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Book devotees and anyone who’s suffered for their craft because they have the courage to write loudly will identify with New Mexican author and activist Margaret Randall. She’s inviting free thinkers to engage in a dialogue about creative resistance next week at Bookworks (4022 Rio Grande Blvd. NW) in Albuquerque at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, April 9 and Collected Works (202 Galisteo St.) in Santa Fe at 4 p.m. on Sunday, April 27. The events will include talks about her latest endeavor Letters from the Edge: Outrider Conversations as well as poetry readings from her new collection Wild Card and a public conversation with Cuban poet, journalist and lifelong friend Victor Rodríguez Nuñez. The talks are moderated by Katherine M. Hedeen.
“I think [Letters from the Edge] sheds a new light on important cultural and political moments from the past, not only moments of my life but of life in general,” Randall says. “It has been described as a new genre, unlike other books that are limited to the letters of a single person outstanding in her or his field. These are two-way conversations that bring history to life.”
Letters from the Edge: Outrider Conversations is a collection of excerpts from letters she exchanged with five writers and artists: Walter Lowenfels, Laurette Séjourné and Arnaldo Orfila, Susan Sherman, and Greg Smith. She says the writers and artists she chose for the book are linked by their “outrider status,” meaning that each correspondent “bucked the system to produce meaningful work, even when this resistance to societal pressure cost them something in terms of what we generally understand as success.”
Randall is a poet, writer, translator, photographer and activist who has lived in Albuquerque, New York, Mexico City, Havana and Managua with short stays in North Vietnam and Lima, Peru. During her time in these places, she experienced socio-political upheavals firsthand and lived through some of the most pivotal eras in both her life and the world at large. This week, New Mexicans have the chance to join her in reliving some of these moments.
“I’m 88 years old, so I have nothing to lose. I feel that one of the privileges of old age is being able to say what you feel needs to be said,” Randall says. “My work is a cry against — or a shout out against — what I think they’re trying to do to us today, which is erase our memory, erase our creativity and our awareness of what’s going on around us.”
Randall’s experiences as an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy in Central America and Southeast Asia mirror the struggles similar artists are having today, and with similar consequences. Because of opinions expressed in her books, she was forced to wage a five-year battle for restoration of citizenship in 1984 under the McCarran Walter Act — also known as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 — and says she was shocked to read a description of having been interrogated at the U.S. consulate in Mexico City for almost a week, accused of things that weren’t true. Randall says had completely erased this memory until it surfaced in one of the letters.
“I lived through McCarthyism in the ‘50s, and I know what censorship can do to a country, to our minds, and one of the things that’s very noticeable today is the lack of critical thinking permitted on college campuses and in schools at all levels,” she says. “I think my work reintroduces the need for critical thinking, the need to be aware, the need to not get your news from the mass media, but from what you’re living through, what you’re experiencing.”
Margaret Randall
Wild Card, Poems and Letters from the Edge
April 9, 4 p.m.
Bookworks
4022 Rio Grande Blvd. NW
Free