Laila Lalami

Some articles from the July/August issue of Poets and Writers are now available online, including a profile of Emily Barton and Gary Shteyngart and an interview with Chris Abani about his novella Becoming Abigail. You might also like to read C. Max Magee’s piece on the new book-cataloguing website Library Thing, which brings joy to book nerds everywhere.

Ron Suskind’s new book, The One Percent Doctrine, a rather damning portrait of the Bush administration, has been getting loads of attention, but I must say I wasn’t particularly interested because, really, how many times does one have to be told about the lies and corruption and belligerence of this administration? That’s precisely the point that Gary Kamiya addresses in his review for Salon:

At this point, one could forgive readers for asking, “How many more damning portraits of the Bush administration do we need?” From yellowcake to Joe Wilson to Abu Ghraib, the list of Bush scandals and outrages is endless, but nothing ever seems to happen. As the journalist Mark Danner has pointed out, the problem is not lack of information: The problem is that Americans can’t, or won’t, acknowledge what that information means.

More of this thorough review here.

In addition to eavesdropping on the phone calls of American citizens, the U.S. government apparently has also been secretly tracking the bank transactions of an untold number of people, according to the New York Times. Naturally, we have assurances that the people being spied on are ’suspected terrorists.’ That’s all you need to know.

I have a very special giveaway for one lucky reader this week: A signed first edition of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. This graphic memoir tells of Alison Bechdel’s relationship with her closeted gay father, Bruce, and of the discovery of her own sexuality. It’s set in a small Pennsylvania town, where Bruce Bechdel ran a funeral home (the ‘fun home’ of the title), where he taught high school English, and where he spent years restoring his house, an 1857 Gothic revival house. It’s an honest and bittersweet portrait of a father-daughter relationship, and easily the best graphic memoir of this year.

The title page reads “To a Moorishgirl.com reader” and is signed by Alison Bechdel. (You can thank Alex for this. I was in DC that night, giving a reading myself, but he took an extra copy and had it signed.) The first reader to write gets the book. Please use the subject line: “Bechdel.” Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded. Update: The winner is Sheila O. from Jackson, MS.

The board of the Miami-Dade County school district has voted 6-3 to remove certain books from its libraries, including one titled Vamos A Cuba! which depicts Cuban children wearing communist uniforms. The district’s position is that the books are “inappropriate for young readers because of inaccuracies and omissions about life in the communist nation.” Wow. Don’t you feel safer with these people guarding your kids’ virtue? The ACLU and the Miami-Dade County Student Government Association have filed a lawsuit.

Tom Bissell’s essay on Robert D. Kaplan, in the current issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, opens thus:

Throughout his long career Robert D. Kaplan has consistently benefited from the fact that no one has any idea what, exactly, he is. A humble travel writer? A popular historian? A panjandrum analyst of developing-world politics and personalities? The 2001 reissue of Kaplan’s Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan (1990) tried to settle the matter. The back-cover copy refers to Kaplan, pretty much definitively, as a “world affairs expert.” Kaplan’s prolific writing would appear to bear out such stature. The subtitles of his eleven books mention twenty countries or regions. The Mediterranean? Check. Kaplan has even lived there. Central Asia? Too late. Kaplan covered it. Southeast Asia? Nope. Annexed by Kaplan. North Africa? Kaplan. West Africa? Sorry. South America? What do you think?

Bissell reviews all the books that have resulted from these peregrinations, and finds that “Kaplan is worse than a bad writer or thinker. He is a dangerous writer made ever more dangerous by the fact that he is taken seriously.” Kaplan is currently the editor of the Atlantic Monthly.

As`ad Abu-Khalil, the curmudgeonly political science professor behind the Angry Arab blog, is currently in the Middle East, and he reports a sighting of poet Ahmad Fouad Negm (or Nejm), on Al-Arabiyya last week. Says Abu-Khalil:

We need somebody to write a PhD dissertation on Shaykh Imam and Ahmad Fu’ad Najm. What a phenomenon. My favorite Najm poem was the one he wrote when Richard Nixon visited Cairo to escape the press scrutiny during Watergate. It goes: “You have honored us, o Nixon, with the visit, o the one of Watergate; the Sultans of ful and [olive] oil have made you a quite a fanfare [try to translate "'imah w-sima" into English].”

The difficulty of translating these lines reminded me of a scene from Ahdaf Soueif’s first novel, In The Eye of the Sun, in which Asya, who is studying for a doctorate in linguistics in northern England, attempts to explain to some of her guests exactly what these lines, written by Nejm and sung by Shaykh Imam, mean:

Hisham presses the pause button.
‘Let’s hear the song through, and then I’ll rewind it and pause after every couplet. I’d really like to hear Asya’s translation.’

‘Sharraft ya Nixon Baba,
Ya bta` el-Watergate -’

Hisham presses pause.
‘Well,’ says Asya, ‘as I said, he says, “You’ve honored us, Nixon Baba - “Baba” means “father” but it’s also used, as it is used here, as a title of mock respect - as in “Ali Baba”, for example - that’s probably derived from Muslim Indian use of Arabic - but the thing is you could also address a child as “Baba” as an endearment - a sort of inversion: like calling him Big Chief because he’s so little - and so when it’s used aggressively - say in an argument between two men - it carries a diminutivising, belittling signification. So here it holds all these meanings. Anyway, “you’ve honoured us, Nixon Baba,” - “You’ve honoured us” is, by the way, the traditional greeting with which you meet someone coming into your home - it’s almost like “come on in” in this country. So it functions merely as a greeting and he uses it in that way but of course he activates - ironically - the meaning of having actually “honoured” us. “You’ve honoured us, Nixon Baba / O you of Watergate” I suppose would be the closest translation - but the structure of “bita` el-whatever” (el - is just the definite article coming before any noun) posits a close but not necessarily defined relationship between the first noun (the person being described) and the second noun. So “bita` el-vegetables”, for example, would be someone who sold vegetables, while “bita` el-women” would be someone who pursued women. So Nixon is “bita` el-Watergate”, which suggests him selling the idea of Watergate to someone - selling his version of Watergate to the public - and pursuing a Watergate type of policy, but all in a very non-pompous, street vernacular, jokingly abusive kind of way. The use of “el-” to further specify Watergate - a noun which needs no further defining - is necessary for the rhythm and to add comic effect. I’m sure you won’t want me to go on like this, so let’s stop -’
‘Nonsense!’ says Gerald.
‘It’s fascinating,’ says Lisa.
‘Asya,’ says Hisham, ‘I swear I’m enjoying this. Come on, I’ll play the next couplet.’

(more…)

The Associated Press has obtained, through the Freedom of Information Act, the FBI files for playwright Arthur Miller.

Miller’s first Broadway play, “The Man Who Had All the Luck,” came out in 1944, around the same time that the earliest FBI files are dated. His professional and personal life were closely watched, usually through newspaper clippings, but also from informants (whose names have been blacked out in the records) and public documents.

The FBI not only kept records of Miller’s political statements, from his opposition to nuclear weapons to his attacks against the anti-communist blacklist, but of his affiliation with such organizations as the American Labor Party (”a communist front”) and the “communist infiltrated”
American Civil Liberties Union.

The agency apparently spied on Arthur Miller until 1956. At least they stopped. In the case of Edward Said, they may have been watching him for 30 years, until his death.

On Monday I posted about the re-issue of Mohammed Choukri’s For Bread Alone in the UK. Donald Linn, of Consortium, writes in to let us know that they will distribute the book in the U.S. in the fall. See? So you’ve got no excuse for not reading this marvel of a novel.

When I was a sophomore in college, our class was assigned Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People for our African Literature course. I went to get my copy at the English Bookshop, which back then was on Zanqat Al-Yamama, across from the train station in downtown Rabat, right behind what used to be the British Council building. The bookseller had ran out of new copies, so I bought a used one–printed by Heinemann in 1982. A Man of the People was a revelation for me; it spoke to me like few books had until then (or since, for that matter.) I went back to the store and bought the other works of Achebe’s that I could find, including, of course, Things Fall Apart.

I’ve been scavenging bookstore shelves for titles from the Heinemann African Writers Series for a while, but I finally gave up and ordered many of the ones I hadn’t yet read from an online site. But what’s strange is that I tend to prefer to buy the orange-covered editions–maybe because I’m hoping to replicate that feeling of discovery I had with Achebe or because I’m hoping to fall into these books in the same way I have fallen into A Man of the People. There hasn’t been anything like that first time, though.