Laila Lalami

I was absolutely thrilled yesterday to find out that the 2006 Booker Prize has gone to The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. What impressed me most about this amazing novel were its wonderfully complex characters, caught in an age of globalization that, while it has made some winners, has created many more losers. I loved how there is no sugar-coating of the immigrant experience (an unfortunately common fault, I think, in recent novels.) It’s a brave book, a smart book, and I hope the prize will get it all the readers it truly deserves.

Photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

“No writer has brought America into sharper focus for me than bell hooks,” Miller says. “My biggest epiphanies in recent years have arrived while her books are on my nightstand. Of all of them, Salvation: Black People and Love had the greatest impact because it offers a different perspective of the Civil Rights Movement and, in doing so, gives a clearer sense of the possibilities for this nation, and how close we once came to realizing them.

Love is the ultimate revolutionary force, hooks argues, and it was at full fury in the lives of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, though they were both individually incomplete in their manifestation of it. Malcolm was a prophet of self-love (always vital in a system of oppression such as ours), while Martin helped change the course of history with an ethic of loving thy enemy. Had the two come together — as it appears they were about to do before Malcolm was assassinated — hooks suggests we might well be living in a different world today.

Where I was most touched, however, was in hooks’ suggestion as to who might rise to carry on love’s call: single mothers. As a child of divorce, this resonates deeply with me. But more importantly, I’m humbled and set straight. In America, unwed moms are at best invisible and at worst vilified. Yet they’ve raised most of us. If anyone has the power to shape our world, it’s them.”

Joe Miller is a journalist who lives in Kansas City, Missouri. His first book, Cross-X: A Turbulent, Triumphant Season with an Inner-City Debate Squad, was published October 2006 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

In these United States: Some people want to ban Alison Bechdel’s delightful graphic memoir Fun Home, as well as Craig Thompson’s Blankets, from their Missouri library. And it looks like they’re winning.

If you’ve ever wondered about the ending to One Thousand and One Nights, and about the significance of Scheherazade’s father being appointed the ruler of Samarkand, then you may like to read this meditation by Salman Rushdie, which appeared in the Times this weekend. The text is part of a collaboration with the sculptor Anish Kapoor, for a series to be shown at the Lisson Gallery.

Remember how Hugo Chávez was mercilessly derided because he thought Chomsky was dead? Well, it turns out, he never said Chomsky was dead. Ah, but surely it was just a big misunderstanding, and not part of the general trend to treat him as a kook for the unforgiveable crime of not liking our foreign policy and not wanting to sell us his oil.

The revelation that “A consortium of major universities, using Homeland Security Department money, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas” has created a lot of anxiety. I understand the feeling, but the truth is that monitoring systems are nothing new, and have long been used by media and politicians to know what is happening around the world. For example, the BBC has one. But one should also point out that the BBC is using trained linguists, editors, and translators, people who are native speakers of the foreign language they are monitoring. These trained professionals read the foreign press and listen to speeches of leaders, and write a piece if they find that there is an interesting development. This is how a lot of the world news is circulated. However, the proposed U.S. system relies on language software, which, in my opinion, has not yet reached levels of maturity that would lead to reliable judgments. So. Expect some problems.

Newsweek seems to be convinced that Orhan Pamuk will take the Nobel Prize in Literature this year. I would not be surprised at all if he wins.

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I have been thinking a lot about African literature–and not because I just got back from a symposium on the subject at Wellesley. I have been fortunate enough to have had conversations with many different people–fellow writers, but also critics, academics, editors, agents, publishers, booksellers–and the different perspectives seem to confirm some trends in the field that I’d like to write about someday, very soon. But first I have to stay focused on the last couple of chapters of my novel.

I am still at Wellesley, and having a wonderful time of it. Tomorrow, I’ll be participating in a roundtable about African Literature. Here are the details:

Saturday, October 7th
10:15 AM – 12 PM
Authors, Critics, Publishers: Conversations about Writing, Translating, Editing, and Publishing followed by discussion with audience.
PNW 212
Wellesley College
Wellesley, MA

More soon, I hope.

I’m in Boston for the rest of the week for a couple of events at Wellesley College. Tonight, Abdourahman Waberi and I will be doing a reading and Q & A at 7:30 PM. Here are the details:

7:30 – 8:45 PM
Readings and Discussion
277 Science Center
Wellesley College
Wellesley, MA

These events are open to the public. So if you’re in the Boston area, do come and say hello.

Mark Sarvas (of TEV) reviews two Turing-related books for the Philadelphia Inquirer: Janna Levin’s A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines and David Leavitt’s The Man Who Knew Too Much.

The brutalized people of Afghanistan, who endured ten years of war with the Soviets, the Mujahideen-Taliban war, and then the American invasion, have never been further from finding the elusive peace and security the country’s protectors keep promising it. In his State of the Union address of January 22, 2002, Bush declared:

The American flag flies again over our embassy in Kabul. Terrorists who once occupied Afghanistan now occupy cells at Guantanamo Bay. (Applause.) And terrorist leaders who urged followers to sacrifice their lives are running for their own. (Applause.)

America and Afghanistan are now allies against terror. We’ll be partners in rebuilding that country. And this evening we welcome the distinguished interim leader of a liberated Afghanistan: Chairman Hamid Karzai. (Applause.)

The last time we met in this chamber, the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school. Today women are free, and are part of Afghanistan’s new government. And we welcome the new Minister of Women’s Affairs, Doctor Sima Samar. (Applause.)

Our progress is a tribute to the spirit of the Afghan people, to the resolve of our coalition, and to the might of the United States military. (Applause.) When I called our troops into action, I did so with complete confidence in their courage and skill. And tonight, thanks to them, we are winning the war on terror. (Applause.)

Five years after the “liberation” of Afghanistan, Karzai can hardly leave his palace in Kabul without his American guards, the Taliban have regained control of parts of the country, girls who go to school have to do so in secret because of threats, and now, according to an Associated Press report, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist tells us:

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan war against Taliban guerrillas can never be won militarily and urged support for efforts to bring “people who call themselves Taliban” and their allies into the government.

The Tennessee Republican said he learned from briefings that Taliban fighters were too numerous and had too much popular support to be defeated on the battlefield.

“You need to bring them into a more transparent type of government,” Frist said during a brief visit to a U.S. and Romanian military base in the southern Taliban stronghold of Qalat. “And if that’s accomplished, we’ll be successful.”

So now one of our representatives wants the Taliban back. What a waste.

The incomparable (and eminently quotable) Marjane Satrapi is interviewed in The Independent.

“Joseph Heller once said that he’d succeeded ‘despite that great handicap for a novelist, a happy childhood’.”

“Well, I would have much preferred to have had a normal childhood. I would have loved it if my greatest dilemma, at 14, was whether to go to Benetton for my pullovers. I would have preferred not to have cried all the tears I have cried.”

“Even if it meant not writing?”

“Definitely. Because I would have been happy. But when you’re dropped in a pile of shit, so to speak, you have to decide – either add to the pile, or use it as fertiliser, and grow flowers.”

Her newest graphic novel to appear in the U.S. is Chicken with Plums, translated by Anjali Singh.