Laila Lalami

On the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, as we remember the 3,000 American people who lost their lives, let us also remember that Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar have still not been captured, that the recommendations of the 9/11 commission have still not been implemented fully, that this nation continues to live under an “elevated” threat level, and that between 62,000 and 180,000 Iraqi people have died as a direct result of these attacks, for no reason other than that they were were nationals of a country that President Bush tried to tie to Al-Qa’ida, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And little appears to have changed on the Bush agenda; indeed, we have this very telling quote from our fearless leader: “One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq with the war on terror.”

Today between 4:30 – 5:00 pm PDT I’ll be on OPB, speaking with April Baer about how we deal with world news (war, poverty, etc..). You can listen online here.

The latest issue of The Nation includes a very thoughtful review by Gary Younge of Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani. Here, he addresses the much-talked about use of the ‘street vernacular’ in the novel:

At times this mix is playfully subversive–one character is told to “wake up, smell the masala tea”; Jas tells us Desi fathers will “drop you like a hot samosa.” But it can be jarring, too. Like Forest Whitaker fumbling to maintain his English accent for the duration of The Crying Game, Malkani puts unlikely middle-class words into the narrative voice of the supposedly streetwise Jas:

Regarding it as some kind a civic duty to educate others in this basic social etiquette, he continued kickin the white kid in the face, each kick carefully planted so he din’t get blood on his Nike Air Force Ones (the pair he’d bought even before Nelly released a track bout what wikid trainers they were).

It’s unclear how someone who thinks in terms of “civic duty” and “basic social etiquette” can move so easily to Nelly’s “wikid” sneakers; still, Malkani’s overall portrait of a hybridity of races, religions, ethnicities and globalized reference points is a welcome reflection of the everyday life of London’s youth.

You can read more here.

For the last few years, the Wahhabi regime of Saudi Arabia has been quietly, but systematically destroying several archeological sites of religious and cultural significance to Muslims. Among these destroyed sites are: The grave of Amina bint Wahb, the Prophet’s mother, which was bulldozed in 1998; the house of Khadijah, the Prophet’s wife, which was demolished and replaced with lavatories; the house of Abu Bakr, the companion of the Prophet and his political successor, was destroyed in favor of a Hilton hotel. Even the birthplace of the Prophet is under threat; the Saudi government built a library around it, and now they want to destroy even those remnants and build on them.

Now, the Wahhabis are mulling whether to bar women from praying at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the world’s largest pilgrimage site. The proposal is sheer misogynistic lunacy. And of course it’s potentially unenforceable. I can’t imagine that women pilgrims will stop turning up at the Ka’aba. But the way in which this fundamentalist sect has co-opted what should be the religious and cultural heritage of one-fifth of humanity is truly sickening.

I’ve been hearing good things about Lawrence Wright’s new book The Looming Tower. Here’s an interview with him on NPR, in which he explains the influence of younger jihadis on the Web, the viral nature of their strategy, their “twenty-year master plan,” and why the current approach to fight them is inadequate.

In a continued bid to liken the Iraq debacle to a fight between Good vs. Evil (TM), Bush has multiplied references to World War II. First was his use of the term “Islamic fascists,” which had hitherto been used mostly by right-wing columnists. Now he’s drawn a comparison between Bin Laden and Hitler.

Hitler is proving quite a useful figure in the culture war. Back in 1991, George Bush The Elder compared Saddam to Hitler, but in the end decided to let him stick around for another ten years. In March 2003, in the run-up to the invasion, George W. Bush also compared Saddam to Hitler. Now that the Iraqi dictator is in custody, he can no longer fulfill the function of Public Enemy Number One. So in February 2006, Donald Rumsfeld compared Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to Hitler. It is now Ossama Bin Laden’s turn at the seat.

Los Angeles-based writer and photographer Ibarionex Perello sends in this photo, which he took in Santa Fe, New Mexico, while attending a regional fair. “I shot over 20 frames trying to get the composition just right with the chain and the red butterfly chair in the background,” he said. I think the result is worth it, don’t you?

I really enjoyed reading with Gary Shteyngart at the Bumbershoot Festival this weekend. I read from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits while Gary did a great rendition in Misha’s voice of the scene from Absurdistan where the hero arrives in New York and has to get circumcised, on orders from his beloved papa. The reading was moderated by Mark White, who did a great job with the questions, and tried to find common ground between Gary’s work and mine.

It’s good that I had no idea that George Saunders and Mary Gaitskill were in the audience or I would have been unable to go through with it without stumbling. I’m always at a loss for words with writers I admire, and I guess this time was no different: When I shook hands with Mary Gaitskill after the reading, I called her “Veronica” (yes, after her latest novel) and, very kindly, she did not correct me.

It’s a shame that Hilary Mantel’s piece on Pankaj Mishra’s new book, Temptations of the West, is hidden behind subscription walls at the New York Review of Books. It’s a very interesting article that places the book in the context of Mishra’s earlier work, and I really enjoyed reading it, so I’ll share at least this paragraph from it:

This is a book written for the West, by a man with a stake in two worlds, who moves through languages—a skill of which Mishra makes little—and who travels uneasily, so that most of us can stay at home. For the West it makes bitter reading. It explores a legacy of bungling and bad faith, of cultural incomprehension and pragmatic exploitation, and the export of two ideas—the idea of the nation-state and the idea of democracy— which have arrived in the East in a deteriorated and contaminating condition. Looking at modern India, with its wildly uneven distribution of wealth, its high-tech dreams existing beside the most debased squalor, the West is inclined to say, “At least we are not responsible for the caste system.” But are those white hands quite clean? How far is modern Hinduism an “Empire product”? How far is it a synthesized organism, bred to rule, bred to be capable of taking over the reins of power when the British quit?

Mishra argues that during the years of British rule a Hindu elite embraced a notion of its own history created at least in part by Western Orientalists. This vision looked back to a pre-Islamic India, and excused its most stomach-turning practices—widow-burning, for instance—as a reaction to the cruelties of Muslim rule. What this elite took from the imperialists was “the European idea of the nation—a cohesive community with a common history, culture, values, and sense of purpose—which for many other colonized peoples appeared a way of duplicating the success of the powerful, all-conquering West.”

More here.

More rave reviews for Edward P. Jones’s new collection, All Aunt Hagar’s Children. Writing in the Boston Globe, John Freeman argues that

Like William Trevor and Alice Munro, Jones compresses whole novels into these stories. Each new paragraph requires a family tree. This almost biblical layering may slow momentum, but it is the real story here: how a generation passes its fears and wisdom and beliefs on to the next, how a chink in that transfer is likened to death.

Meanwhile, in a review for the San Francisco Chronicle David Hellman looks at faith in Jones’s work:

Throughout these stories it is hard not to notice Jones’ affinity for Catholicism, but it is an ordinary, almost secular type of belief where one finds in ritual a comfortable friend, as opposed to the damning guilt of a Flannery O’Connor or the equally damning lack of repentance of a Graham Greene. What he shares with these two great Catholic writers, apart from a confident technical literary prowess, is the ability to work wonders with human emotion through the lens of moral ambiguity.

The superlative comparisons are unlikely to stop there, and I hope you’ll consider reading the book.