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.”

September 13, 2006

Guest Column: Valerie Trueblood

This week, Seattle writer Valerie Trueblood contributes a column about Swiss writer C.-F.Ramuz. Valerie's first novel, Seven Loves, came out this summer from Little, Brown. She is at work on an essay about the fiction of Ramuz, a book of dog stories, and a second novel.

In July, it got so hot in Seattle--a near-100-degree, breathless, un-Pacific-Northwest heat--that I thought of a novel I used to love, and took it off the shelf and read it again: The End of All Men. It made a hot night even longer. It's not a book to take your mind off global warming.

The great Swiss writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, who wrote of life on the steep pastures of the Swiss Alps, published Présence de la Mort in the twenties. Here we waited until 1944 for a translation, The End of All Men. Ramuz has been compared to Hardy for his depiction of rural life, but his barely individualized characters are no kin of Tess and Jude. Hardy would recognize the way their fates dog them, but fate, for a character in Ramuz's disaster novels, is nothing deserved or tragically earned, it's a blow dealt straight from earth and sky onto the body. Reading Ramuz is an exercise in giving up ideas of human cause and effect, and feeling the rumble of tectonic plates. But the humans are there, tiny figures living lives of great particularity on the ground-and somehow we want to go along on their hopeless errands. What is to become of them, these men and women in whom character is beside the point?

And how do these stories conceived just after the Great War differ from our earthquake and asteroid and Ebola-virus blockbusters? For one thing, they're masterpieces. For another, there's nobody in them with foresight, nobody who takes measures, no brainy-romantic operator to get the world out of a fix. There's no way out.

The events Ramuz describes are of mythic enormity. For him, the technology dear to most speculative fiction does not exist. In The End of All Men, hope, not surprisingly, is gone, but it is barely missed as the physical details of existence go on accumulating-and in the hands of this writer these are glorious.

Something has disrupted gravity and the earth has begun to fall towards the sun. It's getting hotter by five degrees a day, and the climbing mercury, only touched on in a glimpse of sweat running off fingers or a cow lying with its horn stuck in mud, inhabits every scene. Ramuz writes as one who, sitting looking out his own window, sees his book going on. It's all happening in a "here," told in three persons: I, Ramuz, comes and goes in the heat, coolly summoning you, the reader, to see what they, the villagers, are going to be driven to do.

Scenes ugly and tender unfold, impassively described, utterly lacking what we now call "edge." In the face of extinction a married pair bicker about their savings, police are posted at the bank, men go on shoeing horses, people get drunk and have an orgy, there's a final war. Ramuz's narrator, but for his grave sadness, would seem to have the calm relish of an auteur strolling the set. His picture comes at us in pixels, intimate and broken: a boot or a neck, "suspenders stitched with crosses," a foraging kitten. It fills in until the vast scale is apparent (see this photograph of his region), as aloof from individual ruin as Brueghel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.

Drought, and then a great heat: everybody's about to die. Why read on? Because Ramuz, who says, "I tried to close my eyes to see heaven: it was the earth," poses the question of exactly what our own attitude is to the earth, and by the time we finish reading this eighty-some-year-old fantasy we've lost our comfortable environmentalism and begun to grieve. And we read because the book is mesmerizing. Some of the cool, regular caress of his French prose is lost in English, but its walking pace and oddly confiding formality survive. He called the washing of lake waters his teacher: "teaching me accent, teaching me repetition, teaching me length."

"Set down nothing but what is seen." Ramuz is a philosopher at heart and doesn't obey his own rule, but his village is voluptuously itself, every detail corroborated by another. A swollen, unmilked cow moos "behind a sack-cloth curtain somewhere; first one cow and then another, and still another now, because they all imitate each other." Water fools people; instead of drying up it rises as the glaciers melt, "running between the blackberry and the gooseberry bushes, the great clumps of dahlias...it has ventured right into the kitchen." This awful, inquisitive, domesticated water "is no longer as it was, so disturbed and warm it is."

The lens zooms in and out: close-up of a pointless murder, upward pan to the hanging ice. Glimpses of village and family life dimming, going out. Wide view of towns, each one a republic organized to guard its pond. A band of men chasing another from a mountain retreat, the expelled returning to smoke the usurpers out with a smudge-bomb and shoot them. Boats from cities (these amusingly outside Ramuz's frame), loaded with passengers trusting to the polar ice for rescue.

We live in a country where many are awaiting the end-time in just the imperturbable mood of the village imbecile in this book. I wish the president, who is said to be reading Camus, would spend one of these hot summer nights in Crawford reading The End of All Men. It's simple enough. Anyone can look up from the page and picture a glacier melting. There's even a divine figure of some sort at the end, where we get something the president might identify as the Rapture, only no one is left behind.

June 14, 2006

Guest Review: Katrina Denza

Voodoo Heart
Scott Snyder
Bantam Dell
276 pp.

The men in Scott Snyder's debut collection of stories Voodoo Heart, are running--either away from constricting lives or after the objects of their affections. Each yearns deeply for that which is beyond his reach.

In "Blue Yodel," a man drives his Model T across the country in pursuit of the blimp which carries his girlfriend away from him, toward the West Coast. The reader can only guess why the girlfriend has left him. Perhaps it's the intensity of his feelings for her--feelings he describes as "an exhibit on hydroelectricity he'd seen at a fair." The chase, which lasts through the whole story, serves as an apt metaphor for the ultimate surrender to the unknown course of love.

Snyder's men possess the innocence and curiosity of children, and this sense of youthful wonder and outrage at the world is the very thing that endears the reader to them. The narrator of "About Face,' has an appealing naiveté. Miles Fergus is twenty-nine, well-meaning but unlucky. He's given a community service job playing the horn for troubled boys after a good deed goes wrong. The camp's director enlists Miles' help in driving his ill daughter to her treatments, and the reader is swept along with Miles as he begins to believe in a happy ending, but as in many of Snyder's stories, happy endings aren't so much a possibility as an anomaly.

Many of Snyder's men are angry. What makes them special is their awareness, and ultimate acceptance, of this anger. The narrator of "Voodoo Heart," confesses frankly:

"That's what happens with me. The feeling hits me and it won't go away. I get angry and mean and, most of all, restless. Everywhere I look I see chances to go back and correct my life, chances to start over alone or with someone new."

In "Dumpster Tuesday," a young professional leaves his Manhattan marketing firm and moves to Florida to chase the woman who left him for a shady country-western singer. He takes a job guarding a dumpster with a spear-gun--the danger of which, he admits, holds a certain appeal:

"I was in Florida because my fianc´e had left me for a brain-damaged country-singer: there were plenty of moments in each day that I wished someone would blow my fucking brains out."

Just when he thinks he's made peace with his situation, fate offers him a chance to test that peace with a face-to-face encounter with the object of his rage.

A barn-storming pilot inadvertently crashes into a wedding party in the story "The Star Attraction of 1919," and is surprised when the bride asks him to take her with him, away from her life and the groom. He's not used to being more than a one-man act and the reader wonders right until the end what will become of this unlikely couple.

Wade, the narrator in "Wreck," sits in his hunting stand and watches children in a neighboring fat-farm attempt to transform themselves by summer's end. But as the story proves, transformation is not always a good thing. For Wade, a loner by nature, change comes in the company of a famous woman, who in turn is temporarily transformed by surgery.

And in the title story, perhaps my favorite, a young man and his girlfriend buy a house too large for them, with dreams just as large. They work side by side to fix it up, often communicating in CB code through walkie-talkies. The only drawback is the women's prison next door. Still, they manage to make the house a plausible reality and the women prisoners are basically harmless. The only hurdle left for the narrator is an adverse reaction to commitment and a family legacy of running away. Snyder ends the story in a most humane and touching way.

I love the absurd in fiction and this collection is filled with delicious oddities. One man's hair has a white streak from being shot in the head as a boy; one girl's skin itches so much she has to take a brush to it; a woman throws personal items out of a blimp like crumbs for her boyfriend to follow; a man has a nose that whistles in the wind; and shards of glass leak out of the skin around a woman's eyes. All of these details add spice to an already rich narrative and in lesser hands they may have appeared gimmicky. Snyder does such a great job of grounding the reader in vibrant natural settings and characters' authentic emotions that these items eventually become not so much unusual as organic to the stories.

Even with all the missteps these characters make, all the dark tendencies and unluckiness they seem to share, the main emotional landscape rendered in these seven stories is love. These men are brave enough to go for the dream of love, and even when it's tried and lost, they're left better people for it. Scott Snyder is a writer I will be watching in the future.

June 07, 2006

Guest Column: Ayun Halliday

This week, writer Ayun Halliday contributes a column on zines. Halliday is the founder of the quarterly zine The East Village Inky and the author of four self-mocking autobiographies, most recently Dirty Sugar Cookies: Culinary Observations, Questionable Taste. She is BUST magazine's Mother Superior columnist and has contributed to a vast array of low-paying forums. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, playwright Greg Kotis, and their two well-documented children. Here is what she had to say about starting her own zine:

Long before I had kids or book contracts or Internet access, I was struck by something Spalding Gray said in an interview with Tricycle magazine. Asked what motivated him to start performing his autobiographical monologues, he replied that he got tired of waiting for "the Big Infernal Machine to make up its mind" about him. I never met him, and have long suspected that he might be one of those charismatic, neurotic handfuls best worshipped from afar, but he was one of my heroes, and those words meant a lot to me. At 31, I was loathe to relinquish my dream of a life in the arts, despite overwhelming evidence that, should I ever be tempted to offer myself up for serious consideration, the Big Infernal Machine would drop my resume in the shredder without even opening the envelope.

These days, blogs provide an excellent forum for those looking to claim a piece of the action without first securing the big infernal machine's approval. Even a cavewoman like me can figure out how to publish (and promote!) on the Internet. Still, there's something to be said for a good, old-fashioned print zine, the kind that gets stapled up on a dining room table and then stuffed into an envelope whose flap will be moistened by the publisher's own tongue.

Good mail begets even better mail. Every three months, I lay a couple thousand copies of my zine, The East Village Inky on the United States Postal Service. In return, my PO box is regularly stuffed with letters, photos, and other ephemera from subscribers who feel like they know me, which indeed, they do, far better than they would have had the hours I devoted to my zine been spent trying to get an article published in the mainstream press. As the sole employee of The East Village Inky, I've never had an editor tell me that a joke is too off-color, a reference too obscure, or a two-page, run-on sentence too long. I might have made more money if I tried playing within the parameters established by the Big Infernal Machine, but I doubt that readers would have been swayed to send unsolicited plastic cocktail monkeys, fresh mint and a Bar Mitzvah present for my cat.

Once, I got an email from someone who'd found an issue of The East Village Inky in a café in Romania. I was kind of surprised she wasn't writing from Tulum, Mexico, as I'd recently slipped a copy behind my guest house's complimentary guide to the Mayan Riviera. Obviously, blogging is not subject to international boundaries, but can a blog wind up in a used bookstore twenty years from now? Can a blog be discovered in an attic or tucked, Pippi Longstocking-style into a hollow tree? It's immensely gratifying to think of The East Village Inky riding the subway to people's crappy day jobs, waiting with them in line at the DMV, and keeping them company on the porcelain throne. It's pocket-sized for a reason. (Those cell phones that can download everything from videos to The New York Times are just copying.)

I spend so much time hunched over my keyboard, it's hard to remember that not everyone is courting a dowager's hump via constant connection to the web. The handwritten nature of my zine means that I can work on it anywhere, as long as I have a pen and paper. I could knock out a page in the middle of a pasture! I'm not fettered by electrical outlets or wireless access, though I do rely rather heavily on correction fluid. My natural tendency toward sloth could only spell trouble when coupled with the one-click ease of publishing half-baked thoughts on a blog. Since I have to go over the East Village Inky's final pages, anyway, checking that I've laid them out correctly, there's always a checkpoint for realizing that the way I've stated something makes me sound like a total ass-bite. (When you write your own zine, you can use idiosyncratic words like ass-bite, a beauty that was lost on the large-circulation editor who attempted to change my characteristic "heinie" to the generic, and to me much less descriptive, "butt.")

And, no promises, butt - sorry, make that 'but' - after you've published a few issues, you might find that your zine has attracted the attention of none other than the Big Infernal Machine. Apparently, it's not immune to the outlaw allure of those who actively reject it.

Want to know more about zines? Visit: The History of Zines, Zine World Guide to the Underground Press, and Stolen Sharpie Revolution, a DIY Zine Resource.

April 19, 2006

Guest Review: Colleen Mondor

Princes Amongst Men: Journeys with Gypsy Musicians
By Garth Cartwright
Serpent's Tail
309 pp.

Garth Cartwright was already familiar with Gypsy music when he decided to travel across the Balkans in search of the truth behind Gypsy myths. He set out to not only interview well-known Gypsy singers and musicians but also to explore how the Roma people were surviving in the former Yugoslavia and other Eastern European countries. (The term "Roma" refers to people of an established ethnic group and is slowly coming back into use. "Gypsy" was a title conferred by Europeans on the first Roma to arrive in Europe a thousand years ago as they mistakenly believed them to have arrived from Egypt. It is now used somewhat negatively to refer to anyone who leads a nomadic life, regardless of ethnicity, but is still the accepted term for Roma music.) While it may sometimes be difficult for some readers to keep track of the many unfamiliar names and destinations that Cartwright rattles off with ease, his intense desire to know just what life is like on the ground for a people struggling not only to hold on to their traditions but also to keep a roof over their heads makes his book, Princes Amongst Men: Journeys with Gypsy Musicians fascinating reading.

In traveling through Serbia, Macedonia, Romania and Bulgaria, Cartwright found most Romas living in "mahalas" or Roma settlements. The poverty is staggering, with the musicians often proving to be the only community members who are able to afford indoor plumbing or electricity. This is the story that, as Cartwright explains, is all too often ignored by journalists investigating post-war Yugoslavia or the collapse of communism. As he writes in the book, "their role in history is reduced to a silent supporting cast. And the Roma know this - nobody's listening - so [it's] feeding a sense of exclusion." This feeling is supported by the fact that few historians acknowledge the Roma genocide in WWII, where they were one of the few groups specifically targeted by Hitler for extermination and lost approximately 500,000 people in concentration camps. Cartwright makes a serious effort toward combating this lack of information by discussing Roma history in each of the countries he visits, explaining how they initially came to live there and their political and social struggles to gain equality. His research reveals that it has not been an easy road for them, and each step of the way their struggle has been gone largely unrecognized.

It is almost incomprehensible that in the midst of so much poverty and sorrow Gypsy music would not only thrive but gain in popularity across Europe. But Cartwright easily finds successful singers and musicians as he travels and interviews long time traditional singers like Esma Teodosievska and the new wave of stars like Jony Iliev and the genre defying Azis. He finds Gypsy music in clubs and bars, at music festivals and packed stadiums. Every chance he gets, he asks the hard questions, presses for answers about the price of success, dreams for the future and hopes for political and social acceptance. In the end he learns a vast amount about the Roma people and with Princes Amongst Men has certainly written a deep and valuable record of the modern Roma culture. But I am not sure that he ever really knows the people he talks to, or understands anything beyond the obvious about their struggles. At the end of the day after all, Cartwright can go home to Britain; he can leave the mahalas behind. The one thing the Roma make clear is that none of them have that option; no matter how loud they sing or how well they play they still remain an overlooked minority in Europe who suffer daily from racism and prejudice. It is that image and not the music that will linger with readers and make them wonder why we all know so many Gypsy myths but precious little Roma truths.

Colleen Mondor writes for Bookslut and Eclectica Magazine. She grew up in Florida, spent ten years in Alaska and now lives in the Pacific Northwest. Her book on Alaska flying is making the agent rounds and she has an essay in Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans, which was published by Chin Music Press in February 2006.

March 22, 2006

Guest Review: S. Ramos O'Briant

A Man Without a Country
Kurt Vonnegut
Seven Stories Press
192 pp.

Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis
Jimmy Carter
Simon & Schuster
224 pp.

At first glance, Kurt Vonnegut, author, pessimist and humorist might not seem to have much in common with Jimmy Carter, author, optimist and former President of the United States. But these two members of the so-called Greatest Generation are worried about America, and both have recently published books on the subject.

A Man Without a Country is a slender book of Vonnegut's musings, opinions and insights about the state of humanity, specifically American humanity. It starts out grumpy -- which brings my mother to mind, only eighty to Vonnegut's eighty-three and Carter's eighty-two. Like her, it focuses on all the bad news in the world: greed, religion, politics, and the curious admixture of religion with politics. He ventures into the last subject via an obscure reference to the Great Lakes people, apparently extinct except for Vonnegut, allowing him to mention Socialist Party candidate Eugene Victor Debs, which naturally segues into Stalin, Christianity, the Spanish Inquisition, Hitler and, ta ta ta ta, Karl Marx. Notice a trend here? And I don't mean the K's in Kurt and Karl. No? As with all Vonnegut books, a pattern will emerge. Or not.

His point is that this is not the first time in history that politics and religion have intermixed to frightening results. I almost used the phrase "catastrophic results," but that would have been too Vonnegut. He's at his best when he veers off the pessimist's track and tells a story, like the one about Powers Hapgood. I love that name. If I was still egglicious, and wasn't so jaded with joy over my empty nest, I'd think about that name for a kid. Or consider Vonnegut's story about his joy when standing in line to purchase the envelope and stamp to mail a chapter to his typist. Only a writer who has worked long hours alone and with little human contact, can appreciate the active use of one's senses -- being outside, walking, talking, and smelling in real time, rather than in imagination.

Vonnegut describes himself and the rest of humanity as hopeless "addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial," and he goes on to say that "our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on," and in the process making "trillionaires out of billionaires." Like Carter, he talks about America's standing in the world community: "[T]hey don't hate us for our purported liberty and justice . . . they hate us now for our arrogance." While he doesn't mention fundamentalists, he does describe the people who are running our government as "Christians," who are "smart, personable people who have no consciences."

Vonnegut's book is peppered with side journeys into his extended family history. He makes his case for being "without a country" by convincing us that it's understandable why he personally believes it's coming to the end of all things. I think he is speaking in mythical, rather than metaphorical terms. He is most dismayed because he thinks we don't really care what happens in the future. Vonnegut compares himself to Einstein and Mark Twain, who he says, "gave up on the human race at the end of their lives."

"This is not the country that I once knew," Jimmy Carter lamented in a recent L.A. Times editorial. Carter is also a humanist and a Christian in the old-time definition, as in: actively helping the poor and doing as Jesus said to do in the Sermon on the Mount (also mentioned in Vonnegut's book). In Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis, Carter cites current government policies threatening American civil liberties, and environmental protections. He emphasizes the widening divide between the rich and the poor, and a growing disregard of human rights. He pays particular attention to the marriage of religion and politics. He's worried, saddened, and possibly even outraged, albeit in a gentlemanly, ex-President sort of way.

Yet, he doesn't mince words, and he names names. He points out that the Bush Administration has justified actions "similar to those of abusive regimes that we have historically condemned." Carter ticks off a list of prime-time issues in our current government: prescriptive war, fundamentalism, women's rights, terrorism, civil liberties, gay rights, abortion, the death penalty, science and religion, nuclear build-up, America's standing in the world, and the unsettling mix of religion and politics.
Back to the old R & P. Carter builds his case for why fundamentalism is ruining America with stark, simple and earnest prose. He defines fundamentalists as those who "have managed to change the nuances and subtleties of historical debate into black-white rigidities and the personal derogation of those who dare to disagree." Unlike Vonnegut, Carter makes no use of humor to soften his view that the fundamentalist philosophy of our current government threatens American representative democracy. He also focuses on money and taxes stating that "[B]illions in tax breaks [have gone] to the wealthiest" but Congress has refused to increase the minimum wage. "This administration has committed itself to extol the advantages of the rich," he says.

Much of what appears in both the Vonnegut and the Carter book has appeared elsewhere, in both speeches and articles the two have written. As early as 1995, Vonnegut spoke about the "computer age minimum-wage conspiracy,"* his extended family, humanists, and Iraq. Likewise, in Carter's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Oslo in 2002, he stated that "we have not yet made the commitment to share with others an appreciable part of our excessive wealth."

To Vonnegut's credit, by the end of A Man Without a Country he admits that he might be a tad on the crotchety side, but more specifically, and in true secular humanist mode, he says, "There have never been any 'good old days,' there have just been days." This admission, stated in the form of an apology (something I'll never hear from my mother), doesn't appear until almost the last of the essays. Carter tells us that our bond of common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices: "God gives us the capacity for choice. We can choose to alleviate suffering. We can choose to work together for peace. We can make changes - and we must."

It's fine to look at an issue from as many different angles as possible, but eventually you have to take a stand. Which is what Vonnegut and Carter have done. Both authors, in very different ways, incite their readers to think hard on the subject of values, and take action. Read them together or back-to-back. They make a nice desk set.

S. Ramos O’Briant’s work has appeared in Whistling Shade, AIM Magazine, Ink Pot, NFG, La Herencia, The Copperfield Review, Cafe Irreal, Best Lesbian Love Stories 2004, and is scheduled to appear in Latinos in Lotus Land, (Bilingual Press,2007). She recently completed her first novel, The Sandoval Sisters: The Secret of Old Blood.

See http://www.links.net/vita/speak/vonnegut

February 22, 2006

Guest Column: Tommy Hays

Tommy Hays is the author of The Pleasure Was Mine, which comes out in paperback this month. A previous contributor to Moorishgirl.com, he sends in this short column, titled "Church of the Big Legs."

As a child, when I thought of Unitarians, I thought of pizza and women with big legs. My best friend across the street in Greenville, South Carolina, where I grew up, was Unitarian. One Sunday his family took me to their church, which was like no other church I had been to. I had had some inkling that it might be a little different because he had told me to bring my swimsuit and a towel, but I didn't think anything could be much stranger than my own religious upbringing.

As a toddler, I had often accompanied my great great aunt and uncle to a small conservative Baptist church, where the preacher harangued, and I often screamed back in a kind of mutual and strangely satisfying hysteria. Then my father, who was from the Midwest and whose parents had been Christian Scientist and who had his own mystical leanings, decided we (at least my brother, my mother and I) should attend a Christian Science Church, while he stayed home and read the Sunday morning paper. At the time a Christian Science Church in a Southern town was a real anomaly, and when my teacher at school discovered I was Christian Scientist, she would ask me questions in front of the whole class like, "If you contracted malaria, would your parents give you quinine?" In my religious upbringing I had gone from fire and brimstone to Mary Baker Eddy's murky mortal mind, from the heat of hell's eternal furnace to the intellectual intricacies of Science and Health.

So the Sunday morning I accompanied my best friend's family to a Unitarian Church I did not know what to expect. I certainly didn't expect that their church would be a house in a neighborhood. Didn't even have a steeple. No crosses. When we went in, no one was dressed in Sunday clothes. Among the men, there wasn't a coat or tie in sight. Many of the women had on slacks. There was one woman in shorts who had the biggest legs I'd ever seen. I was nine-years-old and hadn't seen that many women in shorts. My mother never wore them. No mothers I knew wore them. I certainly had never seen anyone in church wear shorts. While no one else was wearing shorts that day, I had the suspicion as I looked around, that all Unitarian women had monstrous legs.

After what they called "church" which seemed more like conversation to me-no hymns, no prayers, no responsive readings, just talk and a lot of it--we kids were shepherded down some stairs which I assumed led to a dank and moldy Bible class, where verses would be chiseled into our consciousness like epitaphs on tombstones. Instead we were led down to changing rooms, where we changed into our bathing suits, then went into the backyard. To my astonishment, there was a pool. Not a tiny baptismal pool, but a beautiful full-length swimming pool. Instead of reciting The Psalms that morning we did the backstroke. Then we ate this round doughy deliciously cheesy food called pizza. When I got home my mother hardly had time to ask me how it went, before I launched into a detailed description of the church we had to join. I told her about the pizza, the Sunday school swim and the woman with the big legs. She frowned at this last, said some women had big legs, and I should never talk about their legs because it would hurt their feelings.

I was puzzled and deflated by her response. I didn't understand why big legs were anything not to talk about. The woman's legs were interesting. An arresting fact. A breathtaking phenomenon. Even something to be proud of. The more I thought about the woman's legs over the weeks and months that passed, the bigger they grew, until they were the size of tree trunks. To me, a chubby boy who was becoming self-conscious about his body, those legs became a statement, almost religious in their significance. They were a declaration by this woman who was unabashedly and unapologetically who she was.

I never mentioned her legs or any woman's legs again to anybody. For nearly 40 years I have kept silent on this subject. I only bring it up now to show that as a child I had not the foggiest idea who these Unitarian people were and what they believed.

But as I child I believed what was in front of me. Pizza, a house that was a church, and a woman with remarkable legs. Oh, I knew all about the Baptist God, the fierce bearded fellow who sat on the edge of his cloudy throne, lightning bolt in hand waiting for me to sin, and I knew about the Christian Science God who gave me a pained look every time my thoughts wandered to the corporeal, which as far as I could figure was mostly where my thoughts stayed. But what I believed in, deep-down-in-my-heart believed in, was the corporeal, the world I lived in. What I ate, what I drank, what I touched, what I smelled, what I saw. The sensual embodied world. The Unitarians seemed like my kind of people. Their God lived next door. He wore sunglasses and swimming trunks and spent his days, floating around on a little raft, talking with whoever showed up about whatever was on their mind.

Despite my urging, my family did not join the Unitarian Church, although my mother did start buying frozen pizzas. And we remained reluctant Christian Scientists until, at the age of 14, I announced I wasn't going to church anymore. I remained churchless for the next 25 years, although during much of that time my father plied me with readings from writers like Thomas Merton, Huston Smith, Bagwan Sheree Rajneesh, Joel Goldsmith, Meister Eckhart, Gurdjieff, Adam Smith, William James and many many more. But their language was so abstract, so philosophical, so high flown, I would find myself yearning for the mundane, the sensual, the ballast of the embodied moment. I turned to fiction. While my father moved up into religion, I moved down through story. I read Eudora Welty, James Agee, Walker Percy, Katherine Ann Porter, William Maxwell, Fitzgerald and Hemingway and other writers who were so adept at inhabiting their characters and their worlds, that their books felt far more moving and at times more spiritual, than the spiritual writers themselves.

Then my wife and I, who live in Asheville, North Carolina, had our own little embodiments-two children. We were able to bring them to the very denomination I had wanted to join as a child. While I was more than a little disappointed to find no swimming pool out back, I was relieved to come to a place where my beliefs and my children's beliefs would not be scrutinized or corrected or disparaged.

What do I believe now? I believe as I did as a child. I believe what is in front of me. I believe in my family, my friends, my community. I believe in God. I believe He inhabits the stories of our lives, including all the possibilities and uncertainties of the shapes our stories might take. And there is not a Sunday I walk through the doors of our church that I don't think about that woman's legs--powerful columns sturdy enough to support a whole community of beliefs, including one small boy's fledgling faith in the world unfolding inside him.



Tommy Hays' latest novel is The Pleasure Was Mine, published by St. Martin's Press. He has written two other novels — Sam's Crossing and In the Family Way, which was a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award. He is Executive Director of the Great Smokies Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. He is Director of Creative Writing for the Academy at the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and is a contributor to Our State. He received his BA in English from Furman University and his MFA in Creative Writing from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He lives in Asheville, NC with his wife and two children.

February 01, 2006

Guest Review: Kay Sexton

Tales of the Night
Peter Hoeg
The Harvill Press
308 pp

Tales of the Night is a short story collection linked by two themes: all eight stories take place in the same moment -- the night of 19 March 1929; and all deal with the idea of love. So says the writer. Most readers would spot cross-cutting themes without the writer's assistance. The stories range from the Congo to Denmark, a fishing boat to a physics laboratory, but while each is clearly set in the same narrow time-frame, finding the element of love in some stories requires an excavation of archaeological proportions.

It is a daring collection because it makes great demands on its readership. Hoeg doesn't compromise: he expects the reader to master Danish jurisprudence, African colonial history, wave and particle theory, and a final dizzying exploration of obsession -- each in the space of a single short story. But Tales of the Night is also uneven. This earliest published work of the writer now famous for Smilla's Sense of Snow, shows a writer exploring craft, rather than one communicating with certainty.

Some of the stories ('An Experiment in the Constancy of Love' and 'Pity for the Children of Vadan Town') show accomplished mastery of magical realism and surrealism. Others, like 'Journey into a Dark Heart' seem more derivative and possibly reflect a conscious exploration of style.

Some of the eight tales deliberately refer to previous Danish writers, artists and thinkers, but, more than this, the narrative form harks back to the fairy tale, which gives the collection its distinctive tone. The writer as omniscient but dispassionate scene-setter is utilised frequently, whether describing the history of the characters in 'Homage to Bournonville', or laying out the philosophy of creative egotism in 'Portrait of the Avant-Garde'. The similarities to Hans Christian Anderson are obvious, but Hoeg seems to be attempting something deeper than stylistic resonance: he is positing a series of moral fables about the transformative effects of love.

Key themes of his later work emerge here. Time and loss, which become the subjects of the novels Borderliners and Smilla's Sense of Snow, are sketched out in 'An Experiment in the Constancy of Love', and 'Pity for the Children of Vaden Town'. Hoeg's concerns with social justice and the mistreatment of children also emerge in these shorter narratives.

Hoeg is not always well served by his translator Barbara Haveland, because at several points it is hard to judge his meaning. For example, 'I have to face the fact that my balance is not superb, nor is it perfect. That I have lost it.' is an unfortunate rendition where the meaning of the second sentence is obscured by the use of the colloquial 'lost it' which implies losing one's temper or self-control, rather than the fuller and deeper sense of loss which Hoeg undoubtedly means.

However, his love for narrative is clear, and he crafts this collection with uncompromising rigor that requires considerable investment from the reader - but the deep and provocative exploration of the 'conditions of love' are worth the effort.

Kay Sexton is Associate Editor for Night Train and a Jerry Jazz Fiction Award winner with columns at Moondance and The Run Down. Her website gives details of her current and forthcoming publications. Her current focus is "Green Thought in an Urban Shade" a collaboration with the painter Fion Gunn to explore and celebrate the parks and urban spaces of Beijing, Dublin, London and Paris in words and images.

January 18, 2006

Guest Column: John Kropf's Unknown Sands

(Ed: If, like me, you know sensationally little about Turkmenistan, you may be interested in this excerpt from John Kropf's Unknown Sands, an account of the two years he spent living, working, and travelling through this closed country.)

For centuries, Turkmenistan was the world's most feared territory. Since the time of the Mongols, the nomadic tribes of its vast desert wastes were deemed ungovernable. Russians and Persians were captured and carried off by the fierce Turkmen to be used or sold as slaves. Europeans avoided traveling through the area at all costs. It was not until the late 19th century that Turkmenistan-- the last of the wild Central Asian territories--was finally subdued by the Russian Army. Now, an independent country strategically located between the hot spots of Afghanistan and Iran, it sits atop one of the planet's largest natural gas reserves. Still, Turkmenistan is virtually unknown to the outside world.

The country had always been subsumed as part of larger indefinite, geographical regions with names like Khorezm, Tartary, Transoxus, Turkmenia, Transcaspia and Turkestan. Before its conquest by the Russians in the 1880s, the territory was never considered a country in political terms. Its boundaries were undefined and its people were deemed ungovernable despite repeated attempts to subdue them. While the Turkmen tribes had been the last to submit to Russian rule, it came only but only after a terrible cost. There are some who doubted it should even be a country at all; that it should instead be returned to its natural, pre-Russian existence that was nothing more than a harsh desert sparsely occupied by fierce nomadic tribes. The country represented the southernmost reach of the Russian Empire in the Great Game with Britain.

At Turkmenistan's center is the Kara Kum Desert, or Black Sand Desert, which dominates eighty percent of the country. The Kara Kum is a land of graceful windswept ridges of Arabian gold sand about which T.E. Lawrence might have romanticized--the Desert instilled fear and melancholy in Europeans. In the 1880s while traveling the Transcaspian railway, a young Lord Curzon pronounced it the "sorriest waste that ever met the human eye." Intrepid British traveler Fitzroy Maclean, a historian of Central Asia and a man used to hardship, described it as a "vast expanse of stony wasteland stretching away as far as the eye could see in every direction varied only by occasional scrub, by low stony ridges or by dunes of soft, shifting sand, shaped by the wind."

The legends of the Turkmen were as forbidding as the landscape.

Described as "fierce tribes of marauding nomads," by Maclean, he said that they were "notorious through Central Asia for their cruelty, rapacity and treachery." Marco Polo had a bad first impression reporting that the "Turkomans are a rude people and dull of intellect, they dwell amongst the mountains and in places of difficult access." His uncles, who had made the Silk Road journey from Venice to Peking once before, had taken the "northern" route through Turkmen territory, stopping in Merv. On their second trip with Marco, they avoided the Turkmen, preferring to go the longer, southern route through Afghanistan. By then, the armies of Ghengis Khan had obliterated many of the Turkmen cities of the northern route.

As if geographic oblivion, an ethnic identity crisis, and bad travel reviews were not enough, the rulers of this remote territory had long sought to keep the land closed and its people isolated. After independence in 1991, the Turkmen regime, like their tribal predecessors, held an even greater suspicion of foreigners than the Soviets had. Saparamurat Niyazov, who since the Soviet period had been the First Secretary of the Turkmen Communist Party, had become the first president and still remained the supreme decision-maker. He returned the country to a strict Stalinist-style of rule, adopted the title Turkmenbashi (leader of all Turkmen), and bestowed on himself the official title "the Great." Niyazov ordered that a special government committee be formed by the security apparatus to monitor the movement of foreigners and diplomats. Entrance to the country required a letter of invitation approved by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Journalists were routinely denied visas. Turkmenistan was effectively a closed country.

This was where my wife, Eileen, and our two-year old daughter, went to live and work for two years that included September 11 and a war in next-door Afghanistan. The move seemed like a questionable idea at the time but it became one of life's great surprises. It was the beginning of an adventure.

John Kropf served at the American Embassy in Turkmenistan as the Country Director for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Because of his work with the Embassy, he was able to travel extensively through Turkmenistan. His writing credits include creative non-fiction and humor articles that have appeared in The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Marco Polo Magazine and the online humor magazine Flak. He also contributed a story to Sports Car Illustrated (now defunct) that detailed his grandfather's 1919 cross-country trek in a FIAT roadster ("Tales of the Mudbound"). Professionally, he has served as an lawyer for the U.S. Department of State specializing in international law as well as an Honors Program attorney for the Department of Justice. He is currently the Director of International Privacy Programs at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He lives outside Washington D.C.

January 11, 2006

Guest Review: Clifford Garstang

Hannah and the Mountain
Jonathan Johnson
University of Nebraska Press, 2005
224 pp.

In poet Jonathan Johnson's lyrical memoir, subtitled "Notes Toward a Wilderness Fatherhood," every day presents a new challenge: the Idaho snowmelt trickling ominously under the cabin he and his wife, Amy, have built; surviving on Johnson's meager writing grant, without glass in the window-frames, insulation, electricity or running water. But the challenges, both physical and financial, truly begin when a pregnancy test confirms what Amy already suspects.

Johnson's richly-observed descriptions of the land--snow-covered mountains, pine and fir trees, the raging river that severs access to the nearest road--prove his vital connection to his surroundings. He is convinced that Baby Hannah was conceived in a nearby field, under the rising moon, and her origin makes Johnson's ties to the wilderness indissoluble. He prepares for her arrival in this landscape, gradually smoothing the cabin's rough edges, as his anticipation of fatherhood builds.

Amy's difficult pregnancy confines her to bed, further stretching the couple's financial bind and heightening Johnson's anxiety. He wonders if he has endangered their baby by imposing his backcountry dream on Amy. Did their fragile finances force Amy to work longer than was wise? He is a man under a mountain of worry, but at the bottom of that worry is his love for the baby.

To ward off the snowmelt threatening their cabin's foundation, Johnson digs a diversionary trench. "The trick to diverting water, I discovered, is just to give it the idea of a new course, to get a little rivulet started where you want it all to eventually go and let time do most of the work for you." It is a lesson he applies to his own life and his journey toward fatherhood. "I thought of the day, not of any specific thing I did, but of the day itself, how it had moved forward and how I had found its flow. I was crossing new ground, carving a new channel, and this was only one day." He knows he is not completely powerless. He can divert the stream; he and Amy could have made other choices. But all he can do now is wait for time to determine where his life will lead.

Although the memoir is a deeper exploration of home-building and grief, Johnson has visited this landscape before, in his book of poems, Mastodon, 80% Complete (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001). In "Domestic" he writes, "The forest/ keeps us, two creatures scouting on instinct/ the edgeless territory of home." In the memoir, in the early days of Amy's pregnancy, Johnson visits the cabin's closest restaurant, The View Cafe, in order to escape his worries over the water flowing under the cabin. From his table he sees, "Across the lake, pine and fir climb the backs of a couple low mountains." It is beautiful country, but harsh. He doesn't know what to say to the waitress who recently lost her husband. The same view across the lake appears in the poem, "The View Cafe" as well as the same resilient waitress: "The head waitress' husband is/ six days into his suicide./ Everywhere, in here, prayers multiply like silverware/ tossed in a plastic bin." Johnson admits that he is frightened by grief but, he says, "the longer we are here, the more I am beginning to realize that to belong someplace you have to suffer some of its losses. You have to mourn a little with your neighbors. You have to invest yourself in an environment that, like any environment, is constantly threatened and eroding. There is no other way home."

Ultimately, that's what this sorrowful memoir is about: Johnson and his wife learn to mourn with their neighbors, and fashion a home and a future together on the mountain.

Clifford Garstang lives near Staunton, Virginia and occasionally blogs at Perpetual Folly. His work has appeared in Bellowing Ark, Eureka Literary Magazine, and North Dakota Quarterly, and is forthcoming in Baltimore Review and Shenandoah.

December 14, 2005

Guest Review: Colleen Mondor

Ordinary Wolves
Seth Kantner
Milkweed Editions
330 pp.

Ordinary Wolves provides a clear portrayal of a subtle culture clash that continues to play itself out in the northernmost reaches of the U.S. It is the story of the complexities that make up the distant part of the American wilderness and at its heart, it is about a boy who does not know who he is, and the lengths that he will go to find out just where he belongs.

Seth Kantner won the Whiting Award in November for this debut effort and authors such as Louise Erdrich, Barbara Kingsolver and Alaskan Nick Jans have lauded the novel for its honest intensity. As someone who lived in Alaska for ten years, I was happy to see that the novel does not contribute to the long litany of titles trying to cash in on Alaska's poetic wildness - for example, you will find no images here of tourists suddenly finding religion when sighting a herd of caribou for the first time.

Kantner was born in the bush and lived there all of his life (in a relatively remote northwestern area of the state). He has lived the fabled frontier life, hunting, fishing, and running sled dogs, and knows every aspect of this world for what it is, and not as some romantic show performed for visiting journalists. More significantly, Kantner knows and writes about what it is like to be white and live in an environment dominated by Native Alaskans.

This is a subject that is rarely visited by Alaskan writers and is long overdue for the kind of treatment it receives in the novel. Kantner's main character, a young white boy named Cutuk, does not know if he fits in the larger world of Anchorage and Fairbanks or should find a way to be happy in the village near his family's homestead. His search for self and for a way to understand the many different ways that Alaskans live and thrive across the state is the crux of the story. Basically, because of the way in which he grew up, Cutuk does not know who he is, and in the world he lives in, knowing that sort of inner truth is critical to personal survival.

As a young boy Cutuk learns immediately what it is like to be different when his family visits the predominantly Native village. (Typically the only whites are the schoolteachers.) The other children immediately pick fights, and often refer to him in a derogatory Inupiaq term for "whites". Over the course of several years Cutuk and his family become friends with many of the Natives, come to know them on the most intimate of terms, but he is still sometimes held apart as a visitor who does not fully belong. Even though he lives the same way of life, in fact embraces it on every level, it is clear that he will never be permitted to completely own it.

Because of the way that he looks, it seems as if Cutuk should fit in more in the cities but after trying to live beyond the village, he learns that he does not belong there either. He has to find a way to come to terms with the life the Natives will allow him in the village, and understand that he can be accepted and still held as different at the same time. Ultimately, his acceptance of his own difference is critical to his final understanding of himself, and also of all the people both Native and white, he cares about.

There are many different books to read about Alaska and many different aspects of the state to explore. But Ordinary Wolves takes its readers to a place like no other and reveals more about Alaska and the people who live there than any other title on the Last Frontier.

Colleen Mondor writes for Bookslut and Eclectica Magazine. She grew up in Florida, spent ten years in Alaska and now lives in the Pacific Northwest. Her book on Alaska flying is making the agent rounds and she has an essay in Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans, forthcoming from Chin Music Press in February 2006.

December 07, 2005

Guest Column: Nasrin Alavi

I became aware of Nasrin Alavi last summer, when I came across notices of her book, We Are Iran, a portrait of contemporary Iran through its (very dynamic) blog culture. The book was among a handful to be recommended by English PEN, and was also selected by Pankaj Mishra for the New Stateman Best Books of the Year list. We Are Iran was published this month in the United States by Soft Skull Press. Nasrin Alavi contributes a guest column on Moorishgirl today; she will also guest-blog on TEV this Thursday, December 8, so look for her there as well.

Iran: Then and Now
by
Nasrin Alavi

As Western leaders consider Iran's referral to the UN Security Council over its nuclear activities, there is another, furtive Iran simmering behind the headlines.

Those who lived through the Iranian Revolution of 1979 are now a minority. Iran has one of the most youthful and educated populations in the Middle East. Her younger generation has been completely transformed through the Islamic Republic's education policies of free education and national literacy campaigns. Seventy per cent are under thirty, with literacy rates of well over 90%, even in rural areas. Notably, last year, more than 65% of those entering university were women.

It is the voice of this educated youth that comes through loud and clear in the phenomenon that is the Iranian blogosphere. The internet has opened a new, virtual space for free speech in Iran, a country dubbed the "the biggest prison for journalists in the Middle East", by Reporters sans Frontieres (RSF). With an estimated 75,000 blogs, Farsi is now the fourth most popular language for keeping online journals. A blogger asks: "Has everyone noticed the spooky absence of graffiti in our public toilets since the arrival of weblogs?" Unlike the graffiti, Iran's blogs are boundless and global. Only time will tell if Iranian blogs are merely a place for the beleaguered to blow off steam or a modern day Gutenberg press that would usher in the age of Democracy. But for now they offer a unique glimpse of the changing consciousness of Iran's younger generation.

It is no secret that most of the rulers in the Middle East are out of sync with their youth, and Iran is no exception. Except that while Arab leaders have tried to crush the militants, in Iran's case you have had a militant regime. Tahkim Vahdat, Iran's largest national student union, was formed after a decree by Ayatollah Khomeini to reinforce his rule; yet nearly a quarter of a century later it became one of the most vocal critics of the regime.

In November 1979, at the dawn of the revolution, Khomeini had stated that "a country with 20 million youth must have 20 million riflemen or a military... such a country will never be destroyed,". The intention was to create soldiers of the state, but now groups of young people who aspire to a more Western lifestyle have even turned events like St Valentine's Day into a local festival. The regime's attempt to shield Iranians from the West's 'cultural invasion' has backfired magnificently. The country's youth is now almost obsessed with the Western culture they have been deprived of for so long. Last year Iran's former deputy-President Ali Abtahi, a mid-ranking Shia cleric, greeted the new cause for celebration for young lovers in Islamic Iran in his blog webneveshteha.com by writing that although there are many irritated by all this, "We cannot deny the reality. And anyway the Islam that I know encourages life and love."

Iran has also endured a 20th century that is incomparable to the experiences of her immediate neighbours in the region. President George Bush has recently hailed the groundbreaking progress towards democracy by countries like Qatar and Bahrain in setting up constitutional governments, while more than a century ago colonial powers brought an end to Iran's constitutional government of 1906. In the 1950s, the democratically elected government of Mossadegh was finished off in a coup backed by the United States and Britain. Iranians have lived through a recent violent revolution and war; bleak years that they logically do not want to encounter again. They are clearly still haunted by the futility of an eight-year long war with Iraq that only ended in 1998.

Blogger baba.eparizi writes, "When the most ruthless are the victors and not the wise...the story is truly of a bloody vicious struggle... The ruthless killings at the dawn of the Revolution...the assassinations...eight years of devastation and war...the bombing of towns...the dastardly killings of prisoners en masse in the 1980s... These are all the bloody roots of our story... Yet today these blood feuds are fading from the minds of a new generation...a generation that was created to fight for God...a generation that was created for martyrdom is suddenly aware of its predicament and the world around...and no longer believes in the endless wars of its forefathers... A new generation is pressing forward to destroy the old formula."

The roads, streets and narrow alleyways of Iran have been renamed after the hundreds and thousands of martyrs that the locals of these neighbourhoods still vividly and fondly remember as young boys. As one blogger puts it, "Our youth were either in Evin [prison] or at war. The best of that generation ended up in our cemeteries. There was no one left to fight the regime...until now and this new generation." While another laments that, "The Americans fight and go to war to prove to the world that they are cheerful, beautiful and sophisticated humanitarians. The Palestinians fight, as this is all they can do to defend their homes. We fought so that men who represent God...will have more chance of racketeering. We fought against another Muslim country to defend this Islam". Blogger 'Shargi' perhaps sums up the views of many when she says, 'I hate war. I hate the liberating soldiers that trample your soil, home, young and old under their boots. Believe me I love freedom. But I believe that you have to make yourself free. No one else can free you.' In a jibe against an American threat one blogger writes that, "God invented war so that Americans can learn geography".

On Sunday (November 27) a group of Iran/Iraq war veterans protested outside the Presidential office against the lack of healthcare and support for injured and disabled veterans. One banner read "Blessed were the martyrs who departed as they did not [live to] see these days". On the same day there was a student protest at Tehran University during the inauguration ceremony of Ayatollah Ameed-Zanjani (the first ever cleric) appointed as the chancellor of Iran's oldest University. Mohammad Mehdi Zahedi, the Minister of Science, was forced to leave through the University library's back door so as not to come face to face with the student protestors. During the confrontation Ayatollah Ameed-Zanjani's turban was knocked off his head.

Yet what is happening in Iran is more significant than the toppling of turbans. It is also more sustainable in the long run than the mere overthrow of dictators; that, as we are witnessing in Iraq, is the easy part. As blogger 'Even Now' puts it, no one can expel the extremists from Iran. "To reach democracy perhaps there is no other way but to tame this tribe". Today, for more reasons than are obvious, the worst thing that could possibly happen to Iran would be a US attack.

Nasrin Alavi is a British Iranian who gave up her career in the City of London to work for an NGO in Tehran. She spent her formative years in Iran. After attending university in the UK and working in the city of London and academia she returned to her birthplace working for an NGO for a number of years. Today she lives in the UK and in Tehran. This is her first book.

November 23, 2005

Guest Review: Roy Kesey

The Dreams
Naguib Mahfouz
American University in Cairo Press
112pp.

Dreams are strange and wonderful things. Our own dreams, that is. Other people's dreams, of course, are just fucking irritating. "And so then this huge purple-and-green snake rose up out of the stick of butter! And the snake had the face of Tom Cruise! Except it wasn't Tom Cruise, it was my sister! And then the stick of butter turned into an M1 Abrams, and all of a sudden I'm on a battlefield, kind of like Vietnam except not exactly, more like Ecuador, maybe? Are there battlefields in Ecuador? Anyway, so then..."

Which is why I got a little nervous when I read in Raymond Stock's translator's introduction to The Dreams that the mini-narratives in this, Mahfouz's latest book, are all based on dreams that Mahfouz himself actually had, and then developed into fiction. Cue the butter-snakes, I thought.

I needn't have worried. Mahfouz has written more books than most people have read, has shown time and again that he knows his way around the narrative block, and well and truly earned his 1988 Nobel on the strength of both his early historical work (most notably the Cairo trilogy--Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street) and his later, more allegorical and/or experimental work, including Miramar, The Journey of Ibn Fatouma and Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth.

In The Dreams, Mahfouz continues his explorative use of non-mimetic narrative strategies, and of its 104 short pieces--prose-poems, really--only a few fail on the score of overly dreamy, unresolved, unredeeming randomness. Which isn't to say that he knocks the rest of them out of the park. Some are allegories that come already uninterestingly unpacked: Egyptian society, for example, as a man bound and tortured, except that he is his own torturer, and ignorance--he says so himself--is his instrument of choice. Others feel vague and empty, while still others are overly personal, never escaping onto ground that readers outside the author's family and friends might be interested in mapping.

All of which makes this review sound like a pan, I know. But it isn't, not really. First, fourteen of the pieces, taken individually, are diamonds--big, fat, gorgeous, change-not-a-word diamonds that shine from every angle. Dream 5 in particular: a half-dozen Ph.D. theses could be strained from this half-page alone, its street that becomes a circus, the narrator's joy at the miracles of acrobats and trapeze artists, until the miraculous becomes repetitive, and then tense, and then terrifying. Can we give this guy another Nobel on the strength of these two hundred words? Seriously? Or a free car? Or something?

Second, we must add to those fourteen another ten that are brilliantly, hauntingly unconcluded but not inconclusive, plus fifty or so that are solid enough to make for good reading. And third--here comes the money shot--know that the whole is far greater than the sum. Put another, better way: the demons that rise up out of the fog to poke at us would obviously be far less effective if there were no fog out of which to rise, and Mahfouz, as both fog-machine and demon-wielder, sees to it that even the pieces which fail on an individual level come to help constitute the ever-thickening atmosphere of loss and confusion, paranoia and persecution, chaos and insufficiency, the fear of being judged unfairly and, still worse, the fear of being judged fairly.

Know too that this book does very nearly all necessary good work without demanding recourse to autobiographical detail, but, sucker for gossip that I am, I can't help pointing out that Mahfouz has earned every last shred of the fear and paranoia that appear in his dreams and Dreams. Thing is, this is the first book of his to appear since 1994, when at the age of eighty-two he was stabbed in the neck with a switchblade on orders from the blind Egyptian cleric Omar Abd al-Rahman because he, Mahfouz, refused to repent having written Children of the Alley, wherein, according to his critics, God and the prophets are unethically presented as fallible beings.

Stabbed in the neck! With a switchblade! On orders from a blind cleric! Because of the power of his fiction! Boy, some people have all the luck.

Roy Kesey lives in Beijing, and has published fictional and nonfictional objects in several places. Occasionally he talks to people. This is his first published book review, unless you count the pretend one.

November 17, 2005

Guest Column: Mandu Sen

I met Mandu Sen at a reading I gave in Boston earlier this month and we began corresponding shortly afterwards. She sent me this guest column about Amir Peretz, the Moroccan-born politician who's been making headlines in Israel of late:

The rioters in France were not the only people from North Africa to make the news recently.

Amir Peretz's election last week as the head of the dovish Israeli Labor party is a dramatic change in the Israeli political map. Or perhaps it is no change at all, but is yet another expression of the political chaos Israel has been in ever since the collapse of the Oslo agreements in 2000. It is hard to tell as of yet. He just won a vote among tens of thousands of voters. For his ascent to be a real and lasting change, he will have to win the vote of millions in a pending national election and create a functioning coalition in parliament (Most coalitions in Israel don't function. Not well, anyway.)

What is certain is that it is interesting, very interesting, and to those of us who care about such things, even very exciting. See, people like Amir Peretz aren't supposed to get so far in Israeli politics.

Amir Peretz was born to a Jewish family in 1953 in Bojad, Morocco. His family immigrated to Israel in 1957, part of a wave of immigration that brought hundreds of thousands of North African Jews to Israel. The Israeli government had a policy of sending new immigrants to temporary settlements in areas that they wanted to populate. Peretz's family was settled in such a place in the South of the country, away from the economic and cultural heart in Tel Aviv. Like many of his background, Peretz's father, who was a community leader back in Bojad, found employment only as a factory worker.

Today, many of these places might be called the Israeli answer to the French banlieue. They contain clusters of utilitarian housing projects that house the Jewish poor, whether second and third generation North Africans and newly come Russians and Ethiopians. Unemployment is high and opportunities to leave are few. That is where Amir Peretz started his political career, as the mayor of the town where he grew up. He became a rarity in the political scene; a dovish "Mizrahi", a Jew of Arab descent. He joined the Labor party, the political heir of the early Zionists from Europe who established Israel; but Labor was also widely identified as the party that the North African immigrants with extreme condescension and sometimes outright racism. In fact, that is arguably the main reason why so many Jews of Middle Eastern descent lean right rather than left.

So when Peretz won the election he challenged several perceptions. Most importantly, he might have changed the perception that Labor, the Peace party, could never win the votes of the Mizrahi Jews. Labor unexpectedly won the race to nominate the first 'black' candidate for the position of prime minister (many in Israel, both Mizrahi and Ashkenazi, call non Ashkenazim 'black').
He also challenges the idea that Mizrahi Jews cannot be dovish. Israeli politics also tend to elevate ex-generals. One might fairly ask whether that was a good idea; after all, Israel isn't doing all that well right now. But the respect for the military still runs high, and there are those who claim that Peretz is disqualified because "he has never seen a bullet" (Not technically true- he actually reached rank of captain in the IDF).

And what of the man himself?

Not much is known about him, even in Israel. He is supposed to be an extremely crafty politician, a populist, and a charismatic leader. He is for a free market economy, he says, but stresses that "the economy should serve the people", and not the other way around. Right now, it seems like his most compelling message. He is very much a dove, claiming he would speed up the negotiations with the Palestinians for a final settlement if elected. Some are advising him not to stress that point too much; he cannot afford to be seen as weak. But the Israeli public hasn't been exposed much to him, and his image is still evolving.

Overall, it seems that many people will react to him according to their own background.
For example, Peretz was very popular with the Palestinian citizens of Israel who voted in the Labor elections. And he seems to go out of his way to reach out to them, vowing to create a coalition with what is known as the Arab parties (composed purely out of Israelis of Palestinian descent).

Then, of course, there are the critics. Many criticisms of Peretz are absolutely legitimate ("he panders to the big and powerful trade unions rather than to those who represent people who genuinely need help"), while other criticisms have more of a hint of snobbery, if not bigotry, in them ("His English is terrible", meaning, he's not sophisticated enough).

Labor today barely controls 20% of the Israeli Parliament. In its prime, the number was more like 50%. Amir Peretz faces an uphill battle. And even winning a national election, of course, is just the beginning of the battle, not the end. But he has won Labor over by being outspoken, relentless and possibly ruthless. Those of us who really want to see peace now just might dare to hope...

Mandu Sen grew up in Israel, received her undergraduate degree in the Humanities from Yale and is currently living in Boston and trying to be a pre-med student.

November 16, 2005

Guest Review: Clifford Garstang

Devil Talk
Daniel A. Olivas
Bilingual Press
158 pp.

What enchants the reader most in this fast-paced story collection is the element of surprise, the frequent juxtaposition of the realistic and the supernatural. There is a swirl of the fantastic with darkly-observed social commentary, of Latin American imagery and mythology with the gritty streets (and freeways) of L.A. It is not a stretch to associate the tone of these magical pieces with the stories of Gabriel García Márquez or Jorge Luis Borges.

As befits the title, the Devil makes frequent appearances. In the opening story, "Monk," a couple's cat is named Diablo, and the reader can't help wondering whether this feline Devil is somehow behind the central character's otherwise-unexplained rebelliousness and his unsettling dreams. In the title story, "Devil Talk," the Devil actually knocks politely on the front door, planning to make a deal with Jesus Zendejas, only to leave disappointed since Jesus (now Ysrael after his conversion to Judaism to please his Jewish wife) as a non-Christian is no longer eligible for Hell. The Devil takes a female form in "Don de la Cruz and the Devil of Malibu," a chilling story about class, and in "The Plumed Serpent of Los Angeles," where the displaced Aztec god Quetzalcoatl tries to seduce La Diabla in order to regain his throne. In all these stories we discover that it just doesn't pay to bargain with the Devil.

Even when the Devil is not named, though, evil appears in the world of the collection, in the form of child abuse, rape, racism-domination in all its various guises. "La Guaca," one of the shortest stories in the collection, is a dark parable about exploitation. An unnamed man (known to the villages as El Huérfano--The Orphan--because he has no family) runs the finest restaurant in the pueblo. It too has no name, but the villagers call it "La Guaca," which means "tomb" but also has the sense of "buried treasure." El Huérfano announces his intention to take a bride and invites the eligible women of the pueblo to dine at the restaurant. But there is a catch. Only the perfect woman will survive the feast's poisons to become his bride. And sure enough, one by one the women die until only the most beautiful woman remains. It seems they are meant to be together until he tastes his own deadly meal on her lips.

Where the stories are most successful, the supernatural elements are employed to reveal complete tales, some in the folk tradition, some that revolve around unexplained mysteries, some that turn on cultural conflict. On the other hand, the most satisfying and nuanced story of the collection is the least magical. Early in "A Melancholy Chime," a story told in reverse chronological order down to the inverted numbering of its sections, a professor suffers the consequences of an affair with a student, and from then on, moving backward in time, his multi-faceted character is revealed. The result is a vivid portrait of a man who is a flawed reflection of his past, rather than one who is merely explained by the presence of some mystical force.

If this magical collection has a weakness it would be that some of the stories feel fragmentary, as if they are the missing pieces to some other puzzle--polished and interesting, but in themselves not as compelling as the more developed stories are. In "Willie," for example, a pre-teen girl observes her possibly cross-dressing brother being berated by their father, a man who is clearly disappointed in his son�s behavior. This is a fascinating beginning, but the reader is left hanging as to where these characters might be headed. Similarly, in "Señor Sánchez," the title character may or may not have the ability to speak for the dead. In the end he disappears and the reader is unenlightened. It is one thing for a story to resonate, to leave the reader asking what will happen next, but if too little happens in the first place, too much is left to the reader's imagination.

But this is a minor complaint and only proves that Olivas has succeeded admirably in fabricating characters and circumstances that engage the reader to the point of wanting more. At its best, in stories like "A Melancholy Chime" and "Devil Talk," the collection shines magically.

Clifford Garstang lives near Staunton, Virginia and occasionally blogs at Perpetual Folly. His work has appeared in Bellowing Ark, Eureka Literary Magazine, and North Dakota Quarterly, and is forthcoming in Baltimore Review and Shenandoah.