November 21, 2007

On Joan Scott's The Politics of the Veil

The December 10 issue of The Nation magazine is its annual Fall Books issue, so it's a particular delight for those of us who like to read books, and read about them, too. There are pieces on Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah, Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal, Philip Roth's Exit Ghost, among many others.

The magazine also includes an essay of mine about the headscarf controversies in France. It's called "Beyond the Veil." Here is its opening paragraph:

"A kind of aggression." "A successor to the Berlin Wall." "A lever in the long power struggle between democratic values and fundamentalism." "An insult to education." "A terrorist operation." These descriptions--by former French President Jacques Chirac; economist Jacques Attali; and philosophers Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut and André Glucksmann--do not refer to the next great menace to human civilization but rather to the Muslim woman's headscarf, which covers the hair and neck, or, as it is known in France, the foulard islamique.

In her keenly observed book The Politics of the Veil, historian Joan Wallach Scott examines the particular French obsession with the foulard, which culminated in March 2004 with the adoption of a law that made it illegal for students to display any "conspicuous signs" of religious affiliation. The law further specified that the Muslim headscarf, the Jewish skullcap and large crosses were not to be worn but that "medallions, small crosses, stars of David, hands of Fatima, and small Korans" were permitted. Despite the multireligious contortions, it was very clear, of course, that the law was primarily aimed at Muslim schoolgirls.

The rest of the article is freely available online, here.

In the Islands

We are leaving for a week's vacation in Hawaii tomorrow (in fact, I should probably be packing instead of blogging.) Last night, while choosing which books to take with me, I ended up pulling out Joan Didion's essay "In The Islands," which was published in her collection The White Album. The opening paragraph reads:

1969: I had better tell you where I am, and why. I am sitting in a high-ceilinged room in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu watching the long translucent curtains billow in the trade wind and trying to put my life back together. My husband is here, and our daughter, age three. She is blonde and barefoot, a child of paradise in a frangipani lei, and she does not understand why she cannot go to the beach. She cannot go to the beach because there has been an earthquake in the Aleutians, 7.5 on the Richter scale, and a tidal wave is expected. In two or three minutes the wave, if there is one, will hit Midway Island, and we are awaiting word from Midway. My husband watches the television screen. I watch the curtains, and imagine the swell of the water.

The bulletin, when it comes, is a distinct anticlimax: Midway reports no unusual wave action. My husband switches off the television set and stares out the window. I avoid his eyes, and brush the baby's hair. In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices. We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.

Isn't this the best of Didion, and the worst? The precise adjectives, the varied syntax, the parallel between natural and personal calamity--any writer would envy her those qualities. (I know I do.) And yet, the paragraph also has the worst of her, doesn't it? Did you really need to know that she stays in a "high-ceilinged room" at the expensive Royal Hawaiian Hotel? The best and worst compete with each other for the rest of the essay, and yet of course I felt compelled to finish it, and read the best sentences out loud to my husband.

November 20, 2007

Essay in Nexus

I have an essay titled "Why I Write," in the Dutch literary magazine Nexus. I wrote this piece last spring in Casablanca, at the invitation of editor Rob Riemen, who wanted a piece on the subject of childhood dreams--you can easily guess what my dream was. The essay was translated into Dutch by Ineke van der Burg. I haven't submitted the essay anywhere in the States yet (maybe if I stopped traveling so much...) but maybe someday the original English-language edition will appear somewhere. For those of you who read Dutch, the table of contents is available here, and you can purchase a copy here.

November 19, 2007

WWB Book Club

Words Without Borders, the wonderful organization that brings you literature in translation, recently started an online book club. I've linked before to the conversations: Mark Sarvas discussing Sándor Márai's The Rebels and Michael Orthofer talking about Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Mandarins.

I mention all of this again because, next month, I will be doing the book club discussion on Camara Laye's The Radiance of the King, translated from the French by James Kirkup. If you're interested, why not get the book at your local bookstore, or borrow it from your library? You have a couple of weeks before the conversation starts. I haven't read the novel yet myself--I am taking it with me when I go on vacation later this week, and will savor it then. Once I have something up on the WWB website, I'll mention it in this space as well, so you can take part in the conversation.

Reading: Los Angeles Public Library

I will be taking part in a reading tonight at the Los Angeles Public Library to honor the victims of the bombing of Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad last year. I will be reading two brief poems (one by Mutanabbi himself, one by Darwish) in the original Arabic, followed by English translations. My wonderful UCR colleague Chris Abani will read, as will Beau Beausoleil, Suzanne Lummis, Marisela Norte, Sholeh Wolpe, and Terry Wolverton. Please come.

November 16, 2007

New Bookforum

The new issue of Bookforum is now available, and it includes a review by Siddhartha Deb of J.M. Coetzee's new novel Diary of a Bad Year. In the U.K., where the book first appeared, the reviews have been mixed, but this early piece here in the U.S. is just lovely. Here is its concluding paragraph:

The books have all been short, the language deceptively simple, but Coetzee’s recurrent themes have been no less than the vital signs of a culture, one possibly in its death throes. Diary of a Bad Year may be his most successful diagnosis yet of what we are suffering from, one that even offers hope in the form of resistance, critical thought, and the odd, imperfect humanity that emerges in the story of Anya and Señor C. In other writers, such hope would appear trite, but we know that Coetzee is no sentimentalist. His humanism has always been hard-won, wrested from those early lessons in authoritarianism and opposition, and this brilliant novel shows how much better prepared Coetzee is than many Western writers to come to terms with our new age.

When I was in Europe earlier this fall I was frustrated to see that the Italian translation of the novel was already published while we here in the U.S. had to wait until January. Another six weeks to go!

Alike, Not Alike

The lovely and amazing Tayari Jones writes about attending the National Book Awards ceremony, where she was mistaken for other African-American nominees:

While at the National Book Awards, people kept congratulating me on my nomination. Some people complimented me on my beautiful reading. When I didn't win, a couple of really nice folks said they had been pulling for me, and certainly I'll get it next time. I was gracious, of course. But here's the thing: I wasn't up for an award! They had me confused with one of the following people: Edwidge Danticat-- who was nominated for "Brother, I'm Dying." or maybe M. Sindy Felin, who was nominated for "Touching Snow" or maybe Asali Solomon who read in the 5 Under 35 event. The picture at the left is me and Asali. All black people don't look alike but we sorta do.

This reminded me of a very funny moment at the 2006 Bread Loaf Writers' conference. The talented novelist Emily Raboteau read a non-fiction piece about a visit to Israel and being stopped and searched at the airport because she was mistaken for an Arab. (Here's an excerpt.) The next day, the faculty and fellows volunteered to serve lunch to the attendees, so I was in the kitchen waiting for an order for my table when a very famous poet, also getting food for his table, approached me and said how much he loved my reading. He went on and on about how great it was. "That was Emily," I said. "My reading's tomorrow."

So, do we look alike?

November 15, 2007

The Coens' No Country for Old Men

I finished work early yesterday and went to the Laemmle in Santa Monica to catch a matinee of the Coen brothers’ new film, No Country For Old Men, their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel by the same title. The story is about a welder named Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who stumbles on a handful of dead men in the Rio Grande, along with a bag full of cash--about 2 million dollars. He takes the cash, setting off a chain of events, which, although easily guessed at, are nevertheless completely suspenseful. On Moss's trail are a psychopathic killer (Javier Bardem), a sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones), an assassin (Woody Harrelson), and a handful of unnamed Mexican drug dealers. (Unnamed, and undeveloped as characters, something that is true also of two of the three females in the book.)

In some ways, the Coen brothers’ adaptation remedied a couple of the problems in McCarthy's otherwise excellent novel. One is that a crucial scene that resolves what happens to Moss is missing from the book, but not from the film. The other is that, in the book, it's easy to miss the fact that the story is set in 1980 (the date is hinted at the beginning, but not mentioned again until about halfway through the novel.) Obviously, in the movie, the sense of time was immediately clear. The film also gives us the pleasure of hearing McCarthy’s pitch-perfect dialogue spoken by talented actors. (You know how, after watching Fargo, you left the theater and tried to speak like Frances McDormand? You’ll be doing the same with Tommy Lee Jones in No Country.) But there are also ways in which the Coen brothers' movie doesn't quite compare with the novel. The one female character, for instance, that did something other than plead with a man or serve him food or coffee ended up being cut entirely from the film. Still, the level of craft that went into making this adaptation is really, really remarkable. Not to be missed.

November 14, 2007

Reading: Cal Poly Pomona

I'll be giving a reading tomorrow at Cal Poly Pomona. Here are details:

12:00 PM
Lecture and Reading
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
3801 West Temple Avenue
Pomona, California

If you live in the area, come on by. The event is free and open to the public.

November 13, 2007

The Barbarians Are At The Gate, Part 5786

In the Financial Times, Simon Kuper reviews four recent books that purport to show that Europe is under attack from Islam and/or Muslims: Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept, Walter Laqueur's The Last Days of Europe, Melanie Phillips's Londonistan, and Bat Ye'or's Eurabia. Here is Kuper's intro:

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was written in the 1890s, possibly by the Russian-French journalist Matthieu Golovinski, and spread by the Tsarist secret police. A forgery, it claimed to be the manual of a Jewish conspiracy to rule the world.

Bat Ye'or, author of the little-read but influential book Eurabia, repeatedly mentions the Protocols. Well she might, because Eurabia has been described as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in reverse. Bat Ye'or is Hebrew for ''daughter of the Nile'', the pseudonym of a woman who fled Egypt as a Jew in 1957 and now lives in Switzerland. In Eurabia, she purports to reveal an Arab-European conspiracy to rule the world.

Though ludicrous, Eurabia became the spiritual mother of a genre. Ye'or's genius was to bridge two waves of anti-European books: those of 2002-03, which said Europe had gone anti-Semitic again, and those of 2006-07, which say Europe is being conquered by Muslims.

The four books here provide a fair summary of the ''Eurabia'' genre. False as they are, their existence reveals something about the geopolitical moment.

And then he proceeds to deconstruct all these books' claims. You can read the full article here.

November 12, 2007

Lindelof on the WGA Strike

I've been following media coverage of the Writers' Guild strike, and it's really unsettling to see how the writers are being portrayed as greedy bastards who don't care that TV crew-members will be losing their jobs soon. In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Damon Lindelof, who writes for Lost--a show I watched on TV here and streamed online when I was in Morocco on my Fulbright--explains why the strike is necessary:

The motivation for this drastic action — and a strike is drastic, a fact I grow more aware of every passing day — is the guild’s desire for a portion of revenues derived from the Internet. This is nothing new: for more than 50 years, writers have been entitled to a small cut of the studios’ profits from the reuse of our shows or movies; whenever something we created ends up in syndication or is sold on DVD, we receive royalties. But the studios refuse to apply the same rules to the Internet.

My show, “Lost,” has been streamed hundreds of millions of times since it was made available on ABC’s Web site. The downloads require the viewer to first watch an advertisement, from which the network obviously generates some income. The writers of the episodes get nothing. We’re also a hit on iTunes (where shows are sold for $1.99 each). Again, we get nothing.

Read it all here. You can send a message of support through this website.

R.I.P. Norman Mailer

As you no doubt have heard, Norman Mailer died on Saturday, at the age of 84. I have read too little of his work to contribute anything personal in this space, but there are articles and remembrances in the NY Times, the Washington Post, the SF Chronicle, the Nation, the New Yorker, TEV, Critical Mass, and many, many other newspapers, magazines, and blogs. Here in Los Angeles, the Times had a front-page obit yesterday, a long article that covered Mailer's entire literary career and included photos from key moments.

Trampling Marrakesh

The New York Times has a travel piece on Marrakesh, which I fear will result in even more tourists crowding the city. When we were there last spring, I saw a moronic British tourist sticking his ass out of one of the windows of the Ben Youssef Medersa. The floors of the seminary's student rooms were damaged by all the activity, and one of the guides kept touching the exquisite plaster work in the inner courtyard with his bare hands. (The photo above gives you a small idea of what you'll see on any given day at the famous medersa.) The tile floors at the Bahia palace were completely falling apart, and people had no regard for the artifacts. The Menebhi palace was also starting to show signs of wear. Sad.

November 07, 2007

Panel: Georgetown University

This week, Georgetown University and the Moroccan Embassy are co-organizing a conference in Washington, D.C. on "Morocco: Recent Trends and Future Prospects." I will be doing a panel on Moroccan literature with Abdelfettah Kilito and Mokhtar Gambou on Thursday afternoon. You can view the schedule here and here. If you live in the area, do come by and say hello. The event is open to the public.

All The Research That Fits

Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, the esteemed (by Bush & Co., I mean) scholars of the Middle East have started their own academic organization, an alternative to the renowned Middle East Studies Association. Lewis and Ajami are calling their group the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, and they're organizing a conference, starting a journal, and soliciting members.

(Via)

November 06, 2007

Coetzee's Critical Library

Critical Mass, the blog of the National Books Critics Circle, has a fairly regular feature called "The Critical Library," which, as the title suggests, asks critics to name their favorite volumes on criticism. Today, J. M. Coetzee contributes his list, so take a look.

You want to know what my own critical library--for the English language anyway--would look like? Here's a picture:

Book Club: Akutagawa’s Mandarins

The Complete Review's Michael Orthofer leads a book club discussion of Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Mandarins for Words Without Borders. I haven't read anything by Akutagawa, not even Rashomon, upon which Kurosawa's famed film is based, so the background information that Michael offers is really helpful. I'm looking forward to reading the book along with the group.

Musharaf's Mess

Cartoon by Petar Pismestrovic, Kleine Zeitung, Austria. Via Truthdig.

November 05, 2007

Persepolis, Le Film

The Los Angeles Times has a sneak peek at Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronneaud's film adaptation of Persepolis. I was fortunate enough to see the movie at the Internazionale Festival in Ferrara last month, and it was beautiful. It opens here on December 25.

Deparment of WTF

If you're Muslim, the L.A.P.D. wants to know where you live.

Hip Hop in Morocco

Jennifer Needleman and Joshua Asen's documentary film I Love Hip Hop in Morocco, which screened this past weekend at the Arab Film Festival in Los Angeles, and at the Casablanca Film Festival in Morocco, is a rare treat: A film that shows the country in all its complexity. The picture follows several hip hop bands (H-Kayne, Fnaire, DJ Key, Bigg, Brown Fingazz, and Fati Show) as they attempt to set up a hip hop festival in three big cities: Meknes, Marrakesh, and Casablanca. They try to get funding and sponsorship, they rent space, they get permits, they print flyers, they rehearse, and as we follow them through this journey we get a rich portrait of these artists. We visit with DJ Key at home and hear about how he abandoned his work in an architecture firm to focus on hip hop. We hear about the choices they make in their lyrics. For example, the members of Fnaire refuse to use the word 'fuck' ("We don't talk like that") while solo rapper Brown Fingazz defends his use of the epithet 'nigga' to refer to himself and his friends in the medina. They share their struggles, particularly with freedom of speech and with logistical support. They talk about their private lives. The only woman rapper in the film is a young high school girl in Fez, whose parents are extremely supportive, but who has to win the crowd when she goes on stage during the festival. If you have a chance to see this film at the festival near you, don't miss it.

Clip: "Issawa Style" by H-Kayne.

November 01, 2007

New Collection by Bendib

Cartoonist Khalil Bendib has published a new collection of cartoons, which he presented in Los Angeles a few days ago. Here are a couple of photos from the event at the Beverly Hills Public Library:

The cartoon above shows a colony of Dick Cheney lookalikes, carrying bags labeled "Fraud," "No Bid Contracts," "Food Services Overcharges," and "Gasoline Overcharges." The caption says: "Hallibaba and the Forty Thieves."

This one shows two Al-Saud family members fast asleep while their answering machine responds to an incoming call: "Hello. You have reached the House of Saud. We're busy at the moment. If this is an emergency and thousands of pilgrims are dying due to our incompetence, at the sound of the beep please leave us alone. Thank you."

Bendib's new collection is called Mission Accomplished: Wicked Cartoons by America's Most Wanted Political Cartoonist. You can view many of Bendib's cartoons on his website. Enjoy.

Oz on Literature

Amos Oz delivers an impassioned plea for literature in this L.A. Times op-ed:

If you are a mere tourist, you might stand on a street and look up at an old house, in the old part of town, and see a woman staring out of her window. Then you will walk on.

But if you are a reader, you can see that woman staring out of her window, but you are there with her, inside her room, inside her head.

As you read a foreign novel, you are actually invited into other people's living rooms, into their nurseries and studies, into their bedrooms. You are invited into their secret sorrows, into their family joys, into their dreams.

Which is why I believe in literature as a bridge between peoples. I believe curiosity can be a moral quality. I believe imagining the other can be an antidote to fanaticism. Imagining the other will make you not only a better businessperson or a better lover but even a better person.

Part of the tragedy between Jew and Arab is the inability of so many of us, Jews and Arabs, to imagine each other. Really imagine each other: the loves, the terrible fears, the anger, the passion. There is too much hostility between us, too little curiosity.

By the by, Gil Hochberg's book, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination deals with the problem that Oz lays out in this piece. Hochberg contends that, in literature at least, Jews and Arabs have always met, always mixed, always found the self within the other. At a reading sponsored by the Levantine Center last week, Hochberg cited numerous examples, though the one that stuck in my mind and aroused my curiosity most was the work of (Moroccan) Israeli novelist Albert Suissa.

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