Laila Lalami

In the Times, Zoe Paxton tries to find out if Gautam Malkani’s much-hyped Londonstani is ‘authentic’ by visiting a class of teenagers from Hounslow, West London–where the novel is set:

Two weeks before its publication, the book is already notorious for two things: the money and the language.The centre of a huge bidding war at the Frankfurt Book Fair last year, it was bought by Fourth Estate for a six-figure advance (the rumour is £380,000).

Why the fuss? Mainly because Londonstani is written in a head-spinning, expletive-rich mixture of Asian street slang, text-speak, MTV talk and bastardised Punjabi that supposedly reflects the patois of West London Asian gangs. By writing in dialect, Malkani has set himself a tough task; it has worked for Roddy Doyle and Irvine Welsh, but critics had their doubts about the dictated letters in dialect that appeared in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.

That’s not a very apt comparison. The issue with the chapters written in Hasina’s point of view in Brick Lane is this: Hasina presumably writes her letters in Bengali, her native language, and the novelist renders them for us in English. And yet the language of the letters is a pidginized English, which is a rather odd stylistic choice. But based on the description of Malkani’s book, he’s actually trying to approximate the dialect of English that these kids are using. In any case, Paxton leaves the class with reassurances from the kids that the author had gotten it right even if “you would never, ever write these words down.”

In last week’s issue of Tel Quel, Driss Bennani writes about Sheikh Yassine, the spiritual leader of Al-Adl wa Al-Ihsane (Justice and Charity), and the personality cult he’s been developing for some time. (If you don’t read French, you can run the text through this online translator; it’s won’t be too accurate, but it’ll give you an idea, and at least you’ll have a good laugh at some of the lines):

Un militant raconte : “j’ai vu le prophète Mohammed, et je lui ai demandé de me montrer le chemin de Dieu. Il m’a souri, puis a désigné de sa main une tente d’où sortait une lumière éblouissante. à l’intérieur, Abdessalam Yassine ramassait des branches d’arbre par terre. Le prophète s’est alors tourné vers moi et m’a dit, en désignant Sidi Abdessalam : demande à cet homme. Lui, il sait”. Dans les “visions” de ses disciples, Yassine est toujours accompagné du prophète ou de ses sahaba (compagnons). Il est clairement désigné comme étant “le lieutenant de Dieu sur terre” (tel quel). Au Maroc, mais pas seulement. Au Mali (et cette fois, ce n’est pas une “vision”), un alem soufi a brandi le portrait de Yassine et a demandé à ses disciples s’ils le connaissaient. Non, ils ne le connaissaient pas. Le maître soufi le leur a alors présenté en ces termes : “c’est le calife choisi par le prophète et il est au Maroc. Il faut que vous le connaissiez. C’est votre guide spirituel”. Au Maroc, un lieutenant du vieux cheikh a tenté d’être “plus rationnel”. Selon lui, le calife que les musulmans attendent est censé réunir “dix qualités” – évidemment, Yassine les a toutes.

Tout comme le prophète, sa famille est “bénie” : quand les disciples parlent de sa fille Nadia ou de sa mère Rqia, ils ajoutent à son nom l’expression “radia Allahou ânha” – une formule normalement réservée à la famille du prophète et à ses compagnons. D’ailleurs, Yassine aussi a des compagnons, encore une fois comme le prophète. Ce sont les membres du majliss al irchad (conseil de guidance) ou du majliss arrabbani (conseil divin – rien de moins). Eux aussi sont bénis parce que proches de Yassine. Le parallèle avec les sahaba est flagrant. Chaque déplacement du vieil homme est un véritable événement. L’année dernière (un enregistrement vidéo est disponible), Yassine a été reçu avec les honneurs dus à un chef d’Etat dans le hall de l’aéroport Mohammed V, alors qu’il revenait simplement… d’Agadir. Une vingtaine de lieutenants de la jamaâ se sont alignés à la sortie des voyageurs et lui ont tous embrassé la main ou l’épaule. Cherchez le parallèle… En permettant à ses disciples femmes de mentir à leurs parents et à leurs maris pour assister aux rencontres d’Al Adl, Yassine se paye le luxe de dépasser les interdits coraniques, en l’occcurrence ici celui du mensonge. Dans la jamaâ, Yassine est tout : le père, le guide spirituel, le leader politique… Sans lui, les autres responsables de la jamaâ ne sont rien. Quand il a vidé sans ménagement Mohamed Bachiri, pourtant co-fondateur de la jamaâ, personne n’a bronché. Le cheikh ne se trompe jamais.

So now we have militants who see in their dreams validation for divine leadership, who speak of their leader using language reserved for the Prophet himself, and who refer to his daughter as though she were Fatima. And to top it off, their leader “never makes mistakes.” Of course not, he’s a got a direct phone line to God. Hey, I have a dream too: How about we worry about problems, like, oh, I don’t know, unemployment and poverty?

But perhaps those of you who live in Washington, DC, might be able to get some answers from Nadia Yassine, the Sheikh’s daughter and de facto spokesperson for the group. Mrs. Yassine will appear in Georgetown University on April 20. Here is the event description:

The daughter of the founder of the Moroccan movement Al-Adl wa-l-Ihsan (Justice and Spirituality Association, or JSA), Nadia Yassine is the founder of the JSA Women’s Department. Her first book, Toutes voiles dehors [English translation, Full Sails Ahead], was published in 2003 by Le Fennec in Morocco and Altereditions in France. She was the first to proclaim that the Mudawwana (the Moroccan family code) was not sacrosanct and must be revised.

What? So now she’s taking credit for the reform of the Moudawana?? Do the people who invited her know that she led a march against the reforms in Casablanca in the spring of 2000? (By the way, ‘ihsan’ does not mean ‘spirituality.’ Sounds like a lame attempt to make her sound like a real Sufi.)

I had expected E.L. Doctorow to win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The March, but the prize went to another, similarly titled book: March, by Geraldine Brooks.

Several people sent me this link to Fernanda Eberstadt’s profile of Marrakech-based Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, which appeared in the New York Times Magazine. Nothing terribly new in the piece, and I suppose I would have enjoyed it were it not for comments like this:

[Goytisolo's] political essays, denouncing the official neglect that led to last November’s rioting in Paris suburbs, the corruption and tyranny of Arab governments or what he sees as the pernicious influence of Christian evangelism on American foreign policy, appear in Europe’s most prestigious newspapers.

The neglect of minorities in France and the tyranny of Arab governments are stated as incontrovertible facts, but the influence of Christian evangelism gets to be qualified with a “what he sees as.” Ugh.

The Lit Blog Co-Op has made its spring 2006 ‘Read This!’ selection: Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Television, translated by Jordan Stump. Tune in all week to find which other titles were nominated, and to read nominators’ posts.

When she was nine years old, Reyna Grande came to the United States as an undocumented immigrant. Years later, she graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a degree in creative writing and was a 2003 PEN USA Emerging Voices Fellow. Her debut novel Across A Hundred Mountains, tells the story of two undocumented immigrants from Mexico. Daniel Olivas reviews the book for the El Paso Times.

In the nonlinear narrative, chapters alternate between her two female protagonists, Juana Garcia and Adelina Vasquez. First, we have Juana, a young girl who lives in a small Mexican village in extreme poverty. When a flood leads to yet another death in her family — a death that Juana feels responsible for — Juana’s father believes that he must earn more money to house his family in safer quarters. He believes that there are abundant opportunities “en el otro lado,” based on a letter from a friend: “Apá’s friend wrote about riches unheard of, streets that never end, and buildings that nearly reach the sky. He wrote that there’s so much money to be made, and so much food to eat, that people there don’t know what hunger is.”

Read the rest here.

Writing for the NYTBR, William Logan is not entirely pleased with the choices that David Lehman made for The Oxford book of American Poetry:

The dirty secret of American poetry is that until Whitman and Dickinson it was no damn good, and until the modernists it was not good again. It takes only 10 pages for the new “Oxford Anthology of American Poetry,” edited by David Lehman, to get through the 17th century, and 10 more for the 18th. The whole 19th century takes fewer than 200, and half that is devoted to Whitman and Dickinson. After that, for 900 pages, it is one long diet of the 20th century.

Lehman, though a poet himself, is better known as editor of the annual series “The Best American Poetry” and author of “Signs of the Times,” an attack on deconstructive literary theory. “The Oxford Book of American Verse,” as it was first known, was edited by the distinguished scholar F. O. Matthiessen in 1950 and, as “The New Oxford Book of American Verse,” revised by the equally distinguished Richard Ellmann in 1976. Lehman’s introduction, a good deal of it a defense against his predecessors, lives in a prose world where assumptions are governing, essays seminal and stock always goes sky-high. He’s proud of what he calls the “widening of focus” here, though it’s hard to see why this isn’t just “out of focus” by another name. Matthiessen, as Lehman notes, included 51 poets, and Ellmann 78; Lehman has 210, nearly a quarter of them born between 1940 and 1950. This grotesquely overrates the wartime and baby-boom generation, still an amorphous crowd of genial talent through which Lehman offers no path.

Read it here.

Over at Salon, Stephen Amidon praises Frederick Brown’s biography of Gustave Flaubert:

Perhaps the most valuable accomplishment of Brown’s biography is to situate Flaubert squarely amid his turbulent times, echoing the achievement of the biographer’s 1995 “Zola: A Life.” During Flaubert’s lifetime, France experienced both rapid modernization, seen most readily in Baron Haussmann’s radical re-altering of the Parisian cityscape, and constant political upheaval. Although Flaubert often made noises about being above this historical hubbub, he had a knack for landing himself smack dab in the middle of it. In 1848, a curious Flaubert and Du Camp were actually among the first to enter Tuileries Palace after Louis-Phillipe’s hasty abdication; during the disastrous 1871 war against Prussia, Flaubert was evicted from his beloved lifelong home Croisset by invading German troops, and later attended the court-martial of Communards after their unsuccessful socialist uprising in Paris. Despite being a stridently self-professed ‘bourgeoisophobe,’ however, Flaubert had little time for the revolutionaries. As Brown points out, the author, an “affluent bourgeois sustained by unearned income from [his family's] farmland, had no use for egalitarian doctrine. Declaring that only three or four hundred men a century has historical weight, he regarded utopian socialism as the worst despotism. Inherently unintelligent was the mass qua mass.”

And in the New York Times Book Review, James Wood offers similar words of appreciation:

Brown’s biography will clearly be the Life for this generation, and it grandly swipes away — mentioning it only in the bibliography — its most recent rival, Geoffrey Wall’s rather academic and Freudian account of five years ago. Unlike Wall, Brown has no obvious agenda (he could in fact have benefited from one in his literary criticism); he simply opens himself up to Flaubert’s colossal contradictions. From his earliest days, Gustave Flaubert was both a romantic and a realist, a dreamer and a debunker. He was the son of the chief surgeon of the hospital in Rouen, and never shied away from looking at unclothed truth: no one ever forgets the grotesque comedy of Charles Bovary’s operation on Hippolyte’s clubfoot. Of “Madame Bovary,” the critic Sainte-Beuve would say in a contemporary review that Flaubert wielded his pen like a scalpel. But he also loved to surrender to romantic flights of fancy, to historical exoticism and erotic Orientalism. He was still unable to read at the age of 7, Brown tells us, because he was so enthralled by a local neighbor, an elderly man who told Gustave tales from “Don Quixote.” “I find all my roots in the book I knew by heart before learning how to read, ‘Don Quixote,’ ” he later said, and indeed the fantasist at war with reality is the dominant note of both “Madame Bovary” and “Sentimental Education.”

The hardcover of Flaubert: A Biography is pretty pricey, so I’ll have to wait until it’s out in paperback to get it.

The latest issue of the London Review of Books has a short essay by Ilan Pappe about the ‘demographic problem’ in Israel:

Once the ‘Arabs’ in Israel and the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories came to be thought of in the West as ‘Muslims’ it was easy to elicit support for Israel’s demographic policies, at least where it counted: on Capitol Hill. But even in Europe there was no need, after 9/11, to explain why Israel has a ‘demographic problem’. On 2 February 2003 the popular daily Maariv carried a typical headline: ‘A quarter of the children in Israel are Muslims.’ The piece went on to describe this fact as Israel’s next ‘ticking bomb’. The increase in the ‘Muslim’ population – 2.4 per cent a year – was not a problem anymore, but a ‘danger’.

In the run-up to the election, pundits discussed this question using language akin to that employed in Europe and the United States in debates over immigration. Here, however, it is the immigrant community that decides the future of the indigenous population, not vice versa. On 7 February 1948, after driving to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv and seeing the first villages that had been emptied of Palestinians on the western outskirts of Jerusalem, a jubilant Ben-Gurion reported to a gathering of Zionist leaders: ‘When I come nowadays to Jerusalem I feel it is a Hebrew city. This was a feeling I only had in farms and in Tel Aviv. Not all Jerusalem is Hebraic but there is already a huge Hebraic bloc – no Arabs in it. One hundred per cent Jewish. If we can persevere,’ Ben-Gurion added, this miracle will happen elsewhere.

But despite their perseverance, a sizable community of Palestinians remained. They are students at my university, where they attend lectures by professors who talk about the grave demographic problem. Palestinian law students – the lucky ones who constitute an informal quota – in the Hebrew University may well come across Ruth Gabison, a former head of the Association for Civil Rights and a candidate for the Supreme Court, who has come out recently with strong views on the subject, views that probably seem to her to reflect a consensus. ‘Israel has the right to control Palestinian natural growth,’ she has declared.

Read the rest here.

The Independent reports that Martin Amis’s new collection of stories, House of Meetings, will feature a piece about Mohammed Atta, the 9/11 hijacker:

As explained by his publisher, Jonathan Cape, the tale can be summarised like this: “Accompanied by one of the ‘muscle’ Saudis, Mohamed Atta drove to Portland, Maine, on 10 September 2001. Noone knows why. In ‘The Last Days of Mohamed Atta’, Martin Amis provides a rationale for Atta’s insouciant detour, and for other lacunae in the ‘planes operation’. We follow Atta on that day: from his small-hour awakening in the budget hotel room in Portland, all the way to 8:46am – and beyond.”

If this story’s going to be anything like Updike’s “Varieties of Religious Experience,” then spare me.

Link via the Lit Saloon.