Laila Lalami

The latest issue of the LRB has a review by Ruth Bernard Yeazell of Hermione Lee’s new biography of Edith Wharton–a book I really want to get my hands on very soon. Here’s a taste:

‘My God, how does one write a Biography?’ In her magnificent study of Virginia Woolf, Lee chose to answer Woolf’s question not so much by writing a sequential narrative from cradle to grave as by offering a series of topical essays, loosely arranged by chronology and artfully composed to highlight the various aspects of her subject’s personal and imaginative history. So Virginia Woolf began with a meditation on ‘Biography’, and later chapters were as likely to address such recurrent themes as ‘Censors’ or ‘Selves’ as more obvious milestones such as ‘Marriage’ or ‘War’. Edith Wharton adopts a roughly similar method: it opens not with Wharton’s birth but with her parents’ unexpectedly witnessing revolution in the Paris of 1848, and its second chapter, ‘Making Up’, is as much a commentary on the evasions of the adult autobiographer as on the young Edith Jones’s love of storytelling. With both novelists, Lee is particularly sensitive to the gap between the life as lived and the writer’s retrospective creation of herself; and unlike many literary biographers, she is at her best when her subject’s own imaginative powers are at their height. Her readings of The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country and The Age of Innocence – not to mention A Backward Glance – help to persuade one that biography is a means of enhancing literature, not reducing it.

The rest of the review is here.

No reader of Arabic literature in translation would fail to recognize the name of translator Denys Johnson-Davies: He has worked on books by Naguib Mahfouz, Zakaria Tamer, and Tewfiq Al-Hakim, to name just a few. And he also translated Tayib Salih’s masterpiece, Season of Migration to the North. So I was more than a little disappointed when I came across these pearls of wisdom in his introduction to the Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction. On the birth of the Arabic novel, he writes:

But many were the prejudices that had to be overcome. The idea of an author creating characters and making them inhabit worlds of his creation not only was foreign to the Arab Muslim mind but was even regarded as almost unacceptable. Take, for example, the ever-entertaining stories of The Thousand and One Nights. This anonymous work, so esteemed throughout the world as a masterpiece of imaginative literature, remains for most Arabs a work unworthy of serious consideration. Arab men of letters have long looked askance at the extravagances of The Arabian Nights, as the book is better known in the West, finding them suitable only for minds incapable of appreciating other forms of literature, and grudgingly admitting that the stories might have some merit only when the outside world lavished praise on them.

On the universal appeal of Arabic novels:

Many Arab writers have no experience of the outside world or of a foreign language, and their reading of world literature is confined to works translated into Arabic. Thus a reader of Mohamed El-Bisatie’s A Last Glass of Tea will find that every one of its twenty-four stories takes place in villages around Lake Manzala in the Nile Delta. But readers in the West have shown themselves capable of relating to cultures that they come across for the first time in fiction, especially when captured by a master’s hand.

On choosing to present the writers in the anthology by alphabetical order:

I prefer to treat the Arab world as the one cultural unit that it is.

But don’t let these absurd comments discourage you from reading the anthology (which is pretty amazing) or anything he’s translated (particularly Season of Migration.)

I forgot to mention last week how much I enjoyed Richard Wolin’s essay in The Nation on the current malaise about Muslim citizens and immigrants in Europe. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Today there are an estimated 15 million to 17 million Muslims living in Europe. Anyone who wishes to address the theme of “Europe and Islam” immediately runs up against an intractable definitional conundrum. For in Europe, the monolithic religion known as Islam is functionally nonexistent. The national origins of the European Muslim population vary dramatically from country to country. To wit: Whereas the majority of Dutch Muslims hail from Indonesia, Suriname, Morocco and Turkey, most British Muslims emigrated from the Indian subcontinent. Germany’s Muslims are predominantly Turks (Turkey is, of course, a secular republic, honoring the separation of mosque and state), whereas the origins of the French Muslim community may be traced to the Maghreb, or Saharan Africa.

The French Muslim community itself is further subdivided among Arabs, Berbers (from the mountainous Kabyle region of Algeria), Africans and converts, who compose 1 percent of French Muslims. How, then, might one classify a nonobservant Kabyle immigrant who is a French citizen, born in Algeria, educated in the French school system, who speaks Amazigh at home and French at work? Is he/she Berber, Algerian, French or, qua non­observant, even veritably Muslim? Clearly, the vagaries of religion, identity and ethnicity are multifarious, rich and potentially dizzying.

You can read it all here.

I was walking back home through a small street where kids from a nearby high school often gather to smoke, hang out, or chat each other up. It was six o’clock, and it was already getting dark. I was thinking about my novel and not paying too much attention, when I saw two cops drive their motorcycles, tires screeching, right up in front of a teenager standing by an electricity pole. He was tall and lanky, wore jeans and a jacket, and seemed entirely harmless. One of the cops got off his bike, and told the teenager to turn out his pockets. The boy refused; the cop slapped him.

Almost instantaneously, a handful of the teenager’s friends moved away to the other side of the street. I heard someone yell out loud–from a safe distance: “So this is democracy?”

When the pat-down didn’t reveal anything, the policemen told the teenager he could go. Just as he started walking away, they made him turn around and walk in the opposite direction–for the hell of it. And then they sat on their motorcycles and watched.

Pankaj Mishra reviews Hisham Matar’s In The Country of Men, and my book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, for the April 12 issue of the New York Review of Books The review is freely available online, here.

The Guardian challenged a whole bunch of writers to come up with the shortest story possible (in the vein of Hemingway’s “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Find out what Kate Atkinson, John Banville, David Lodge, Hari Kunzru, George Saunders, and many others came up with.

The organizers of the PEN World Voices festival have announced their theme and program for this year. I will be taking part in three events. Here’s the first:

History and the Truth of Fiction
When: Wednesday, April 25
Where: Hemmerdinger Hall at NYU: 100 Washington Square East
What time: 1–2:30 p.m.
With Arthur Japin, Laila Lalami, Imma Monsó, Michael Wallner; moderated by Colum McCann
Free and open to the public. No reservations. 

The second:

Where on Earth: The Refugee Emergency
When: Thursday, April 26
Where: Lang Recital Hall, Hunter College: 695 Park Ave.
What time: 3–4:30 p.m.
With Ishmael Beah, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Laila Lalami, Saadi Youssef; moderated by Russell Banks
Free and open to the public. No reservations. 

And the third:

An Evening with The Moth
When: Thursday, April 26
Where: 37 Arts: 450 West 37th St.
What time: 8–10 p.m.
With Neil Gaiman, Pico Iyer, Laila Lalami; and John Hodgman as your MC
Tickets: $30 (includes wine and beer)
Purchase tickets from Ticketmaster: www.ticketmaster.com or (212) 307-4100 

I know what you’re wondering. And yes, I would be nervous, except I haven’t left the house in four days, haven’t showered in two, I’m on my fourth cup of coffee, and I am almost done with Chapter 11 of my novel. My brain is fried, and I have no room for nerves.

I have a story in a new anthology called X-24: Unclassified, edited by Tash Aw and Nii Ayikwei Parkes. It’s a slightly older piece; I haven’t written any new short fiction this year since I’m trying to focus on finishing the novel. But the book includes fantastic contributions by people like Naomi Alderman, Daniel Alarcón, Mohammed Naseehu Ali, Sefi Atta, and many others, so check it out.

The Iraq war is four years old. The BBC has an overview of the violence, in numbers.

I was relieved when I had to travel to Rabat for the Fulbright Symposium because it meant I would get away from the news coverage of the foiled terrorist attack in Casablanca. Last week, As Sabah published a color picture of the torn body of Abdelfettah Raydi, the 24-year-old man who blew himself up inside a cyber cafe in Sidi Moumen on March 11. Al Massae showed the second terrorist, 17-year-old Youssef Khoudri, while he was transported to Ibn Rochd Hospital. An Nass, meanwhile, printed a photo of him being stitched up. Not to be outdone, La Vie Economique did a dossier on the events, and included a photo of the severed head of Raydi.

Despite the sensationalism, the articles accompanying the photos were, for the most part, well researched and interesting. They included interviews with the man who had alerted police, with witnesses and survivors, and with the terrorists’ family and neighbors. Many journalists asked why nothing had been done about the shantytowns in Sidi Moumen since the attacks of May 2003, and cautioned that more attacks remain possible so long as there is fertile ground for them. But a columnist for Aujourd’hui le Maroc fumed that “barbarians should not be pitied.” (You’d think you were reading Max Boot.)

The details that have emerged certainly give pause: the seizure of 200 kg of explosives in Sidi Moumen; the fact that Raydi had already served two years of prison for suspected Salafi activities before being released in an amnesty in 2005; the claim that it took only two weeks to convince Youssef Khoudri–an illiterate mint seller and sometime drug user who lived in a one-room house with his five siblings and parents–to take part in the attack; the suggestion that the targets included the police headquarters on Zerktouni; and so on.

All this took me back to my work. Large parts of my novel are set in Sidi Moumen and it is difficult to write about something knowing not only that it could happen, but that it does happen. It’s not easy to use one’s imagination while at the same time grappling with a similar reality. In the end, I had to shut off the real in order to focus on the fictional; I had to stop reading the papers–at least until coverage subsides–so I can finish my novel. The symposium came at the right time.