June 29, 2007

Reading in Fez

This Saturday, I will give a reading at the International Conference on Mediterranean Women and Human Development, which takes place in Fez on June 28, 29 and 30. Here are the details:

June 30, 2007
5:00 PM
Reading and Discussion
Fes International Conference on Mediterranean Women
Palais des Congrès
Fes, Morocco

The conference will include talks by the likes of Latifa Jbabdi, Nouzha Skalli, Zakya Daoud, Leila Abouzeid, and Fatima Sadiqi, so be there.

June 25, 2007

Pictures from the Road

A couple of photos while I have access to an internet connection. Here's a picture from the reading I gave at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane. (Great crowd, by the way, and lovely campus.)

I had a couple of friends visiting from the States, and we made a stop in Azrou so they could buy some rugs.

We also visited the Roman ruins at Volubilis. The city was much bigger than I remembered from my last visit, fifteen years ago.

Lastly, an aerial view of Moulay Driss, the ancestral home of my family. The mausoleum had been recently renovated.

June 18, 2007

On the Road

I am going to be on the road for the next three to four weeks, with little or no access to the Internet, so I won't be able to blog. If you subscribe to my XML feed, you'll know immediately when I resume posting. Otherwise, tune in again in mid-July; I will have some major news to announce.

June 17, 2007

Department of WTF

So Salman Rushdie was finally honored with an honorary knighthood (he's Sir Salman from now on) and a Pakistani MP apparently thinks that this award justifies suicide attacks. In addition, the Pakistani minister for parliamentary affairs says that the honor "has hurt the sentiments of the Muslims across the world. " I'd love to know what qualifies her to speak for Muslims across the world. My God. Can you imagine if Rushdie ever wins the Nobel? The loonie fringe will probably blame him for everything from the Iraq war to the fighting in Gaza. Enough.

Lost Fathers

Edwidge Danticat has an op-ed in the New York Times about the cost of a recent immigration crackdown on families all over the United States. Do read it.

June 15, 2007

Reading: Ifrane, Morocco.

Next Tuesday, I will be reading from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane. Details:

June 19, 2007
5:00 PM
Reading and Discussion
Building 4, Auditorium
Al Akhawayn University
Ifrane, Morocco

(The reading and discussion will be in English. ) Hope to see you there!

June 14, 2007

'I Do Not Judge...But I Do Pose The Question.'

A few months ago I received a copy of Dave Eggers' new novel What is the What, and, after leafing through it, I set it aside to read later. Except that later never came. Something about the book made me uncomfortable, and the encomiums it has received in the press haven't really changed my mind. London Review of Books contributing editor Thomas Jones expresses that discomfort better than I could:

The book itself makes no attempt to explain how such a hybrid came into being. Readers are twice reassured in small type that ‘all proceeds . . . will go to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which distributes funds to Sudanese refugees in America; to rebuilding Southern Sudan, beginning with Marial Bai; to organisations working for peace and humanitarian relief in Darfur; and to the college education of Valentino Achak Deng.’ But Eggers is repeatedly referred to as ‘the author’, and his is the only name on the cover or the copyright page (the subtitle, ‘The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng’, appears only on the title page). This may make sense from the point of view of publicity and sales – Eggers’s name sells books, and selling more books raises awareness of and more funds for the causes that matter most to Achak – but it also inspires unease: Achak may benefit from the text, but he doesn’t own it; he has become a character in a fictionalised version of his life story that legally belongs to someone else. Practically speaking, this hardly matters: the motives for and consequences of Eggers’s actions are unquestionably benevolent, and the book could not have taken the form it has without Achak’s consent and blessing.

And yet, that a story so concerned with so many different forms of dispossession should itself be subject to a variety of appropriation is not unproblematic, and requires a more positive justification than mere silence. Eggers, unlike many of Achak’s American friends and benefactors, does not feature as a character in What Is the What. No doubt it was important to avoid distracting readers with anything that could be mistaken for cute metafictional trickery, one of the less interesting but more remarked-on aspects of Eggers’s first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a lightly fictionalised account of bringing up his younger brother after the deaths of his parents from cancer. But in What Is the What, Eggers is conspicuous by his absence from the narrative, which leaves you wondering how his name came to such solitary prominence on the cover, how the autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng came to be ‘Copyright © Dave Eggers’.

Read the rest of this otherwise positive review here.

June 13, 2007

Achebe Awarded Booker International

The Man Booker International Prize, which is awarded every two years to "a living author for a body of work that has contributed to an achievement in fiction on the world stage," has been given to Chinua Achebe. I adore and admire Achebe, and could not be happier with the judges' choice.

Asleep At The Editorial Desk

Over the last few years, Moroccan requests for visas to go to Mecca for the Hajj pilgrimage have consistently outnumbered the quotas set by the Saudis, so the Moroccan government has been forced to set up lotteries for prospective pilgrims. More than 32,000 applicants will get a chance to win one of 7,700 spots. Such news, of course, makes local headlines, as you can see below from this scan of La Vie Economique. Now notice the ad accompanying the article.

Link via the indispensable Larbi.

June 12, 2007

R.I.P. Ousmane Sembene

Some very upsetting news today: Ousmane Sembene passed away last Sunday, aged 84. A great loss for Senegal, for Africa, and for fans of films and literature everywhere.

Mabanckou @ UCLA

Over on his blog, poet and novelist Alain Mabanckou (Mémoires de porc-épic) announces that he has joined the faculty of the French department at UCLA as a tenured professor, starting in the fall. He also mentions that he will spend this summer translating Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation into French.

June 11, 2007

False Dichotomies

The latest New York Review of Books includes a thoughtful review by Pankaj Mishra of Martha Nussbaum's new book, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future. Here's a snippet:

Describing the BJP's quest for a culturally homogeneous Hindu nation-state, Nussbaum wishes to introduce her Western readers to "a complex and chilling case of religious violence that does not fit some common stereotypes about the sources of religious violence in today's world." Nussbaum claims that "most Americans are still inclined to believe that religious extremism in the developing world is entirely a Muslim matter." She hints that at least part of this myopia must be blamed on Samuel Huntington's hugely influential "clash of civilizations" argument, which led many to believe that the world is "currently polarized between a Muslim monolith, bent on violence, and the democratic cultures of Europe and North America."

Nussbaum points out that India, a democracy with the third-largest Muslim population in the world, doesn't fit Huntington's theory of a clash between civilizations. The real clash exists

within virtually all modern nations —between people who are prepared to live with others who are different, on terms of equal respect, and those who seek the... domination of a single religious and ethnic tradition.

She describes how Indian voters angered by the BJP's pro-rich economic policies and anti-Muslim violence voted it out of power in general elections in 2004. Detailing the general Indian revulsion against the violence in Gujarat [during which Hindu mobs lynched 2,000 Muslims] and the search for justice by its victims, she highlights the "ability of well-informed citizens to turn against religious nationalism and to rally behind the values of pluralism and equality."

I'm going to have to get a copy of Nussbaum's book when I return to the U.S. in the summer. You can read Mishra's review in full here.

Pay Discrimination Is Your Problem

Katha Pollitt has a great column in the latest issue of The Nation about the Supreme Court's recent decision to limit to 180 days the time in which a worker may legally file suit against his or her employer for pay discrimination. Pollitt comments on possible consequences of the ruling:

If we can't rely on the courts(...) there's always the law of unintended consequences. A lot more women and minorities may bring suit first, rather than try to work things out politely with their employer, as right-wing antifeminists are always advising women to do if they feel, no doubt mistakenly, that they have a grievance. For those who believe the feminist movement marginalized itself by taking its eye off the dollar, this is the perfect opportunity to get back to economic issues that have cross-class appeal. Economic populists take note: You might want to add eliminating sexist and racist pay discrimination to your definition of the common good. And those who think feminism is no longer necessary might want to consider the connection between Ledbetter and the Court's upholding of the so-called Partial-Birth Abortion Ban. Putting women back in their box, anyone?

More here.

June 07, 2007

Adichie wins Orange Prize

Great, great news: Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has won the 2007 Orange Prize for her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. She is the first African to take home the British award, established twelve years ago to honor the best writing by women. The Guardian has an audio interview of Chimamanda, as well as a reading from her novel. The news has made my day.

Photo: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

June 06, 2007

Zakya Daoud's Les Années Lamalif

I am reading Zakya Daoud's new book, Les Années Lamalif. 1958-1988. Trente ans de journalisme au Maroc. Daoud is a fascinating person, and one hopes that a proper biography will someday be devoted to her. Born Jacqueline David in a small town in Normandy, she went to journalism school in Paris. There, she met Mohammed Loghlam, whom she married and followed to Casablanca in 1958, after the completion of their degrees. Loghlam applied formally for Moroccan citizenship (he was born in Casablanca to a Moroccan mother and an Algerian father), for himself and for their son, but when the citizenship papers came through, they included Jacqueline's as well, even though she never asked for them. This clerical error resulted in her becoming one of very few naturalized Moroccans. Later on, the editor of Jeune Afrique suggested that she take on a pseudonym when she started writing for him, and that was how Jacqueline David became Zakya Daoud. Years later, her detractors still used her foreign birth to criticize her and to deny her the right to speak out on any number of political issues in Morocco. The wound of being called "nesranya" is very raw still, as her many references to it in the book attest.

Les Années Lamalif is a chronicle of Daoud's work as a journalist at various organizations in Morocco, including the Radio Télévision Marocaine, and all the difficulties that such work entailed, including several vicious altercations with Moulay Ahmed Alaoui, the imprisonment of many friends or acquaintances, the constant threat of censorship. In 1966, using all their savings, Daoud and Loghlam founded Lamalif , which would later become a reference for many in the opposition movement. Daoud published the work of Abdallah Laroui, Mohammed Tozy, Paul Pascon, and many others. It's very clear that this was a period not just of political upheaval, but also of great cultural and literary activity. There are a few gossipy tidbits (e.g. How the Souffles group became upset when a Lamalif article by a young Salim Jay ridiculed a reading by some of their poets.) There are also disturbing anecdotes (e.g. Daoud being required to go to the local commissariat regularly to be questioned about matters of public knowledge.) Most of all, Les Années Lamalif is a rigorous account of all the work that went into contesting the established power structure, into saying No to the Makhzen's domination.

Although the book is exceedingly interesting, it suffers occasionally from a tendency to list series of events rather than placing them in a narrative, whether personal or historical. This may be due to the fact that Daoud's journals were stolen from her by Moroccan security on a flight to Paris in 1988, so she had no access to her personal notes from those years, and had to rely instead on memory, documentation, and research. Still, this is an important book, a reference for the younger generation. May they read it and draw the necessary parallels.

Hope in Brazil

I just heard that the Brazilian edition of my book has been released by Editora Rocco in Rio de Janeiro, under the title A Esperança È Uma Travessia. Here is the cover art:

Check it out, Brazilian readers.

June 05, 2007

Matar on Salih

Just in time for Reading the World, Critical Mass has begun a series of posts in which writers recommend books from around the world. Hisham Matar (In The Country of Men) puts in a few words about one of my favorite novels of all time: Tayib Salih's Season of Migration to the North. See what Hisham had to say about it here.

40 Years Ago: The Six-Day War

It was 40 years ago that Israel bombed Egyptian airplanes on the ground, launching the Six-Day war. Over at Salon, Sandy Tolan revisits some of the era's myths, which have contributed to the creation of competing narratives about what happened then:

At a little after 7 on the morning of June 5, 1967, as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's commanders were finishing their breakfasts and driving to work, French-built Israeli fighter jets roared out of their bases and flew low, below radar, into Egyptian airspace. Within three hours, 500 Israeli sorties had destroyed Nasser's entire air force. Just after midday, the air forces of Jordan and Syria also lay in smoking ruins, and Israel had essentially won the Six-Day War -- in six hours.

Israeli and U.S. historians and commentators describe the surprise attack as necessary, and the war as inevitable, the result of Nasser's fearsome war machine that had closed the Strait of Tiran, evicted United Nations peacekeeping troops, taunted the traumatized Israeli public, and churned toward the Jewish state's border with 100,000 troops. "The morning of 5 June 1967," wrote Israel's warrior-turned-historian, Chaim Herzog, "found Israel's armed forces facing the massed Arab armies around her frontiers." Attack or be annihilated: The choice was clear.

Or was it?

You can read it all here.

Same Shit, Different Day

The fighting between Lebanese forces and Fath El Islam terrorists appears to be spreading from Nahr el Bared to Ain El Hilweh. The Lebanese army has been killing Palestinian refugees seemingly indiscriminately--more than 100 civilians since May 20--not that you'd notice it from newspaper coverage.

June 04, 2007

Haiha Evening: Hoba Hoba Spirit

Having completed a new draft of my novel, I am finally re-emerging from my apartment and going out on the town a bit. Last Saturday, for instance, I saw Hoba Hoba Spirit in a small concert in Casablanca. If you're unfamiliar with this band, you can check out some of their music here, or, better yet, visit their website. They mix traditional instruments like the bendir or the qraqeb with electric guitar and bass, and the music they play fuses gnawa with rock, or ska with chaabi. One of the highlights of the evening was their cover of Nass El Ghiwane's "Fin Ghadi Biyya Khoya," which they managed to modernize without losing anything of its spirit. Mostly, though, Hoba Hoba played original music, and what strikes me about those songs is that they have that rare quality of capturing a particular moment in Moroccan history, with lyrics that speak of life as we know it, of a country in the middle of great changes.

Photo credit: Hoba Hoba Spirit

June 01, 2007

The Road, Discussed

Cormac McCarthy's The Road, one of my favorite novels this year, is this month's Slate book club selection, and the site's Meghan O'Rourke, Katie Roiphe, and John Burnham Schwartz discuss the novel in this podcast.

Hostage Crisis, Redux

The Iranian government has arrested and jailed a fourth person with dual Iranian and American citizenships. His name is Ali Shakeri and he is a California businessman and founding member of UCI's Center for Citizen Peacebuilding. I am starting to put more credence in the theory that is floating around, and which one of my readers emailed me about: That Iran would like to trade these four Iranian American prisoners for the five Iranian diplomats abducted in Iraq in January.

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My Events

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

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