Laila Lalami

The Bulgarian government has made an official suggestion that the death sentence that was passed by the fascist regime of King Boris against poet Nikola Vaptsarov be repealed.

Bulgarian journalists and social activists have reiterated many times their appeal to national prosecution authorities to take due steps to denounce his death sentence and thus remove this shameful act from Bulgarian history.

Vaptsarov was shot by firing squad in Sofia in 1942. He composed until the very end. His last poem was addressed to his wife.

The fight is hard and pitiless
The fight is epic, as they say.
I fell. Another takes my place
Why single out a name?

After the firing squad the worms.
Thus does the simple logic go.
But in the storm we’ll be with you,
My people, for we loved you so.
2 p.m. 23.vii.1942

Maud Newton reminds us all why we love her site: She tells it like it is.

Maya Jaggi’s profile of Edwidge Danticat in this Saturday’s Guardian is quite au point, considering the news that came to light on Friday, on this blog and elsewhere.

The official cause of [Danticat's uncle's] death was acute pancreatitis. Yet for his niece, who says she begged to be allowed to see him when he was taken from the detention centre to hospital on November 2, but was refused “for security reasons”, he is a “casualty of both the conflict in Haiti and an inhumane and discriminatory US immigration system”. There are, she says, “so many people caught in the crossfire; my uncle was driven out with the clothes on his back and a briefcase. But he fled the frying pan for the fire. Maybe if they’d considered his age instead of applying a blanket policy he might be alive today.” Aristide was forced into exile by the combined effects of internal rebellion and US pressure. In Danticat’s view, “at the same time as this administration is creating situations elsewhere in the world that cause people to flee, it’s closing the doors even tighter against them”.

But the profile covers a lot of other territory–Danticat’s fiction of course, but also her film work, her activism, her upbringing, politics in Haiti, writing in a third language, and much, much else. A must read.

In the Friday Guardian novelist Nada Jarrar (Somewhere, Home) writes about Norma Khouri, the woman behind one of the biggest hoaxes in publishing and who single-handedly set back the cause of Arab women through her lies. I have to say, Jarrar’s arguments closely mirror mine, previously mentioned here.
Thanks to David for the link.

In a profile sure to incense quite a few people, Jackie McGlone describes author Louise Bagshawe, a woman who says she writes “trashy novels”, is unabashedly conservative (not that there’s anything wrong with that), and is apparently not ashamed to admit that she founded the Rock Society at Oxford only so she could use the school’s clout to “make contacts in the record business” (now that‘s wrong.) Here’s Bagshawe in her own words:

But being a trashy novelist is not exactly work, whether you’re doing Chick-Lit or Glam-Style, another of the genres in which I write. I bang out some words for about two or three hours a day; then I tidy up before Caius – we named him after Julius Caesar because it goes pretty well with my husband’s family name, LoCicero – comes home from nursery school.

Bagshawe also believes the Tory Party needs more “articulate women like [her]“.

In a Popmatters column, Ursula Lindsey reviews the well-known problems that affect the publishing industry in the Arab world, and which became all even more apparent during the 2004 Frankfurt Book Fair.

A large part of the pre-fair debate involved questioning whether the Arab League a political organ of unparalleled ineffectiveness, representing authoritarian governments that all engage in varying degrees of censorship had any place coordinating the event. A few countries, such as Morocco, decided that they would go solo rather than be amalgamated into a questionable “Arab world” whole. Some prominent writers were excluded. Some declined to attend. Those who didn’t question the league’s right to organize the presentation still worried about its ability to do so. The fair was huge, and without having been there it’s very hard to gauge how successful it was. Arab visitors and attendees had good things to say about the degree of German interest, and the quality of some of the forums and discussion panels. But they also complained that works were poorly translated, and that some of the official presentations were folkloric and apolitical: kitchy amalgams of carpets and sand dunes.

Lindsey argues that the single biggest problem facing Arab writers these days is censorship, but, she says, that hasn’t stopped them from creating.

As the Arab Human Development Report itself notes, writing is one of the few creative fields in which a lack of funding or support is not an insurmountable handicap. Writers aren’t like scientists. They don’t need labs. You don’t have to live in a rich country, or a free country, or a powerful country, to write a good book.

And while they continue to write the books, they still have trouble getting them published, finding readers for them, or getting them translated outside their countries, which is why projects like Words Without Borders need support.
Thanks to Mark for the link.

In a brief survey of sex in twentieth-century writing in English, Natasha Walter argues that for all the effort it took to make sex a part of life in literature, it has become weightless of late. She mentions both male and female writers, gay and straight, from D.H. Lawrence to Doris Lessing, John Updike to Monica Ali, Linda Grant to Alan Hollinghurst, but modern writers in general don’t find favor with her.

This belief in the unparalleled authenticity of sexual love has for two centuries been a distinctive belief of our society; it is part of our aggrandisement of the individual against society and part of modern western culture’s disdain for social structures whenever they come into conflict with individual desire. Yet it is striking how novelists today have moved away from this reliance on sexual intimacy as a source of emotional revelation, and how the search for intimacy is simply no longer the prime motor that it once was for the novel. This goes much, much further than simply disappointment that sex does not live up to expectations – rather, it is a pervasive feeling that sex is not worth making a great fuss about at all. Although sex can be as explicit as you like, it is no longer centrally important to many novelists.

Racial tensions following the murder of Theo van Gogh have spread from Holland to Belgium. The BBC reports that a suspect has been arrested in Antwerp for making death threats against senator cum author Mimount Bousakla, a Belgian citizen of Moroccan origin.

Ms Bousakla, 32, whose parents are Moroccan, came to prominence after writing a book about her cross-cultural upbringing called Couscous with Belgian Fries.
She has received sporadic death threats ever since, but this time they were taken so seriously that she went into hiding and was given round-the-clock police protection.

Previous posts about van Gogh: 1, 2, 3, and 4.

The Oregon Book Awards were announced last Thursday. The fiction awards were judged by Colson Whitehead and he selected Axeman’s Jazz by Tracy Daugherty in the novel category and Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories by Scott Nadelson in the short fiction category. The Oregonian has a report that gives a bit more detail about the winners in all categories.

I arrived in New York in August 1989, leaving behind my homeland, Yugoslavia, which was deathly ill with nationalism and a collective psychosis that was about to swallow the fragile Balkan sanity. I was 22 years old. I arrived with $1,000 inside my sock, having been advised that a sock was the safest sanctuary for one’s fortune during a border crossing in a heat wave; looking inconspicuous while wearing a coat with money sewn inside the lining would have been impossible.

Natasha Radojcic writes in the Times about how she came to New York, worked a variety of jobs including at a sex shop and as as a personal trainer, in order to afford the luxury of writing. In a related multimedia feature, StaceyAnn Chin, Boris Fishman, Mohammed Naseehu Ali, Nelly Rosario, George Sarrinikolaou, Sanjna N. Singh, and Suki Kim share their stories of being new new yorkers.