Rooke's Acceptance Speech:
"Only connect"-these are the words the great English writer E.M. Forster used as the epigraph for his 1910 novel Howard's End. "Only connect"-words that state very precisely and with great yearning the theme of Forster's novel: IF only we could connect... I'd like to quote for you, if I may, the passage from Howard's End from which these words are taken. (Margaret Schlegel, a romantic, has just decided to marry Henry Wilcox, a pragmatic businessman):
She might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion... It did not seem so difficult... She would only point out to him the salvation that was latent in his soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
These two words - only connect! - may be uttered with hope (as here in Forster's text, on the eve of a marriage that is not, as it turns out, a shining success) or with something close to despair. It OUGHT to be easy, but it doesn't seem to be. Only connect! These words encapsulate perfectly - on every scale from the personal to the global, and for issue after issue, in every sphere of human endeavour - the crux of it all, with failure or success hanging in the balance. Forster's two small words (plus an exclamation point!) acknowledge in a cry from the heart that the answers to the world's problems rest with us, with our ability to connect.
I believe this too. I have had a profoundly satisfying career in part because I believe (with both the prose AND the passion in me) in the power of literature to connect us, to teach us empathy, to help us walk in another person's shoes, to see with another person's eyes. I believe - despite our ongoing, manifold, terrible failures to connect, to understand, to change our ways - that literature does great good in the world, and that without it we would be truly lost.
In my career, I've had the great good luck of thinking about literature, and working on behalf of it, from multiple perspectives: as teacher, writer, critic, editor, anthologist, administrator, and activist. And the connections between these activities have been hugely important for me, each kind of work helping me, I believe, to perform the others more effectively and with a more open heart.
I am deeply honoured to be a recipient of the Gjenima Prize. That it comes from The Society of Albanian-American Writers delights me more than I can say. Your hyphen is in fact my anthem, "Only connect!" - an essential link in the rainbow bridge that literature helps to forge, that crosses language groups and nations, and that must span the world. And as for the Society of Writers, it seems to me there is none better. Thank you so much for the award, for having me here this evening, and for the pleasure of your company.
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