Laila Lalami

I picked up a copy of Colum McCann’s new novel, Zoli, when I was in New York for the PEN festival, on the recommendation of a couple of friends, including my editor at Algonquin. The story begins in the 1930s, when a young Roma girl named Marienka (nicknamed Zoli) loses her entire family in an attack by Hlinka guards. (Fascist attacks against such minorities were common in Czechoslovakia at the time.) Zoli escapes with her grandfather, and together they join a kumpanija, a traveling group of Romani musicians. Zoli’s extraordinary ability to remember and to write songs and poems soon attracts notice–from Swann, an expat translator, and Stransky, a Slovak poet and editor. Zoli’s growing fame is quickly co-opted by the Communists, who want to make of her a poster child of Romani “integration” in a new society. The novel explores questions of belonging–national, cultural, linguistic–as well as class and ideology, without ever once slipping into a harangue. A rare feat these days. McCann immersed himself in Roma culture to write this novel, and the care with which he draws this world is palpable. He breathes life into very different characters, giving them each the space in which to tell their story. A great book.

Some sad news today: Driss Benzekri, the political dissident who was imprisoned and tortured under King Hassan, and who later became the head of Morocco’s Equity and Reconciliation Commission, has passed away. He was 57.

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Pankaj Mishra reviews Don DeLillo’s new novel, Falling Man for the Guardian, placing it into the context of post 9/11 fiction by British and American novelists like Ken Kalfus, Deborah Eisenberg, Mohsin Hamid, Kiran Desai, among many others.

Reflecting on the attacks on the twin towers in 2001, Don DeLillo seemed to speak for many Americans when he admitted that “We like to think that America invented the future. We are comfortable with the future, intimate with it. But there are disturbances now, in large and small ways, a chain of reconsiderations.” On September 11, terrorists from the Middle East who destroyed American immunity to large-scale violence and chaos also forced many American and British novelists to reconsider the value of their work and its relation to the history of the present. (…) Amis went on to claim that “after a couple of hours at their desks, on September 12 2001, all the writers on earth were reluctantly considering a change of occupation.” This is, of course, an exaggeration. Many writers had intuited that religious and political extremism, which had ravaged large parts of the world, would eventually be unleashed upon the west’s rich, more protected societies.

The shock of the attacks was probably greater for writers who had been ensconced deep in what DeLillo in his new novel Falling Man calls the “narcissistic heart of the west”.

Mishra also quotes from one of my favorite essays by Orhan Pamuk, the piece “The Anger of the Damned,” which appeared in the New York Review of Books in November 2001.

As you may have heard, Iranian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiari, the director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has been detained in Iran. She had traveled to the country of her birth to visit her 93-year-old mother. She was on her way to Tehran’s international airport on December 30, when masked gunmen stopped her taxi and stole her belongings, including her Iranian and U.S. passports. She was then effectively under house arrest for four months, and then on May 8 she was taken to the notorious Evin Prison, where political prisoners are held and sometimes tortured. There have been no news of her since she was taken there. Please sign the petition for her release. More info about her here.

Paul Bremer, who between May 2003 and June 2004 was in charge of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, took to the pages of the Washington Post last Sunday to tell the American public “What We Got right in Iraq.” Today, journalist and NAF fellow Nir Rosen, who was in Iraq before, during, and after Bremer’s tenure, responds:

[T]he former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority argues that he “was absolutely right to strip away the apparatus of a particularly odious tyranny,” including the Baath Party and the Iraqi army. He complains about “critics who’ve never spent time in Iraq” and “don’t understand its complexities.” But Bremer himself never understood Iraq, knew no Arabic, had no experience in the Middle East and made no effort to educate himself — as his statements clearly show.

Time and again, he refers to “the formerly ruling Sunnis,” “rank-and-file Sunnis,” “the old Sunni regime,” “responsible Sunnis.” This obsession with sects informed the U.S. approach to Iraq from day one of the occupation, but it was not how Iraqis saw themselves — at least, not until very recently. Iraqis were not primarily Sunnis or Shiites; they were Iraqis first, and their sectarian identities did not become politicized until the Americans occupied their country, treating Sunnis as the bad guys and Shiites as the good guys. There were no blocs of “Sunni Iraqis” or “Shiite Iraqis” before the war, just like there was no “Sunni Triangle” or “Shiite South” until the Americans imposed ethnic and sectarian identities onto Iraq’s regions.

You can read the article in full here.

I had been told by several friends that the humanities campus of the University of Kenitra has quite a few religiously conservative students, but I had not thought much about this until I gave a reading there last week. I did my usual introduction about the process of writing Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, and then I read for about 10 minutes. During the Q&A, a student raised his hand and asked why the father character in “The Fanatic” tries to stop his daughter from covering her hair. “This is strange, ” he said, “because most of the time the fathers do want their daughters to cover.” I wasn’t sure exactly what he based this statement on, particularly since he was a man and did not really know what a daughter’s experience is like. I pointed out that, in the amphitheater where we sat, there were many women who covered, and many who did not. I said that no one, least of all my father, had ever asked me to cover. It’s a woman’s choice, I said. A bearded young man behind the questioner interrupted me, “Actually, it’s not a choice.” A few people laughed at his temerity, and then I explained that, above and beyond the debate over the veil, the story dealt with a very specific father, a very specific daughter, certainly not people who represent every gamut of experience in Moroccan society.

A young woman asked me, “Your book deals with illegal immigration, fundamentalism, judicial corruption, and so on. Do you think that writing about negative things in Morocco makes your work more attractive to the Western reader?” I must say I was taken aback because I had never thought of my work as being about “negative things.” I explained that the book describes complex characters, who are put in complex situations. Some of the things in their lives are positive, others are negative. One could just as easily say that, in addition to illegal immigration, for example, the book deals with filial love and romantic love and platonic love, so why not mention those things, too?

I thought that I had laid those concerns about outsider/insider writing to rest. How wrong I was. A smiling young man in the front row asked, “I found your story “The Fanatic” to be insulting, in the same way that Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was insulting to Nigeria.” This, of course, wasn’t so much a question, as a comment, more specifically a challenge to me to say something for myself. The problem was that I had already forgotten about my book by then because I was trying to get my head wrapped around the idea that Things Fall Apart was insulting to Nigeria.
“Have you ever been to Nigeria?” I asked.
“No.”
“How do you know that it’s insulting? In what way is it insulting?”
“Because Okonkwo is polygamous and he beats his wives.”
I was mystified as to how this young student could have possibly reduced Achebe’s work to this one-liner. The gentleman who had introduced me, a professor in the English department, squirmed in his seat in embarrassment. I spoke about Achebe’s work, explained that the book is set in a very specific time and place in Nigerian history, that there is much more to Okonkwo than the polygamy, that the book deals with many issues, most importantly the appearance of British colonialism and how it changes Okonkwo’s world.

As I talked, I realized that this young man (and indeed several of the people who were so eager to ask questions that put literature on trial) was not a regular reader of books. It seems impossible to me that anyone who reads novels on a usual basis could come up with such a reductive interpretation, and I felt an overwhelming sadness, for him, and for what he was missing. After the reading, he came up to the podium to have his picture taken with me. I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know if he had asked that question because he truly felt the way he said he did, or because he thought it would be funny, or if he was just being a punk. I think what upset me most was this expectation that my work, or literature in general, should be a stage in which good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people. In other words, what this student wanted was a fairytale. Life is not like that, and neither is literature.

The strangest interpretation, however, came when a student asked me: “In your book, a young woman goes from being a religious conservative who covers her hair to being a prostitute in Spain. Do you think that this is a metaphor for Morocco, which prostitutes itself to the West through the Free Trade Agreement?” I think I heaved a very audible sigh. Sometimes, a scarf is just a scarf, it’s not a symbol for a country. I used as an example the anecdote that Sydney Lumet tells about asking filmmaker Akira Kurosawa why he framed a particular shot in Ran the way he did. Kurosawa’s answer was that if the shot had been an inch to the left, a factory would have been exposed, and if it was one inch to the right, the airport would be in the frame, and neither of these buildings belonged in a period movie. The students all had a good laugh.

A couple of my friends are mentioned in this Los Angeles Times piece by Josh Getlin, about the shrinking space reserved to book reviews in newspapers. The issue, as Getlin explains, quickly turned into a needless game of blame-the-lit-blogs. Take a look.

Neil MacFarquhar visits with poet and novelist Mohja Kahf at a reading in the Bay Area and writes about it for the New York Times.

A father and son walk along a road in a post-apocalyptic future. Around them, everything is dead or dying. Between sunup and sundown, the sky’s color changes by only a few shades of gray. It’s numbingly cold, and ash falls from the sky nearly all the time. The reader is never told what could have caused the world to turn out like this, but it’s not hard to imagine that it could be a nuclear explosion. In the end, it doesn’t much matter what caused it all, because there is life to attend to. The little boy needs to be fed and protected, and the father devotes himself to that. There are other survivors, but it’s hard to tell who “the good guys” are, those “who carry the fire.” McCarthy ventures into the deepest, darkest recesses of the human heart, and chronicles what he sees in vivid, yet restrained prose. Some survivors engage in cannibalism; others have organized in armies, red scarves at their necks, killing and stealing and rampaging; slavery reappears; and through all this madness the father must find food and protect his little boy. I had to put this book down a couple of times because I was not sure I could finish it. But I cared about the characters far too much to stay away, and so I picked it up again and finished it in one sitting. What Cormac McCarthy has done in his new novel is difficult, brave, and incredibly well-executed. A masterpiece.