when people started saying: "Let's round up all the Muslims"…When you understand that what John Ashcroft is doing is seen by somebody from one of these parts of the world as the beginning of a fresh killing cycle, when you understand the social violence of America's responses to its problems, when you begin to look through eyes that have suffered, so you're alert to pain, you're alert to injustice, you're alert to unfairness, you're alert to the consequences of not living well, that it doesn't turn out well in the end, that every small slip ultimately has terrifying consequences. CL: For me and for all of us media-saturated news consumers, Peter Sellars kept saying that we need other ways to listen, and not just to refugee stories… PS: One of the biggest tasks is actually learning how to listen to a west African and just realize the way a west African is going to tell you a story is going to be really different from Jim Lehrer or Ted Koppel and…you're gonna have to listen differently and…that act of listening differently is going to actually be one of the most important things you do in your life. This question of the refugees first having to take you a bit on their path of deprivation, you know, everything that didn't go according to plan, and everything that you'd rather skip over in the story…but it's actually what gives the story its overwhelming force and moral weight is how hard it was to get there and how amazing it is that they've arrived here and, once they've arrived, what they are now empowered to see. They have been chosen, and you're aware that we are in the presence not just of master storytellers, but of the seers, of the profits, of the consciences that are going to inform the next generation of this nation of immigrants and renew the promise of this country. CL: Night after night I sat on Peter Sellars' stage as the host of spontaneous testimonies from refugees with messages for us in America today. Here is one of them: Yasmina's sister, a Serb married to a Bosnian: I have to first say I'm Serbian, married to a Bosnian Muslim…and the way I viewed this conflict and what I base other conflicts, past and present, [on] is that refugees, ethnic cleansing, and wars come from power and money. And what we need to start doing, and what the Greeks have written about, and what we still try to analyze is how to better ourselves as human beings. And when I look at the Bosnian situation…(crying) excuse me…you had leaders who were fearful that they were going to lose power and, in losing power, they would lose land. So, what they started to do was inject into their societies past hatreds. They did not only inject them into the…what we would call in Bosnia…the peasant classes, the "narod" (sp?), the people, but they injected them into the well-educated, who held still stories in their heads from their great-grandfathers. And, as we learned through Dostoevsky in "Brothers Karamazov," we know it is the intelligensia that makes the reasons for the war, but it is the "narod," it is the people who are illiterate, the people who work the soil, who do the actual killing. The people who follow their leaders blindly into battle because…not because of the land underneath them, not because of the money…they don't want to kill for the dinner or the dollar, but they want to kill because it is better to kill them first, before they kill us. So, how do we raise a society of people that differentiate between power and self-worth? [Music] CL: When we come back…from Euripides to 9/11. Peter Sellars talks about kinship, globalization, and his optimism. You're listening to the Whole Wide World, from PRI, Public Radio International. [Music] CL: I'm Christopher Lydon and this is the Whole Wide World…exploring the underworld of globalization, the world of refugees, with the theater director Peter Sellars. Before 26 performances of "The Children of Herakles," an ancient play about refugees, I held open conversations on-stage with today's refugees and asylum seekers and also with the wide web of professionals who deal with them: immigration judges, torture monitors, human rights advocates, doctors, lawyers, Bush administration policy people. It added up to a kind of Refugees 101. [Speaker 1]: Under international law, if someone leaves their country and seeks political asylum, meaning they are facing some kind of persecution there…but realistic fear that they will be persecuted because of their religion, their race, their involvement in politics in one degree or another…then the host country has an obligation not to return them to their country of origin… [Speaker 2]: And refugees, by definition, leave their homes without documents, without anything…they can't prove who they are. In this world, not being able to prove who you are is a very difficult position... [Speaker 3]: We're living through a period that is creating different kinds of wars than we've had in the past, where civilians are the target, and where one of the goals is to create refugees and to create crises… [Speaker 4]: The refugee crisis is destabilizing countries throughout the world. The countries that are the receiving countries are overwhelmed by the problems. You can imagine…we had a million and a half Afghans who fled into Pakistan. The countries can't begin to care for their own populations, and then they're impacted enormously… [Music] CL: You learn, for example, that three quarters of the 30 million displaced people in the world are women and children. It's the lucky few, less than one percent, who get in the United States. It takes a good lawyer, which most refugees don't have. Since 9/11 refugees can get lumped loosely with terrorists – though they are people in danger, not dangerous people. [Speaker]: People who are now…arrive at the borders or port of entry, are thrown into expedited removal…don't even come in front of the asylum core anymore. They're stopped at the airport and they're put in detention, and they're sent immediately to immigration judges… [Speaker 2]: I have to deal with INS everyday, and one of the challenges is knowing how hard their job is. Now, the guys who are sitting in those chairs are producing 50 decisions a day, which is to say, the average life decision, whether you should live or die in this country, is ten minutes…the time from opening your file to closing it… [Speaker 3]: It's only the lucky and the strong and the ones who can hold on to family or are phenomenally sustaining within themselves who, post war, can stand on their feet…and, in that first generation, thrive. Often, it takes another generation for people to come back from being war refugees… [Speaker 4]: The American story of an immigrant coming, bringing their children, learning the language, going to school, and becoming a success within one generation or two generations…that's something we should celebrate. But we shouldn't have the illusion that that is typical for what happens to refugees in the modern world. In the modern world, the success story is when the tent has some electricity and some heat… [Speaker 5]: But a refugee, who does come, is welcomed by an institute like ours…there are 35 partners, more than 100 agencies across the country who do this kind of work. We greet a person at the airport; we've already rented an apartment; we have food on the shelves; we have linens and beds; and we'll welcome them with the assurance that they will be supported during their first months in this country. And the good news is (and I think it's one of the great success stories of America)…is that we average from…a person who arrives without a change of shirt…to economic self-sufficiency for themselves, for their family…four and a half months… CL: Another thing I learned, just listening, was that always there have been good refugees and bad refugees. Nowadays exiles from Cuba can be presumed good, from Haiti presumed bad. We see them differently, even when they look much the same. Ketna, a teenage refugee from Haiti, took the Haitian image problem head on, speaking to a matinee audience of high-school students: Ketna: At my high school, people were just talking about: Did you see that Haitian people jump off the boat and kill themselves? And people were laughing and making jokes and…I was like, you think it's funny, right? You have it good here; you have a fridge full of food; you have nice clothes, the Nike sneakers; life is good for you, but let's think about it. Why would somebody rather kill themselves than go back home? CL: For Peter Sellars it was another instance of what often happens in theater, the atmosphere of high art and personal history producing an "elixir of liberation." Ketna's story was another that seemed to ease the grip of a generalized fear. [CL to PS:] I mean, she's again a teenager who told a theater full of teenagers today nothing funny about those boats being turned away full of Haitian, or people jumping out of rickety boats to their deaths. And she got away with it! She transformed a television image into a kind of heart's truth, kid to kid. It was overwhelming to me. PS: Well, it's not so much that she got away with it. What's amazing is that the American media gets away with. Ketna had the truth on her side, and the truth is always the most powerful thing on earth. You know, we're just trained to do everything we can to avoid it. And so Ketna just touched, you know, this much of the hem of the garment of truth and the healing power was overwhelming. And, suddenly, that audience just sat right up. I think one of the most empowering things is the play has a very beautiful line of Iolaus, the old fighter, who says, "Very few men match their fathers today." That kind of notion, that a heroic generation has passed and now there's just us…and Ketna saying that her father, when she told him that she was going to go back to Haiti this summer and do human rights work and help out at hospitals…and he said, "You're crazy you can't go back there!"…When Ketna announced to an audience of teenagers today that she knew that she was now stronger than her father, that was powerful. And you get, you know…the great times are not gone and the great men are not passed from the earth, but the opposite. The generation on the way is gonna be strong exactly because they've seen weakness, they've seen corruption, they've seen the absence of courage and moral clarity, and they know that it is urgent. CL: Peter Sellars is best known for his operas, modern and classic, for staging Mozart's "Don Giovanni," for example, among drug dealers in New York's Spanish Harlem. It was 9/11 that brought him back 24 centuries to Euripides, and it was Euripides that brought our conversation back to 9/11: PS: September 11th has been the oddest event because it's been used as a mask for so many things rather than as a revelation. And the actual outcomes of American policies in this last generation, where we're going to go everywhere and intervene and install democracy…you know, our record of installing democracy in Somalia, in Haiti, in Afghanistan is not impressive…you'd have to say that there's a trail of wreckage. And we have a situation where what can be said for every one of these American interventions is that [that] group constitutes the largest refugee population in the world…that the Somalian refugees, the Haitian refugees, the Afghani refugees, and now the Iraqi refugees…What we have done is displaced entire populations, and we have situations now where each of these country's is uninhabitable by its own citizens and people are living in fear everyday. So that's a kind of corollary and consequence of U.S. policy that is underrepresented in the media (I think its fair to say!) and is underrepresented in the minds of most Americans, because most Americans aren't thinking of consequences, they're not thinking 3 or 4 steps ahead, they are not thinking what the actual result of this action will be. And so, Euripides is busy thinking several steps ahead, busy thinking several generations ahead, busy thinking, "Well this action is actually going to play out on a very large canvas across a long timeline and don't think you're just going to have your little five minutes of revenge and then we can say, 'We're even,'" because the world doesn't work that way. CL: Euripides and this refugee play, "The Children of Herakles," leave a key question hanging for the ages; it's the question of kinship, and what it gets you. In the small world of Greece 2500 years ago, kinship was about blood and shared battles. Herakles, Iolaus, and the Athenian President were all related, near cousins, who had fought alongside each other; and the connection helped get the children of Herakles into Athens. But in the 21st Century, what are the family ties between us Americans, in this nation of immigrants, and the new refugees? [CL to PS]: What's the modern version of kinship on which these refugee and obligation questions should be resolved? PS: Well, when Iolaus says that, you know, "I carried Hercules' shield on the bloody expedition to bring back the Amazon queen's belt, and Hercules, as everybody knows, saved your father from the moated depths of hell," the whole question of what we did so that you people could have something…I think, you know, in a very, very simple way, you know, the White House in Washington, DC, was built by slaves, the US Capitol Building was built…two thirds of the laborers were slaves. Their masters were paid five dollars a day for their labor; they were paid nothing. If you ask, "How did we get here?" ask who picked the strawberry on your strawberry shortcake tonight, ask who made your underwear in Bangladesh or Honduras, ask which Chinese prisoners made the shoes on your feet, just ask who did what they did so you can be who you are and have what you have, and then say can we live in some sense of reciprocal obligation. And right now that is the reality of a globalized, interpenetrated world. And we only want it to go one way, and that is a big mistake, because globalization is two-way, and that means we have to figure out how to share. We have taken a whole lot from everywhere and, at the moment, a lot of people have done extraordinary things so that we can enjoy our prosperity. That prosperity needs to be the world's prosperity, and that's the first step of the kinship of immigration. You know, we're very happy for global capital to move with no borders and, suddenly, we are stopping every human being at every border. And what most societies live with around the world, which is a non-cash economy, where the economy is sustained by giving of gifts, and what people owe each other is based on exchange. One of the things we did was we said, "I'm paying for this, so I don't want to know who made it; I don't want to know what they went through – I just bought it, that's all I need to know is this transaction," but in fact every single thing in our lives has a big chain of transactions behind that transaction and that's the karma that's coming into your life and that you're part of, and you can recognize it or not, but it's a whole lot healthier to recognize it and, again, imagine what it is that we can offer in return. And, I think, as Iolaus says, "In return, what we're asking you is not to be betrayed, not to be given back into the hands of our enemies. We have made these sacrifices so that you can be the most prosperous country on the face of the earth; now we're asking you not to betray us." CL: Peter Sellars is a man who can see the darkness in the world, in great detail, and locate the light in it. The young refugees on his stage, in particular Ketna from Haiti and Niazi from Kosovo, he saw as heroic versions of himself. PS: I'm somebody who, you know, started when I was very young. I knew what I was going to do with my life when I was ten, and I've been doing it everyday since then. And so, a lot of artists are in that state sort of, you know very early on, and then you are very, very, very clearly focused. And so I am very moved when I see another young person who already can see their life ahead of them, is preparing for it everyday, knows how high the stakes are, knows it's very important not to fail, and holds their own highest standard of excellence, holds themselves to a much higher standard of excellence than the world around them… CL: The agony of asylum seekers, in the Peter Sellars telling, is part of replanting the best of American values in our own soil… PS: I'm a very, very positive person and, where we are headed with Ketna and Niazi, where we are headed…is people who have been there, done that and truly do not want to repeat the cycle and truly are hoping for a new century where there is a kind of evenness, you know, where an African can be equal to an American, where a Latin American can be equal to a north American. And, we haven't seen that yet, and that's going to be a few generations of work, but these are the generations that are committed. My deepest sense of why we do these plays and, you know, what we're doing as artists, is that we are actually creating a sense of the viability of alternatives. [Music] CL: Refugia, this nowhere nation, is not quite everywhere, but it's closer to all of us than we usually imagine, and it seems to be growing. If you suppose you've never met a refugee, think again about grandparents, great-grandparents. Within two generations, or three blocks, or two chairs from where most of us are now, somebody has a story of another place still pined for, or of the hard lessons on the road to this one. Tell them you want to listen. [Music] CL: And before we go, listen to some last words this hour from the Czech novelist, Milan Kundera, on themes of flight, exile, nightmares, and nostalgia among refugees. This is from his new novel titled "Ignorance." It involves a Czech woman, Irena, who's living in Paris in the 1990s and just aching for home in Prague after the Velvet Revolution turned the Communists out. We asked the Czech actor Jan Triska, who played Iolaus in "The Children of Herakles," to read it for us: Jan Triska: For the very first weeks after emigrating, Irena began to have strange dreams. She's in an airplane that switches direction and lands at an unknown airport. Uniformed men with guns are waiting for her at the foot of the gangway. In a cold sweat she recognizes the Czech police. She cries out. She wakes up. Martin, her husband, was having the same dreams. Every morning they would talk about the horror of that return to their native land. Then, in the course of a conversation with a Polish friend, an émigré herself, Irena realized that all émigrés had those dreams, everyone, without exception. On any given night, thousands of émigrés were all dreaming the same dream in numberless variants. The Emigration Dream, one of the strangest phenomena of the second half of the twentieth century. These dream-nightmares seemed to her all the more mysterious in that she was afflicted simultaneously with an uncontrollable nostalgia and another, completely opposite experience: landscapes from her country kept appearing to her by day. Visions of landscapes would blink on in her head – unexpectedly, abruptly, swiftly – and go out instantly. She would be talking to her boss and, all at once, like a flash of lightning, she would see a path through a field. She would be jostled on a metro, and suddenly a narrow lane in some leafy, bract (sp?) neighborhood would rise up before her for a split second. All day long these fleeting images would visit her to assuage the longing for her lost Bohemia. The same moviemaker of the subconscious, who by day was sending her bits of the home landscape as images of happiness, by night would send up terrifying returns to that same land. The day was licked with the beauty of the land forsaken; the night, by the horror of returning to it. The day would show her the paradise she had lost; the night, the hell she had fled. [Music] CL: That was Jan Triska reading from Milan Kundera's novel "Ignorance." [Music] Please visit our global community online at www.thewholewideworld.net. The Whole Wide World is a collaboration of Lydon and McGrath Productions and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, in association with WGBH Radio Boston. We had help from producers Ben Walker and Katherine Bidwell, from engineer Tom Tiger, and Jake Shapiro of the Public Radio Exchange. Jay Allison of transom.org, with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is our radio visionary. Thanks also to Keith Kiya Wilson, Justin Grotelueschen, Kezia Parsons, Josh Ward, the Christian Science Publishing Society, and public radio stations WCAI and WNAN on Cape Cod. Special thanks to the American Repertory Theatre. Support for this program is made possible in part by the PRI Program Fund, whose contributors include the John D. and Katherine T. McArthur Foundation. Mary McGrath is our executive producer. I'm Christopher Lydon. [Music]