City of Asylum role expected to be expanded

Sito Negron

Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2004 | 11:11 a.m.

Las Vegas plans to expand its role in helping writers flee persecution with the opening of an office of the International Network of Cities of Asylum, a development to be announced by Mayor Oscar Goodman tonight at his State of the City address.

While the exact details remain to be settled, the regional office for the group will be placed in the Fifth Street School downtown, where the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, International Institute of Modern Letters will locate. The asylum group works out of the UNLV program.

"The city's role will be laid out this evening by Mayor Goodman, so I will defer to him in terms of how he wants to describe it," said Sarah Ralston, executive director of the North American Cities of Asylum Network, the group that will operate out of Las Vegas.

Las Vegas became part of the international program in 2000, when it lent its name as a city of asylum. With private donations through the institute of letters, the program brought writer Syl Cheney-Coker of Sierra Leone to the valley.

Cheney-Coker has gone back to Sierra Leone. Er Tai Gao, a Chinese writer and painter who was imprisoned for two decades in his home country, came to Las Vegas in the summer and is writing his memoir, "To Seek My Homeland," Ralston said.

In addition, Noble Laureate Wole Soyinka of Nigeria, who was president of the international network, is the Elias Ghanem Chair of Creative Writing at UNLV.

The Las Vegas regional office will be the first such in the U.S., an offshoot of the mostly Western European international group, which was founded about 10 years ago "to provide safe places where writers of conscience who are under threat of death, torture, or imprisonment can live and work," states the International Institute of Modern Letters website. "There are over 34 cities of asylum in the world, most of them in Europe."

The asylum network's website (www.autodafe.org) is a mixture of essays, letters, and other information. It describes the project like this:

"Confronted with the archipelago of international terrorism and the internationalization of repression, we had no other choice in fact than to take back new free territories, free zones where creation is not merely tolerated but encouraged, where writers can continue to write despite the assassins. An ark or an archipelago for imagination," wrote Christian Salmon, executive director of the International Network of Cities of Asylum.

Through e-mail, he said this morning that the group is working with the institute of modern letters on the Las Vegas office.

"But for the moment no formal agreement has been signed," he said.