April 30, 2007

Back in Action

My trip to New York was great. My first event was the History and the Truth of Fiction panel, which was held at NYU. We had a great turn out, and it was particularly nice to see a few familiar faces in the crowd. Colum McCann, our moderator, was fantastic; he knew how to ask questions that would involve all of us and get us to discuss with one another. Several wraps up have popped up online (see, for instance, this, this, or this) and some photos as well.

One of the highlights of the PEN festival for me was getting to meet Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose latest novel, Desertion, was one of my favorites of last year. We were on one panel together, Where on Earth: The Refugee Emergency, which was about different experiences of exile, whether old or new, forced or desired, brutal or peaceful. (We also shared a memorable cab ride, during which the driver, a fellow Moroccan, treated us to his life story, including an anecdote about how he worked as a bartender for ten years while being an observant Muslim.)

My final event was a gathering of storytellers, with Jonathan Ames, Pico Iyer, Edgar Oliver, and Neil Gaiman. Ordinarily, Alex loves to talk to writers, but he was so intimidated that he fell completely silent in Neil Gaiman's presence--which was quite amusing considering that Gaiman is so nice, and so down to earth. I was fortunate enough to spend some time with Pico Iyer at the rehearsal, and heard so many wonderful stories of his travels, including the one he told at The Moth, about a trip to Aden to do research on a fourteenth-century Chinese Muslim eunuch admiral. (Yes, you read that last part right. More on Zheng He here.)

I didn't get a chance to go to many other panels, but I loved the Town Hall Readings, and the panel on Gritty Realism, with Daniel Alarcon, Guillermo Arriaga, Jorge Franco, and Patricia Melo, moderated by the amazing Francisco Goldman. You can read various reports about the panels and readings at the World Voices blogs, and at TEV.

April 26, 2007

The Moth: PEN World Voices

My last event for the PEN World Voices festival is a gathering of storytellers:

An Evening with The Moth
With Neil Gaiman, Pico Iyer, Laila Lalami; and Jonathan Ames as your MC
Thursday, April 26
8 – 10 PM
37 Arts: 450 West 37th St.
New York, New York
Tickets: $30 (includes wine and beer)
Purchase tickets from Ticketmaster: www.ticketmaster.com or (212) 307-4100

See you there!

Panel: PEN World Voices

I am doing two events today. Here are details for the first:

PEN World Voices
Where on Earth: The Refugee Emergency
With Ishmael Beah, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Laila Lalami, Saadi Youssef; moderated by Russell Banks
Thursday, April 26
3 – 4:30 PM
Lang Recital Hall, Hunter College: 695 Park Ave.
New York, New York
Free and open to the public. No reservations.

Hope to see you there.

April 25, 2007

Panel: PEN World Voices

I'm in New York this week for the PEN World Voices festival. Here are the details for a panel to which I'm contributing today:

PEN World Voices
History and the Truth of Fiction
With Arthur Japin, Laila Lalami, Imma Monsó, Michael Wallner; moderated by Colum McCann
Wednesday April 25
1 – 2:30 PM
Hemmerdinger Hall at NYU: 100 Washington Square East
New York, New York
Free and open to the public. No reservations.

Hope to see you there.

April 23, 2007

Sarvas on Wilcox

I'm on the road at the moment so I have to keep this brief, but I did want to point to Mark Sarvas's piece on James Wilcox's new book Hunk City in this weekend's NYTBR:

As in his prior novels, Wilcox’s narrative, which skitters like a stone thrown expertly across a country pond, delivers a high quotient of whimsy — Pickens’s assistant supplements his income by making office visits to floss his customers’ teeth. Wilcox’s books are full of flourishes like this, and they won’t be to every reader’s taste, especially those with a low threshold for quirkiness. His work is so crammed with complications — some subplots have subplots — that it’s occasionally hard to know what matters.

But Wilcox has always been about more than broad comedy. His men and women, though often clownish, are rarely cartoonish. He has a Dickensian knack for animating minor characters and an eye for the telling detail. “Though he was barely 23,” Wilcox writes of the professional flosser, “Edsell’s lantern jaw and narrow-set eyes gave him the spry, wizened look of an octogenarian.” Here in Barcalounger country, startled by a bit of unpleasant news, Pickens “pulled a lever and sat upright.” Burma’s mother, an especially memorable creation, invests “lavishly in a Chinese wardrobe not just to encourage capitalism in that bastion of godless Communism, but also because the high collars hid the scar from her goiter operation.”

Read it all here.

April 20, 2007

Mohsin Hamid's Reluctant Fundamentalist

I went to Rabat to pick up my mail at the Fulbright office today, and I found several packages waiting for me. In the lot was a copy of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which I started reading on the train back home. The story is told through a monologue by a young Pakistani man, sitting across from an American stranger in the Old Anarkali neighborhood of Lahore. I am enthralled by it so far, and hope it can deliver on its promise in the end.

Updated to say that I thought the second half of the book didn't hold as well as the first half. Changez's transformation from a successful analyst to a disgruntled slack is not earned, I'm afraid. It fits the plot, but doesn't fit the character. I did like this book a lot, though, for other reasons. I could see the influence of Tayib Salih and Joseph Conrad, and if I were not so completely busy with my own novel, I think I would have written about The Reluctant Fundamentalist at great length.

April 19, 2007

Pointing Fingers

It has been interesting to watch reactions to the revelation that the Virginia Tech gunman was a 23-year-old creative writing student of South Korean descent by the name of Cho Seung-Hui. People of every other ethnic group breathed a sigh of relief that the murderer was not one of their own. Andrew Lam captured this feeling perfectly in his column for New American Media. Here is an excerpt:

Before the news identified the killer as Cho Seung-hui, a 23-year-old English major from South Korea, all ethnic backgrounds were up for grabs. A Chinese friend from a small college town on the East Coast called to say: “Please, please let it be some other Asian. We’ll be in deep if it’s Chinese.”

In a popular Vietnamese chatroom, Vietnamese college students were writing to each other to speculate. One said, “I have a bad feeling. It might be Mi’t (Vietnamese slang for Vietnamese).” Others wrote in advising each other on what to do if it was.(...)

Let it be some other Asian! This was the prayer among so many Asian-American communities. And not just Asians.

“Every time there’s an incident like this, every ethnic group is on pins and needles,” said Khalil Abdullah, an African-American colleague. An Anglo shooter may be an individual, a loner, but God forbid if a person of color goes on a shooting rampage. His whole tribe would be implicated. “I still recall my aunts when President Kennedy was assassinated. They were praying that it wasn’t a Negro.” Many ethnic communities do not feel that they belong to the core of the American fabric, Abdullah added. “The action of an individual can cancel out the good image of an entire group.”

The focus on the murderer's background was not restricted to his nationality; there was also the religious angle. The New York Post quickly speculated that the words "Ismail Ax," which were scrawled on the gunman's arm, were a reference to the Qur'anic account of Abraham's sacrifice of Ismail, or possibly also to Abraham's destruction of pagan idols, also in the Qur'anic tradition. The fact that the document sent by Cho to NBC contained such bizarre claims as "Thanks to you I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people" did not seem to merit the kind of religious exegesis that the New York Post was so keen on doing earlier in the week. People look for intrinsic reasons for Cho's acts, when the simpler explanation--to the extent that such a horrendous act can ever be explained--is that Cho was a mentally ill young man, who should never have had access to guns.

April 18, 2007

Department of WTF

The Los Angeles Times obtained a copy of the budget for the 2005 action film Sahara, which starred Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz, and which is considered a financial disaster for the studio that produced it. What I found interesting about Glenn F. Bunting's article was this tidbit, which describes the shoot in Morocco: the work involves paying out bribes, interfering with government development projects, and the removal of trees:

Although portions of the movie were shot in Britain and Spain, most of the filming was done in Morocco, a country in North Africa that has become a popular site for U.S. filmmakers. "Babel," "Syriana," "Black Hawk Down" and "Kingdom of Heaven" all have benefited from Morocco's welcoming environment, favorable exchange rate and cheap labor. An "assistant propman" on "Sahara," for example, earned a weekly salary of $233, the equivalent of one day's pay for a U.S. prop worker. In one impoverished village, a "Sahara" crew acquired household items at a bargain price. "We actually bought all the dressings from this person's house at a very inflated rate, which was probably about a dollar," Eisner said on the "Sahara" DVD. Producers had little reason to worry about red tape or paperwork because in Morocco a single permit provides access to the entire kingdom.

Cold cash came in handy. According to Account No. 3,600 of the "Sahara" budget, 16 "gratuity" or "courtesy" payments were made throughout Morocco. Six of the expenditures were "local bribes" in the amount of 65,000 dirham, or $7,559. Experts in Hollywood accounting could not recall ever seeing a line item in a movie budget described as a bribe. "It's a bad choice of words in a document, but it's a perfectly normal and cost-efficient way of getting a film made in a place like Morocco," said David A. Davis of FMV Opinions Inc., a Century City financial advisory firm.

The final budget shows that "local bribes" were handed out in remote locations such as Ouirgane in the Atlas Mountains, Merzouga and Rissani. One payment was made to expedite the removal of palm trees from an old French fort called Ouled Zahra, said a person close to the production who requested anonymity. Other items include $23,250 for "Political/Mayoral support" in Erfoud and $40,688 "to halt river improvement project" in Azemmour. The latter payment was made to delay construction of a government sewage system that would have interrupted filming. Putnam, Anschutz's lawyer, said the "local bribes" reflected line items that were budgeted but not actually spent. He said the payments on location in Morocco were reviewed after "Sahara" executives were contacted by The Times.

Honestly, I started to laugh about all this, until I got to the part where palm trees are being taken out and river improvement projects that benefit Moroccans are halted in order to accommodate films, and then I wanted to cry.

The rest of the article describes, in painstaking detail, all the movie's expenditures, which included a payment of $72,800 to McConaughey's hair colorist for 90 days' work. Yes, those numbers are correct.

April 17, 2007

Horror at Virginia Tech

I have been avoiding the news, so it wasn't until very late yesterday that I found out about the shootings at Virginia Tech. My first instinct was to worry about a friend of mine who teaches there, but thankfully he had not yet left his house to go to campus when the news broke.

Too many others have not been as fortunate; the death toll kept on climbing. There is loss and mourning, and few words seem apt at such a time. There are also questions, and perhaps I find it easier to cope with the tragedy by asking them. From the NYT's unsigned editorial:

Our hearts and the hearts of all Americans go out to the victims and their families. Sympathy was not enough at the time of Columbine, and eight years later it is not enough. What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss.

More here.

April 16, 2007

Terror, Banalized

We were having our second cup of coffee on Saturday morning when we heard a loud, whooshing sound, followed by police sirens. An hour later we found out that a suicide bomber had blown himself up in front of the American Language Center, which is about a mile from our apartment. The man had tried to gain access to the ALC (which, by the way, is privately owned and is not in any way affiliated with the U.S. government) and the security guard asked for an I.D. card. The bomber then walked away, and blew himself up, killing no one but himself. A few seconds later, another bomber detonated his explosives, a few meters away from the U.S. consulate. There were no other fatalities.

Police arrived on the crime scene and chased after suspected fugitives. The evening news anchor said that the police had arrested the gang leader, the man responsible for the foiled attack of March 11, and his second-in-command on Thursday night, along with other members of the group. It's unclear why the police didn't announce these arrests right away, but it's possible that they were not sure they had caught all the members of the cell, and indeed the acts of Saturday would seem to confirm that theory.

The footage on TV showed plainclothes and uniformed cops with bulletproof vests, guns drawn. Morocco does not have a gun culture so the sight of the weapons on the streets of Casablanca certainly gave me pause. Sometimes I feel like I don't recognize the country I grew up in (just as, in the wake of the Iraq war, I felt I no longer recognized the country I moved to.) Everyone is shaken, revolted, and worried, and already citizens have called cops on someone who was acting 'suspicious'. (It turned out to be a false alarm.)

For other perspectives:
Lounsbury in Casablanca. Lounsbury on the aftermath. Najlae. BO18. Red@blog. And, via Red@blog, this clip from rap group Fnaire, a song written post-May 2003: Matqich Bladi.

Sunday Reviews

I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw this: The New York Times Book Review devoted its weekend issue to fiction (!) in translation (!!). You can read reviews of Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, Maryse Condé's The Story of the Cannibal Woman, Aharon Appelfeld's All Whom I Have Loved, and several other novels in translation.

I was particularly interested in Jascha Hoffman's data (warning: pdf format) on fiction published around the world. It reveals that, of the 1.5 million books published around the world last year, 30% were originally written in English, even though only 6% of the world's population speaks English as a first language. This hegemony is accompanied by quite a bit of insularity, with only 2.62% of books published in the United States having originally appeared in another language, compared with 25% for Spain and 23% for Iran.

Elsewhere, the Los Angeles Times unveiled its new book section. Some material has been moved online from the print version (e.g. the calendar) and some content will be web-only, such as Sarah Weinman's crime fiction column, which will be followed by Ed Park on science fiction, Richard Rayner on paperbacks, and Sonja Bolle on children's books.

April 12, 2007

R.I.P.: Kurt Vonnegut

A mere ten days after the passing of Driss Chraibi, another literary giant has left us: Kurt Vonnegut has died. He was 84. Articles and obits have begun to pour in, including this one in the New York Times, by Dinitia Smith. It's a sad, sad day.

Update: RoTR has a long list of Vonnegut links. Maud bids farewell.

Photo: Jill Krementz.

April 11, 2007

Edens, Here and There

We were walking in the Marrakech medina last week when we came across this old movie theater, just a stone's throw away from the historic Jamaa El Fna square. Such cinema houses are now a rarity in Morocco--most of them closed down in the last twenty years, due to the relentless competition from pirated films. According to this recent article on Magharebia, the number of movie theaters in Morocco has gone from 280 in 1980 to just 85 by the end of 2006. In addition:

Director Saad Charaib explains that when the government worked out the details of its policy to support film production ($3.5 million annually), it failed to create a parallel policy to expand the broadcasting and cinema operation sector. He says that the total number of cinema-goers in 2000 was 13 million, whereas now the figure has dropped to 5 million. In his view there are several reasons, but chief among them is piracy, which draws many Moroccans away from cinemas. They would rather buy a film for ten dirhams than pay 30 dirhams to watch it at the cinema.

I was talking to one of my uncles about this--he used to be a movie nut when I was a child, so I wanted his opinion. He said he couldn't remember the last time he had been in a theater. And of course he missed seeing a movie on the big screen, but he also missed the social aspect of going out to the movies, and interacting with friends and acquaintances rather than staying cooped up at home, watching a pirated film whose quality is so bad you can't even suspend disbelief long enough to lose yourself in the story. I was also struck by the name of the theater in the Marrakech medina. Maybe if there were more Edens right here, young men would not be looking for Edens elsewhere.

Here We Go Again

Thirty days after the foiled March 11 attacks, Moroccan police have tracked and neutralized 3 members of the same terrorist cell, which they say numbers up to 12 people. In a pursuit that started at 5 am in the Hay Al Farah neighborhood and ended not far from there at 4 pm, three suicide bombers blew themselves up, one policeman died of his wounds, and another was slightly injured. The bombers were allegedly companions of the March 11 bomber, Abdelfettah Raydi, and had been under police surveillance for some time. This morning's papers all lead with the story, except for the pro-government paper Le Matin, which placed the news below the fold. No one I've talked to is entirely surprised, but everyone is extremely upset and terribly worried. There is also a lot of public support for the family of the police inspector who died in the line of duty.Llah yehfed w yester.

April 09, 2007

Kerr on Didion

The latest issue of the New York Review of Books includes a lovely review by Sarah Kerr of Joan Didion's We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. (This latest collection includes all Didion's non-fiction books published between 1968 and 2003.) After quoting a brief passage from Run, River, Kerr comments on Didion's rhythm and approach to detail:

Writing here seems to function like a kind of insurance, keeping the record for later, in case familiar things suddenly up and disappear. And notice a striking phrase: "There was the sense that..." Soon enough, declarations in this vein would become a signature move in Didion's work as a journalist. Boldly, she would mix authority and impressionism, the objective-sounding "there was" with the far more elusive "sense"—a transient perception, usually attributable to one perceiving mind. And in so doing, she would come up against one of the key problems in American nonfiction prose in the last half-century. She herself would help to formulate the problem, in fact, and she has never stopped trying—not to solve it, for there may be no solution, but to stay in its challenging presence.

The problem is something like this: A writer writes from a point of view. This point of view is partly a factual matter of physical or social positioning (either she is inside or outside, close to the problem she is writing about or out on the periphery). Further, point of view implies the more abstract positioning of an attitude toward time (does she look to the past for orientation, or the future?). The writer can never totally transcend her point of view. She would be dishonest if she tried to deny it. So how can she stay true to it, while meeting her ethical duty to hazard larger truths about the world?

Read this excellent piece here.

April 05, 2007

April Words Without Borders

The April issue of Words Without Borders focuses on African literature, with work by Marguerite Abouet, Alain Mabanckou, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Yasmina Khadra, Amina Saïd, Ondjaki, and the late, great Ahmadou Kourouma. What a relief to see that, unlike many other literary editors, those at WWB understand that Africa also includes North Africa.

Photo credit: Aya; written by Marguerite Abouet, illustrations by Clement Oubrerie.

IMPAC Dublin Shortlist

As widely reported, the shortlist for the 2007 IMPAC Dublin Awards has been announced. And the finalists are:

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes
A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry
Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Short Day Dying by Peter Hobbs
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born
Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie

It's a strong list, but I'm somewhat disappointed that neither Abdulrazak Gurnah's Desertion nor Ismail Kadare's The Successor made the cut. (See the longlist here.)

April 04, 2007

Le Manifeste des 44

Two weeks ago, 44 French-language authors, including Tahar Ben Jelloun, Edouard Glissant, JMG Le Clézio, Amin Maalouf, Alain Mabanckou, Erik Orsenna, and Abdourahman Waberi, signed a manifesto titled "Pour une 'littérature-monde' en français," which was published on the cover of Le Monde des Livres. The writers want a reconsideration of the literary aspect of "francophonie," in which France sees itself as the hub, while countries from the ex-empire are the spokes.

[L]e centre, ce point depuis lequel était supposée rayonner une littérature franco-française, n'est plus le centre. Le centre jusqu'ici, même si de moins en moins, avait eu cette capacité d'absorption qui contraignait les auteurs venus d'ailleurs à se dépouiller de leurs bagages avant de se fondre dans le creuset de la langue et de son histoire nationale : le centre, nous disent les prix d'automne, est désormais partout, aux quatre coins du monde. Fin de la francophonie. Et naissance d'une littérature-monde en français.

Here's a rough translation:

The center, that point from which a Francophone-French literature was supposed to shine, is no longer the center. The center, up until now, had an absorption capacity that forced authors who came from somewhere else to give up their belongings before melting in the pot of the language and its national history. The center, the fall prizes tell us, is now everywhere, in the four corners of the world. End of francophonie. And birth of a world literature in French.

This year, all the major French prizes (the Goncourt, the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française, the Renaudot and the Femina) were awarded to non-native French authors, and so it was perhaps an opportune time to raise the question of a "world literature in French," one that can live and thrive in the same way as world literature in English. Indeed, it's quite clear from the document that the authors look to the English-speaking world as one in which it is easier for non-English writers to have their words heard, and their books considered for their merits. The authors write:

Combien d'écrivains de langue française, pris eux aussi entre deux ou plusieurs cultures, se sont interrogés alors sur cette étrange disparité qui les reléguait sur les marges, eux "francophones", variante exotique tout juste tolérée, tandis que les enfants de l'ex-empire britannique prenaient, en toute légitimité, possession des lettres anglaises ? Fallait-il tenir pour acquis quelque dégénérescence congénitale des héritiers de l'empire colonial français, en comparaison de ceux de l'empire britannique ? Ou bien reconnaître que le problème tenait au milieu littéraire lui-même, à son étrange art poétique tournant comme un derviche tourneur sur lui-même, et à cette vision d'une francophonie sur laquelle une France mère des arts, des armes et des lois continuait de dispenser ses lumières, en bienfaitrice universelle, soucieuse d'apporter la civilisation aux peuples vivant dans les ténèbres ?

And, in English:

How many French-language writers, caught between two or several cultures, have asked themselves about this strange disparity, which relegated them to the margins, as 'francophones', a barely tolerated exotic variant, while the children of the ex-British empire were taking, in all legitimacy, possession of English letters? Was one supposed to take for granted a certain congenital degeneration among the heirs of the French colonial empire, by comparison with those of the British empire? Or else recognize that the problem was in the literary milieu itself, in its strange poetic art, turning like a dervish upon itself, and in this vision of a francophonie upon which a France, mother of letters, arms, and laws, continued to dispense its lights, as a universal benefactor, concerned with giving civilization to the peoples living in darkness?

I am not sure that things are so rosy in the world of English-language literature, but they are certainly rosier than in the francophone world. In any case, the manifesto drew a number of reactions. Abdou Diouf, ex-president of Senegal and now secretary-general of the International Organization of Francophonie denounced the 44 authors as "gravediggers of francophonie." And in Le Figaro, presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, who never misses an opportunity to shut up, jumped into the fray, saying that "francophonie is not a colonial concept." (One wonders, given his passionate defense, how many native-born Frenchmen identify themselves as 'francophones.' We all know it's a term for The Others.) There is also a lively discussion on Alain Mabanckou's blog, here, here, here, and here.

As for me, I look upon all of this with a mixture of sympathy and amusement. Born and raised in Morocco, I received a semi-colonial education that valued French over both my native language (Darija/Moroccan Arabic) and the standard form (Fusha/Standard Arabic). Until I went to college, I did all of my creative writing in French. I started to write in English in 1996, while in graduate school. When my first book was published in the United States, it was shelved in the general fiction section, just like any other book by any other American writer. When it appeared in France in January, however, La Fnac had it under Littérature anglophone. Meanwhile, my friends in France were looking for it under Littérature maghrebine. That is how silly labels are. All I can say is that I live in the republic of letters; my book belongs to anyone who wants to read it.

April 03, 2007

R.I.P: Driss Chraïbi

I was in Marrakech for the weekend, so I did not hear the terrible news of Driss Chraïbi's passing until yesterday. Although Chraïbi is probably not as known in the West as Tahar Ben Jelloun, he certainly remains one of Morocco's best writers. In Le Passé Simple, he wrote of the clash between the old generation and the new, during the years of French occupation. In Les Boucs, he portrayed the hardships of Moroccan immigrants in France. In La Civilisation, Ma Mère, he drew a loving portrait of a Moroccan housewife who emancipates herself. For La Mère du Printemps, he went back to his Berber roots, drawing a historical portrait of the Aït Yafelman tribe. In short, he wrote about all the things that mattered to his countrymen. He was widely read, always interesting, and enormously influential (I am thinking, in particular, of Fouad Laroui). A part of me feels that, with his passing, a whole era of Moroccan literature is also dead.

Related: Driss Chraïbi Turns 80.

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