May 31, 2007

New BR

The May/June issue of the Boston Review is available online, with articles by Akbar Ganji, Hans Blix, Catherine Tumber, and others. The issue also includes the winning short story from the annual fiction contest, which was judged this year by the excellent George Saunders: "Transitory Cities," by Padma Viswanathan. Here's an excerpt:

(How did he come to bear others’ homes on his back?)

That question can only be answered by the one holding the strings ascending from Hram’s pivotal points, as from the joints of every bearer.

It’s not that Hram didn’t like bearing a building; he did. He received no acknowledgment—at least not from the tenants. He wouldn’t have wanted the residents of the building he bore to know that he chose where they would be when they walked out the front door of their apartment building in the morning, briefcase or tool kit or purse or newspaper in one hand, brown paper lunch bag in the other, ready to participate in maintaining the universe, their first task that of finding their way to the office or factory, which could be anywhere within their city.

Read this refreshingly imaginative story here.

May 29, 2007

YouTube Unblocked

Thanks to all those who spread the word and signed the petition. YouTube is now available again on Maroc Telecom.

Caught in a Web of Lies

The headline is, of course, irresistible: Great Satan sits down with Axis of Evil.

But even as these encouraging talks are taking place, the Iranian government cannot seem to let go of the fantasy: It has formally charged Haleh Esfandiari with "spying, acting against Iran's national security and conducting propaganda against the Islamic Republic." In addition, Kian Tajbaksh, a social scientist who also holds dual Iranian and American citizenships has been jailed and charged with spying, as has Parnaz Azima, a journalist.

This weekend, Haleh Esfandiari's husband, Shaul Bakhash, also an academic, wrote an impassioned piece in the Los Angeles Times asking for her release.

Should you wake up one day to find your wife or child or parent in the hands of the secret police in a country that routinely violates the rule of law, you will likely choose quiet probing over publicity. You have no recourse to law or courts. You fear publicity may make things worse. You believe, almost always wrongly, that if you work quietly, use the contacts you have and wait reasonably, the nightmare will be over.

When Haleh was initially prevented from leaving Iran and the interrogations began, it was principally at my insistence that we did not "go public." Repeatedly I was told by those who supposedly understand the inner workings of Iran: "Don't worry; it's only an interrogation; once they have finished with their questions, they will let her go."

Once Haleh was arrested, however, silence was no longer an option.

I am very upset--this woman is my mother's age, she is a grandmother, and she is someone who advocated for dialogue, not war. And now she's in Evin Prison, on this ridiculous charge. Please sign the petition for Haleh's release, as well as Kian's release.

Business as Usual

It looks like the U.S. has decided to go forward with sanctions on Sudan over Darfur. Predictably, however, the Chinese government--which enables the killing by selling arms to Sudan and buying its oil--is not too pleased. The sanctions, one of their representatives said, "are not conducive to solving the problem."

What My Friends Are Up To

My good friend Maaza Mengiste is featured in New York magazine as one of a handful of "future writing stars" from the city. An excerpt of her first novel is included with the profile. Check it out.

Pink-haired Carolyn Kellogg reviews Mary Otis's debut collection, Yes, Yes, Cherries, finding that, despite the title, the stories "eddy around forlorn characters and their thwarted desires."

May 28, 2007

YouTube Blocked

The big news over the weekend was that video-sharing site YouTube is no longer accessible through Maroc Telecom in Morocco. There has been no official statement, which means that no reason has been given, and no explanation provided. But since about Friday, Maroc Telecom users (of which I am one) cannot access the site, while customers who use rivals Wana or Meditel supposedly can.

I should point out that the vast majority of Internet users here go through Maroc Telecom, and that the bandwidth of the two rival ISPs is smaller. So in effect YouTube has been censored. It's worth pointing out that Maroc Telecom is a subsidiary of Vivendi, so if there is censorship at the behest of the government, it is carried out by a multinational company.

The ban, of course, is completely useless. Bloggers have already begun sharing addresses of proxy servers, or suggesting the use of Dailymotion, which has many of the same material on Morocco as YouTube. And because the ban makes people curious, the offending material--whatever it is--will undoubtedly pop up on another web site.

Update: Please sign the petition asking Vivendi and Maroc Telecom to stop censoring YouTube.

Another update: YouTube is back on. Yay! Thanks to all those who spread the word out about this.

May 25, 2007

Middle Class, Mostly Mainstream, And Favorite Boogeymen

Earlier this week, the Pew Research Center released the results of a nationwide poll of U.S. Muslims, called "Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream." (Full report available here. Warning: PDF format.) Having looked at the survey results, I was bewildered by the way in which they were covered in the media. Newsweek's Lorraine Ali ponders this as well:

According to a Pew Research Center poll released earlier this week, Muslim-Americans are “largely assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world.” The poll showed the majority surveyed have close non-Muslim friends, believe in a strong American work ethic and feel there is little conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society. Overall, an encouraging picture, right?

Not according to a cavalcade of major media outlets. On Tuesday and Wednesday, coverage of the poll was downright foreboding. “Supporting Terror?” read the CNN crawl at the bottom of the screen as John Roberts interviewed a group of young moderate Muslims about the poll. On CBS News online, the headline incorrectly stated that 26% OF YOUNG U.S. MUSLIMS OK BOMBS. And in USA Today, more misinformation and scare tactics: POLL: 1 IN 4 YOUNGER U.S. MUSLIMS SUPPORT SUICIDE BOMBINGS.

Ali interviews a few people and tries to find out why the coverage went that way. Read it all here.

HODP in Jeune Afrique

For those who care and/or read French: There is an interview with me about Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits in the current issue of Jeune Afrique magazine.

UNHCR Office Closes

The United Nations has closed its HCR office in Rabat, due to what it claimed were violent protests by refugees.

The UNHCR says there are some 600 registered refugees in Morocco, along with some 10,000 illegal migrants. Some 30 people who are camped outside the UNHCR office denied using violence during Saturday's demonstration.

They also want the right to work and say that those from Arab countries receive favourable treatment. UNHCR said they closed the building because they could not work under the threat of violence which was intolerable.

It also said it does not provide refugees with financial assistance anywhere in the world.

Paulin Kuanzambi, an Angolan refugee who is the president of the Collectif des Réfugiés in Morocco, pointed out in an open letter that this is not the first time UNHCR closes its doors in Rabat. He called on the Moroccan government to uphold the rights of refugees under the Geneva convention. Let's just say there's a long, long road to go before that becomes a reality.

May 24, 2007

Adaptation

Not content with jailing Haleh Esfandiari, a scholar whose sole crime seems to be to believe in a dialogue between Iran and the United States, the Iranian government, through its cinema organization Farabi Cinema Foundation has protested Marjane Satrapi's adaptation of her book Persepolis into an animated film. The movie presents an "unrealistic face of the achievements and results of the glorious Islamic Revolution in some of its parts," the protest letter said.

The always quotable Satrapi responds:

"The worst reaction in the movie comes from myself, it doesn't come from the guardians of the revolution," she said. "The film's about being true to yourself, it's about humanism. I really believe that humanism is a word that has lost its power and its meaning and it's exactly at this time in the history of human beings that we need it more than any other time. We should stop considerations such as manhood and womanhood, of coming from east and west, or this and that religion, and just try to do the best with the imperfections of human beings."

More here.

May 23, 2007

Otherwise Engaged

Sorry, no posts today. Come back again tomorrow.

May 22, 2007

Colum McCann's Zoli

I picked up a copy of Colum McCann's new novel, Zoli, when I was in New York for the PEN festival, on the recommendation of a couple of friends, including my editor at Algonquin. The story begins in the 1930s, when a young Roma girl named Marienka (nicknamed Zoli) loses her entire family in an attack by Hlinka guards. (Fascist attacks against such minorities were common in Czechoslovakia at the time.) Zoli escapes with her grandfather, and together they join a kumpanija, a traveling group of Romani musicians. Zoli's extraordinary ability to remember and to write songs and poems soon attracts notice--from Swann, an expat translator, and Stransky, a Slovak poet and editor. Zoli's growing fame is quickly co-opted by the Communists, who want to make of her a poster child of Romani "integration" in a new society. The novel explores questions of belonging--national, cultural, linguistic--as well as class and ideology, without ever once slipping into a harangue. A rare feat these days. McCann immersed himself in Roma culture to write this novel, and the care with which he draws this world is palpable. He breathes life into very different characters, giving them each the space in which to tell their story. A great book.

May 21, 2007

R.I.P. Driss Benzekri

Some sad news today: Driss Benzekri, the political dissident who was imprisoned and tortured under King Hassan, and who later became the head of Morocco's Equity and Reconciliation Commission, has passed away. He was 57.

(via.)

Novels and 9/11

Pankaj Mishra reviews Don DeLillo's new novel, Falling Man for the Guardian, placing it into the context of post 9/11 fiction by British and American novelists like Ken Kalfus, Deborah Eisenberg, Mohsin Hamid, Kiran Desai, among many others.

Reflecting on the attacks on the twin towers in 2001, Don DeLillo seemed to speak for many Americans when he admitted that "We like to think that America invented the future. We are comfortable with the future, intimate with it. But there are disturbances now, in large and small ways, a chain of reconsiderations." On September 11, terrorists from the Middle East who destroyed American immunity to large-scale violence and chaos also forced many American and British novelists to reconsider the value of their work and its relation to the history of the present. (...) Amis went on to claim that "after a couple of hours at their desks, on September 12 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation." This is, of course, an exaggeration. Many writers had intuited that religious and political extremism, which had ravaged large parts of the world, would eventually be unleashed upon the west's rich, more protected societies.

The shock of the attacks was probably greater for writers who had been ensconced deep in what DeLillo in his new novel Falling Man calls the "narcissistic heart of the west".

Mishra also quotes from one of my favorite essays by Orhan Pamuk, the piece "The Anger of the Damned," which appeared in the New York Review of Books in November 2001.

May 18, 2007

Free Haleh Esfandiari

As you may have heard, Iranian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiari, the director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has been detained in Iran. She had traveled to the country of her birth to visit her 93-year-old mother. She was on her way to Tehran's international airport on December 30, when masked gunmen stopped her taxi and stole her belongings, including her Iranian and U.S. passports. She was then effectively under house arrest for four months, and then on May 8 she was taken to the notorious Evin Prison, where political prisoners are held and sometimes tortured. There have been no news of her since she was taken there. Please sign the petition for her release. More info about her here.

May 16, 2007

Reality Check

Paul Bremer, who between May 2003 and June 2004 was in charge of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, took to the pages of the Washington Post last Sunday to tell the American public "What We Got right in Iraq." Today, journalist and NAF fellow Nir Rosen, who was in Iraq before, during, and after Bremer's tenure, responds:

[T]he former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority argues that he "was absolutely right to strip away the apparatus of a particularly odious tyranny," including the Baath Party and the Iraqi army. He complains about "critics who've never spent time in Iraq" and "don't understand its complexities." But Bremer himself never understood Iraq, knew no Arabic, had no experience in the Middle East and made no effort to educate himself -- as his statements clearly show.

Time and again, he refers to "the formerly ruling Sunnis," "rank-and-file Sunnis," "the old Sunni regime," "responsible Sunnis." This obsession with sects informed the U.S. approach to Iraq from day one of the occupation, but it was not how Iraqis saw themselves -- at least, not until very recently. Iraqis were not primarily Sunnis or Shiites; they were Iraqis first, and their sectarian identities did not become politicized until the Americans occupied their country, treating Sunnis as the bad guys and Shiites as the good guys. There were no blocs of "Sunni Iraqis" or "Shiite Iraqis" before the war, just like there was no "Sunni Triangle" or "Shiite South" until the Americans imposed ethnic and sectarian identities onto Iraq's regions.

You can read the article in full here.

May 15, 2007

On Interpretations

I had been told by several friends that the humanities campus of the University of Kenitra has quite a few religiously conservative students, but I had not thought much about this until I gave a reading there last week. I did my usual introduction about the process of writing Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, and then I read for about 10 minutes. During the Q&A, a student raised his hand and asked why the father character in "The Fanatic" tries to stop his daughter from covering her hair. "This is strange, " he said, "because most of the time the fathers do want their daughters to cover." I wasn't sure exactly what he based this statement on, particularly since he was a man and did not really know what a daughter's experience is like. I pointed out that, in the amphitheater where we sat, there were many women who covered, and many who did not. I said that no one, least of all my father, had ever asked me to cover. It's a woman's choice, I said. A bearded young man behind the questioner interrupted me, "Actually, it's not a choice." A few people laughed at his temerity, and then I explained that, above and beyond the debate over the veil, the story dealt with a very specific father, a very specific daughter, certainly not people who represent every gamut of experience in Moroccan society.

A young woman asked me, "Your book deals with illegal immigration, fundamentalism, judicial corruption, and so on. Do you think that writing about negative things in Morocco makes your work more attractive to the Western reader?" I must say I was taken aback because I had never thought of my work as being about "negative things." I explained that the book describes complex characters, who are put in complex situations. Some of the things in their lives are positive, others are negative. One could just as easily say that, in addition to illegal immigration, for example, the book deals with filial love and romantic love and platonic love, so why not mention those things, too?

I thought that I had laid those concerns about outsider/insider writing to rest. How wrong I was. A smiling young man in the front row asked, "I found your story "The Fanatic" to be insulting, in the same way that Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was insulting to Nigeria." This, of course, wasn't so much a question, as a comment, more specifically a challenge to me to say something for myself. The problem was that I had already forgotten about my book by then because I was trying to get my head wrapped around the idea that Things Fall Apart was insulting to Nigeria.
"Have you ever been to Nigeria?" I asked.
"No."
"How do you know that it's insulting? In what way is it insulting?"
"Because Okonkwo is polygamous and he beats his wives."
I was mystified as to how this young student could have possibly reduced Achebe's work to this one-liner. The gentleman who had introduced me, a professor in the English department, squirmed in his seat in embarrassment. I spoke about Achebe's work, explained that the book is set in a very specific time and place in Nigerian history, that there is much more to Okonkwo than the polygamy, that the book deals with many issues, most importantly the appearance of British colonialism and how it changes Okonkwo's world.

As I talked, I realized that this young man (and indeed several of the people who were so eager to ask questions that put literature on trial) was not a regular reader of books. It seems impossible to me that anyone who reads novels on a usual basis could come up with such a reductive interpretation, and I felt an overwhelming sadness, for him, and for what he was missing. After the reading, he came up to the podium to have his picture taken with me. I didn't know what to think. I didn't know if he had asked that question because he truly felt the way he said he did, or because he thought it would be funny, or if he was just being a punk. I think what upset me most was this expectation that my work, or literature in general, should be a stage in which good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people. In other words, what this student wanted was a fairytale. Life is not like that, and neither is literature.

The strangest interpretation, however, came when a student asked me: "In your book, a young woman goes from being a religious conservative who covers her hair to being a prostitute in Spain. Do you think that this is a metaphor for Morocco, which prostitutes itself to the West through the Free Trade Agreement?" I think I heaved a very audible sigh. Sometimes, a scarf is just a scarf, it's not a symbol for a country. I used as an example the anecdote that Sydney Lumet tells about asking filmmaker Akira Kurosawa why he framed a particular shot in Ran the way he did. Kurosawa's answer was that if the shot had been an inch to the left, a factory would have been exposed, and if it was one inch to the right, the airport would be in the frame, and neither of these buildings belonged in a period movie. The students all had a good laugh.

May 14, 2007

Kahf Profile

Neil MacFarquhar visits with poet and novelist Mohja Kahf at a reading in the Bay Area and writes about it for the New York Times.

Books Reviews and Lit Blogs

A couple of my friends are mentioned in this Los Angeles Times piece by Josh Getlin, about the shrinking space reserved to book reviews in newspapers. The issue, as Getlin explains, quickly turned into a needless game of blame-the-lit-blogs. Take a look.

May 09, 2007

Cormac McCarthy's The Road

A father and son walk along a road in a post-apocalyptic future. Around them, everything is dead or dying. Between sunup and sundown, the sky's color changes by only a few shades of gray. It's numbingly cold, and ash falls from the sky nearly all the time. The reader is never told what could have caused the world to turn out like this, but it's not hard to imagine that it could be a nuclear explosion. In the end, it doesn't much matter what caused it all, because there is life to attend to. The little boy needs to be fed and protected, and the father devotes himself to that. There are other survivors, but it's hard to tell who "the good guys" are, those "who carry the fire." McCarthy ventures into the deepest, darkest recesses of the human heart, and chronicles what he sees in vivid, yet restrained prose. Some survivors engage in cannibalism; others have organized in armies, red scarves at their necks, killing and stealing and rampaging; slavery reappears; and through all this madness the father must find food and protect his little boy. I had to put this book down a couple of times because I was not sure I could finish it. But I cared about the characters far too much to stay away, and so I picked it up again and finished it in one sitting. What Cormac McCarthy has done in his new novel is difficult, brave, and incredibly well-executed. A masterpiece.

May 08, 2007

Home Rule

The leaders of Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party will take their pledge of office in Belfast today. In the New York Times, novelist Colum McCann remembers growing up in Dublin, with a mother from the North and a father from the South.

I wanted desperately to know the “why” of Northern Ireland. My mother was raw and quiet with grief. “Ach, it’s just sad,” she said. My father told me that the answer was simple — all the murderers, hatemongers, kneecappers, bombers, were going to be herded onto a small floating island, and they would be pushed out to sea, whereupon they could kill and maim and tar-and-feather one another endlessly. The rest of us, he said, would be left in peace.

More here.

May 07, 2007

Department of WTF

Suketu Mehta (Maximum City) writing in The New York Times:

I grew up watching my father stand on his head every morning. He was doing sirsasana, a yoga pose that accounts for his youthful looks well into his 60s. Now he might have to pay a royalty to an American patent holder if he teaches the secrets of his good health to others. The United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued 150 yoga-related copyrights, 134 patents on yoga accessories and 2,315 yoga trademarks. There’s big money in those pretzel twists and contortions — $3 billion a year in America alone.

Read on, to find out how knowledge is being patented, and by those who should know better.

Sarkozy Win

53% of French voters have decided to let Sarkozy "water-hose" more "scum" from the cités.

May 04, 2007

New Medium, Same Censorship

Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day, and for the occasion Issandr El Amrani contributed this great piece at the Guardian's Comment Is Free blog, about the threats faced by Egyptian journalists and bloggers. Here's an excerpt:

Although it took time, Egypt's zealous security services have begun to catch up with bloggers, as in the case of Abdel Kareem Soliman, a Muslim who lambasted his co-religionists after sectarian clashes in his hometown of Alexandria. Soliman ended up being sentenced to four years in prison for an anti-Muslim post he wrote, becoming a poster child for online freedom of speech. A few months later, Abdel Moneim Mahmoud, an Islamist blogger, was in turn arrested. While earning much less media coverage - as Islamist political prisoners generally do - Mahmoud's case has now rallied much of the Egyptian blogosphere.

That unusual show of support for an Islamist in Egypt's secularist-dominated blogosphere came in recognition that Mahmoud had broken ranks with the powerful political movement to which he belongs, the Muslim Brotherhood, and voiced support for Soliman despite disapproving of what he wrote.

Please read the article in full here.

Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking

I've had a copy of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking for a long, long while, and I finally got to read it last week, on the plane to New York. It's her memoir of the year following the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, of a massive heart attack while their only daughter, Quintana, was in the hospital, receiving treatment for septic shock. (After the book was completed, but before its publication, Quintana passed away, in an almost unbearable post scriptum.) Didion chronicles the process of grief and mourning with stunning clarity, and many times I was moved to tears and had to put the book down. But there were also moments when I was frustrated by the sheer amount of control in the prose, as if the words could somehow serve as refuge from things Didion might not want the reader to know.

May 02, 2007

Apologies

My apologies for the lack of posts these past few days. I've been busy with travel, and I've also been devoting whatever time I have to my novel. Posting should resume shortly.

May 01, 2007

L.A. Lit Fest Recaps

The inimitable Tod Goldberg offers a write-up of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which took place last weekend. Here's a snippet:

A popular misconception about Los Angeles is that it's a town full of illiterate, fame-obsessed aspiring screenwriters whose most intense relationship with literature is Starbucks' employee relations manual. Well, perhaps that's not the most popular misconception -- there's the one about how pictures of your shaved genitalia appearing in US Magazine is actually a wise career move -- but time and again Southern California is noted for being the Capitol of Vapid; a place where Norbit's opening weekend is considered the high watermark of cultural talk. And while this may be true for the ten percenters who clog Wilshire Blvd. and the mail room denizens who spend their off hours speaking in Variety's Esperanto while in line at Baja Fresh, the hidden truth is that Los Angeles is a book town.

The empirical evidence is provided every April when the Los Angeles Times hosts their annual Festival of Books and Book Prizes ceremonies, a three-day celebration of the written word on the campus of UCLA. An average year features 150,000 readers, 500 authors, a hundred moderated panels, countless book signings, those weird people who believe Ayn Rand is a religious icon, those weird people who believe Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' caterwauling alien/human hybrid child is the messiah, my gut filled with churros and at least three of the following spectacles..

You'll have to go over to Jewcy to read the rest. And check out the posts over at Pinky's Paperhaus and Galleycat.

About

bio articles news contact rss

My Events

04.26: LA Times Festival of Books
04.30: Claremont, California
09.23-10.04: International Literature Festival Berlin

Search

Web Laila Lalami

My book

Hope & Other Dangerous Pursuits

In hardcover

Buy a Signed Copy!

In Morocco

De l’espoir et autres quêtes dangereuses

In Italian

La speranza e altri sogni pericolosi

In Portuguese

A Esperança È Uma Travessia

In french

De l’espoir et autres quêtes dangereuses

In dutch

Hoop en andere gevaarlijke verlangens Hoop en andere gevaarlijke verlangens (paperpack)

In spanish

Esperanza y Otros Sueños