Art as Advocacy: A Conversation with Rose Styron
By Madeleine Schwartz
“One second,” Rose Styron tells me. “I just have to call Carlos Fuentes.” Telephone conversations with the world’s most famous writers are nothing new for Styron, a fellow at the IOP this spring. As a founding member of Amnesty International USA, the human rights activist and poet has spent the past forty years campaigning with fellow artists to help fellow humans. The list of her friends and familiar colleagues reads like a roster of the century’s most famous artistic personalities: Philip Roth, Mia Farrow, Frank McCourt. “Sting,” she says, is a good friend.”
The activist’s artistic posse is no coincidence—for Styron, art should be political. Art, she believes, has the power to elucidate social and political situations, both in their work itself and in their daily life. “Artists,” she says, “have an obligation to society to use their empathy, talent, and ingenuity in any way they can to protect citizen integrity.”
Styron’s own work follows such a model. Styron spent the first part of her career as a poet, immersed in American literary circles alongside her late husband William Styron, author of the novels Sophie’s Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner. While Rose Styron had been active in politics and aided several presidential campaigns, her focus had been on her writing. “I was a poet,” she says.
But this focus began to shift at a writer’s conference in Russia in the late sixties. “There, I met a number of citizens… who had been exiled and tortured,” says Styron. “They told me their stories and they gave me manuscripts to bring back. But when I went to Washington, no one was a bit interested.” Determined to get the stories out, Styron joined the incipient American branch of Amnesty. “I devoted the next 20 years doing human rights,” says Styron.
Styron traveled the world on Amnesty’s behalf. Sent to Chile after Commander-in-Chief Augusto Pinochet’s coup to find supporters of ousted president Salvador Allende who had “disappeared” under the new regime, Styron feigned a family vacation and scoured the country. “We played cat and mouse with the police trying to get information,” she says.
The trip, as Styron describes it, was an adventure worthy of a spy thriller. In order to obtain reports from wives of missing husbands, Styron set-up an elaborate game of catch. “We were in a swimming pool, playing with a red beach ball. [The women] knew us that way. When they were close to me in the pool they would give information.”
To be sure, artists do not need to go on missions make an impact. “My artist friends, whether they are writers or painters or photographers or musicians have depth and insight into the human condition.
I think they have the talent to persuade through the senses,” she says. “Although they may not go into government where they would act more directly, they can sway government leaders through their writing or visual art.”
Art as advocacy can take several forms. “It doesn’t have to be strictly political,” Styron says. She points to the ways that the guests in her study group, “Art and Politics,” have each created for a cause. “In his novels, Ward Just reveals or comments on politics through character… [poet] Jorie Graham talks about climate change both subtly through poetry and publicly in speeches,” Styron says.
But no matter the method, Styron believes that the arts and politics must be linked in order to effect change. “If [artists] can bring their talents to bear on a society where tyranny or suppression or lack of freedom is rampant I think it is their duty to do it,” she says.