May 31, 2006

O Pioneer

Charles McGrath interviews John Updike over at the New York Times about his new novel, Terrorist. A snippet:

[Updike] went on: "I think I felt I could understand the animosity and hatred which an Islamic believer would have for our system. Nobody's trying to see it from that point of view. I guess I have stuck my neck out here in a number of ways, but that's what writers are for, maybe."

Hmm. Yeah. Nobody. Except for Salman Rushdie (Shalimar the Clown), Nadeem Aslam (Maps for Lost Lovers), Slimane Benaissa (The Last Night of A Damned Soul), Alaa Al-Aswany (The Yacoubian Building), and half of contemporary Algerian novelists.

Ordinary Man Trouble

The Kigali New Times reports of concerns about An Ordinary Man, the memoir by Paul Rusesabagina (of Hotel Rwanda fame). Linda Melvern, an independent researcher into the genocide claims that the version of events described in the book "seems to deviate from the facts as I have researched them." You can read more about it here.

Hay Highlights

The Guardian Hay Festival opened last Friday--some interesting stuff, which you can read about in almost real time on their 'Culture Vulture' blog.

"Jawaan Nazneen"

My short story "A Nice Young Man," which appeared in Pindeldyboz, has been translated into Farsi by Asad Amraee, and published in Atiye Weekly Magazine. I can't read the piece, obviously, but Farsi uses Arabic characters, so I can understand a few words here and there. Any readers out there who are fluent in Farsi? Let me know what you think.

May 30, 2006

Meg Mullins' The Rug Merchant

My review of Meg Mullins' The Rug Merchant appeared in the Washington Post Book World this past weekend. Here's an excerpt:

The Rug Merchant is based on a short story by the same name that appeared in the Iowa Review and was later anthologized in Best American Short Stories (2002). The delicate, subtle style that highlighted that work can frequently be found in the novel. But the long form also reveals shortcomings in the consistency of the narrator's voice. In addition, Mullins appears to have trouble creating full lives for her characters. Although we hear that Ushman has a successful business, we never see him interact with any clients except Mrs. Roberts. He never chats with a neighbor, doesn't meet any friends, doesn't have any employees. Indeed, the only relationships he appears to have are those that serve the plot.

The Rug Merchant chronicles one man's relationship with two very different women -- one a friend, the other a lover -- and the more successful rendering is the least romantic. Ushman's friendship with Mrs. Roberts reveals a darker and affecting side to both of them, a touch that remains missing from the love affair with Stella. This imbalance makes the world that Mullins has created engaging, but not fully rewarding.

You can read it in full here.

LBC Says: Read This!

This week, the Lit Blog Co-Op will be discussing its spring 2006 Read This! selection, Television, by Jean-Phillippe Toussaint, translated from the French by Jordan Stump. Check it out.

Persepolis, Le Film

Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoir Persepolis is being made into a film by Sony, and is due out in 2007. Satrapi herself will direct it, along with Vincent Paronnaud.

(via.)

Indigènes Win

I mentioned last week Rachid Bouchareb's new film, Indigènes, which is about a little known chapter of history: That (Muslim) soldiers from the French colonies were sent to fight the Nazis. It's a subject that's near to my heart, because my grandfather was part of the Tirailleurs Marocains, so I am dying to see the movie. I just heard that the ensemble cast (Jamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem, Sami Bouajila, and Samy Naceri) has won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. The film doesn't have a U.S. distributor yet, but one hopes that the attention at Cannes will help get it to theatres here.
I'd like to read Elaine Sciolino's interview with Jamel Debbouze in the NYT, but it's hidden behind a subscription wall. Can someone send it to me? Thanks, A. Here's a snippet:

He achieved international recognition with the 2001 film "Amélie," in which he played Lucien, a stammering grocer's assistant. In "Astérix and Obélix: Mission Cleopatra" the next year, Mr. Debbouze played an incompetent Egyptian architect who never made his deadlines and put doors near ceilings, justifying them by saying, "In case you ever want to build a second floor." That role earned him $2.7 million,
making him one of France's top-grossing actors. Now only Gérard Depardieu commands a higher salary per film.

He credits his mother, who rose every morning at 4 and held down back-to-back jobs to help support him and his five siblings, for his success.

"In everything that's black, she sees rose, yellow, green," he said. His mother, a Muslim, wears a headscarf in public.

When he told his father, now a retired sweeper in the Métro, that he wanted to be a comedian, he said his father replied, "That's for drug addicts and homosexuals." After a pause, Mr. Debbouze smiled and added, "But he calmed down when I gave him his first Mercedes."

Mr. Debbouze resents that he is given such labels as "the prince of the housing projects" or the "Arab with attitude."

"They categorize us always as 'actors of Moroccan origin,'" he said. "I am not an 'actor of Moroccan origin.' I am an actor."

I'm not sure why we needed to hear about his mother's headscarf, but oh wait, it is the NYT, after all.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

I have been following the excellent coverage at The Arabist of all the pro-reform demonstrations in Egypt, where activists are being beaten, tortured, and sodomized. It's utterly revolting stuff, and though it's not new to Mubarak's regime, the sheer magnitude of the arrests would seem to indicate that the country is on the brink of an implosion.

There's also a worthwhile opinion piece by novelist Ahdaf Soueif in the Guardian 'Comment Is Free' blog:

But Egypt has been teetering for years on the edge of chaos. The process of development the country has been subjected to for the last 30 years is now affecting the life of every citizen. Cairo has unacceptable levels of pollution; the haphazard slums that have sprung up have no access to clean water. For the first time in history Egyptians are undernourished. Cancer, respiratory disease and hepatitis C run rampant - said to be caused by suspect agricultural pesticides and other chemical imports. Unemployment sits at 12%. A nation that's been rooted in its land for six millennia is queueing at every embassy's immigration counter. Education has become a farce; so has healthcare. The gap between rich and poor yawns obscenely and the middle classes have vanished into it. And most of this is avoidable - if the country were run in the interests of its people, by a government accountable to the people and governed by the law and the constitution. This is what the reform movement is about.

The fact that Egypt has not yet collapsed is largely because of values that are entrenched in the Egyptian way of life: patience, compromise and solidarity. But now matters are coming to a head: a fault line is being created between Egyptian Copts and Egyptian Muslims, and there is official negligence and corruption. The situation becomes more and more unsettling.

Egypt, of course, is a top recipient of U.S. aid. Democracy is on the march, I tell you.

May 25, 2006

Giveaway: The Attack

This week, I'm giving away a copy of Yasmina Khadra's The Attack, translated by John Cullen. The novel is about a Palestinian-Israeli surgeon named Amin Jaafari, who is on duty when victims of a suicide bombing are brought in to the emergency room. Among the dead and dismembered, he discovers the body of his wife, and learns that she played a crucial role in the attack. The book has received two reviews in the New York Times, one by Janet Maslin, the other by Lorraine Adams, and is sure to get more attention from the media. For my money, though, the best review I've read of Khadra's work appeared a couple of years ago in the London Review of Books. Check it out.

The third person to correctly answer this question gets the book: What is Yasmina Khadra's real name? Please use the subject line "The Attack" in your email. And please include your street address. Previous winners excluded. Update: The winner is Richard G. from Brooklyn, New York.

Hekeh Niswan

I could have sworn this had already been done, but maybe I'm mistaken: The Vagina Monologues has been staged in Arabic by Lebanese playwright Lina Khoury. You can listen to an interview with her on NPR.

For Book Geeks

Earlier this week, Powell's unveiled its special summer promotion: a series of collectible author trading cards. There are sixteen in all. Number 1 is Aimee Bender, 2 is John Berendt, 3 is Billy Collins. The others will be announced daily, on the Powell's blog. I wonder who lucky number 7 will be...

Lies, Lies, and More Lies

Remember the babies-out-of-incubators stories that came out of Kuwait back in 1991? Or, for that matter, the reports in 2002 that Iraq was buying yellowcake uranium from Niger? Well, you can safely put that whole piece by Amir Taheri about Jews in Iran being forced to wear yellow insignia into that same folder labeled "Lies to Sell the War." What's fascinating to me is that Dan Rather was forced to quit CBS because of poor journalism, but odds are that Amir Taheri will continue to write for places like the Wall Street Journal or to appear on CNN. And he hasn't even issued a retraction.

Ruland on O'Brien

Jim Ruland has a piece about Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman on NPR. He describes the novel's tortuous history, and talks to its publisher as well as to a local bookseller about its newfound success.

Danticat on Immigration Protests

Novelist and short-story writer Edwidge Danticat contributes an opinion piece to The Progressive about the immigration protests of last month, and what they say about our society:

At the heart of these protests is also the obligation of a country that needs, yet despises, those who comprise a large percentage of its fundamental workforce. Should we desire in our midst a group of people only when they’re willing to do for less pay the work that our own citizens find too grueling, too demeaning, or too hazardous? The moral question aside, what does it say about our own societal structure that we cannot within our own borders make these jobs more appealing and more humane for our own citizens?

The bottom line is we’d like our immigrants to be disposable, to work when we need them, then disappear when we don’t.

Please read it all here.

May 24, 2006

RAWI Award

RAWI, the association of Arab-American writers, has announced the winners of its 2006 Literary Prose Competition. They are: Barbara Bedway for "The Hungers of the World," Patricia Sarrafian Ward for "Remember," and Nada Sneige Fuleihan for "Photo Opportunity."

New LRB

In latest issue of the London Review of Books, Daniel Soar suggests a wholly novel way of looking at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's letter to George W. Bush: arrange it alphabetically.

[The letter] addresses various specific issues – Iraq, Guantanamo, American double standards over human rights abuses – but more generally tries to appeal to a shared religious sense. That attempt was bound to fail, but what Ahmadinejad does share with Bush is a way with grand concepts. To avoid being confused by the letter’s unfamiliar catechistic structure, it helps to arrange its four thousand translated words in alphabetical order, which makes the whole thing read more straightforwardly. There’s a certain amount of fiery grandiloquence (‘abandon abduction abide ablaze’), but there are also moments of telegraphic irony (‘administration’s advised advocated affairs affected Afghanistan’) and moments of pathos (‘forcing foreign forgiveness’). An alphabeticised Bush also comes across much more poetically than the one we’re used to: in January’s State of the Union address his mention of ‘faithful faithful fallen fallen falling Fallujah’ was remarkably to the point. It isn’t so clear what he meant when he said ‘eliminate elite embryos’. Was this evidence of new thinking on Roe v. Wade?

Also check out Nicholas Spice's review of Philip Roth's new novel.

Funny Mom

The New York Times features a profile of a Muslim woman...and she's not veiled! And she works! And her husband's a stay-at-home dad to their two kids! Oh, but wait. They have the profile because she's just won Nick at Nite's 'Funniest Mom in America' contest.

BR 31:3

The May/June issue of the Boston Review is now out, and portions of it are available freely online.

May 23, 2006

Thomson Interview

I bookmarked Maud Newton's interview with Rupert Thomson yesterday and now that the house is empty and I'm alone, I finally sat down and read it. I loved reading Thomson's insights about his writing process:

I tend to write at least six entire drafts of a book, and sometimes as many as twelve. By a draft, I mean writing the book from beginning to end, no matter how long that takes. I will often go back and forwards as well, within a single draft. By the time I reach the third or fourth draft, I have a good idea of the final shape of the book, but I still might not have found that extra level that’s crucial if the book is to have the depth I want it to have. The best novels are like cities built on cities built on cities. Once you start digging, there’s no end to what you can discover.

The actual writing process feels a lot like sculpture. I start with something amorphous and vague — the equivalent of a piece of wood or marble — and do my best to find out what it’s supposed to be.

I feel like screaming, "I'm not alone! I'm not alone!"

'An Inconvenient Truth'

Over the last few days, I've been getting links about "An Inconvenient Truth," Davis Guggenheim's documentary about Al Gore's attempts to bring attention to global warming. I might not have paid too much attention, precisely because of the fact that the film is about a potential presidential candidate, but I have heard very very good things about it, so I do look forward to seeing it. Here is the trailer.

There is also a companion book by Al Gore, also titled An Inconvenient Truth, which Michiko Kakutani reviews in today's NYT:

Fourteen years ago, during the 1992 campaign, the current president's father, George Herbert Walker Bush, dismissed Mr. Gore as "Ozone Man" — if the Clinton-Gore ticket were elected, he suggested, "we'll be up to our neck in owls and out of work for every American" — but with the emerging consensus on global warming today, Mr. Gore's passionate warnings about climate change seem increasingly prescient. He has revived the slide presentation about global warming that he first began giving in 1990 and taken that slide show on the road, and he has now turned that presentation into a book and a documentary film, both called "An Inconvenient Truth."

Read the rest here.

EWN Talks To Translators

Dan Wickett's latest e-panel features literary translators C.M Mayo, Jordan Stump, Liz Stump, Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough, Laura Wideburg, and Linda Coverdale.

Another Day in the Forgotten Conflict

AP writer Scheherezade Faramarzi files a report about Western Sahara, specifically the case of one woman who has changed camps, from Polisario to Morocco, and the reaction of those she left behind. The article is largely favorable to the Moroccan point of view.

May 22, 2006

Imperialism: OK for Some

God save us from the "experts" on "Islam." In the latest example of the kind of spurious scholarship that is being widely distributed in Washington, Edward Luttwak, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, announces that much of what people know about Islam "happens to be untrue," and so he has taken it upon himself to correct them, by striking down what he considers to be myths about tolerance in Islam. Luttwak quotes the usual pseudo-research into the topic, so it's hardly worth anyone's time, but what strikes me with this latest Islamophobic rant (published in The Sun) is that it ends with a ringing endorsement of King Leopold.

Even a suicide bomber who kills only innocent babies can rightly claim that insofar as he contributes to the ultimate victory of Islam, he will ultimately save many more babies from eternal suffering, giving them paradise instead, complete with virginal black-eyed beauties, if they are males. It is enough to make one nostalgic for the imperialist freebooters of the West, down to King Leopold I of Belgium: They only wanted loot, not to force salvation on their victims.

Excuse me? To call King Leopold a "freebooter" is obscene. Never mind the rubber and ivory he stole from the Congo. The man killed, depending on the source, between 5 and 15 million people and is responsible for the worst genocide in recent human history. As for the contention that he did all of this without the cover of wanting to save the natives, it's quite simply ignorant. Leopold's efforts were clearly part of the mission civilisatrice, which deemed that imperialism was acceptable so long as the natives were civilised, by which it was meant they would be Christianized. And by the way, Luttwak: It's King Leopold II, not Leopold I.

Last week, a professor at the University of Illinois was wondering whether he should stop teaching Heart of Darkness. I would suggest he hold special classes for someone like Luttwak.

Department of WTF

John Malkovich will play David Lurie in the film adaptation of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace. Why, oh why? He will completely ruin it.

(via)

Ngugi Back in Kenya

Ngugi wa Thiongo is back in Kenya, to attend the trial of the thugs who attacked him in 2004, and to launch his new book, Murogi wa Kigogo. It's written in Gikuyu and I'm not sure if an English translation is planned, and the English translation, by Ngugi himself, is due out from Pantheon in August, under the title Wizard of the Crow.

(Thanks to Kyle B. for the info.)

New Ali

I'm very interested to read Monica Ali's new novel, Alentejo Blue, which comes out in the United States next month. The Guardian already has a review, and the chief complaint seems to be that this book is not Brick Lane--not the same voice, not the same 'colorful' characters, not the same structure, etc.

All the characters bow off too hurriedly, little sketches that never get fleshed out, people glimpsed from a train that is moving too quickly through a strange landscape. Even if you enjoy the ride, you can't help wishing that Monica Ali had chosen to write about somewhere she knew better, or wanted to know better.

As I was reading the piece, I kept waiting for the appearance of the word "inauthentic"--the word that seems to be the sole criterion by which Ali's work is judged.

Alvarez Interview

Julia Alvarez, whose new novel Saving the World came out last month, is interviewed by Robert Birnbaum for Identity Theory.

May 19, 2006

Quotable

From The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene:

I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income-tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead; one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come, the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward; the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

With the novel I'm writing now, I feel like I'm well into the stage where the characters have begun to live, and of course there's a lot of pleasure in this. But I still struggle with the fear that grips me whenever I sit down to write, the fear that I won't be able to move forward. So it's always nice to remember--or at least to hope--that the subconscious is always at work, and that progress may be right around the corner.

'Stranger in a Strange Land'

The Guardian has an excerpt from Gary Younge's forthcoming book, Stranger in a Strange Land that's very much worth a read. The book chronicles his arrival in America a couple of years after 9/11, and the work he did covering American political life. Right-wing conservatives, he writes, "badgered me as though their own reference points represented the sole prism through which global events could possibly be understood. As if the struggle for moral superiority between Europe and the US could have any relevance to someone whose ancestors were brought to the Americas as slaves and whose parents and grandparents lived through the war under European colonisation. 'If it wasn't for us, you would be speaking German,' they would say. 'No, if it wasn't for you,' I would tell them, 'I would probably be speaking Yoruba.'"

Mubarak's Democracy

The Arabist has posted pictures from one of the many demonstrations in Cairo in favor of an independent judiciary. Mubarak's police is shown at work, beating up peaceful demonstrators.

May 18, 2006

Barrada Interview

There is a very cool interview with Moroccan photographer Yto Barrada at openDemocracy. Over the last five years, Barrada's work has centered around the question of borders and migration, particularly from Morocco to Spain. You can also listen to the interview here. Highly recommended.

Yto Barrada's "The Strait Project: A Life Full of Holes" is currently on display at the Kitchen in New York (only until May 20, so hurry and see it while you can!)

(Photo: Yto Barrada.)

On Teaching Heart of Darkness

Over at the Chronicle, Lennard Davis asks: Should one keep on teaching Heart of Darkness, despite its obvious racism? Davis first read the book in high school, where it was interpreted as "a kind of existential journey." In Edward Said's class at Columbia, Davis came to see the book as "a stinging indictment of the callous and genocidal treatment of the Africans." Under a feminist teacher, Davis's eyes were opened to the "male world that kept women in the dark" about inhuman practices in the colonies. Later, with Chinua Achebe's famous denouncement, he saw the novella as "hopelessly Eurocentric." But his black students' reluctance to read the work leads Davis to wonder:

But my latest learning experience has taught me that this text, which has been mined for so much meaning and inspiration, perhaps needs to be discarded. I can't underline that point, because the lesson isn't on the page but in the brain and heart.

As a culture, we have granted certain books immortality and permit them to teach us new lessons across the ages. We've given that privilege to the works of Homer, Shakespeare, Shelley (Mary), Defoe, Swift, Austen, Dickens, Flaubert, and more recently Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Silko, and others. But we can rescind that immortality and consign certain books to the back shelves of our consciousness.

This argument keeps cropping up every once in a while: that Heart of Darkness is obsolete because its views on race are retrograde. In my opinion, reading the text with a historical eye is a very useful exercise in how imperialism needs ethnocentrism in order to succeed. Conrad rejected the former, but not the latter--a stance that one can see today as well. I think that the book is as relevant today as it was in 1899. Our culture has a different focus now (the Middle East instead of the Congo) and uses different language ("sand-nigger" instead of "nigger"), but the mission civilisatrice is still there, and there are plenty of Marlowes and Kurtzes around. This is a book, I, for one, would continue to teach.

Thanks to Maud Newton for the link.

Marock

Do any of you MG readers have access to a DVD or review copy of Laila Marrakchi's Marock? I have been going crazy for the last few weeks trying to locate one, without luck. If you are able to help, please email me at llalami AT yahoo DOT com.

Thursday Giveaway: Nothing in the World

My friend Roy Kesey is publishing his first book, a novella called Nothing in the World, which has been praised by George Saunders, Anthony Doerr, Tom Bissell, David Vann, and, uh, me. I loved it. Nothing in the World tells the story of Josko Banovic, a young, lonely Croatian man who soon finds himself dragged into a war he doesn't quite comprehend, but in which he contributes his share of courage and cowardliness, occasional kindness and utmost cruelty. In a review for TEV, Ron Currie, Jr. writes:

Through Josko, Kesey illustrates the grotesque incongruities of war, how it produces impossible duality, souls in which seemingly contradictory elements can coexist. Josko, like the boy he is, yearns painfully for his sister in one scene; a few pages later, he shoots a man twice in the back and cuts the head off his corpse. He politely insists on paying for rolls from a bakery, then murders a man by slamming his face into the fan of a jeep engine. Like a heartbroken child he follows the voice of the girl he's imagined is his love, then wanders into a cafe and, as a joke, puts on display the severed head of the man he killed earlier and orders a drink for it. Horrible acts, perpetrated with a coolness that borders on sociopathic, but Kesey merely reports them in his clear, subtly lyrical style, refusing to pass judgment of any kind.

You can find more coverage of Nothing in the World here. So here's how it works: The first person to send me an email with the subject line "Kesey" gets the free copy. Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded.

Update: The winner is Matthew T. from Buxton, Maine.

May 17, 2006

Cannes 2006

At Cannes this week, all eyes are on the film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, but I'm really intrigued by the new film from Rachid Bouchareb, called Indigènes, which will also premiere at the festival. It's set in 1944, and it's about four young soldiers from France's colonies in Algeria and Morocco, who are sent to the mainland to fight the Nazis. It stars Jamel Debbouze, Samy Naceri, Roschdy Zem, and Sami Bouajila. You can view a trailer here. The official site also has photos and information about this forgotten moment of history. Notice, by the way, that there was no hand-wringing about "integration" and "assimilation" of North Africans when they were being sent to the front lines to fight for the freedom of their oppressor.

Soyinka Interview

NPR's Rene Montagne interviews Wole Soyinka about his new memoir, You Must Set Forth At Dawn. Among other things, Soyinka talks about Ogun (I hope I spelled that right!), a Yoruba deity that has had a huge impact on his work.

Teenage Expert

I remember seeing a profile in Le Monde of Aziz Ridouan, the French-Moroccan high school student and founder of Audionautes, an NGO that provides legal assistance to those accused of illegally downloading music. Nice to see the NYT catching up. My favorite lines in the profile:

Mr. Ridouan, who intends to study political science in college, said his Audionautes-financed lobbying did not hurt his studies. He has missed some school but has a note from the French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, excusing him from class when he meets with government officials.

"There's no need for me to fake notes to skip class ever since I got Sarkozy's written permission," said Mr. Ridouan. "I don't even have the note anymore because my teacher wanted to keep it as a souvenir."

More here.

Whiteman Review

Over at Salon, Laura Miller praises Tony D'Souza debut novel, Whiteman. "If you read a lot of debut novels, you know there's a category of these books written by earnest young men who have done stints with the Peace Corps or other NGOs working in developing nations," she writes. " (...) As you can tell, I'm pretty jaded about this particular species of first novel, and it must be admitted that Tony D'Souza's "Whiteman" would seem to fit the formula uncomfortably well. Yet somehow, this novel beats the odds: It manages to be quirky, seductive and funny, but most of all it has captured a shard of the host country in a way that NGO novels rarely do. " Read it all here.

Yesterday's Foes = Today's Friends

The United States is restoring full diplomatic relations with Libya, and removing that country from the list of state sponsors of terror. In other news, Egypt continues to terrorize its people and prevent the establishment of an independent judiciary, but it gets a bit pat on the back.

May 16, 2006

May 16

I wrote a piece for the Huffington Post about the third anniversary of the May 16 bombings in Casablanca: "Days of Terror."

Essence Ward Recommends

"The man dies in him who stands silent in the face of tyranny." The words are Wole Soyinka's, a longtime critic of Nigerian corruption and brutality. When first quoted by a student organizer in Helon Habila's Waiting for an Angel, the rallying cry ushers in a demonstration that, despite the rubber bullets, teargas and temporary shuttering of the university, leave the campus heady with triumph. But a few pages later, a character unhinged by the sudden death of his parents and sister, launches into a speech with this phrase and is carried off by security agents; their vicious beating seals his insanity.

Such is the ambiguous but no less astute commentary on the wisdom of protest that flows throughout this novel. At its end, which is actually the beginning of the story, the fate of the central character, Lomba, who has raised his voice against the regime, remains unknown. Still, what is fully resolved, is Habila's accomplishment in crafting a story that remains all too rare in contemporary fiction. It is an intimate look into the soul of a young, African man who has prioritized artistic expression, intellectual diligence and emotional honesty.

Essence Ward is a freelance radio producer living in Atlanta.

If you'd like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

May 15, 2006

"The Fanatic" on The Caine Prize 2006 Shortlist

The shortlist for the 2006 Caine Prize in African Writing has been announced, and I was thrilled and honored to find out that my short story, "The Fanatic," was included. The shortlisted stories are:

Sefi Atta (Nigeria). "The Last Trip" in Chimurenga.
Darrel Bristow-Bovey (South Africa). "A Joburg Story" in African Compass.
Muthoni Garland (Kenya). "Tracking the Scent of my Mother" in Seventh Street Alchemy.
Laila Lalami (Morocco). "The Fanatic" in Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits.
Mary Watson (South Africa). "Jungfrau" in Moss.

You can find out more about the prize in this Guardian article. The winning story will be announced on July 10, at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Ebadi Interview

Over at Salon, Michelle Goldberg interviews Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, who's currently in the U.S. to promote her memoir, Iran Awakening:

In February, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice requested $85 million for a plan to promote democracy in Iran, partly by funding reformists and dissidents. Has this increased the suspicion and harassment of reformists in Iran?
I think that this is not in favor of democracy in Iran. The people who live in Iran will never dare accept any foreign money, because this would be the first proof of treason.

In January, you co-wrote an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times saying that America was undermining Iran's "fledgling democratic movement" by demonizing the country. As the conflict between our governments heats up, what effect has it had on your country's reformists?
It's very well known that any time a country is under threat from outside, the government uses it as an excuse and starts talking about the necessity of preserving national security, and therefore individual liberties suffer.

A recent article in Time magazine suggested that the administration might ratchet up the conflict in order to get Americans to rally around the president again. How worried are Iranians about the possibility of an American attack?
Some people are worried. People are very critical toward the government, but I think that if there is an attack against Iran, people will forget about their criticism, and they will rally with the government. Any attack on Iran will be good for the government and will actually damage the democratic movement in Iran.

Read it all here. (You have to watch an ad before you can access the article.)

Related: Reza Aslan's review of Ebadi's book, in the Nation.

On Voice

Edwidge Danticat talks to Sarah T. Williams about the influence of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God on her adolescent self and on her writing life.

While Danticat navigated family, culture, language and the streets of Brooklyn, Hurston's book appeared as a bridge between time and place. Because Hurston had spent many years in Haiti researching folklore and culture, "I felt she knew something about me," said Danticat, "something about the soul of Haiti." (...)

The novel gave Danticat permission to use her own storytelling voice. "Some things were for the kitchen," she said, "and some things for the books. The way we spoke to our grandmother was not the way we wrote. Reading [Hurston] allowed me to use the voice in my head, the voice with which I spoke."

Danticat has written the introduction to one of the book's editions.

Ticknor In Review

MG pal Mark Sarvas reviews Sheila Heti's Ticknor for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Biographer George Ticknor's friendship with his great subject, historian W.H. Prescott, was the foundation of his 1864 Life of William Hickling Prescott, a popular and critical success. Pulling this obscure page from the archives, Heti has turned their friendship on its head, transforming it into a darkly funny anti-history, a hilariously biting study of envy, bitterness and promise unfulfilled. In her masterfully reimagined landscape, her Ticknor - quite unlike his real-life counterpart - is a thwarted second-rater, all talk and very little action, forever toiling in the shadow of his wildly successful childhood friend.

Read on.

Orientalist Cuisine

I was cleaning my bookmarks last night, when I came across this article about Casablanca in the Travel section of the New York Times:

When the French pulled out of Morocco in 1956, they left behind an appreciation for fine food and drink that persists to this day.

Those poor, poor Moroccans. Really, without the French, they would not have known what to eat.

True Crime Raises Issue of Violence Against Women

Nearly thirty years ago, while camping in Cline Falls, Oregon, two 19-year-old Yale undergraduates were assaulted by a man dressed as a cowboy. He drove over their tent in the middle of the night, and then attacked them with an ax, causing severe injuries. Many people within the community had strong suspicions about the man's identity, but none of them came forward. The crime was never solved. Now one of the women, Terri Jentz, has written a memoir about her ordeal: Strange Piece of Paradise. When Jeff Baker interviewed Jentz for the Oregonian a couple of weeks ago, she told him she didn't identify the cowboy in the book because she didn't want to feed into a celebrity culture of "charismatic villains." Rather, she wanted the incident to be viewed in the larger context of how violence is dealt with by communities.

Also in the Oregonian, George Rede, who thirty years ago covered the case as a young reporter for The Bulletin in Bend, shares his thoughts in an opinion piece:

[H]ere's my mea culpa. I wish I had done more to write about the Cline Falls attack as more than just a crime story. I wish I had thought to report with more context to the broader issue of random violence.

I wish I had thought to interview the crew of young emergency room nurses who saw themselves in Terri Jentz and her college roommate.

I wish I had pried myself away from the office phone in Bend and driven up the road to Redmond to interview townspeople who had suspicions about one of their own.

I wish I had been more aggressive in asking state and local police about their investigative methods and lack of suspects.

For God's sake, I wish I had gone out to Cline Falls to see the crime scene for myself. It astounds me that I didn't -- and that my editors didn't suggest or insist that I do so.

Lastly, in the New York Times, Mary Roach has this to say in her review: "Imagine that it had been Truman Capote himself who'd been savaged in Holcomb, Kan., and that he had survived to describe his ordeal. That is the level of command and sinew at work in the writing."

Umrigar on Ghosh

I've mentioned before how much I enjoyed Amitav Ghosh's essay collection Incendiary Circumstances, and I have to say I was disappointed that it didn't get much attention from the press. So it was a delight to read Thrity Umrigar's review of the book in the Boston Globe. The essays, she writes, "cover different countries and crises, but each is enlightened by Ghosh's signature intelligence and humanity. This is a writer who delights in human complexity, who avoids generalities and seeks out the small truths that illuminate the larger story."