Laila Lalami

There seems to be a cash-for-fatwa scandal in India. Apparently, you can order your very own edict for as little as $22. I wonder how much it would cost to get a fatwa on fatwas.

The latest issue of the Boston Review includes my essay about writing in a non-native language, looking specifically at Sayed Kashua’s novels Let It Be Morning and Dancing Arabs. Here’s an excerpt:

Those who write fiction in a language other than their own are often asked what motivates their decision, even though this literary choice has a long and rich history. Joseph Conrad, for instance, did not write in Polish, his mother tongue; instead, and after 20 years of world travel, he settled in England and embraced its language in his work. Milan Kundera chose French rather than Czech for his later books because he wanted to free himself of expectations and censorship. Elias Canetti, whose native language is Ladino, opted for German, though he lived most of his life in England and Switzerland. But for others, the decision to give up their mother tongue was not a choice at all. It was the inescapable result of colonial education—witness, for example, the vast literature in French that came out of Africa in the wake of France’s century of hegemony: Assia Djebbar, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Camara Laye, and Léopold Sedar Senghor, to name just a handful.

What is striking about these shifting linguistic allegiances is that they tend to favor the language that is culturally dominant on the international scene. Thus, despite the great diversity of reasons for writing in a foreign language, the writer’s choice is often interpreted as a political statement, and in particular as a form of capitulation. This was precisely what prompted the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o to abandon English and return to Gikuyu, his native tongue, and what led him to argue, in Decolonizing the Mind, that other African writers should do the same.

But does creative expression in a foreign language always equal the rejection of native culture and the embrace of another? Or can it also be a way to challenge readers’ assumptions? The work of the young novelist Sayed Kashua raises just these questions.

Read the rest here.

Novelist and activist Edwidge Danticat has a lovely opinion piece in the Washington Post about torture:

For many who remember — just as these women do, and my own parents do — what it means to live under a dictatorial regime, a regime in which citizens must leave work or school to witness public executions, torture is not just an individual affliction but a communal one. And now, when political leaders in the United States are asking us as a society to consider not only the legal and moral ramifications of torture but its effectiveness, we are brought closer to these regimes than we may think. If we are part of all that has touched us, as Alfred Tennyson wrote, then we are all endorsers of torture when it is done in our name.

Torture aims for a single goal — obtaining information — but it achieves a slew of others.

The piece is quite au point, considering the fact that the Cheney-McCain deal has essentially given Bush free reign to define what torture is.

I’m going to be doing a reading for our local library’s Banned Books Week, which is “an annual celebration of the freedom to read that highlights the importance of intellectual freedom and reminds us not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted.” Here are the details:

Saturday, September 23
2:30 - 4:00 PM
Café Banned - Celebrating the Freedom to Read
Central Library
Multnomah County Library
Portland, Oregon

Open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

Iranian writer and journalist Akbar Ganji has an op-ed in the Washington Post, titled, “Letter to America”.

In Iran, we hope to achieve our goal of a new polity and a new constitution not by violence but by following a peaceful and democratic path. And in this struggle we need moral support from all freedom-loving people around the world — particularly the United States.

We want the world to know that our rulers do not represent the Iranian people and that their religion is not the religion of the entire nation. We ask that in shaping its policies toward the Iranian regime, the United States not overlook the interests of Iranian civil society. In particular, we hope that America listens to those in Iran who fear that policies intended to contain the current crisis might in fact lead to a greater crisis, and to war.

Read it all here.

Read this, and weep for the people of Iraq:

The republic of fear is born again. The state of terror now gripping Iraq is as bad as it was under Saddam Hussein. Torture in the country may even be worse than it was during his rule, the United Nation’s special investigator on torture said yesterday.

In related news, a 78-year-old man, who is nearly blind and needs a walker to move, has been released from the American base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after three years of imprisonment, and without charges being filed against him.

(via.)

Ramadan Mubarak to all my Muslim readers. May you all have a happy and healthy holiday.

Predictably, Elif Shafak has been acquitted of the charge that she had “insulted Turkishness” in her most recent novel, Father and Bastard. Shafak was not present at her trial–she delivered her first child on Saturday. The name of that baby girl is Sheherazad. A wise choice, and one that prosecutors ought to pay attention to. Their intimidations will not stop the woman from telling stories.

Article 301, which made the charges against Shafak possible, is still in the books, although there is a tiny hope that the government might reform its ways:

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan also welcomed the verdict and signalled that the government would consider amending Article 301 of Turkey’s penal code. It envisages up to three years in jail for “denigrating Turkish national identity”.

“The ruling party and the opposition can sit down together again to discuss this issue as laws are not eternal,” Anatolia news agency quoted Mr Erdogan as saying.

So it’s wait and see at this point.

(Thanks to N. and S. for the link.)

One of the fall 2006 books I was most excited about is Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. Set in the 1960s, during the aborted attempt to set up an independent state in Biafra, the book tells the story of three characters whose loyalties to their ideas, ideals, and one another, are tested. There’s thirteen-year-old Ugwu, a houseboy for a university professor, Olanna, the professor’s mistress; and Richard, an Englishman infatuated with Olanna’s twin sister. You can read some of the early (and mostly excellent) reviews of the book: Janet Maslin in the New York Times, Martin Rubin in the San Francisco Chronicle, Merle Rubin in the L.A. Times.

Some related links:
Adichie’s website.
Debbie Elliot’s interview with Adichie on NPR.
Adichie writes about the books that have influenced her in the Guardian.

Last year, when the Turkish government’s case against novelist Orhan Pamuk was thrown out of court on a technicality, many had hoped that Article 301–the law that makes it illegal to “insult Turkishness,” whatever that means–would also be purged from the penal code. It has not.

Now it is the turn of novelist Elif Shafak to go on trial for something she has written, and which has irked the establishment. What makes her case even more remarkable is that, this time, the supposed “insult to Turkishness” comes from a fictional character in one of her novels, Father and Bastard (English title: The Bastard of Istanbul.) The character speaks about the (otherwise well-documented) genocide of Armenians by Turks in 1915, and apparently it is illegal to imagine such a scene in a novel. Shafak’s trial opens today in Istanbul. It also bears mention that the writer was pregnant during all these stressful weeks; she delivered just five days ago, and now she must attend the trial against her.

Shafak is only one among many (eighteen, to be precise) writers and journalists who are being harrassed via Article 301. You can read more about the cases here.

Photo: Homelands Productions