Manifesto for Another World

Voices from Beyond the Dark

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by Ariel Dorfman

Seven Stories Press

Due/Published March 2004, 160 pages, paper

ISBN 1583225633

In this interlocking prose web of first-person testimony, novelist, poet, and playwright Ariel Dorfman relates the struggles of fifty human rights activists hailing from more than forty countries. Manifesto for Another World features the words and struggles of internationally celebrated activists including Vaclav Havel, Baltasar Garzón, Helen Prejean, and Marian Wright Edelman; and Nobel Prize Laureates the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Elie Wiesel, Oscar Arias Sánchez, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, José Ramos-Horta, and Bobby Muller. Equally moving are the stories of more than thirty others, unknown and (as yet) unsung beyond their national boundaries: Kailash Satyarthi, who has spent a lifetime working to free tens of thousands of victims of child labor in his native India: Juliana Dogbadzi, who was sold into sexual slavery by her parents at age twelve, escaped after seventeen degrading years and now is devoted to the liberation of African girls bound in the same terror. From their ranging voices Dorfman culls the message: freedom from persecution, and freedom of opportunity, for all. Manifesto for Another World is both a political testament and a work of art.

(When Manifesto for Another World was adapted for the stage in September 2000 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. (with the title "Voices From Beyond the Dark," based on the book Speak Truth to Power by prominent American human rights lawyer Kerry Kennedy Cuomo), the reception was electric. A packed house gave a fifteen-minute ovation for the all-star cast: Alec Baldwin, Hector Elizondo, Giancarlo Esposito, Kevin Kline, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, John Malkovich, Rita Moreno, Sigourney Weaver, and Alfre Woodard.)