December 14, 2007

Out and About

Guess what? I'm traveling again; I'm going to Portland to visit my sister. I'm also trying to finish a new piece before I start teaching in January, so things are a bit hectic at the moment. Posting is likely to be light over the next few days.

December 12, 2007

Being Read in Morocco

My friend D. emailed me to say that my book appeared in the best-seller list compiled by the Moroccan magazine Le Journal. It's really lovely to see the Moroccan edition (published by Le Fennec) getting into the hands of readers.

Round the World

The two car bombs that exploded in Algiers yesterday have made anywhere from 31 to 60 victims, depending on the source. Gaddafi pitched a tent in Paris and signed billions of dollars' worth of armament deals with France; Sarkozy and his government quickly forgot about Libya's poor human rights record. Meanwhile, the Bush administration continues to put pressure on Iran, despite the latest National Intelligence Estimate. One could go on all day in this vein, so here's an uplifting story, for a change: A Muslim college student breaks up train beating of two Jewish youths.

New Yorker Stories of 2007

Over the past year, novelist Cliff Garstang has been commenting on short stories published in the New Yorker, and now he promises he will reveal his five favorites soon. I canceled my subscription to the magazine when I moved back to Morocco to finish my book, and I was often grateful to be able to read the stories online, although I didn't always keep up with them, so I just spent the past hour browsing though the posts and reading (or rereading) some of the pieces.

December 11, 2007

Writers, Beware

I hadn't heard of this author scam before.

December 10, 2007

Darwish Review

Mahmoud Darwish's The Butterfly's Burden, which appeared in the United States in a translation by Fady Joudah almost a year ago but has not gotten a single review in a newspaper or magazine, was written up this weekend in the Guardian. Here's what Fiona Sampson said about the book:

This most public of Palestinians is the master not of reductive polemic but of a profoundly lyric imagination, one that draws together the textures of daily life, physical beauty - whether of landscape or of women - longing, myth and history. Using poetry complex with personal experience, he has recreated an entire society's sensibility.

WWB Book Club: The Radiance of the King

My discussion of Camara Laye's novel The Radiance of the King continues over at Words Without Borders. Here's a snippet:

I want to start our discussion of The Radiance of the King by talking about the story itself. In the novel, Clarence, a white man of undefined origin and occupation, lands on the coast of Africa (which coast, you ask? We are not told) and in short order he loses all his money, in a gambling game, to a group of white men. He is evicted from his hotel, and the owner decides to keep Clarence's trunk as collateral for the unpaid bill. Now Clarence is desperate; he wants to figure out a way to get his belongings, since his only possessions now are the clothes on his back, which are already showing signs of wear. He stumbles onto a street celebration for a local monarch, and immediately and rather arrogantly thinks that the king might hire him as an advisor, or at least vouch for him to the hotel owner, or, at any rate, know what to do to save Clarence from the misery in which he finds himself.

Pamuk Profile

I love reading the profiles Maya Jaggi writes for the Guardian, don't you? Her latest one is of Orhan Pamuk.

Rockin' the Fowler

This past weekend, the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies hosted a conference on the work of Clifford Geertz, the famed anthropologist who wrote extensively about Morocco (and Indonesia.) The conference was organized by Susan Slyomovics and Lahouari Addi, and featured conversations between anthropologists from around the world. Unfortunately, I was working on a new piece, so I wasn't able to attend any of the panels, but I managed to get away on Saturday night to attend the musical performance that took place at the Fowler museum.

The Aza music ensemble played Tamazight-language songs that fused indigenous Moroccan beats with modern sounds. They used the oud and qraqeb, but also the guitar, tabla, clarinet, and banjo. I don't speak a word of Tamazight, but the music touched me and their rhythms made me want to get up and dance. I took a photo of them with my phone, but as you can see I was a bit far from the stage. You can listen to some excerpts from their music here. Aza was co-founded by two Moroccan-Americans from Santa Cruz, Fattah Abbou and Mohamed Aoualou, and includes four talented artists from the area as well.

Afterwards, the municipal orchestra of Sefrou took to the stage, accompanied by two guest artists from the Los Angeles area. The featured vocalist was the amazing Abderrahim Souiri, who performed an array of Andalusian songs; he was joined on stage by the equally amazing Raphael Skouri, who I believe is the cantor of the Baba Sale synagogue. Souiri and Skouri alternated singing verses in Arabic and in Hebrew, and their voices complemented each other beautifully, culminating in a rousing rendition of the late Abdessadek Cheqara's "Bent Bladi." It was nice to have an evening in which so many different components of the Moroccan music scene were present. The lyrics were in Tamazight, Arabic, and Hebrew, and were sung by Arab and Berber, Muslim and Jewish, male and female musicians.

December 07, 2007

Guest Column: Valerie Trueblood

Seattle writer Valerie Trueblood contributes the column below about the famed traveler Isabelle Eberhardt, who, for much of her short life, lived and wrote about Algeria during the French occupation.

Hardly anybody who met the writer Isabelle Eberhardt at the turn of the last century thought she was an Arab man. But all of her physical and mental powers went into making believe she was one: she dressed like one, she rode and camped like one, she lived hand to mouth in the Algerian desert as a nomad and disciple of Sufism. At the same time, she wrote for the French newspapers and even sought to embed herself with the troops expanding French “protection,” having vague ideas of a fusion of Islamic and French culture in her adopted country. For herself, she chose firmly against European life in any form. The French in Algiers—other than officials who kept an eye on her movements—shunned her, despite their intense interest in her disguise and her exploits. As for the undeceived Algerians, they courteously received her as a man.

Isabelle Eberhardt was born in 1877, the year that gave the world Isadora Duncan, the psychic Edgar Cayce, Brigham Young, Hermann Hesse, the pacifist Rosika Schwimmer—the list starts to make one think some star of the rebel, romantic, obsessed imagination shone on the births of that year. Some of those who admired her stories and took an interest in the life she led became obsessed themselves: in the next century, the critic and biographer Cecily Mackworth traveled to the Sahara to follow the paths she had taken.

Eberhardt's mother was a German-Russian aristocrat, and her father an Armenian ex-priest, anarchist, and tutor; the two were never married. Eberhardt studied Arabic and the Qur'an with her father, and traveled to North Africa with her mother. In Algeria, the mother died suddenly and the bereft daughter (“the world has lost its smile for me”) began the life of a wanderer in men’s clothing. She rode the desert on horseback, slept in the dunes, habitually smoked kif, involved herself in sexual liaisons and political intrigue, even for a time took a job with the spahis (North African soldiers in service to the French) in Tunisia collecting the poll tax. She left a painful account of the burden the tax was to Bedouins in rags, and of her feeling of having committed a crime.

Such ambiguity ruled her short life. She has been accused both of aiding French colonialism and of being its dogged and potent enemy. Certainly she began by seeing herself as its enemy, though danger and poverty often reduced her to begging favors of officials, and she welcomed the friendship of the powerful French General Lyautey despite his mandate to shape the future of Algeria and make a “pacific penetration” into Morocco.

Some of the contradictions lie simply in her youth. She was barely into her twenties, a young woman at once hiding, masking, and desperately in search of herself, a half-suicidal nature juggling poverty, the writing of books, exhausting compulsions, membership in a tribal religious brotherhood, enemies in government, and diplomatic assignments.

She was a drinker, defying the precepts of her beloved religion; she ignored the constrained lives of women around her—Algerians and wives of colonial administrators alike—while insisting on an extreme of freedom for herself. She wished to be seen as a man, but loved and desired men. Her sensuality left her with what may have been syphilis, but she turned her back on “people who exude decay.” She was capable of a sudden and rather bitter narrow-mindedness, calling the residents of one village “a race weakened by ancient inbreeding and sedentary lives,” yet her “intensely sad” love for mystical Islam and for the people and landscape of the North African desert—“Perhaps it is the Predestined Land from which the light that will regenerate the world will one day emerge”—was undying. She had a boundless compassion for other outsiders, even the assassin who tried to kill her.

In her character, dissipation was united with an unusual self-control. She welcomed rough travel and physical ordeal, yet gave in at times to numb depression. Poverty dogged her, though servants and guides lurk in the background of her adventures. She broke every rule of society, but took pains to enter into legal marriage with a spahi (her story “Blue Jacket” tells of the tribal scorn for men who left their villages to become soldiers). Finally, with her affinity and reverence for the sands and salt, the baked towns of the desert, she drowned when a flash flood roared down a dry riverbed. She was twenty-seven years old.

We have to remember, reading her stories and journals, that they are those of an artist little more than a girl. It is useless to speculate about what she would have produced. These mixtures of hers—adolescent joy with pessimism, soaring fantasy with stern ambition and readiness to work, cool nerve with the conviction of being despised, ecstasy with blind longing (“nostalgia for an elsewhere”), give her diaries and stories a quality missing in more mature work. The girlishness—discredited word; I use it on purpose—and exhilaration of Marie Bashkirtseff’s journals come to mind, the passion of Emily Bronte’s poems.

In English we have Mackworth’s biography noted above and another equally good one by Annette Kobak, Isabelle (Virago, London, 1998), as well as two translations from the journals, In the Shadow of Islam, by Sharon Bangert (Peter Owen, London, 1993), and The Passionate Nomad, by Nina de Voogd (Beacon Press, Boston, 1987). Writing twenty years ago in the New York Review of Books about The Passionate Nomad, Gabriele Annan gave Eberhardt little quarter (“she might have come from the Me generation”), perhaps because of the book’s skeptical introduction by the scholar Rana Kabbani. Kabbani has done much to unmask literary orientalism, and sees in Eberhardt the imperial traveler’s sins of pride and self-absorption (in particular contrast to the delicate workings of Arab courtesy), as well as of chasing, in both her life and her work, the exotic and erotic in some eastern Other.

Nevertheless the writing holds its own today, in its painter’s fidelity to the Sahara, its gusts of feeling and bitter recoil from feeling. In the 1970’s Paul Bowles published a fine translation of some of the stories and journal passages, The Oblivion Seekers, for which he wrote a sympathetic preface: “Her life seems haphazard, at the mercy of caprice, but her writings prove otherwise.” Yes, to foreign readers the stories are exotic, but they are lean and fierce and bring the desert near.

At last, more is on the way. I know I join many other admirers of Isabelle Eberhardt’s work in my delight at learning that Robert Bononno will be bringing out a translation of her journals. There is a beautiful passage from his translation of Sept Années Dans La Vie d’Une Femme here. “My soul was calm:” not a statement we run across much now. It brings a passage of unusual grace to a close, the violets and greens and milk-whites of the Tunisian Sahel seen by a painter.

Such an unanchored life--but contained and brought into focus when she picked up a pen. Then she got away from the addictions, the “prodigious changeability” that drove her to sleep in courtyards and oases and kif-rooms, the whole shaky contraption of her assumed life, and described what haunted her: a place and a people. She knew they were not hers and she was not theirs. She saw the end coming and seems to have known it would be death rather than departure. Again and again in her journals and stories something ridden-after, hunted, longed-for, is relinquished. Something that has consumed her comes--or almost come--to rest, in a state she called “fearless, patient expectation of eternity.”

“Once more astounded by all that has captured me and all I have left, I tell myself that love is a worry and what’s necessary is to love to leave--persons and things being loveliest when left behind.”

December 06, 2007

Domestic Woes

What happens when I try to cook.

December 05, 2007

R.I.P. Elizabeth Hardwick

Sad news this morning: Novelist and critic Elizabeth Hardwick, who co-founded the New York Review of Books, has died.

No More Print P-Boz

Pindeldyboz has announced that it will cease publication of its print magazine on December 10, 2007. They're having a party in New York to celebrate the final issue. Check it out.

December 04, 2007

On Martin Amis

I have been battling with every ounce of my strength the urge to respond to Martin Amis's latest comments on Muslims. I have succumbed to that urge before, mind you, but not this time. Instead, I offer you, gentle reader, a quote from James Baldwin.

[I]ndeed, within this web of lust and fury, black and white can only thrust and counter-thrust, long for each other's slow, exquisite death; death by torture, acid knives and burning; the thrust, the counter-thrust, the longing making the heavier that cloud which blinds and suffocates them both, so that they go down into the pit together. Thus has the cage betrayed us all, this moment, our life, turned to nothing through our terrible attempts to insure it. For Bigger's tragedy is not that he is cold or black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being sub-human and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria, bequeathed to him at birth. But our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult--that is, accept it.

December 03, 2007

WWB Book Club: The Radiance of the King

As I mentioned a few days ago, Words Without Borders has asked me to lead a book club discussion of Camara Laye's The Radiance of the King. My first post is already up on their site. Here's how it starts:

When my friend Mark Sarvas introduced his book club discussion of Sándor Márai’s The Rebels, he wrote that “as an American of Hungarian descent, taking on Márai was an obvious and overdue choice for me.” I confess to a very similar bias in my own choice. When I was presented with a list of books to pick from, I naturally gravitated to a novel by a fellow African, in this case Camara Laye, whose Radiance of the King I had not read before. Generally speaking, African authors who write in French, or indeed in any of the native languages of Africa such as Gikuyu or Berber or Swahili, are not nearly as known or read in the United States as those who write in English. So the opportunity to discuss Camara Laye was also an opportunity for me to invite readers to consider a different African book and a different African author than those with whom they may already be familiar.

Camara Laye was born in 1928 in Kouroussa, a small village of Guinea, which at that time was under French occupation. He attended Qur’anic school as well as elementary school in his village, but moved to Conakry, the capital, in order to continue his education. In 1947, he moved to Paris to attend engineering school. His experience of double dislocation—from his village to the city, from Guinea to France—appears to have inspired in him a deep nostalgia for home. His first novel, the semi-autobiographical L’Enfant noir (usually translated as The Dark Child), was published in 1953, and was met with a mixture of admiration and hostility: Admiration for Camara’s storytelling skills, and hostility for his depiction of an idyllic village childhood at a time when the country was under colonial rule. These reactions remind me of those reserved for Moroccan novelist Ahmed Sefroui’s La Boîte à merveilles, published in 1954, and which also depicted a happy childhood under/despite French rule. Some scholars today may consider both novels ethnographic works, while others may emphasize the tribute they pay to ways of life later disrupted by French rule.

While I Was Out

One of the advantages of being on vacation is that, despite having brought my laptop with me, I did not keep up with the news. So until I came back, I had been unaware that riots had ignited in the suburb of Villiers-le-Bel in France, following the deaths of two teenagers of North African and West African descent; that there had been a circus at Annapolis, in which nothing was achieved (well, except for Mahmoud Abbas getting to try on the local haberdashery); that the Sudanese government was using a stupid teddy bear to divert attention from the killings in Darfur; and that my beloved Tangier lost its bid to host the 2012 World Expo.

(The above picture is from Glass Beach in Kauai.)

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