Laila Lalami

I’m waiting for the movers to show up and won’t be able to blog through the rest of this week, so I apologize for the lack of posts. I should be back in these parts on Tuesday, when my internet connection is installed.

For Italian readers: My book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, is published in Italy by Fusi Orari this month. Here is the cover art:

I’ll be in Italy in early October for the Internationale Festival in Ferrara, followed by readings in Cagliari and Rome. You can check my events for more details.

Driss Basri, former Minister of the Interior and torturer-in-chief during Morocco’s Years of Lead, has passed away in Paris. In other news, Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales, who has written memos arguing that the United States could use torture in interrogations of detainees, has resigned.

We went to Powell’s last night, and being in those aisles almost brought me to tears. The Blue Room! The literary magazine rack! The Cavallini notebooks! I picked up two travel books by Pico Iyer (The Lady and the Monk and Video Night in Kathmandu), a used hardcover, in excellent condition, of Moroccan anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi’s A Season in Mecca, Coetzee’s memoir Youth, and a few other titles for fall. Few places give readers so much opportunity as Powell’s to explore and try something different. I don’t know what I’m going to do without it.

I’m in Portland this weekend to prepare for the move to Los Angeles, but I wanted to let you know that I’ll be on NPR’s Weekend Edition tomorrow (Sunday) morning to talk about summer reading. You can tune into your local NPR station or listen online tomorrow.

More sad news: Qurratulain Hayder, whose 1959 novel A River of Fire was favorably compared to Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, has also passed away.

I found out the terrible news by reading Maud Newton’s blog this morning: Grace Paley has passed away. The New York Times has an obit as well.

Over the last fifteen years, I’ve lived in Downtown Los Angeles, Koreatown, Torrance, Redondo Beach, Portland, and Casablanca. That’s one move every two years. I am so tired of moving–and yet here I am, doing it again. I’m in L.A. with my husband at the moment, looking for a place. We’ve only been gone from the city for four years, and yet so much seems to have changed. There’s so much gentrification; traffic is worse, if that’s even conceivable; and there’s a café that calls itself ‘literati,’ because it uses book spines as wall decor. (The horror! The horror!) Still, I’ve missed L.A. There’s a great diner we went to every weekend for 8 years, and it’s still open; there are lots of good theaters; amazing music; and of course all our friends and family.

On July 26, French president Nicolas Sarkozy gave a speech in Dakar, addressed not to his Senegalese hosts, but rather to “African youth” in its entirety. The speech was a bizarre mix of neo-colonial clichés and passionate promises of help. The trouble in Africa, as in the Middle East, has always been the sheer number of people so eager to help, and all out of altruism, of course.

Among other things, Sarkozy said that slavery happened, but it’s all in the past; that he did not want to speak of repentance, but of the future; that colonialism was not all bad because the French built schools, roads, and bridges. (Whenever someone claims that the French built schools in Morocco, I always like to point out that in 44 years of their presence in my homeland, they managed to graduate fewer than 50 people from university; so enough about the ‘benefits’ of colonization already.) Sarkozy then claimed that the African farmer knows only the “eternal beginning of time, marked by the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words.” (Three guesses as to who will help Africans enter, at long last, into history.) He added that France would help all African nations who wish to have democracy. And then he went on to meet with Omar Bongo of Gabon, one of the oldest dictators in Africa. (40 years and going!) It was, in short, the kind of speech that really made me wonder how French imperialism, both military and economic, is not talked about in the West to the same extent as, for instance, British or American interventions.

Needless to say, Sarkozy’s speech was severely criticized in Senegalese newspapers, and in the African press at large. His speech drew a response from the African literary community, as well. In Libération last week, Raharimanana (of Madagascar), Boubacar Boris Diop (of Sénégal), Abderrahman Beggar (of Morocco), Patrice Nganang (of Cameroon), Koulsy Lamko (of Chad), Kangni Alem (of Togo), and Jutta Hepke (of Germany) addressed an open letter to the president, in which they ask him to “stop fraternizing with the gravediggers of our hopes” and invite him to have a true debate.

My time in Casablanca is drawing to a close. It was a wonderful experience, at once heart-expanding and thought-provoking. I feel pretty good about what I’ve accomplished: I’m almost done with my novel. But, and characteristically for me, I can’t help but wish I had been able to do even more: Write more non-fiction, travel around the Middle Atlas, climb Mount Toubkal. Maybe next time, insha’llah. I will miss my brother, the new friends I made this year, the incredible food, the long afternoons spent in cafés, the call for prayer, the music, the light, the way people always rush to help. I will not, obviously, miss having to deal with Maroc Telecom every other week, or coming across the kind of society people Gad El Maleh satirizes so well.