August 29, 2007

Otherwise Engaged

I'm waiting for the movers to show up and won't be able to blog through the rest of this week, so I apologize for the lack of posts. I should be back in these parts on Tuesday, when my internet connection is installed.

August 28, 2007

Hope in Italy

For Italian readers: My book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, is published in Italy by Fusi Orari this month. Here is the cover art:

I'll be in Italy in early October for the Internationale Festival in Ferrara, followed by readings in Cagliari and Rome. You can check my events for more details.

August 27, 2007

Not A Good Day For Bad Guys

Driss Basri, former Minister of the Interior and torturer-in-chief during Morocco's Years of Lead, has passed away in Paris. In other news, Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales, who has written memos arguing that the United States could use torture in interrogations of detainees, has resigned.

Interlude

We went to Powell's last night, and being in those aisles almost brought me to tears. The Blue Room! The literary magazine rack! The Cavallini notebooks! I picked up two travel books by Pico Iyer (The Lady and the Monk and Video Night in Kathmandu), a used hardcover, in excellent condition, of Moroccan anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi's A Season in Mecca, Coetzee's memoir Youth, and a few other titles for fall. Few places give readers so much opportunity as Powell's to explore and try something different. I don't know what I'm going to do without it.

August 25, 2007

On NPR's Weekend Edition

I'm in Portland this weekend to prepare for the move to Los Angeles, but I wanted to let you know that I'll be on NPR's Weekend Edition tomorrow (Sunday) morning to talk about summer reading. You can tune into your local NPR station or listen online tomorrow.

August 23, 2007

R.I.P. Qurratulain Hyder

More sad news: Qurratulain Hayder, whose 1959 novel A River of Fire was favorably compared to Rushdie's Midnight's Children, has also passed away.

R.I.P. Grace Paley

I found out the terrible news by reading Maud Newton's blog this morning: Grace Paley has passed away. The New York Times has an obit as well.

August 20, 2007

One More Move

Over the last fifteen years, I've lived in Downtown Los Angeles, Koreatown, Torrance, Redondo Beach, Portland, and Casablanca. That's one move every two years. I am so tired of moving--and yet here I am, doing it again. I'm in L.A. with my husband at the moment, looking for a place. We've only been gone from the city for four years, and yet so much seems to have changed. There's so much gentrification; traffic is worse, if that's even conceivable; and there's a café that calls itself 'literati,' because it uses book spines as wall decor. (The horror! The horror!) Still, I've missed L.A. There's a great diner we went to every weekend for 8 years, and it's still open; there are lots of good theaters; amazing music; and of course all our friends and family.

August 16, 2007

Writers To Sarkozy: Don't Rewrite History

On July 26, French president Nicolas Sarkozy gave a speech in Dakar, addressed not to his Senegalese hosts, but rather to "African youth" in its entirety. The speech was a bizarre mix of neo-colonial clichés and passionate promises of help. The trouble in Africa, as in the Middle East, has always been the sheer number of people so eager to help, and all out of altruism, of course.

Among other things, Sarkozy said that slavery happened, but it's all in the past; that he did not want to speak of repentance, but of the future; that colonialism was not all bad because the French built schools, roads, and bridges. (Whenever someone claims that the French built schools in Morocco, I always like to point out that in 44 years of their presence in my homeland, they managed to graduate fewer than 50 people from university; so enough about the 'benefits' of colonization already.) Sarkozy then claimed that the African farmer knows only the "eternal beginning of time, marked by the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words." (Three guesses as to who will help Africans enter, at long last, into history.) He added that France would help all African nations who wish to have democracy. And then he went on to meet with Omar Bongo of Gabon, one of the oldest dictators in Africa. (40 years and going!) It was, in short, the kind of speech that really made me wonder how French imperialism, both military and economic, is not talked about in the West to the same extent as, for instance, British or American interventions.

Needless to say, Sarkozy's speech was severely criticized in Senegalese newspapers, and in the African press at large. His speech drew a response from the African literary community, as well. In Libération last week, Raharimanana (of Madagascar), Boubacar Boris Diop (of Sénégal), Abderrahman Beggar (of Morocco), Patrice Nganang (of Cameroon), Koulsy Lamko (of Chad), Kangni Alem (of Togo), and Jutta Hepke (of Germany) addressed an open letter to the president, in which they ask him to "stop fraternizing with the gravediggers of our hopes" and invite him to have a true debate.

August 15, 2007

Time Up

My time in Casablanca is drawing to a close. It was a wonderful experience, at once heart-expanding and thought-provoking. I feel pretty good about what I've accomplished: I'm almost done with my novel. But, and characteristically for me, I can't help but wish I had been able to do even more: Write more non-fiction, travel around the Middle Atlas, climb Mount Toubkal. Maybe next time, insha'llah. I will miss my brother, the new friends I made this year, the incredible food, the long afternoons spent in cafés, the call for prayer, the music, the light, the way people always rush to help. I will not, obviously, miss having to deal with Maroc Telecom every other week, or coming across the kind of society people Gad El Maleh satirizes so well.

August 14, 2007

Saunders Does Climate Change

A day in the life of George Saunders, a few years from now:

Syracuse, New York, where I live, is famous for its brutal winters. We're having one now. Although it's been a strange year, weatherwise, given "global warming" and all. (Thanks Mr. Gore, for inventing that!) Yesterday it was a nice mild summer day, about 150 degrees - I'd just come inside from mopping up the puddle that was formerly Keith, our postman - when suddenly, I could feel it in my bones, that good old "Ah, winter's a-coming!" feeling.

And I was right.

Suddenly the temperature dropped - three hundred degrees in one hour, a local record! It was so lovely, I couldn't resist putting my work aside and donning special clothing purchased from NASA and taking a stroll through this "winter wonderland." It was gorgeous: the neighborhood cats, converted to ice-cats in mid-stride, four pert little robins literally frozen to death on a clothesline, little beaks open in mid-peep.

I guess I'm just a sucker for the "pastoral." Across the street, here was old Mrs Clark, bending to pick up her newspaper, grouchy look frozen on her face, reaching back absent-mindedly to scratch her - it was really too bad. I liked Mrs Clark. I mean, yes, she was always complaining - about Mr Clark, about the president not signing the Kyoto treaty, the kids running across her lawn, the way our lawmakers embrace pseudo-science to protect the big oil companies: a real malcontent - but still, you hate anyone to be instantaneously frozen, especially right out there where you can see them, cluttering up your beautiful winter view.

More Saundersian genius here. The piece originally appeared in Neue Zürcher Zeitung in March, and was reprinted on signandsight.com last weekend.

August 13, 2007

Kahlo Letters

Fifty years after her death, Frida Kahlo's letters to one of her best friends, Dr. Leo Eloesser, have been released, and are now published in Mexico, under the title My Beloved Doctor.The letters had been kept sealed on Diego Rivera's orders for all this time, but now visitors to the Kahlo family home in Mexico City can see the letters, and other artifacts, displayed for the first time. I am a huge fan of Frida Kahlo's--maybe someday I can finally, finally, visit her house.

Photo: Las Dos Fridas. Via.

Season in Review

Dan Olivas reviews Dahlia Season, the debut collection of stories by Long Beach author Myriam Gurba for the El Paso Times.

Police Encounter

We were driving along a beach road with a couple of friends when a cop stopped us. I was sitting in the back, but being the only Darija speaker in the car, I lowered my window, ready to translate. "You went up a one-way street," the policeman said. "License and registration."

I apologized and explained we had not seen the sign. (Later, we drove by again and saw that it was partially covered by shrub.)

"I have to write you up. The ticket's going to be 400 dirhams."

Upon hearing my translation of what the cop said, my husband, clearly unaware of how these things are supposed to be handled, immediately whipped out the money from his wallet. (You are supposed to start by saying you're very sorry, you were distracted, and yes you made a big mistake; you're busy, so you don't have time to deal with the paperwork; how you wish you could come to an understanding... and then you would bargain the cop down to about 1/3 of the ticket price--about 130 dirhams in this case. My husband had skipped all these steps, and was ready to hand the entire amount over. )

The cop, a tall and lanky fellow with a thin mustache, got very nervous, and walked away. He went to the intersection and directed traffic for a few minutes, before coming back.

"So," he asked, "what are you all doing here? Are you tourists?"

"No, sir," I said. "I'm here for research. But my friends are tourists."

As soon as he heard the word "research," he looked scared. He handed Alex his money back. "We don't want to give tourists a bad image of the country. Here. Just pay attention next time."

I had no idea that "research" was such a red flag for cops.

August 09, 2007

'Nether Caste'

The July/August issue of the Boston Review is not yet up, but the article by Glenn Loury on the prison system in the U.S. is already available. Loury is a professor of social sciences at Brown, and in the piece he lays out the fundamental problem with the culture (and business) of mass incarceration:

Crime rates peaked in 1992 and have dropped sharply since. Even as crime rates fell, however, imprisonment rates remained high and continued their upward march. The result, the current American prison system, is a leviathan unmatched in human history.

According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with five percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes. One third of inmates in state prisons are violent criminals, convicted of homicide, rape, or robbery. But the other two thirds consist mainly of property and drug offenders. Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.

How did it come to this?

It's a thought-provoking piece. Read it if you know what's good for you.

Booker Longlist

As has been widely reported, the longlist for the Booker Prize was announced. I was pleased to see Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist included, but surprised that J. M. Coetzee's new book, Diary of A Bad Year, was not. Still, it's nice to see younger authors get a shot. (The shortlist will be announced on September 6 and the winner on October 16.)

August 07, 2007

'Letter to Jimmy'

Alain Mabanckou's new book, Lettre à Jimmy, has just been published by Fayard in France. As the title suggests, it's essentially an homage to James Baldwin in epistolary form. If you read French, you can check out an excerpt on Mabanckou's blog.

Crusader Talk

Over at Slate, Reza Aslan reviews two books that collect Osama Bin Laden's speeches, looking for clues as to the terrorist leader's arguments. The first is Messages to the World, translated by James Howarth and edited by Duke University professor Bruce Lawrence, and the other, newer volume is The Al Qaeda Reader, edited and translated by Library of Congress scholar Raymond Ibrahim. Here's a quote from Aslan's review:

[F]ar from debunking al-Qaida's twisted vision of a world divided in two, the Bush administration has legitimized it through its own morally reductive "us vs. them" rhetoric.
In the end, this is the most important lesson to be learned from these writings. Because, if we are truly locked in an ideological war, as the president keeps reminding us, then our greatest weapons are our words. And thus far, instead of fighting this war on our terms, we have been fighting it on al-Qaida's.
Don't believe me? Ask Bin Laden:

Bush left no room for doubts or media opinion. He stated clearly that this war is a Crusader war. He said this in front of the whole world so as to emphasize this fact. … When Bush says that, they try to cover up for him, then he said he didn't mean it. He said, 'crusade.' Bush divided the world into two: 'either with us or with terrorism' … The odd thing about this is that he has taken the words right out of our mouths.

Odd, indeed.

By the way, earlier this year, the Boston Review published an excellent essay by Khaled Abou el Fadl about the Lawrence book, which you can still find online here.

August 06, 2007

On Naming

Manuel Muñoz, whose short story collection The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue was recently short-listed for the Frank O'Connor prize, has a pretty cool op-ed in the New York Times about the politics of naming. Here's an excerpt:

It’s intriguing to watch “American” names begin to dominate among my nieces and nephews and second cousins, as well as with the children of my hometown friends. I am not surprised to meet 5-year-old Brandon or Kaitlyn. Hardly anyone questions the incongruity of matching these names with last names like Trujillo or Zepeda. The English-only way of life partly explains the quiet erasure of cultural difference that assimilation has attempted to accomplish. A name like Kaitlyn Zepeda doesn’t completely obscure her ethnicity, but the half-step of her name, as a gesture, is almost understandable.

Spanish was and still is viewed with suspicion: always the language of the vilified illegal immigrant, it segregated schoolchildren into English-only and bilingual programs; it defined you, above all else, as part of a lower class. Learning English, though, brought its own complications with identity. It was simultaneously the language of the white population and a path toward the richer, expansive identity of “American.” But it took getting out of the Valley for me to understand that “white” and “American” were two very different things.

You can read the piece in full here.

August 05, 2007

Department of WTF

It's really disheartening to have to write yet another post, about yet another problem in the Moroccan press, but it seems the wheels of censorship never stop. Over the weekend, the government ordered all issues of Tel Quel and its sister publication Nichane seized from points of sale. The magazine's editor in chief Ahmed Reda Benchemi was heard by police on Saturday, and was back at home on Sunday, according to this Reuters report.

Apologia

Sorry for the silence in the last couple of days. I was busy finishing a piece on Zakes Mda (for The Nation) and now that it's turned in I can spend some time online again.

August 01, 2007

Jaggi on Khouri

I missed this piece when it appeared in last weekend's Guardian Review, until a reader kindly sent me the link: Maya Jaggi's profile of Elias Khouri. Here's a snippet:

Khoury may be well placed to assess the aspirations and tensions among Palestinians in Lebanon's 12 camps, who remain "in closed ghettos, separated from Lebanese society". As a young Lebanese at the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut in the 1970s, he spent years gathering from refugees their personal histories of the mass expulsions that attended the creation of Israel. He felt the stories should be given to an Arab Tolstoy, and imagined himself in the role ("everybody laughed"), but says, "I never dared write it then because I didn't know how."

More here.

Health Hazard

This is not the kind of thing you want to learn when you're printing draft after draft of your book: Office printers are 'health risk.'

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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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