Laila Lalami

Deborah Solomon interviews Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua for the New York Times:

Let’s talk about your latest novel, “A Woman in Jerusalem,” which comes out in this country in a few weeks.
This is the most important thing! Meaning, I would like to speak not about the Hezbollah but my novel.

Isn’t politics more important than your own career?
Of course, but about my novel I can speak something more accurate, more intimate and more true than I can about Hezbollah.

(via.)

In the spring of 1996, the Israeli army bombed the Lebanese village of Qana, southeast of Tyre, killing more than 150 civilians and injuring 4 UN soldiers. Now, only ten years later, the brutalized people of Qana have had to pay again for crimes they didn’t commit: On Sunday, the IDF bombed a three-story building in Qana in which refugees had taken shelter, killing sixty people, among them 37 young children.

Some pictures have been posted on Flickr, and I urge you to take a look. Please do not close your eyes to this massacre.

Predictably, Prime Minister Olmert expressed “deep sorrow” for the deaths, but said his government would continue with the bombing. There are accusations that the civilians were put there because Hizbollah was using them as ‘human shields’ and that, therefore, the fault lies with Hizbollah, not Israel. Furthermore, the Israeli government has sought to deflect blame by saying that the village had been leafleted and that civilians had been warned to flee.

Setting aside Olmert’s crocodile tears, what exactly does he hope to accomplish by killing innocent Lebanese civilians? Does he seriously expect that the terrorized families of the dead will suddenly say, “You are right, we are wrong, and we will disavow Hizbollah and force it to disarm”?? The exact opposite will happen (in fact, has started to happen.) Olmert would do well to remember that Hizbollah did not spring into being out of thin air. It was created after the first Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Children who were six years old in 1982 are now 30, and it’s a safe bet that some of them are part of Hizbollah.

I do not know what will come out of the third invasion of 2006, but I do know it will not be a pacifist movement. It will only be more terror, and more war.

As for the claim that Hizbollah was using civilians as human shields, I would urge you all to read this article by Mitch Prothero in Salon that debunks the theory. He writes: “Much smarter and better trained than the PLO and Hamas fighters, they know that if they mingle with civilians, they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators — as so many Palestinian militants have been.” In addition, if you look at this map of Israeli bombing, you will see that the entire country has been hit. Most cities and villages, not to mention roads connecting them, have been bombed.

Lastly, the idea that if you leaflet people then you are absolved of responsibility is as callous as it is immoral. How were people supposed to leave when the roads linking their village to others were bombed? (This argument reminded me of those who blamed the victims of Hurricane Katrina for not leaving.)

The justification for the bombing was that Israel was responding to shelling from that site. This account has been disputed by eyewitnesses, and if you look at the Flickr pictures, you can see that all the victims were found barefoot, in their pyjamas. They were killed while they slept. How could they have slept if there had been shelling from their end just prior to the Israeli bombing?

Despite appearances, I do not believe that this is a war between Jews and Muslims. The events unfolding at the moment really aren’t about whether you believe that it was Ismael or Isaac who was sacrificed on the altar by Abraham; it isn’t about whether you believe you should fast for one day of atonement or for thirty days of reflection; it isn’t about whether you should pray at Al-Masjid Al-Aqsa or at the Western Wall. It’s about much more prosaic things, like land and water, like guns and money. And yet, the identities color everything. The privilege of criticizing is doled out by those who see identity politics everywhere. If you’re Muslim and you decry the Israeli bombing, then it means you’re supporting Hizbollah. If you’re Jewish and you decry the Israeli bombing, then it means you’re not patriotic, and you don’t understand that the Muslims will always hate you, blah, blah, blah. I am sick of it all.

My review of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, appeared in the Boston Globe this past weekend. Here is an excerpt:

Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” is a brilliant and bittersweet graphic memoir that chronicles the author’s relationship with her formidably troubled father, Bruce. The book takes its title from the funeral home that Bruce inherited and ran. In his spare time, he restored the family’s 1867 Gothic Revival house. Giving a semblance of life to dead bodies and returning its lost splendor to an old home — Bruce was obviously obsessed with appearances. “He used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not,” Bechdel writes. The deceit lasts for many years; only when Bechdel is in college does she find out that her father is gay.

You can read the rest here.

As you may recall, Professor Fouad Ajami found time from his visits to the White House to write another book about the Middle East. It’s called The Foreigner’s Gift, and it’s been reviewed in the NYT by Noah Feldman, who himself was involved with the ill-fated Iraqi adventure. He was hired by the Provisional Authority as a consultant to help draft the new Iraqi Constitution–you know, the piece of paper that says that no law in Iraq can contradict principles of Sharia? Anyway, here is Feldman on Ajami:

Few other Americans have Ajami’s distinctive qualifications for reflecting on the Iraq war. Born to a Shiite family in Lebanon, he has written several important books about Middle Eastern political culture, including a recognized classic on the Lebanese Shiites, “The Vanished Imam.” He supported the removal of Saddam Hussein, and his extraordinary level of access in Washington is reflected in “The Foreigner’s Gift,” which recounts many conversations he had in Iraq while shadowing American officials or traveling with close American allies like Chalabi. Respected by politicians who disdain most academics, and excoriated by antiwar academics who detest the present government, Ajami richly deserves the attention of both camps.

More than just “supporting the removal of Saddam Hussein,” Ajami was one of those scholars (Bernard Lewis, Kanan Makiya, et al.) who predicted (in fact, told the administration) that the Americans would be greeted with “sweets and flowers.” One hundred thousand deaths and a civil war later, why would anyone lend credence to his analysis of Iraq?? But, hey, what do I know–I’m just a poor Arab immigrant. And a woman, at that. I think I’m supposed to be silent or submissive or something.

Feldman is on more solid ground in his criticism of Peter Galbraith’s The End of Iraq, in which the question of the Kurds (and an independent Kurdistan) is discussed. Here, Feldman raises some serious and pragmatic questions to the proposal:

The chief problem with the “break Iraq in two” option is that creating an independent Kurdistan does absolutely nothing to address the present violence in the country. It might be nice for the Kurds, especially if the United States gave them the Kirkuk oil field and then permanently stationed large numbers of troops in Kurdistan to protect it. But Kurdistan is mostly peaceful, and at present Kurds are not fighting Arabs in Iraq, except to some small degree around disputed Kirkuk itself. The violence in Iraq is predominantly Sunni-Shiite; and the United States desperately needs the stabilizing third force of the Kurds in the national leadership and the armed forces to have any hope at all of damping it down. To the contrary, breaking off Kurdistan would create a new violent front, because a Sunni ministate could never survive without a share of Kirkuk’s oil, and so Sunni insurgents would have to turn their attentions to the Kurds. This is to say nothing of the continuing concerns of Turkey about an independent Kurdistan, or the possibility of Turkish encroachment having to be confronted by American forces.

To this list one might also add the domino effect an independent Kurdistan could have for other Kurdish minorities in Syria and Iran. Oy. Is your head spinning yet?

Feminist scholar Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch) has jumped into the row over the film adaptation of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. As you may recall, the novel stirred some strong feelings within the Bangladeshi community back in 2003, and now that a production company has started work on a film adaptation, some people want the filming to be taken elsewhere. (There are, it should be said, other people from the community who think filming on location would be great for business and should be encouraged. Not that this makes for great newspaper copy. But, moving on.)

Greer’s stance, or however much of it I can decode, seems to be that a) Monica Ali is not really Bengali, because she has “allowed herself to forget” her mother tongue; b) she is British, and has a British point of view ; c) she is not ostracized because she went to Oxford and lives in a nice neighborhood; therefore d) she doesn’t really have what it takes to write about poor Bengalis from Brick Lane; and, as a corollary, e) Bangladeshi Britons are better off not reading the book or seeing the movie.

This Ali-bashing is getting really tiresome. Yes, she made a poor stylistic choice with Hasina’s voice, and no, Brick Lane is not without fault. But to claim to know what Monica Ali’s intentions are when she wrote the novel is just plain ridiculous. Is Greer a mind reader? And to condemn Ali because she dared–dared!–to go to Oxford is even more stupid. Since when has education been an impediment to writing? Does Greer think she is God? What gives her the right to decide whether Monica Ali is Bangladeshi enough? And what gives her the right to tell Bangladeshi Britons whether they should see the movie or not?

In other developments, Salman Rushdie fired off a response to the editors, in which he took issue with Greer’s characterization of Ali, and added

At the height of the assault against my novel The Satanic Verses, Germaine Greer stated: “I refuse to sign petitions for that book of his, which was about his own troubles.” She went on to describe me as “a megalomaniac, an Englishman with dark skin”. Now it’s Monica Ali’s turn to be deracinated: “She writes in English and her point of view is, whether she allows herself to impersonate a village Bangladeshi woman or not, British.” There is a kind of double racism in this argument. To suit Greer, the British-Bangladeshi Ali is denied her heritage and belittled for her Britishness, while her British-Bangladeshi critics are denied that same Britishness, which most of them would certainly insist was theirs by right. “Writers are treacherous,” Greer says, and she should know.

Touché.

There is an excellent opinion piece by Orhan Pamuk in the IHT, addressing a question that comes up, again and again, at readings: ‘Who do you write for?’*

For the last 30 years - since I first became a writer - this is the question I’ve heard most often from both readers and journalists. Their motives depend on the time and the place, as do the things they wish to know. But they all use the same suspicious, supercilious tone of voice.

In the mid-’70s, when I first decided to become a novelist, the question reflected the widely held philistine view that art and literature were luxuries in a poor non-Western country troubled by premodern problems.

There was also the suggestion that someone “as educated and cultivated as yourself” might serve the nation more usefully as a doctor fighting epidemics or an engineer building bridges.

Pamuk also addresses the perennial suggestion that writing for certain audiences automatically makes you ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic.’ Some great stuff. Read it.

*Relax, I know it should be ‘whom.’

In late 2004, the Rev. Joseph Dantica, a Haitian refugee who had sought asylum in the States, died while in immigration services custody. His niece, the novelist Edwidge Danticat, has been trying to uncover the circumstances of his death ever since. Now, at last, there are some details about what happened to the pastor, in an AP story by Pauline Arrigalla.

A Muslim man who suffers from bipolar disorder has killed a member of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, for no other reason than that the woman was Jewish. Some moron fired shots at a mosque in Houston, and Muslim institutions have been vandalized throughout the country. I am so sick of the hate. And it doesn’t stop. It won’t stop.

Whenever the situation in the Middle East deteriorates–which is to say, very often–you hear people saying things like, “I don’t hate Arabs, but…” or “I don’t hate Jews, but…” I’m always amused and also mystified by these reactions because, while they may deny hate, they never affirm love. Call me deluded, but I prefer love.

Arabs and Jews. Can you even tell them apart? They’re hairy (and I don’t mean just the men); they’re loud (try overselling them something; go ahead, I dare you); they dote on their children (’Is that all you’re eating?’ is the universal lament of the Middle-Eastern table); they sit together and smoke and want to remake the world (’Ah, back in ‘67, if Nasser had…;’ or ‘Ah, back in ‘67, Dayan should have…’)

Jews and Arabs. I am convinced that, when they die, they come back reincarnated as one another. And they still don’t get it. They still want to make the other one believe in their right to survival. Maybe that’s why they love to tell stories so much. Storytelling is how they survive. And their stories are so similar: Persecuted and driven out of their homes. Looked upon with suspicion. Hated for their customs.

At such times, my reflex is to go back to books. I find myself reaching for Hanan Al-Shaykh and A.B Yehoshua, for Mahmoud Darwish and Anton Shammas. I turn to literature. There, at least, I don’t have to come across borders, mental or otherwise. I don’t have to figure out who’s right or who’s wrong. I can just live other people’s lives for the length of a book.

Nell Freudenberger reviews Monica Ali’s Alentejo Blue for The Nation:

If Brick Lane belonged stylistically to the nineteenth century, the new book jumps forward in time. Modernist in form (the epigraph is from T.S. Eliot’s “Ash-Wednesday”), it explores the decidedly twenty-first-century obsession with what is foreign and what is local, and how the mysterious category of the “global” might break down that distinction.

Alentejo Blue takes place almost entirely in Mamarrosa, a village in Portugal’s south-central Alentejo region, known for its cork and olive trees. The village is either impossibly backward or heartbreakingly picturesque, depending on which character is observing it. The nine narrators include three natives of Mamarrosa, three expatriates and three tourists. All of the chapters are written in the third person (except for two); each character has his or her own chapter (except for one young couple, who share).

Freudenberger finds that reading the novel is a “little like hitchhiking through unfamiliar countryside: You become so involved in the driver’s story that you’re surprised each time one of the characters stops to let you off.”

Meanwhile, the filming of Ali’s first novel, Brick Lane, had to be moved outside the neighborhood itself, due to protests from goons who revendicate “the freedom to burn books.” Some freedom.

Last month, Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between was hailed as “a masterpiece” by Tom Bissell in the New York Times. But it looks like Stewart has another book out at the same time: The Prince of the Marshes, about his stint as governor of two provinces in Iraq, and it, too, gets a rave review from the paper of record. Busy guy.