Laila Lalami

My trip to New York was great. My first event was the History and the Truth of Fiction panel, which was held at NYU. We had a great turn out, and it was particularly nice to see a few familiar faces in the crowd. Colum McCann, our moderator, was fantastic; he knew how to ask questions that would involve all of us and get us to discuss with one another. Several wraps up have popped up online (see, for instance, this, this, or this) and some photos as well.

One of the highlights of the PEN festival for me was getting to meet Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose latest novel, Desertion, was one of my favorites of last year. We were on one panel together, Where on Earth: The Refugee Emergency, which was about different experiences of exile, whether old or new, forced or desired, brutal or peaceful. (We also shared a memorable cab ride, during which the driver, a fellow Moroccan, treated us to his life story, including an anecdote about how he worked as a bartender for ten years while being an observant Muslim.)

My final event was a gathering of storytellers, with Jonathan Ames, Pico Iyer, Edgar Oliver, and Neil Gaiman. Ordinarily, Alex loves to talk to writers, but he was so intimidated that he fell completely silent in Neil Gaiman’s presence–which was quite amusing considering that Gaiman is so nice, and so down to earth. I was fortunate enough to spend some time with Pico Iyer at the rehearsal, and heard so many wonderful stories of his travels, including the one he told at The Moth, about a trip to Aden to do research on a fourteenth-century Chinese Muslim eunuch admiral. (Yes, you read that last part right. More on Zheng He here.)

I didn’t get a chance to go to many other panels, but I loved the Town Hall Readings, and the panel on Gritty Realism, with Daniel Alarcon, Guillermo Arriaga, Jorge Franco, and Patricia Melo, moderated by the amazing Francisco Goldman. You can read various reports about the panels and readings at the World Voices blogs, and at TEV.

My last event for the PEN World Voices festival is a gathering of storytellers:

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

See you there!

I am doing two events today. Here are details for the first:

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

Hope to see you there.

I’m in New York this week for the PEN World Voices festival. Here are the details for a panel to which I’m contributing today:

PEN World Voices
History and the Truth of Fiction
With Arthur Japin, Laila Lalami, Imma Monsó, Michael Wallner; moderated by Colum McCann
Wednesday April 25
1 – 2:30 PM
Hemmerdinger Hall at NYU: 100 Washington Square East
New York, New York
Free and open to the public. No reservations.

Hope to see you there.

I’m on the road at the moment so I have to keep this brief, but I did want to point to Mark Sarvas‘s piece on James Wilcox’s new book Hunk City in this weekend’s NYTBR:

As in his prior novels, Wilcox’s narrative, which skitters like a stone thrown expertly across a country pond, delivers a high quotient of whimsy — Pickens’s assistant supplements his income by making office visits to floss his customers’ teeth. Wilcox’s books are full of flourishes like this, and they won’t be to every reader’s taste, especially those with a low threshold for quirkiness. His work is so crammed with complications — some subplots have subplots — that it’s occasionally hard to know what matters.

But Wilcox has always been about more than broad comedy. His men and women, though often clownish, are rarely cartoonish. He has a Dickensian knack for animating minor characters and an eye for the telling detail. “Though he was barely 23,” Wilcox writes of the professional flosser, “Edsell’s lantern jaw and narrow-set eyes gave him the spry, wizened look of an octogenarian.” Here in Barcalounger country, startled by a bit of unpleasant news, Pickens “pulled a lever and sat upright.” Burma’s mother, an especially memorable creation, invests “lavishly in a Chinese wardrobe not just to encourage capitalism in that bastion of godless Communism, but also because the high collars hid the scar from her goiter operation.”

Read it all here.

I went to Rabat to pick up my mail at the Fulbright office today, and I found several packages waiting for me. In the lot was a copy of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which I started reading on the train back home. The story is told through a monologue by a young Pakistani man, sitting across from an American stranger in the Old Anarkali neighborhood of Lahore. I am enthralled by it so far, and hope it can deliver on its promise in the end.

Updated to say that I thought the second half of the book didn’t hold as well as the first half. Changez’s transformation from a successful analyst to a disgruntled slack is not earned, I’m afraid. It fits the plot, but doesn’t fit the character. I did like this book a lot, though, for other reasons. I could see the influence of Tayib Salih and Joseph Conrad, and if I were not so completely busy with my own novel, I think I would have written about The Reluctant Fundamentalist at great length.

It has been interesting to watch reactions to the revelation that the Virginia Tech gunman was a 23-year-old creative writing student of South Korean descent by the name of Cho Seung-Hui. People of every other ethnic group breathed a sigh of relief that the murderer was not one of their own. Andrew Lam captured this feeling perfectly in his column for New American Media. Here is an excerpt:

Before the news identified the killer as Cho Seung-hui, a 23-year-old English major from South Korea, all ethnic backgrounds were up for grabs. A Chinese friend from a small college town on the East Coast called to say: “Please, please let it be some other Asian. We’ll be in deep if it’s Chinese.”

In a popular Vietnamese chatroom, Vietnamese college students were writing to each other to speculate. One said, “I have a bad feeling. It might be Mi’t (Vietnamese slang for Vietnamese).” Others wrote in advising each other on what to do if it was.(…)

Let it be some other Asian! This was the prayer among so many Asian-American communities. And not just Asians.

“Every time there’s an incident like this, every ethnic group is on pins and needles,” said Khalil Abdullah, an African-American colleague. An Anglo shooter may be an individual, a loner, but God forbid if a person of color goes on a shooting rampage. His whole tribe would be implicated. “I still recall my aunts when President Kennedy was assassinated. They were praying that it wasn’t a Negro.” Many ethnic communities do not feel that they belong to the core of the American fabric, Abdullah added. “The action of an individual can cancel out the good image of an entire group.”

The focus on the murderer’s background was not restricted to his nationality; there was also the religious angle. The New York Post quickly speculated that the words “Ismail Ax,” which were scrawled on the gunman’s arm, were a reference to the Qur’anic account of Abraham’s sacrifice of Ismail, or possibly also to Abraham’s destruction of pagan idols, also in the Qur’anic tradition. The fact that the document sent by Cho to NBC contained such bizarre claims as “Thanks to you I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people” did not seem to merit the kind of religious exegesis that the New York Post was so keen on doing earlier in the week. People look for intrinsic reasons for Cho’s acts, when the simpler explanation–to the extent that such a horrendous act can ever be explained–is that Cho was a mentally ill young man, who should never have had access to guns.

The Los Angeles Times obtained a copy of the budget for the 2005 action film Sahara, which starred Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz, and which is considered a financial disaster for the studio that produced it. What I found interesting about Glenn F. Bunting’s article was this tidbit, which describes the shoot in Morocco: the work involves paying out bribes, interfering with government development projects, and the removal of trees:

Although portions of the movie were shot in Britain and Spain, most of the filming was done in Morocco, a country in North Africa that has become a popular site for U.S. filmmakers. “Babel,” “Syriana,” “Black Hawk Down” and “Kingdom of Heaven” all have benefited from Morocco’s welcoming environment, favorable exchange rate and cheap labor. An “assistant propman” on “Sahara,” for example, earned a weekly salary of $233, the equivalent of one day’s pay for a U.S. prop worker. In one impoverished village, a “Sahara” crew acquired household items at a bargain price. “We actually bought all the dressings from this person’s house at a very inflated rate, which was probably about a dollar,” Eisner said on the “Sahara” DVD. Producers had little reason to worry about red tape or paperwork because in Morocco a single permit provides access to the entire kingdom.

Cold cash came in handy. According to Account No. 3,600 of the “Sahara” budget, 16 “gratuity” or “courtesy” payments were made throughout Morocco. Six of the expenditures were “local bribes” in the amount of 65,000 dirham, or $7,559. Experts in Hollywood accounting could not recall ever seeing a line item in a movie budget described as a bribe. “It’s a bad choice of words in a document, but it’s a perfectly normal and cost-efficient way of getting a film made in a place like Morocco,” said David A. Davis of FMV Opinions Inc., a Century City financial advisory firm.

The final budget shows that “local bribes” were handed out in remote locations such as Ouirgane in the Atlas Mountains, Merzouga and Rissani. One payment was made to expedite the removal of palm trees from an old French fort called Ouled Zahra, said a person close to the production who requested anonymity. Other items include $23,250 for “Political/Mayoral support” in Erfoud and $40,688 “to halt river improvement project” in Azemmour. The latter payment was made to delay construction of a government sewage system that would have interrupted filming. Putnam, Anschutz’s lawyer, said the “local bribes” reflected line items that were budgeted but not actually spent. He said the payments on location in Morocco were reviewed after “Sahara” executives were contacted by The Times.

Honestly, I started to laugh about all this, until I got to the part where palm trees are being taken out and river improvement projects that benefit Moroccans are halted in order to accommodate films, and then I wanted to cry.

The rest of the article describes, in painstaking detail, all the movie’s expenditures, which included a payment of $72,800 to McConaughey’s hair colorist for 90 days’ work. Yes, those numbers are correct.

I have been avoiding the news, so it wasn’t until very late yesterday that I found out about the shootings at Virginia Tech. My first instinct was to worry about a friend of mine who teaches there, but thankfully he had not yet left his house to go to campus when the news broke.

Too many others have not been as fortunate; the death toll kept on climbing. There is loss and mourning, and few words seem apt at such a time. There are also questions, and perhaps I find it easier to cope with the tragedy by asking them. From the NYT‘s unsigned editorial:

Our hearts and the hearts of all Americans go out to the victims and their families. Sympathy was not enough at the time of Columbine, and eight years later it is not enough. What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss.

More here.

We were having our second cup of coffee on Saturday morning when we heard a loud, whooshing sound, followed by police sirens. An hour later we found out that a suicide bomber had blown himself up in front of the American Language Center, which is about a mile from our apartment. The man had tried to gain access to the ALC (which, by the way, is privately owned and is not in any way affiliated with the U.S. government) and the security guard asked for an I.D. card. The bomber then walked away, and blew himself up, killing no one but himself. A few seconds later, another bomber detonated his explosives, a few meters away from the U.S. consulate. There were no other fatalities.

Police arrived on the crime scene and chased after suspected fugitives. The evening news anchor said that the police had arrested the gang leader, the man responsible for the foiled attack of March 11, and his second-in-command on Thursday night, along with other members of the group. It’s unclear why the police didn’t announce these arrests right away, but it’s possible that they were not sure they had caught all the members of the cell, and indeed the acts of Saturday would seem to confirm that theory.

The footage on TV showed plainclothes and uniformed cops with bulletproof vests, guns drawn. Morocco does not have a gun culture so the sight of the weapons on the streets of Casablanca certainly gave me pause. Sometimes I feel like I don’t recognize the country I grew up in (just as, in the wake of the Iraq war, I felt I no longer recognized the country I moved to.) Everyone is shaken, revolted, and worried, and already citizens have called cops on someone who was acting ‘suspicious’. (It turned out to be a false alarm.)

For other perspectives:
Lounsbury in Casablanca. Lounsbury on the aftermath. Najlae. BO18. Red@blog. And, via Red@blog, this clip from rap group Fnaire, a song written post-May 2003: Matqich Bladi.