Las Vegas now cultural refuge

Erin Neff

Tuesday, May 16, 2000 | 11:15 a.m.

Philadelphia may have the nation's most colleges, Atlanta may be considered the belle of the South and San Francisco might just fit its designation as the country's most culturally diverse city.

But on Monday neon-dripped Las Vegas, the 24-7 bastion of gambling and booze, became the first city in the United States designated a City of Asylum for international writers exiled from their homelands.

Local organizers joined with Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka at the West Las Vegas Arts Center to sign a mock decree designating Sin City a cultural refuge.

"This is an exquisite irony," said Soyinka, president of the International Parliament of Writers (IPW).

The irony, Soyinka said, came from Las Vegas' derisive designation by many as a cultural wasteland. To have the world's leading intellects seeking asylum here is part of what led to Las Vegas' designation.

"Why not Las Vegas," said Glenn Shaeffer, president of Mandalay Resort Group, which is providing seed money to launch City of Asylum here. "After all, it's a boomtown in the American tradition of rising up from nothing and having our own say." Shaeffer said many persecuted writers are threatened because they have the guts to say no to tyrants and make their voices heard.

"You can't see it by driving down the Strip, but the city is full of writers," Shaeffer added.

The IPW has created a network of 25 cities, mostly in Europe, that offer one or two-year residences and assistance to persecuted writers. Although the City of Asylum network has spread into parts of Latin America and Africa, U.S. and Canadian cities were not yet in the official mix until Monday.

After taking in a performance of Blue Man Group and looking at an exhibit in the arts center, Soyinka declared: "There is culture here. It's enough to get going."

Soyinka became the first African writer awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986 for a body of work that includes novels, poetry and plays.

The white haired 66-year-old currently commutes between Nigeria and Atlanta, where he is a professor at Emory University. But he empathizes with writers who still face exile.

Nigeria leaders imprisoned Soyinka from 1967 to 1969 when he called for a cease-fire in the Biafran civil war. In 1997 he was charged with treason in absentia and feared a similar fate that befell Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa who was hanged for treason in 1995.

The City of Asylum program was inspired in the mid-1990s by the well-publicized struggle facing writer Salman Rushdie. Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" led Middle East extremists to declare a fatwa, or death sentence, on him.

Las Vegas could see its first exiled writer later this fall. Writers will get a place to live, a car, a monthly stipend and, most importantly, the freedom to express their ideas in safety.

"A City of Asylum, how contrary and how delightful," said UNLV Professor Richard Wiley. "The more I think about it, that idea fits us and we fit it."

Wiley, a PEN-Faulkner award-winning novelist and friend of Soyinka, who spent several years teaching in Nigeria and is currently chairman of the master of fine arts program within UNLV's English department.

Soyinka first came to Las Vegas in 1990 to work with UNLV's creative writing classes.

"There is humanity here," Soyinka said.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said the designation moves Las Vegas one step further along in its cultural evolution.

"Today is, in my opinion, a landmark day as far as Las Vegas is concerned," Goodman said.