Laila Lalami

Gary Younge has an excellent column in the current issue of The Nation about the case of the Jena 6. After describing the series of abhorrent racial incidents leading up to charging six black teenagers for attempted second-degree murder, he concludes:

These incidents have turned Jena into a national symbol of racial injustice. As such it is both a potent emblem and a convenient whipping boy. Potent because it shines a spotlight on how race and class conspire to deny black people equality before the law. According to the Justice Department, blacks are almost three times as likely as whites to have their cars searched when they are pulled over and more than twice as likely to be arrested. They are more than five times as likely as whites to be sent to jail and are sentenced to 20 percent longer jail time. This would not be a problem for the likes of Kobe Bryant, but in Jena’s “quarters” high-powered legal teams are hard to come by.

Convenient because it allows the rest of the nation to dismiss the incidents as the work of Southern redneck backwoodsmen without addressing the systemic national failures it showcases. According to the Sentencing Project, the ten states with the highest discrepancy between black and white incarceration rates include Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New York and none from the South. What took place in Jena is not aberrant; it’s consistent. The details are a local disgrace. The broader themes are a national scandal. Jim Crow Jr. travels well–unencumbered by historical baggage.

Read it all here.

The UK Telegraph has published sales figures for this year’s shortlisted books. Kind of shocking.

It was very nice to come home to news that Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh has been released from Evin Prison. (See also.)

The New York Times has a slide show from a photo album found in Germany after World War II, but only recently donated to the Holocaust Memorial Museum. The photos show senior SS officers and their families listening to music, relaxing on lounge chairs, and trimming Christmas trees while Jews and other Nazi victims were being gassed in Auschwitz.

I am back at home after a couple of days in New York, where I met with my editor, my agent, caught up with some good friends, and stopped by Columbia to attend the CJR panel on book reviewing (podcast here.) On the plane over, I read James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, which for some reason I had never read before. I’ve said before that writing a novel is like having a religion: you see signs everywhere. I felt like this book came at the right time for me; it’s helped me see how a character’s tortured inner life can be dissected and every feeling, every thought, every impulse recorded. Pretty stunning.

I am in New York for a couple of days, for meetings with my agent and my editor, and to catch up with some friends. On Tuesday night, my friend Mark Sarvas will be taking part in a panel discussion at the Columbia School of Journalism, and I plan on being in the audience. Join us, won’t you? Here are the details:

Panel on the crisis in book reviewing
7 p.m.
Tuesday, September 18
Third-floor lecture hall, Journalism Building
116th and Broadway
The panelists will be Steve Wasserman, Peter Osnos, Elisabeth Sifton, Carlin Romano, and Mark Sarvas.

The moderator for the panel will be CJR’s publisher, Evan Cornog

When I was writing Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, I could not possibly have imagined it would get the reaction it did from readers, or that it would be used in such varied classrooms as post-colonial North African literature and high school English. On Friday, I went to give a reading at Mercy High School, where the entire class of 600 students had read my book for the fall. What surprised me was how much and well the book was integrated into the curriculum. In drama class, students teased out personality traits for each of the main characters in my novel; in literature class, they looked for simile, metaphor, and other figures of speech; in French class, they translated some key quotes from the book; in ceramics class, they looked for Moroccan designs and used them to create artifacts, and they also chose scenes from some of the stories and recreated them in clay. Students were very familiar with the book by the time I came to read from it, and being in that auditorium with so many teenagers was truly one of the most fun experiences I have had on the road.

I am in San Francisco for the day to do a reading at Mercy High School, which has selected my book for a school-wide read. Sorry, no posts today.

The latest issue of the London Review of Books is available, and it includes an excellent essay by Hilary Mantel on two new books about the AIDS crisis in South Africa. The essay explores sociological, economic, historical, and cultural aspects of the epidemic in a country that struck down apartheid only a decade or so ago. A must read.

Today marks the start of Ramadan, so I’d like to wish ramadan karim to all my Muslim readers. May the coming month bring good tidings to all. In a happy coincidence, Rosh Hashanah started at sundown last night, so happy new year to all my Jewish readers as well.