- E' un esempio di cinema-verità, rappresenta uno spaccato della nuova cinematografia africana, porta in scena un tema.
- Yohannes Abraham, Chief of Staff of the White House Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs.
Liberty on Ice, Ben Ponté, Oil and mixed media on paper, 2015, 25” x 30”. Cb01.uno ex cineblog01 è Gratis! Nessuna registrazione è richiesta. Commentate i film loggandovi con Facebook, Twitter, Google o Disqus. Em caso de mensagem de erro referente ao Smart Card, é necessário seguir alguns procedimentos: retire o Smart Card e insira novamente, desligue o decodificador.
Interviews archive at Tadias Magazine Physician and author Abraham Verghese. From fascinating social and political portraits of Ethiopia in upheaval, Cutting for Stone zooms into a territory where few have gone before: the drama of the operating theater and the mysteries inside the human body. There can be no doubt that this novel is the work of a seasoned writer who has led many lives in many places. Time and again, Dr. Verghese has dipped heavily into his own life for furnishing the material for his writing. Later, in The Tennis Partner: A Story of Friendship and Loss, he described a beloved friend’s struggle with drug addiction, rendering a poetic, raw tribute to male friendships.
In his latest book and first novel, Cutting for Stone, the protagonist is a young doctor, raised in Ethiopia, who seeks his fortune in America. Verghese’s own career as a physician in the United States has taken him from his grueling days as a foreign medical graduate (recounted in The New Yorker article, The Cowpath to America) to becoming the voice of empathetic medicine. As founding director of Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics at the University of Texas and in his current role as a senior professor at Stanford University, Dr. Verghese is a champion in the field of Medical Humanities.
He is passionate about bedside medicine and physical examination and values the human element that these rituals bring to the facelessness of modern medicine. In an exclusive interview, Tadias Magazine spoke with Abraham Verghese about writing, medicine, the healthcare crisis, and how to lead double lives. Abraham Verghese (photo by Joanne Chan)Can you begin by telling us a bit about all the different places that are a part of you? Film Noir Movies The Case For Christ (2017) on this page. My identification with place is complicated. Ethnically, I feel very much Indian. My parents are Indian and I feel very conscious of their legacy, But countrywise, I strongly identify with Ethiopia, having grown up there.
And then of course, America is the place that welcomes everybody. So this is home unequivocally, and I am very proud to be American. So there are all these different threads that run through my life. I remember the passage in the book where Hema speaks of Addis as an evolving city whereas Madras seems to have finished evolving.
Was that something that struck you as a primary difference between both places? Yes, when I went to India and lived in Madras, that was one of the things that struck me about the city. Traditions and ways of life were very established in Madras whereas so much was in transition in Addis. And then when I came to America, it was very different again. There’s a scene later in the book where Marion arrives in America and feels completely unprepared for the scale and scope of America. You also show how, even through its upheavals, Addis was a cosmopolitan city of the twentieth century. You help the reader picture the different peoples who had congregated in Addis.
Can you give us a sense of your relationship with Addis? I don’t have any family in Addis but I do have friends there and I have strong connections to the medical world in Ethiopia. Also, the present Prime Minister of Ethiopia was a medical student one year behind me. When civil war broke out and the military took over the medical school, he became a guerilla fighter and I left. So I have been back twice – once to do an interview with him for a magazine and the other time for a medical symposium. Could you tell us something about your writing process? You must have drawn a lot on your memories of growing up in Ethiopia but it is also clear you did a lot of research on Ethiopian history and politics.
I think the research happens in parallel with the writing. I was consciously trying to learn more about the Italian time in Ethiopia because it was a very colorful legacy. Every colonial power leaves their stamp on their country and we are very familiar with the English stamp on India or the French stamp on Cameroon but the Italian stamp on Ethiopia is not very well- known.
So I spent a lot of time on that. But the research was in parallel with the writing because as I wrote I would stumble on something that I needed to know more about and so that would set me off in another direction. One of the great joys of research is that you find unexpected things in unexpected places. You are looking for one article but you find another right next to it that leads you to include something you might never have otherwise written about. There’s a lot of serendipity. Elsewhere you talked about the incremental method of writing in which you write a little bit everyday.
I think I was talking about the incremental method of doing anything. If you do a little of something every day, you gradually get better at it. Instead of finding great blocks of time, you just have to find a little time every day. So do you have a daily writing practice? Not really. I write whenever I can and sometimes it winds up being everyday for several days at a stretch of time but sometimes I cannot get to it every day.
I also heard that you have a room on the campus, something like a secret bunker, where you can go and write. Tell me it is true and not a legend. No, it is true. When I took this position I negotiated for a second office, separate from the student- related, that I could disappear into. And you also negotiated two days a week to write. Well, everybody here has protected time to do their research and so during my protected time, instead of going to a lab and doing experiments, I go to my lab and conduct my kind of experiments. In fiction, nonfiction. In any kind of writing, really.
How important is it as a writer to have a place for writing? I actually don’t think it is very important. I think people make much too much of having a place and how it has to be just right.
I can actually write anywhere and often do. The most important thing when you are trying to write is to simply sit down and try to write, it doesn’t matter where. If you are waiting for the right environment before you can write, then you are probably not prepared to write.
What would you say is the unlikeliest place that you have written in?(Laughs) Probably airports. Everyone’s waiting to take off and frustrated that we are late or whatever and I am barely aware that anything is going on. Pico Iyer talks about airports as the ultimate postmodern metropolis. He probably gets a lot of writing done in airports as well. I am not surprised.
He travels a whole lot more than I do. In fact, in his book Global Soul, he talks about a new generation of transnationals who belong to so many cultures that they belong to nowhere. He calls them Nowherians, or fulltime citizens of nowhere. Do you think you are a global soul? I feel I am not completely a global soul. I have sequential interactions with different countries and even within the US, I have steadily migrated from Tennessee to Iowa to Texas to California now. I hope this is the last stop.
I hope I am not destined to go to Guam and Hawaii! But even when our migrations are sequential, our memories are not, right?
Yes, very true. They are seamless and overlapping and the only constant is you. You are the only one linking the different places. Movie Dvd Armed Response (2017).
There is that beautiful passage in the book where you talk about how listening to Tizita takes the narrator right back to Ethiopia, whether he is in Adams Morgan or in Khartoum. Yes, music is so mysterious that way in its connection to the brain and its ability to transform us. We all probably have a song that can transport us back to a different part of our life. And it is very difficult to make that song come alive for someone else us.
I could not bring the song to the reader but I could try to bring that sense of identification, the nostalgia that it evoked. And of course, that song . I worried a great deal about whether I could pull it off. But we all have our tizitas, our songs of some kind. To get back to the subject of medicine and writing.