Laila Lalami

That’s it for me this week. The one and only Randa Jarrar takes over tomorrow and every Friday. Monday being a holiday in these parts, I probably won’t be back here till Tuesday. Have a great weekend!

Over at the Lit Blog Co-Op site, editor Reagan Arthur talks about the selection of Case Histories for Read This!

So, no, CASE HISTORIES was not lurking shyly in the corner, waiting for someone to notice it but I can tell you that despite all that good news and good fortune, it has not hit the New York Times bestseller list, and its sales, while certainly respectable, are not so stratospheric that the Read This! recommendation is the blog equivalent of sending coals to Newcastle. I get the sense that some readers are disappointed enough in the book’s success and its corporate publisher that they’ll give it a miss on principle, and that old maternal stand-by comes to mind: don’t cut off your nose to spite your face! Borrow it from a friend, or the library — I’m not interested in boosting our sales figures, only, like the estimable folks behind the LitBlog Co-Op, in sharing the rare satisfaction to be found in reading a great book.

Agree? Disagree? Hit the thread with your comments.

BTW, while this doesn’t have the same weight as the hallowed NY Times bestseller list, the selection seems to have at least some impact on online sales. Over at Powells.com’s bestseller list, Case Histories is currently at #21.

Ibrahim Abusharif, the editor of Starlatch Press, contributes a thoughtful column to the Christian Science Monitor about the recent reports of desecration of the Qur’an at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After talking about what improper handling by American soldiers of Islam’s holy book means to Muslims, he also reminds us that Muslims themselves abuse their own symbols, as we have witnessed in the Nicholas Berg case.

Those who doubt the staying power of symbols and religion may want to reconsider their stand.

It is a striking reality that human sensitivity to symbols has survived, despite the postmodern flattening of the world and its aggression against belief in the unseen. But while humans have God-given emotional accouterments naturally sensitive to such things as desecration, we also have been given the intellect that keeps that sensitivity in check and within the realm of moderation.

Just as we know that this episode of the desecration of the Koran is not reflective of the ethos of religious tolerance among Americans, we must also learn never to attach to Islam – either the religion or the civilization – the acts of vigilante Muslims who unwittingly desecrate the name of Islam and, perhaps, inspire others to desecrate their book.

Read the full column here.

Please take a moment to visit FreeThemNow.org, a new website that seeks to bring world attention to the plight of more than 408 Moroccan POWs–the world’s longest-held prisoners of war. Captured in the early days of the conflict in Western Sahara between Morocco and the Polisario Front, these people have been held for nearly 30 years. Senator McCain, a former POW, has recently joined the Free Them Now group.

Frequent Moorishgirl contributor Dan Olivas has joined La Bloga, a group of kick-ass Chicano bloggers posting on all things literary. Something to add to your bookmarks.

Random House editor Jillian Quint writes in to inform us of a contest for young writers called Twentysomething Essays By Twentysomething Writers. Says Jillian:

Basically we’re looking for cool, short nonfiction essays by good (but not super famous) writers in their twenties. The top essay wins $20,000 and up to 28 others get published in a book due out in September 2006.

Check out the website for more details.

Below is a guest column from Peter Laufer, author of Wetback Nation: The Case for Opening the Mexican-American Border, sharing his thoughts about the Minuteman Project, which California’s immigrant governor has recently praised, and which has been denounced by civil rights groups.

No one disagrees that the U.S.-Mexico border is out of control. Virtually anyone who wants to come north across that line simply comes north. If they survive the crossing, they try to disappear into an America anxious to take advantage of their labor, and they usually succeed.

But it’s murderous chaos on the border today: desperate migrants succumb to harsh weather, vicious bandits and the brutal extortion techniques of the smugglers they hire to help them gain access to the American Dream. The Border Patrol doesn’t only try to keep undocumented travelers out of the U.S., it often saves the border jumpers’ lives before it deports them.

The so-called Minuteman Project — the stationing of self-selected volunteers along the Arizona border this spring in a vain attempt to stem the flow of illegal traffic north — is only exacerbating the crisis. I’ve spent time on that border with these self-appointed guardians. I know that a motley bunch of thrill-seeking publicity junkies will not keep hungry Mexicans from making the trek north. At best the vigilantes will be an irritant to the travelers. At worst they’ll spark tragic and unnecessary violence.

Chris Simcox is one of the Minuteman Project ringleaders. When he moved to Arizona from California in 2003 and bought the Tombstone Tumbleweed he slapped an editorial across the front page of the paper that screamed: “Enough is enough! A public call to arms! Citizens Border Patrol Militia Now Forming!” The immediate result was to disrupt life in his new hometown.

I stayed at at Curley Bill’s Bed & Breakfast, a few blocks across town from the Tombstone Tumbleweed offices. Owner Larry “Curley Bill” Alves expressed disgust with Simcox. “I’m a conservative Republican, but I’m an ex-senior non-com in Vietnam. He’s a little kid who never got to play soldier as a kid.” And hotelier Alves sees a direct relationship between his bed and breakfast business and Simcox’s ability to draw national news coverage. “This militia stuff hurts tourism. People in this town don’t like this at all.”

Alves’s wife, Sally, readily agreed. “If you could still run people out of town on a rail, he’d be run out of town on a rail. I’ve had a couple of people cancel reservations, afraid Simcox and his group were walking around with assault rifles and camouflage. It’s too bad when a guy doing something bad owns the town’s newspaper.”

A few miles down the road from Tombstone, Douglas Mayor Ray Borane, born and raised in the border town he now governs, just wishes Simcox and his followers would go back where they came from. He calls the volunteers assembled on the US side of the border a charade. “The only thing it lacked,– he told me about the border chaos, –was an idiot like that guy Simcox up the road. Simcox writes that idiotic call to arms, and I really don’t think that he, in his lifetime, would have ever dreamt that he was going to get the attention he got. The media jumped on it. Before you know it he’s a media cutie. Not because he’s saying things that are going to be effective, but because it’s so outlandish and it’s reminiscent of the Old West. The media built him. He’s a fraud.

There is a simple solution to securing the U.S.-Mexican border: let Mexicans who wish to come north, come north. Regularize that which cannot be controlled, which we in fact do not wish to control because we need the labor.

The best arguments for eliminating attempts to control Mexican migration are that such a policy is counterproductive to attempt and impossible to achieve. Instead, open the border to Mexicans. These people are coming north despite US laws. Open the border to Mexican workers so that the bad guys cannot hide in their shadows as they sneak across the border. Open the border to Mexicans the US wants and needs, and then the Border Patrol will know that the people trying to break into the US — the ones in the tunnels, those running across the desert and jumping the fences — are the real villains. Open the border to Mexicans, a significant fuel for the US economy, and make it easier for the Border Patrol to keep out the drug traffickers and the terrorists.

Opening the border to the free passage of Mexicans who wish to come north is the only reasonable and long-term solution. Over time the Mexicans and we will learn to blend, not collide. And once Mexicans can again travel freely north, the US government will know that the people in the tunnels and jumping the fences and running across the desert are the villains and not the fuel of the US economy.

You can acknowledge the reality that this policy is correct and work to make it happen, or just allow events to overwhelm you. Because now or later, the artificial line separating Mexico from the US (and Mexico’s former land) will disappear.

I never thought that the biggest win in my life would come from being a Class A loser. But that’s the way it went down. Let me explain.

I’m the wordsmith who penned The Resilient Writer: Tales of Rejection and Triumph from 23 Top Authors, a book about how we scriveners can deal with the thumbs-down, but my pipe dream was to become a published novelist. When all else failed, I decided to latch onto rejection instead, which is what finally led me to a real live book.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d been published before, in some magazines you’ve heard of and plenty you haven’t, and I’d been making a living as a corporate hack for a good chunk of time before I even dared to attempt writing a novel. And I got plenty of rejections along the way. But believe you me, nothing is as personal, painful and ego-shattering as the rejection of a first novel. Or at least, if there is, I haven’t found it yet.

You may be wondering if my novel was any good, or if maybe it deserved to be rejected? All I know I worked darn hard on it for five backbreaking years, and that I was pleased as punch when I wrote “The End.” Hell, anyone who even finishes a novel, no matter how bad it is, deserves some pride! And mine was good enough to land me a top New York agent. We just never found the proverbial happy home for it.

A lot of the people I interviewed for The Resilient Writer have plenty of rejected novels hidden away in their drawers or closets. Maybe my first novel deserves to be deep-sixed, too. I can’t be the judge of that. All I know is, when my then-agent gave up on it for good, after sending it out for two-and-a-half years, I had a bad case of the blues. It wasn’t a pretty picture. I even pulled the plug on my second novel, that’s how broken up I was.

Then I had the bright idea of taking my tormented emotions and putting them to good use. First I whipped up a website, www.rejectioncollection.com, for other crazed rejects like me to beef about the unfairness of it all. Then I came up with a book proposal for a book about rejection, which was rejected, and a second one, likewise. But by the third or fourth rewrite I finally had a winner.

So here I am today. I’m not known as a sensitive novelist, but as a hard-boiled rejexpert. But I guess this is one twist of fate I’ll just have to learn to live with.

“Emil Habibi’s The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist is classic satire and may also be one of the first examples of peculiarly Israeli Arab literature,” Jonathan says. “The Arab Israelis are ethnically Palestinian, but their experiences have been shaped by life in an Israeli society to which they simultaneously do and do not belong, and this has given rise to a distinct literary voice. Habibi – who was a communist member of the Israeli Knesset – experienced these contradictions in full, and the exploits of his absurd anti-hero illustrate how surreal they must have seemed to those living through them.

The term “pessoptimist” – the author’s coinage for a pessimistic optimist – is a good one to know for those who follow Middle Eastern politics, because the news from that region is often both hopeful and depressing. The continuing validity of Habibi’s satire a generation after it was written inspires the same mix of emotions.”

Jonathan Edelstein is a lawyer practicing in New York City and the author of The Head Heeb, which analyzes Middle East affairs and democratization in the developing world.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.

Over at Salon, Daniel Alarcon analyzes some of the reactions he’s been getting recently while on tour promoting his collection, War By Candlelight.

Last April I was invited to a literary fundraiser of sorts. It was a fancy affair, full of very wealthy people and well-dressed waiters carrying trays of wine and strange-looking appetizers. A couple of dozen writers had been invited, and we were plied with alcohol and dispersed into the party. I fell into a few pleasant conversations with some very kind people, all of them genuinely excited for me — You’re so young to have published a book! etc. — and then was seated at dinner next to a woman in her 60s, who spent her meal asking me about the exotic origins of my last name. I’m Peruvian, I told her. But that last name, it reminds me of a bug that bit me when I was living in Mexico! Oh, I said. Where does it come from? she asked. I explained to her at one point that most words in Spanish that begin in “Al” are Arabic in origin, that the Moorish influence transformed the language, so that my last name may have been Arcon or Arco. I’m not sure why I told her this. I’m neither Spanish nor Moorish, and certainly not a linguist, but I felt she needed something to keep her occupied for a bit.

She gave me this wide-eyed look: That is so topical, she said. Like al-Qaida.

Even in the dim light, I’m sure she sensed she had stunned me: not that I’m saying you’re one of those people.

Oh, no, I stammered. Because I’m not.

She patted me on the shoulder. I understand, she said in a conspiratorial whisper; my daughter married a Mexican.

It goes downhill from there, with Alarcon getting increasingly frustrated that he doesn’t fit the image that is expected of the Latino writer, which is to say that of the struggling immigrant who writes novels or stories that are merely thinly disguised versions of his autobiography, how it’s all heartbreaking and so, so real.

Oh and the answer to that question? Clearly, one who can write.