Laila Lalami

Hello, World. I am back, after a two-week hiatus during which I moved to Casablanca, Morocco, to begin a Fulbright fellowship. I used the down-time to give the site a fresh look. Please note the new name and web address, and update your bookmarks. As always, I welcome your comments at llalami AT yahoo DOT com. Regular posting should resume by Monday.

You may have noticed that when you type in this blog’s address in your browser you get forwarded to my personal site. This is part of the redesign I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, and it will help me streamline things around here. So please update your links: moorishgirl.com is now lailalalami.com/blog. (Yeah, I know, lots of ls. Imagine having to spell it out loud every day. Count your blessings.) I should have lots of new material up here by the first week of December. Happy Thanksgiving.

On Saturday afternoon I’ll be reading from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits at the Central Library here in Portland. Here are the details:

Saturday, November 18
1:00 PM
Writers Talking Series
Central Library
Multnomah County Library
Portland, Oregon

See you then.

Tonight I’ll be reading from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits at the Japanese Gardens. This is a reading for the Oregon Book Awards and I will be joined by fellow finalists Scott Nadelson and Justin Tussing. There will also be a discussion, moderated by last year’s award winner, my pal Marc Acito. Here are the details:

Wednesday, November 15
6:30 PM
Oregon Book Awards Reading
Japanese Gardens
Portland, Oregon

Hope to see you there.

For those of you in L.A.: I will be appearing on cable TV this afternoon at 2:00 pm, discussing “the Politics of the Middle East with Hamoud Salhi.” The show is broadcast live on Channel 36 and you can call in with questions. Tune in.

Tonight, the New Short Fiction Series will be presenting four excerpts from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits at the Beverly Hills Public Library, with performances by Sally Shore, Merik Tadros, Alex Kalognomos, and Rima Lyn. Here are the details:

Friday, November 10
8:00 PM
New Short Fiction Series
The Beverly Hills Public Library
444 N. Rexford Dr.
Beverly Hills, California

Books will be available for sale through Barnes and Noble, and I will be signing during the intermission and after the show. Come one, come all.

The current issue of The Nation includes two must-read pieces. Amitava Kumar’s review of The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad is a very thoughtful overview of Ahmad and his work, including many anecdotes such as this:

One senses that Ahmad was deeply sensitive to the waning influence of radical secular politics in the Muslim world, where Islamists increasingly led the opposition to military regimes that had betrayed the dream of independence from colonialism. It may well have been this concern that led him to return, shortly before his death in 1999, to Pakistan, where he hoped to build a university that would teach the humanities. It was to be called Khaldunia University, after the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), whom UN General Secretary Kofi Annan described as “a globalist long before the age of globalization.” (…) Alas, Khaldunia University was never built; according to The Economist’s obituary of Ahmad, he “died before a rupee was raised for it.”

And then there is Arthur Danto’s piece, also freely available online, about Botero’s Abu-Ghraib paintings:

hough transparently modern, Botero’s style is admired mainly by those outside the art world. Inside the art world, critic Rosalind Krauss spoke for many of us when she dismissed Botero as “pathetic.”

When it was announced not long ago that Botero had made a series of paintings and drawings inspired by the notorious photographs showing Iraqi captives, naked, degraded, tortured and humiliated by American soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, it was easy to feel skeptical–wouldn’t Botero’s signature style humorize and cheapen this horror? And it was hard to imagine that paintings by anyone could convey the horrors of Abu Ghraib as well as–much less better than–the photographs themselves. These ghastly images of violence and humiliation, circulated on the Internet, on television and in newspapers throughout the world, were hardly in need of artistic amplification. And if any artist was to re-enact this theater of cruelty, Botero did not seem cut out for the job.

As it turns out, his images of torture, now on view at the Marlborough Gallery in midtown Manhattan and compiled in the book Botero Abu Ghraib, are masterpieces of what I have called disturbatory art–art whose point and purpose is to make vivid and objective our most frightening subjective thoughts.

You can read it all here.

I am in Los Angeles this week, catching up with my friends and family and doing a bunch of events. My trip was off to a great start (the TV in the car-rental office was broadcasting news of Rumsfeld’s resignation). I taught a master class in fiction at UC Riverside on Wednesday. It was at once terrifying and exhilarating to be in the classroom again, and I had a great time. Then on Thursday I taped a radio show and went to watch a rehearsal for the New Short Fiction Series, so I haven’t had a chance to catch up with my email yet. Apologies to those of you who are awaiting an answer.

Apologies for the lack of posts over the last couple of days. I’ve been busy with packing, traveling, teaching, and reading election coverage. I’m pleased with the outcome–particularly for my friend C., who volunteered for Jim Webb. But the results weren’t about Democratic leadership as much as about George W. Bush. Still, the news of Rumsfeld stepping down deserved a full, off-line celebration. More soon.

Audience: 40-50 at each location.
Anxiety index: 1 (out of 10).
Surprise guest(s): Several academics.
No. of Moroccans who said hello: 6.

I drove from Portland up to Olympia and then Seattle this weekend under whipping, miserable, constant rain. At one point, my car started to shake and I thought the glass would give in under the weight of the water. But I made it on time and even had time to check email and dry up before my readings.

The Olympia group was made up of very diverse, hard-core readers (my favorite kind) and they seemed thoroughly engaged. Because the room was set up without a podium or mike, it allowed for a very cozy, very intimate discussion of the book. We talked quite extensively about Hope but also about my new novel, which I am desperate to finish soon. And someone asked me about my Nation essay “The Missionary Position”–I’ve noticed there’s always interest about this piece at my recent events. Hmm.

The Seattle reading was at Elliott Bay Book Company, one of my favorite bookstores in the world. (Hi Rick!) Much to my delight, the reading was very well attended. There were three high school exchange students from Morocco who were very excited to be there, and one of them jumped up and shouted “Woo-hoo!!” when she found out I was from Rabat. The discussion was wide-ranging: the process of writing Hope, characters’ choices, favorite writers, language, language teaching, immigration, representations of Islam, the veil as a symbol of identity politics, and even whether you can buy alcohol in Morocco (the answer is yes.)