Laila Lalami

That’s it for me for this week. I will be taking a break from blogging to focus on my novel, which I’m hoping to finish (khamsa u khmis!) by the new year. I will be back in this space the week of January 9, 2006. See ya.

Good news: Paperback rights to Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits have sold to Harcourt, with publication tentatively scheduled for fall 2006.

Given the international attention that Orhan Pamuk’s case had drawn, both in and out of Turkey, I had hoped that the suit would be dismissed before it went to trial. This has not been the case, unfortunately for him (and for freedom of speech in Turkey.) Pamuk, you’ll recall, stands accused of “denigrating Turkish identity” because he dared to speak of the genocide of Armenians by the Turks, in an interview he gave to a Swiss magazine. If found guilty, Pamuk faces up to three years’ imprisonment.

No word yet on the outcome of today’s hearing, but, according to this article, it could still be postponed.

(Update: The BBC reports that the trial has indeed been postponed, due to a legal technicality. The prosecutor sent the case back to the Justice Ministry to decide whether Pamuk should be tried under the old penal code or the new. The next hearing is set for February 7, 2006.)

(Another update: The BBC article states that 60 other writers have been accused under the same law that Pamuk is being tried under. So perhaps a high-profile case like this will actually help get the law repealed.)

Pamuk has received wide support, from individual writers like Jose Saramago and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from writers’ organizations like PEN, and from government bodies as well (the EU has been pretty vocal). But that has not stopped the Turkish prosecutor from moving forward with the case.

Moorishgirl’s stats file indicates that it has readers in Turkey. If you are one, I’d love to hear from you. What is the local press saying? What are the reactions among your friends?

Related posts:
Pamuk in Trouble.
Pamuk vs. Turkish Government
Pamuk vs. Turkish Government #2.
Pamuk Update.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen conferences, panels, symposia, and roundtables organized around the theme (announced in big, bold letters): “Islam and Democracy: Are They Compatible?” Here’s a newsflash: Religion and State don’t mix well. Just save yourself money and go home.

But I suspect that’s not the question that is really being asked. I think the question that is being alluded to in those conferences is this: Can Muslims Have Democracy? Which is a bit a like asking: Can Brown People Have Democracy? Can Black People Have Democracy? Can Gays Have Democracy?

We live in strange times, when we constantly have to point out the obvious: that people are people, and that we’re all the same. If Muslims want democracy, they’ll get it for themselves; they don’t need Bush for that.

I bring this up because I just read Reza Aslan’s opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times yesterday, about an early form of democracy in 14th century Arabia.

Yet the selection of Abu Bakr was meaningless until the entire Muslim community pledged an oath of allegiance to him. In fact, Abu Bakr’s appointment as caliph was delayed because partisans of Muhammad’s nephew and son-in-law, Ali, refused to swear allegiance. It was only after this powerful faction, the Shi’atu Ali, or the Party of Ali (a.k.a. the Shiites), relented and took the oath that Abu Bakr was allowed to assume his leadership role.

Perhaps it seems wrong to call this a democratic process. After all, Abu Bakr was appointed rather than directly elected. But it required community approval nonetheless. The Greeks may have invented democracy, and the Romans may have transformed it into republicanism, but throughout the Middle East, from the Nile in Egypt to the Oxus in Afghanistan and beyond, no other experiment in popular sovereignty had even been imagined, let alone attempted.

Aslan is the author of the excellent No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, which you really should read.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times (reprinted in the Star Tribune), E. Annie Proulx describes the kind of imaginative work she had to do to create the characters in “Brokeback Mountain.”

“Put yourself in my place,” the author says. “An elderly, white, straight female, trying to write about two 19-year-old gay kids in 1963. What kind of imaginative leap do you think was necessary? Profound, extreme, large. To get into those guys’ heads and actions took a lot of 16-hour days, and never thinking about anything else and living a zombie life. That’s what I had to do. I really needed an exorcist to get rid of those characters. And they roared back when I saw the film.”(…)

It was 1995 and Proulx, who lives in Wyoming, visited a crowded bar near the Montana border. The place was rowdy and packed with attractive women, everyone was drinking, and the energy was high.

“There was the smell of sex in the air,” remembers Proulx. “[B]ut here was this old shabby-looking guy. … watching the guys playing pool. He had a raw hunger in his eyes that made me wonder if he were country gay. I wondered, ‘What would’ve he been like when he was younger?’ Then he disappeared, and in his place appeared Ennis. And then Jack. You can’t have Ennis without Jack.”

A year after the story was published, Proulx says, Matthew Shepard was killed in Wyoming and she was called to be on the jury.

Shepard’s murder partly inspired Percival Everett for his new novel, Wounded. In it, a horse rancher hires a laborer who eventually becomes accused of a hate crime against a gay man. The book was released to generally positive reviews earlier this fall.

This week, I’ll be reading with Jess Row (The Train to Lo Wu) at the very cozy Looking Glass Bookstore this Tuesday, December 20th at 7 pm. Details:

Looking Glass Bookstore
318 SW Taylor St.
Portland
503 227 4760

If you’re in town, stop by and say hi to us.

This week, I’d like to give away a copy of Dana Adam Shapiro’s debut novel, The Every Boy, which is about the sudden death of a troubled teenager, and the father’s attempt to discover what happened by poring over his son’s diary. The Every Boy, which was released last summer, has been praised by Amy Sedaris, Tom Perrotta, and Matthew Sharpe.

The first person to correctly answer this question wins the book: Which movie did Dana Adam Shapiro direct? Please use the subject line “Every Boy” in your email, and please also include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded.

Update: The winner is Ilham E. from Decatur, Georgia.

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.

(more…)

Salman Rushdie’s latest op-ed in the Times is about that hot topic of the moment: multiculturalism. In it, he argues that those who seek “purity” are deluding themselves:

The mélange of culture is in us all, with its irreconcilable contradictions. In our swollen, polyglot cities, we are all cultural mestizos. So it is important to make a distinction between multifaceted culture and multiculturalism. In the age of mass migration and the internet, cultural plurality is an irreversible fact; like it or dislike it, it’s where we live, and the dream of a pure monoculture is at best an unattainable, nostalgic fantasy and at worst a life-threatening menace

In the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jennifer Howard explores the state of literary theory. (This is a free-access link, thankfully.) In the Chronicle Review, editor Lindsay Waters (Harvard University Press) argues that the study of literature in academe is no longer connected to …literature.