HOST: Today on Peace Talks Radio, using art to connect people across borders and ideological divides. We hear from a photographer and a writer who've dedicated their lives to building bridges through their work.
(Clip from John Nolter)
Photography, and really, art in general is a way that we can express ideas differently, and it's a way that we can maybe access communication differently.
(Clip from Margaret Randall)
I look at a book like it's an object. It's a material object as well as a transmitter of ideas.
HOST: Art is a tool for cross-cultural understanding. Today on Peace Talks Radio,
This is Peace Talks Radio, the radio series and podcast on peacemaking and nonviolent conflict resolution. I am Jessica Ticktin in today with correspondent Andrew Stelzer. Whether it's the search for inner peace or seeking peace in our closest relationships or with others in our workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, our cities and towns, our nation and our world, we consider it here on Peace Talks Radio.
To cause harm to someone, we first have to otherize them to see our enemy as less deserving of safety than ourselves. On the contrary, when we get to know someone and see them as human, it becomes a lot harder to wish them ill or hurt them. For many artists, building those bonds of humanity is a key part of their mission, and it can be accomplished using words, images, sounds pretty much any medium.
For this Peace Talks Radio episode, we'll hear from a writer and an artist who have dedicated their lives to helping us truly see and hear each other in the hope that with better understanding, we can come closer together. They're both ordinary people who have managed to live rather extraordinary lives.
Their wealth of experience allows them to share a unique perspective with us. In part two of this episode, we'll talk to Margaret Randall, a literary legend and global citizen who's been creating space for revolutionary poets and authors throughout the Americas since the 1950s. But first in part one, we'll meet John Noltner.
He's traveled to tens of thousands of miles across the United States using his camera to break through our polarized perceptions of one another. Noltner had built a successful career as a photojournalist. He worked assignments for national magazines and Fortune 500 companies. But he felt like there was something missing.
And in 2009, he started a new project that took him in a totally different direction. He began taking pictures of regular people, asking them about their lives, and compiling their stories into a book. He called it a peace of my Mind, spelled P-E-A-C-E. Several other books followed, and the project has turned into a traveling multimedia experience.
Let's let him bring us back to the origins of the project. Here's Andrew Stelzer interview with John Noltner.
Andrew Stelzer: Personally, I love to road trip. So when I heard about John Noltner's lifestyle, I was jealous. Not everybody gets to live in a van for two and a half years and drive 93,000 miles.
John Noltner: I mean, if you get to, I highly recommend it, but life on the road can also be tough.
So to make that choice, it has to be worthwhile. I began my conversation with John by asking what caused him to make such a drastic shift.
John Noltner: The project started with interviews in Minnesota where I'm based, but uh, grew to a number of road trips and during the pandemic we really sort of upped the ante. And my wife and I sold our house in Bloomington, Minnesota where we raised our family.
They were grown and doing their own thing, and we bought a van and we spent two and a half years driving 93,000 miles across the country. Going intentionally to all of our tension points, going to the border to talk about immigration, going to Mississippi, to talk about Confederate monuments and Skid Row to talk about housing security, but always looking for people who are finding creative solutions to some of these really challenging issues.
So through the course of these 15 years, we've now produced four books. The latest one is called Lessons on the Road to Peace, and we've got five traveling exhibits that we bring around the country and we install 'em at. Colleges and community centers and conferences, and we use those stories not to tell people the secret meaning of peace, but we use those stories to invite people into the conversation to realize that if there are challenges in the world, and there certainly are, that these are our challenges collectively.
And if there are gonna be solutions, and I believe that there are. That they're gonna have to be our solutions. So we use these stories to help people have conversations about conflict resolution and civic responsibility and social change, and how we can approach some of these really difficult issues with a grace and a hope and the belief that something better is possible.
Andrew Stelzer: And when you say stories, a lot of what? Someone looking at one of your books or? Going to one of the exhibits would see would be a photograph and a little bit of text. Not much text. What kind of stories are we talking about?
John Noltner: What they will find in the exhibits, in the books is a portrait of a person, a short biography of who they are, and maybe an excerpt of 300 or 400 words from the oral history interview that we did.
We also share these on our website and as podcasts so that people can hear the longer stories. But these are people who have marched with Dr. King back in the day. They're people who are Holocaust survivors. They're veterans who've been wounded. In combat. They're people who've had terminal uh diagnoses.
They're people who work for civil rights and justice issues. It's really a broad cross section of who we are as human beings, and it's centered in the belief. There's beauty and wisdom all around us that everybody has a story to share, that everybody has an experience that we can learn from. You are probably not gonna find many people whose names you'll recognize.
You know? I think that that very often in society we sort of defer our power to celebrity and people in political leadership and these sorts of things. And part of the methodology of this project is to realize that we all have some sort of power to make change in the world. That we all have a voice that's worth hearing.
And so, uh, I've got sort of two methodologies and one of them is to do these long form oral histories with people. But then we wanted a public engagement component that was a little bit more nimble. And so we'll do public studios and we will go into a community or a college campus or a faith community.
And we will ask a question, we'll sort of collaboratively decide on what we want that community to be talking about. We'll ask a prompt, and then we'll have people in the community respond In 25 words or less, we'll do a black and white portrait, and we will combine that portrait with. The quote. So in the course of a day, we'll maybe get 40 or 50 or 60 of these people and we can create a body of work that sort of reflects the mission, vision, and values of the community.
And one of the really fun parts about the project is that when we do that in a public setting, a. I will do that production and editing work ridiculously fast. I'll do it overnight when most normal people will be sleeping, and then I can share that back to the community the next day. So, you know, tomorrow I'm going to a conference in Kearney, Nebraska, and it's going to be, it's a conference focused on brain injuries, so practitioners who are working and advocating for people who've had some sort of traumatic brain injury across the state will come and share a story related to their work and their advocacy. I'll gather all of those stories on Thursday and Friday.
I'll give the closing keynote for the conference and we will share that back to them in a short video as part of that keynote, and they will. Be able to see their own community's response to this issue. So it's a really interesting and immediate way for people to start seeing themselves and their peers in new ways.
Andrew Stelzer: Your work is primarily visual. There are some words, as you said, a few hundred words sometimes, but your background is also a photographer. How can photographs make the world a more peaceful place? And, and if you, if you believe that's true, when did you decide that to be true along your career path?
John Noltner: That's a really interesting question, Andrew. Uh, my training actually was in writing, but I knew that I was always interested in photography, so between the journalism department and the art department, when I was in college, I had 30 credits in photography, and I've always made my living primarily as a photographer, honestly.
Uh, a part of that is self-serving. Photography became my way to explore the world. It became my excuse for going and exploring different ideas in different places as a travel photographer, but I did have a growing awareness that photography is a way that can help us see. Things in new ways. I mean, in a very literal sense.
You can change your angle, you can change your perspective or your distance or the lens that you're using, and it helps you see the world in a new way. But I'll also say that in this world where words often fail us. Right where things are so polarized, where we have an emotional response to something and we're not able to necessarily communicate what it is we're trying to say that photography and really art in general is a way that we can express ideas differently, and it's a way that we can maybe access communication differently.
And so for me, I love the combination of somebody else's words paired with my visual. Representation through my photography. That's a collaborative process, and it's not just me saying, look at this picture and listen to what I have to say about it, but it is, look at this picture and how I am seeing things, but also hear these words and how this person is trying to be viewed and seen in the world.
So I'm really fascinated and enamored with that combination of my visual. Vision and somebody else's written response. I'm also in love with the still photo. I recognize that video can do some amazing things, and I'm toying around with it, but I'm really enamored with the still image and the way it captures a moment and the way that you can really examine.
That image, these portraits are larger than life. You know, they might be 36 inches square and really a tight portrait of a human being, and there are ways that you can examine that, that are not possible and not appropriate in real life. You know, you can stand really close to it. You can really study it, and you can start to see things.
In a new way, and that's really a gift, I think. And it's also a gentle way to encounter difference if there's things that you're not entirely comfortable with. If you're looking at an image of somebody from a demographic that you haven't had much experience with, you can just sit and study that in a way that feels really personal and intimate and is not available to us sort of on a day by day basis as we're walking down the street.
Andrew Stelzer: You are listening to Peace Talks Radio. I'm Andrew Stelzer and I'm speaking with photographer John Noltner about his project. A piece of my Mind, John travels the country using images and words to try and help people really see and understand each other. Back to our conversation.
Looking at your professional progression and your resume, you, as you mentioned, you kind of made a break with the corporate world, the work you were doing for magazines. Was there something missing for you from that work? Was this new direction to fill a void? I know it took a financial hit. You had to sort of rejigger your life and how it all worked. What was that transition like and and was it driven by a need to become more active or feed your heart or feed your soul, something like that.
John Noltner: It was driven by two things, Andrew, and the first was within my control and the other one wasn't. You know, I was going a hundred miles an hour shooting assignment work, and it was good work. It was a lot of fun, you know, a lot of travel photography and I might be photographing a, a spy in Chicago and then a resort in Costa Rica and then riding barges down the Mississippi River.
And it was all really fascinating stuff and I never, I don't think. Realistically, I would've stepped away from that. It was good money, it was satisfying work and I really enjoyed it. But two things were going on. The first is that I was getting a little bit restless. I was responding to somebody else's assignment when they would say, Hey, go take pictures of this thing and we will pay you for it.
And it was great stuff and I enjoyed it, but I started feeling like. I had something else to say. I started feeling like I wanted to share my own story. I started being really increasingly concerned with the quality of our national dialogue and all of the things that were asking us to look at what separated us in life.
I wondered if there was something I could do with my photography and storytelling to remember what connects us. You know, I heard somebody say once, don't fight against the things you hate, but fight for the things you love. You know, and so I was really frustrated and concerned about this political animosity out in the world, and I didn't think that I could shout that down.
I didn't think I could fix that by yelling into that storm. What I wanted to do was create a body of work that could quietly present an alternative. An opportunity to really hear other people's voices a a chance to really see that beauty and wisdom that's all around us. So that was all sort of swirling together around 2008, 2009.
The other thing that was out of my control. As I like to say, the economy handed me some free time. The recession hit the world of freelance photography really hard and really fast, and I could have used that time to look for new clients, but not, not every decision is based in dollars and cents, and I really took that opportunity to start working on this personal project.
In part just to remember my own self-worth, to put my skills to work, to have something to do to fill this void, but in part because I believed there was something to this project.
Andrew Stelzer: You were seeking to tell a story other than that of the polarization and division you were hearing about. That sounds like you were taking a little bit of a chance.What if you went out there, even in Minnesota or across the country and you found out, oh wow, this country, the people really are divided and polarized. What if you had found that? Were you sure that you were gonna find something different or were you not sure what? That's a little bit of a risk, right?
John Noltner: Yeah. Yeah. It, it is a risk and I'm, I am not convinced that we are not polarized. I think that is true, but a part of a piece of my mind is reckoning with those challenges honestly and directly. Right? This is not about rainbows and daisies. This is not about sticking our head in the sand and, and singing la la, la all the way to the playground.
This is about reckoning with those challenges honestly and directly, but approaching them with a grace and a hope and a belief that something better is possible, you know? And so when we are down along the border to talk about immigration. Yeah. Obviously immigration can be a really polarizing debate, but when I go down to a place like that, I'm not just looking for people who agree with me.
I'm not just looking for people who will share a story that says, yeah, John, you're right about this, and we should do things this way. You know, I want to talk to an activist and I want to talk. To an asylum seeker, but I'm also interested in talking to a local rancher and a border patrol agent and people with this broad range of experiences because I think that each, you know, no, no individual has access to the full truth of what's going on in the world.
We all have access based on our own experience. The journey of our lives to this little thread of truth. But I think when we can start weaving those threads together, it starts transforming into a rich fabric that looks a little bit more like truth. And so very often when I'm talking to people, we're not agreeing about everything, and I will push back a little bit, not to say to somebody, Hey, you're wrong, and I'm right.
But. Boy, I think that you have had a different experience than I have and help me understand that a little bit better. How did you get to that? And so, you know, then we're able to have conversations that address some of these complexities and some of these subtle nuances and, and I don't know that I'm setting out to change somebody else's mind, and I don't know that I'm changing my position on particular policy, but in the process, I can start to see somebody who maybe I would view as an adversary. I can start to see them as a human being, you know, and that they see things a little bit differently. And so, you know, I'll encounter people like Alvaro and ciso, who is a Colombian immigrant in Tucson, and he's an artist as well.
And he decided he wanted to attach his art to his immigration experience. And so he started building these really beautiful wooden crosses, and he found a map that indicated the sites in the Sonoran Desert where the remains of migrants had been found. And this map had like 4,000 little red dots on it that marked the GPS coordinate.
It's where migrants remains had been found who died in the Sonoran Desert on their journey into America. Every Tuesday, Alvaro will carry three or four of these crosses out into the Sonoran Desert and place them at the sites where these migrants remains have been found. And he does that in his words, to try to make the invisible visible again.
You know? And so that's. You know, it, it is a bit of a political statement on his part, but it also is his human acknowledgement of the loss that is happening in this larger story of migration. And so it lets us remove things a little bit from politics and look at the humanity of things.
Andrew Stelzer: We are speaking with John Noltner about his project, a piece of My Mind Photography Plus, plus a lot more.
When you close your eyes and think about the United States, what does it look like? What do you see? I'm referring mostly to the people. What does the United States look like to you and how does it look different than when you started this project?
John Noltner: When I close my eyes and think about the narrative that I hear.
In our news cycle, in our 24 7 news cycle, I get really concerned. Really fast. But when I'm out in the world and when I'm engaging with people on an individual level, when I'm doing these interviews and when I'm meeting folks who are deeply engaged in some of these really challenging issues, that's what gives me hope when I'm on the ground and actually talking to people, I find that we are a world of kind and generous and thoughtful human beings. I may go into the deep south or I may go into a place that. That I feel has different political inclinations than I do and expect that maybe I might not be welcome because of how I vote, because of what I believe.
All of these other things. That is almost never the case. You know, I find that people are warm and welcoming and kind. And in our 93,000 mile journey across the country, we encountered people who were, who were complete strangers that became fast friends because I just think that's what people do.
Andrew Stelzer: There's aspects of your project that consist of asking people, what does peace mean to you? And then you might put their answer along with their photograph, a portrait photograph. Obviously there's a wide variety, but are there phrases, words that you hear over and over, especially if they surprised you, that you wouldn't expect that theme or that phrase, that word to come up a lot amongst a, a variety of people. What are people's answers like?
John Nolter: I mean, I think the stories that really grab my attention and the interviews that really resonate with me are. The people who are looking out not only for their own interest, but for the interest of others. You know, trying to establish a world that is interested in the common good.
You know, making sure that everybody has the ability to thrive. Making sure that even if my needs are met, that if my neighbor's needs are not met. My work is not quite done yet. My primary. Interest in these conversations about peace is that moment of tension. Very few of us are gonna be have a Mahatma Gandhi moment or a Dr. King moment where we get to lead in such a fashion. But on a day by day basis, we're constantly encountering moments of tension, difficult moments where we could make a choice to lean into conflict. Or we could make a choice to move towards healing, and we get that active opportunity to say, you know what?
There's a way that I can lower tensions here, or I think I'm gonna ratchet tensions up here at that moment of tension to say, you know what? Let's shift towards healing. Let's see what we can accomplish together. Let's see how we can find some way for this to be a win for everybody involved.
Andrew Stelzer: I have to turn the tables on you. I'm sure I'm not the first one to do this and ask you the question. You've asked so many people, what does peace mean to you?
John Noltner: Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. Um, and every time I'm asked that question, I answer a little bit differently, but in a nutshell, it's Dr. King's notion of a beloved community. People whose circles of compassion can expand beyond their own immediate needs to embrace and include everybody, making sure everybody has the resources that they need.
Available to 'em. That is sort of the guiding question of the project, but what becomes even more interesting to me is a follow-up question that I always ask, which is, well, when have you seen a great example of that kind of piece? Unfolding in the world in front of you. And I'll tell you for me, it was when I moved into this house that we sold when we bought a van and went on the road.
When we first moved into the house, a neighbor came up and said, Hey, you know we have a first Friday. Of the month gathering every month you should come and be a part of it. And I sort of, you know, I was busy and I don't know if I paid the attention he wanted and he, he looked at me, he goes, no, really, I want you to come and, and I'll tell you why.
He said, because someday your kids are gonna do something stupid. And I sort of chuckled. He goes, yeah, I don't know what it'll be. Maybe they'll ride their bike through my flowers or throw their baseball through my window, or whatever it is. There's a really good chance they're gonna do something stupid.
And when that happens, I don't want that to be the first time that I meet you. And I thought that was such a, such a brilliant approach to life, right? Because we know that conflict is gonna come. We know that things are gonna be difficult down the road, but what if we took the time to build a foundation of relationship before that?
What if we establish some level of trust and relationship with one another before the conflict happened as a proactive exercise in that way? When something bad happened, we've got a foundation and we've got some tools available to us to address it. So when I think about peace, I don't just think about negative peace, which is the absence of violence and crime and everything bad and ugly like that.
But it is the presence of. Positive piece, which is making intentional choices to cultivate an environment where everybody can thrive. And we have the tools available to us to navigate the difficult things that we encounter.
Andrew Stelzer: We're speaking with John Noltner about his project, A Piece of My Mind, and that project is focused on the United States.
A lot of people are pessimistic about the country, the future of the country. Can you give them any words of encouragement or words of wisdom? What are they not seeing? What are they going to see in the future? Uh, what's your advice?
John Noltner: Let me first say, I've got a friend named Joe Davis who's a spoken word artist, and he likes to say that we do best what we do most, which is to say that if we're not practiced at having conversations about race, we're probably gonna stumble a little bit.
If we're really not good at having political debate or practiced with it, we'll probably stumble a little bit. But if we do it more, if we exercise those muscles, if we practice those skills, we can get better. I think we need to commit to practicing some of those civic skills to reweave some of the social trust that has been frayed in our country.
The three point plan that I try to remember when I enter into all of these conversations, it's, it's this simple, but this hard really. The first is to, uh, listen deeply. Right, and that doesn't mean, think about the next thing you're gonna say. That means really be curious. Ask people, well what do you mean by that?
Or, help me understand that or tell me a little bit more. Practice. That process of listening deeply and really hearing what people say. The second part is. To be willing to challenge your own expectations. You know, every one of these conversations I go into, I kind of think it's gonna go this one way, but when I pay attention, it actually goes this different way.
That often surprises and challenges and stretches me a little bit. And then the third one is. To stay at the table. You know, we're we're inclined to cancel people or walk away or just ignore them if things get difficult. But look, most of these issues that we're dealing with as a country took a long time to develop, and they're probably gonna take quite a while to unravel and make better again.
But as long as we stay engaged and we stay at the table, there's some hope of us finding a path forward. But when we walk away from the table, that hope walks away with us. And so my final challenge to people, my final question to folks is when things get difficult, will you stay at the table?
HOST: That was correspondent Andrew Stelzer, speaking with John Noltner, the founder of a piece of my mind spelled P-E-A-C-E.
It is a multimedia arts project, incorporating portraits and personal stories designed to bridge divides and encourage dialogue. They have traveling exhibits and workshops which could be coming to a town near you. We'll link to the project website@peacetalksradio.com. I hope you'll join us in a moment for part two of our program.
Coming up, we'll be speaking with Margaret Randall, an intercultural publisher, writer, and activist who's been supporting feminist socialists and other revolutionary struggles for almost 70 years. Stay tuned after this break for correspondent Andra Stelzer. I'm Jessica Ticktin. Thanks for listening to and for supporting Peace Talks Radio.
(Music Break)
You are listening to Peace Talks Radio, the radio series and podcast on peacemaking and nonviolent conflict resolution. I'm Jessica Ticktin today with Correspondent Andrew Stelzer. This is the second half of a two-part program about artists building bridges of understanding in the pursuit of peace. In part one, we heard from John Noltner, a photographer who founded the multimedia project, A Peace of my mind.
He travels the country using images and words to put our humanity on display for one another. This time on Peace Talks Radio. Andrew speaks with the New Mexico based artist and activist Margaret Randall. Randall was an eyewitness to and participant in revolutionary movements in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua.
As a publisher, she provided exposure and connections to numerous authors just getting their start and her work. Translating poetry and other writing from Spanish to English served as a crucial cultural bridge. Here's Andrew Stelzer in conversation with Margaret Randall.
Andrew Stelzer: She's lived in several countries, talked poetry with Fidel Castro, and was deported from her nation of birth, the United States.
There's way too much to include in a snapshot biography of Margaret Randall. So when we began our conversation, I asked Randall how she identifies herself.
Margaret Randall: I am a poet, first of all, an oral historian, a writer. I've written some volumes of short stories, an essay. I am a US poet, although I lived for 23 years in Latin America.
First in Mexico, then in Cuba, then in Nicaragua, supposedly lost my citizenship when I married a Mexican. I took out Mexican citizenship in 1967 in order to just get a better job in Mexico. We had three kids by that time and so forth. And of course I thought the marriage would be forever. It wasn't. Uh, so when I wanted to come home, the government was able to use the fact that I had taken out Mexican citizenship to deny me my US citizenship and order me deported because of the content of some of my books. So I had to fight that case. I fought it with the help of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York who were wonderful. It took five years. I won the case in 89, and so now in my old age, I'm just writing full time and feeling very fortunate to be able to do that.
Andrew Stelzer: Would you consider yourself, are you a peace activist?
Margaret Randall: Of course, I'm a peace activist. I think, you know, if you're not a peace activist, shame on you.
Andrew Stelzer: Margaret Randall's activism has taken place in the streets, but more often it's on the pages of the book. She's published or written like interviews with Cuban women, testimonies of Nicaragua, women in struggle on feminism in Nicaragua, or the failure of 20th century revolutions to develop a feminist agenda, she produced Spanish and English translations.
Which served as a rare window into the lives and cultures of people who were being demonized by the US government and much of the English speaking press, giving voice to those forbidden subjects meant that even her books of poetry were often labeled as subversive. Randall's 2025 books, letters from the Edge and More Letters from the Edge are windows into her relationships with colleagues and collaborators.
Randall's clearly engaged deeply in both her art and her support of revolutionary movements. Through her letters, she describes a life that simultaneously feels like a joy, an inescapable passion, and a 24 hour a day job. There was just so much I could ask. Margaret Randall. I began our conversation with a question about how she's seen ideas spread and how they can change the world.
Over the years, you've spent a lot of time engaging in conversation with activists and other public intellectuals, uh, debating, refining arguments about strategy and movement structure and the meaning of history, connections to history, and I'm not sure that everyone, especially in the United States, understands how political discussion over long dinners or at bookshops and other small events are actually a crucial part of movements for change. Can you sort of unpack that a bit? Explain how people exchanging thoughts at intimate gatherings eventually filter their way down to hundreds of thousands or, or millions of people in some cases. How, how does that process work?
Margaret Randall: I think it works differently in different places and at different moments in time. In Mexico, my most profound experience was that with, that was during the student movement. In 1968, I worked closely with students in the school of Medicine at the University of Mexico. And, um, we met to discuss what we wanted, uh, what our demands of the government were, what was feasible, what we thought we could get, what we didn't think we could get, what needed to be prioritized. And um, then in Cuba, of course, I arrived there during the second decade of the revolution. So those who made the revolution had already had their major discussions and there was policy. By that time, Cuba had declared itself socialist, and so socialism was the sort of guiding force of the Cuban Revolution.
But things come up, you know, things come up in terms of what people need at a particular moment. Healthcare, education, working conditions. And so you know, those discussions are multilevel. Some of them, of course, take place in Cuba. They took place within the Communist party. I was not a member of that party, so I was not privy to those discussions, but I was privy to the discussions in the street and my neighborhood and my workplace.
And very often there's conflict. The government has decided, for example, that something's going to be a particular way. But people don't like that. They don't wanna go along with it. And so there's resistance, there's a questioning. And those discussions in Cuba, there was a very interesting way that happened because when new law was made in Cuba, projects of a particular law would be written by a committee given the task to do that.
A legal committee, a committee of lawyers. And party people. And then that rough draft would be sent down to the population at large. It was discussed in neighborhoods, in workplaces, in military units and schools, and we all had input. And that process would take perhaps a year for very important policy.
And then all of our suggestions for change and. And so forth would go up, would move up to that committee, and many of those changes would be incorporated, especially those that were favored by a large number of people. And then the final law would come out and it really felt as if everyone had input and everyone had.
An impact on that. And then I moved on to Nicaragua, and there again, it was different. But I've been involved in many such processes, including here in the United States after coming home. And they're all different. And they all depend on who's in power at the moment, who's making the laws, who's making the rules.
Andrew Stelzer: And when you were in Mexico, in Nicaragua, in Cuba. Those are not your native land, so to speak. You grew up in the United States, so how did you reconcile your role as someone who was an outsider? At some times you had privilege. What did you think you brought that was unique and what were the limitations of your involvement in those struggles?
Margaret Randall: Both. Both things were true. I mean, in Mexico, of course I was, to a certain degree, an outsider, but. Once I started participating in the Mexican student movement, I didn't really feel like an outsider. There were many people there from other parts of the world who were involved in that movement, and um, I think we felt very much accepted.
At least I can say that for myself. I had children who were going to school. I had a job. I was very much integrated into society. In Cuba, I suppose you could say I was an outsider, but I also f. Always felt quite accepted. I think one of the reasons I may have felt more accepted in these places than people who go for a month or a year is because I lived there for so long.
I lived in Mexico for eight years. I lived in Cuba for 11 years. I lived in Nicaragua for four years. You are an outsider. I, I'm not denying that. And certainly as somebody from the United States, I carry that shame that we, we carry in Latin America for being from a country that has. Imperialist policies and imperialist designs on the Latin American continent, but I also felt quite integrated, I must say.
You know, I think I was fortunate in that respect. I always felt that, um, in Cuba, for example, and in Nicaragua too, the revolutionary governments always emphasized the fact that one shouldn't confuse the American people with the American government. And so there was quite an effort to make us feel that we were part of what was going on there, the Vietnam War, the US War in Vietnam was a defining issue of my coming of age politically, and it was very, very different to be in Cuba during the last years of that war, to be in a place where over a thousand Vietnamese students were studying in Havana. And we interacted with them in the streets and they became our friends, and they told us what was going on back home and how their families were suffering and so forth.
Then to be in the United States where there was a tremendous protest movement, a movement that in fact, I think did a lot to help end that war, but the feeling was different.
Andrew Stelzer: And what about the role of art and artists? What is the role of art and what is the role of artists in creating social change?
Margaret Randall: You know, I'm, I'm not someone who thinks that art has to be political.
I don't like the term political poet. I don't let people call me a political poet. I think poetry can be about anything. I think art is. In and of itself, something very separate from a course of or even directional effort. But I think that given that we have tremendous examples in every country, in every language of art that is political and that has helped move movements forward.
And create change. We have people like Bertol, Bre, we have people like Ernesto Cardinal, great Nicaragua poet and Art in both Cuba and Nicaragua. And I would say Mexico too, although not so. Specifically stated by the government, but certainly in Cuba and Nicaragua. Art is highly valued and appreciated and facilitated and supported by the government artists in Cuba.
Were privileged. Um, you know, in times of great scarcity, artists were given paints and canvases and film and paper and typewriter ribbons. And in Nicaragua it, they went even further. The Sunni is, the real Sunni is of the 1980s. They paid people salaries for. Doing their art and not doing art for the government or for the revolution, but simply doing their art.
Art was considered necessary, as necessary as education or health. So the United States has a lot to learn from those countries. 'cause we don't really love artists here. I mean, I love artists. You may, but I. I feel that the US government has never been particularly appreciative of artists or has facilitated art for art's sake, but I would counter that by suggesting whether or not the US values it.
It appears they do fear it. We have examples like McCarthyism, which you sort of caught a tail end of when your citizenship was revoked, in part because of the political content of your writings. I think there are fewer and fewer people alive in the US who have firsthand experience with the targeting of free speech that went on during the Cold War.
For those who might not appreciate how restrictions on speech by an author or a poet. Really connect to the ability to peacefully organize.
Andrew Stelzer: Can you describe those connections and how that works?
Margaret Randall: Absolutely. I think it's very important that today in the United States, we remember McCarthyism, what it was like, how it took people's jobs.
It took people's lives, it took people's freedom, and certainly in terms of. Artists, filmmakers, writers, some of those people never recovered. But even after McCarthyism was put down in the United States, when McCarthyism ended, the chill remained. And the United States government has never stopped trying to influence people around the world, not just in the United States, but in the countries that it dominates.
To fall in line to support that point of view. When I experienced this, most directly was in Mexico. I was then married to a Mexican poet here at Hum, and he and I founded and for almost eight years, edited a bilingual poetry magazine called, and we were, you know, more and more progressive. We prided ourselves in publishing poems from.
All kinds of people, socialists, uh, Catholic priests, gorillas. They weren't necessarily political poems. Some of them were, some of them weren't. But we never made the person's ideology a requirement for our publishing or not publishing their work. So. It was surprising to me and I learned a lot when the Organization of American States, which is a, a political organization in Washington, that to which the member states belong, and almost all the countries in Latin America belong to it.
The organization of American States has a cultural wing called the Pan-American Union, and the head of the Pan-American Union wrote to us one day, wrote to our magazine. And, you know, in glowing terms, congratulating us for this wonderful magazine, which was by that time getting around the world and ordered 500 subscriptions to the magazine.
We were thrilled because we, you know, that would've paid for two or three issues coming issues. But then he said, the only thing is, there's just a small caveat. We don't want you to publish anything else from Cuba. We were publishing Cuban poets and it was important to us because in the United States, nobody knew what was going on in the Cuban Revolution, what kind of poetry their poets were writing, uh, what kind of art Cuba was producing.
And it was exciting and we provided that service. With our magazine. So of course we said, no, you know, we're not going to stump publishing Cubans. And of course they canceled the 500 subscriptions. There were many examples of that. That was a particular example that I experienced. But there were many examples of, uh, institutions in the United States, like the Voice of America or The Pan-American Union, or even the Guggenheim Foundation and others, other foundations that worked hard to seduce the best writers, the best artists to positions of support for the United States and against. Positions of independence. So when we talk about McCarthyism, the worst years, yes, were in the mid fifties, mid to late fifties, but it didn't stop with that.
Andrew Stelzer: And do you think governments are right to feel threatened by words, by art?
Margaret Randall: I pride myself in the fact that we're dangerous. We're dangerous in that we want peace. We're dangerous in that we are against war. We're dangerous in that we stand for values of diversity and caring for our fellow humans. And if a government is opposed to those values, we're very dangerous.
Andrew Stelzer: This is Peace Talks Radio. I'm Andrew Stelzer. I'm speaking with author, poet, academic and activist Margaret Randall, who's now in her eighth decade of working to bridge the divides that separate us. She's lived in Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, and is now back in the United States, and she's still publishing books and travels, often sharing her experiences and thoughts about how to make the world a safer and more peaceful place.
Back to our conversation now. You've witnessed, uh, some people's struggles that arguably, and you may argue, uh, this is not correct, incorporated some level of violence as one of their tools to make change. What is your view on the role of violence versus non-violence and how has it changed or evolved over the years?
Margaret Randall: Yeah, that's a good question and it has changed. Originally, I felt that if a movement tried, legal means. Uh, and let's take Cuba again as an example. Fidel Castro was of course, a lawyer and he tried electoral means. He tried legal means to change the Cuban society and was unsuccessful. So. Not being able to do it legally, not being able to do it peacefully.
He resorted to armed struggle, which of course is violence. But you know, you have to, I think it's important to remember that state violence is what produces its opposite, which is a violence struggle. And I was all for that and I still am in some situations, but one of the things I've learned over the years.
Is that if you have a movement for change that is constructed militarily, that is gonna. Bleed over into, if you win, that's gonna be ingrained in the new society. And so it's going to be vertical, it's not going to be horizontal, it's gonna be authoritarian, and I don't think it's gonna work in the way we hoped it would work.
So over the years I've become much. Less willing to support armed struggle unless it's a situation, for example, in Gaza today where, you know, there's no question the genocide is being committed against the people and they have to fight back. That's a different story. But I would hope that we can find, or that future generations, because we didn't find it.
My generation failed in that. But I, I'm hoping that younger people will find other ways to affect change through discussion, through means that are not violent. Because when you have violence. In the end, nobody really wins. Everyone suffers. On the other hand, we have very few, if any, examples in history where absolute pacifism has been the method through which liberation has been gained.
Perhaps India with Gandhi, it's the only one I can think of. So I think that state violence almost always requires a violent response.
Andrew Stelzer: Feminism and the role of women has been a long time focus of yours, particularly not just in Cuba, how to incorporate it into socialist revolutionary struggles. What do you think has and has not been accomplished in this regard, both through your work and through your lifetime and what you've seen?
Margaret Randall: It's a hard question to be hit with at the moment because. You know, we've struggled for years in this country to gain the right to abortion, women's right to over reproductive systems. So many things, you know, affirmative action. I could go on and on, and now they're all being torn apart and we're losing, um, when we've lost abortion, of course, and we're losing so much else, you know?
So it's very painful to see. I mean, I feel like. Our generation, we have to really analyze where we went wrong and where we misjudged the strength of the enemy because, um, we did misjudge that strength. I think we know a lot more now. I mean, we certainly know that. Or depending on our generation, I suppose we know what it's like to have abortion, which is safe and legal, and we know what it's like to have marriage equality.
We know what it's like to have affirmative action. We know what it's like to have one that the civil rights struggle in this country. But you know, as each generation succeeds, the last. The memory goes, the collective memory of all that. And I think that's one of the greatest risks and the greatest dangers right now, is that people are no longer gonna remember.
What it was like when books weren't censored, when abortion was free, when people's race was considered, when they made college applications and so forth and so on, you know, so if this new model of, um, neofascist regime that we're living under at the moment continues for another generation or so, people will not have that memory anymore.
Of what it was like to really be free and or to be partially free and to be able to struggle to have that space for struggle.
Andrew Stelzer: Well, one of the ways we do preserve that memory is through books and you've spent a lot of your life writing down what's going on in another part of the world and giving a platform to people who wouldn't be heard in the communities in which those books are often read, that could be Cuban women or women in Nicaragua, feminism in Latin America. You've talked about somebody called you a bridge between cultures. What has that role been like and also sort of being that bridge?
Margaret Randall: It came naturally to me, Andrew, because I, I had the privilege, certainly I feel it as a privilege to have lived in places where social change was high on the agenda, so I had a certain understanding of what was going on in those places at those times, and yet I also had an understanding of the background of somebody from my country, from the United States for whom socialism was very unfamiliar, was a dirty word, and so forth. And so I felt that I could be that bridge. I could explain to both sides. I could explain to people in Cuba how people in the United States thought and felt, and I could explain to people in the United States what was really going on in Cuba at a time when there was no news or the news was distorted.
So it came naturally to me and I, it has been a part of what I've written, of the books I've written and, um, I feel fortunate that I was able to do that.
Andrew Stelzer: You are publishing two books of correspondences between you and some of your friends and comrades over the years. So much of what you've published through your lifetime is in the goal of aiding people's movements and helping people understand the world around them and what's going on in another part of the world.
How are your letters and your correspondences serving these needs both of people who want a good read but also are aching for justice and wanting to read something that that moves them forward and and helps them understand how to do so. How do books of letters do that?
Andrew Stelzer: So because they're not written for posterity, they may not be as polished as essays or other literary genres, but they're very spontaneous and they're authentic in that respect, and I think that that is their value.
All of these people were enormously creative, or are enormously creative, and they're very astute observers, participant observers of society during their lifetimes. So. I think that lends them a quality that you don't always find in other genres. I've also just finished a book that is also letters, but very different.
It's not correspondences between myself and somebody else. It's a compendium of the letters that were written to El Cord Plum. The literary magazine that I edited in the sixties out of Mexico City Poets wrote to us from all over the world. Poets mostly occasionally. Graphic artists and also readers, people who just read the magazine and had and made a comment, or, these letters are fascinating from a completely different point of view.
They, uh, really paint a picture of an era, a decade from the viewpoint of poets of creative people. Many of them are very well known today and many of them completely are known who. We actually discovered, or in some cases, published for the first time, how they started out, what they sounded like, what they were concerned with when they were in their twenties.
So that book will be out. It's going to be called Le Letters That Breathe Fire.
HOST: That was correspondent Andrew Stelzer speaking with author and activist Margaret Randall. Randall's. Two books of letters titled Letters From the Edge and More Letters From the Edge are published by New Village Press. We'll link to them on our website, peace Talks radio.com.
In part one, we featured John Noltner who founded the multimedia project, A Peace of My Mind. To learn more about this program, go to peace talks radio.com and look for a season 23, episode seven. That's where you can hear all the programs in our series dating back to 2002. See photos of our guests, read and share transcripts.
It's also where you can sign up for our podcast, and importantly, where you can make a donation to keep this program going into the future. Support comes from listeners like you. As well as the Albuquerque Community Foundation Ties Fund and KUNM at the University of New Mexico. Nola Daves Moses is our executive director, Addie Adelman, composed and performs the theme music. For correspondent Andrew Stelzer, co-founders Paul Ingles and Suzanne Kryder, I'm Jessica Ticktin. Thanks so much for listening to and for supporting Peace Talks Radio.
