Writer receives asylum

Erin Neff

Friday, Oct. 13, 2000 | 10:43 a.m.

Donors

The nonprofit group, City of Asylum -- Las Vegas, has launched a fund-raising drive to support the writers to which it gives shelter. Donations may be sent to the group at:

Syl Cheney-Coker arrived in Las Vegas 10 days ago with the same fantastic images in his mind that help sell tourists on making trips here.

But before even driving down the Strip, Cheney-Coker set out to dispel a myth that Las Vegas is more erupting volcanoes and dueling pirate ships than true culture.

So when the exiled poet from Sierra Leone awoke for his first day in town, he immediately found a bookstore and a coffee shop.

"I discovered a city away from the Strip," said Cheney-Coker, the first persecuted writer to take refuge in the nation's first City of Asylum, right here in Las Vegas.

Mayor Oscar Goodman introduced Cheney-Coker during his weekly press conference and later invited the writer, Nobel laureate Wole Syinka and UNLV professor Richard Wiley to his home for dinner.

"We're welcoming a genius to our community," Goodman said. "He takes this to a level where Las Vegas has never been before as far as culture is concerned."

Cheney-Coker, who tells people to call him by his first name (pronounced Seal), said he thinks the contrasts between the "phantasmagoric" casinos on the Strip and the simple day-to-day community will be inspiring to his writing.

"Las Vegas is like a mother with twin babies," Cheney-Coker said. "One panders to the dreams and fantasies of ours, the other is a normal child.

"I think sooner than later, Las Vegas with its extremes will become just another normal place to me," he added.

City of Asylum, created by the International Parliament of Writers, was established locally several months ago when Wiley and Soyinka discussed whether Las Vegas could ever be host to such a program.

Mandalay Resort Group President Glenn Schaeffer, himself an aspiring novelist, committed $20,000 of his company's money and $5,000 of his own to make it happen.

When Soyinka called Cheney-Coker to ask him about whether he'd consider Las Vegas, the poet couldn't resist.

"I could have gone to Italy or France," Cheney-Coker said of other countries with Cities of Asylum. "But this was an opportunity to experience a part of the United States I haven't seen before."

Cheyney-Coker has written four books of poetry and three novels, including "The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar," a story critically acclaimed as a fine example of magic realism and compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

He was awarded the Africa Best Book award in the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1991 and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 1992.

All of his work has a political bend, and he has been a vocal critic of the military government in Sierre Leone.

After the coup in 1997, rebel troops came to his home and killed a dog before leaving. But a friend warned Cheyney-Coker that his life was in danger, and the writer fled.

He found refuge first at Cambridge University and then received a two-year Writer-in-Residence appointment at City University of New York's Medgar Evars College.

Most recently, he was writing in Virginia where he received a grant from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

In Las Vegas, Cheyney-Coker lives in a townhouse and has been provided a car and a $30,000 annual stipend from the local City of Asylum.

Like every writer in exile, Cheyney-Coker longs to return to his homeland, where he enjoyed puffing a pipe outside his home overlooking a river.

"The writer eventually loses a lot by going into exile," he said. "The language of emotion is there."