Laila Lalami

Activists, professors and authors Abdelhay El Moudden and Abdelahad Sebti have launched an online Moroccan literary magazine called Ribat El Koutoub. It features book reviews, interviews, articles, and literary news. Check it out.

The French government has opened a National Center of the History of Immigration in Paris and Michael Kimmelman visits it for the New York Times. The result is a great, great piece that highlights the ways in which some French officials conceive of immigration. Here’s just one tiny excerpt:

“The history of immigration is one thing, and the history of slavery and the history of colonization are other things,” Jacques Toubon, the museum’s president, told me, somewhat defensively I thought. France “is very late in confronting the truth about its colonial history,” he said, but the purpose of his museum “is to tell the story of immigration.” That sounded to an American like devising a museum for African-American or American Indian cultures but skipping gingerly over slavery, segregation and Manifest Destiny.

Do read the entire piece here.

One thing Kimmelman could have pointed out is that the French name for the center is: Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, which, in a very literal translation, means simply “National City of the History of Immigration,” and so the word cité is meant to suggest republican notions of unity, and of a single, indivisible, unhyphenated French identity. But cité is also the colloquial word in French for the suburbs around the big cities where immigrants live. This is a bit like building a museum for Mexican-Americans and calling it the “barrio museum.” And the worst part of it is: I don’t even think French officials realize the ambiguity.

Maud Newton has a wonderful review in Sunday’s NYTBR of Ellen Litman’s Last Chicken in America. Here’s how it opens:

That people won’t read story collections is an axiom at publishing houses and a common notion in newspaper idea pieces. Whether it was ever true I tend to doubt, but it certainly isn’t now. Evidence springs effortlessly to mind — Junot Díaz, ZZ Packer, Lorrie Moore and George Saunders are just a few of the youngish writers beloved first for the short fiction that started their careers — yet the distrust persists.

When a good novel fails to find an audience, it’s the fault of bad marketing, unappealing cover art or a public too dim to appreciate literary fiction. But if short stories don’t sell, publishers blame the form. The resulting skittishness may account for the rise of the “novel in stories,” a hybridized creature typically denoted, as in the case of Ellen Litman’s “Last Chicken in America,” by an italicized subtitle.

The worst of these books are chilly and labyrinthine. You follow dour characters down corridors of plot, theme or emotion that threaten to lead to some destination, but never actually do. Litman’s elegantly constructed web of stories about Russian-Jewish immigrants living in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh is the converse of such aimless solemnity. It’s warm, true and original, and packed with incisive, subtle one-liners.

More here.

Giles Foden, the author of The Last King of Scotland and this year’s chair of judges for the Booker Prize, files a post-mortem piece for the Guardian about the judging process. I was shocked to read this tidbit:

The Reluctant Fundamentalist divided the panel: one judge felt the book tacitly supported Islamic fundamentalist violence, another that it evaded the issue. I thought these views were wrong. To my mind the skill of the book lay in the way its ingenious narrative device implicated the reader in the political issues explored.

The text itself remained ambivalent. The fact that the device was borrowed or learned from Camus’ The Fall did not generate as much excitement among the judges as it did among certain literary journalists. Most of us felt imitation of form was one of the ways in which literature is carried on. Besides, the debt to the author of The Fall was implicitly acknowledged by its overtness, and by a mention of Camus in the blurb.

Some of the judges thought The Reluctant Fundamentalist condones Islamic fundamentalist violence? The character of Changez smiles at the collapse of the towers not out of political or religious fervor, but because of feelings of inferiority and resentment that he, a man from a forgotten city of the third world, harbors toward the strongest city of the first world and its obscenely powerful corporations. But let’s face it: If the book had been written by a middle-aged white man (think Updike) he’d have been praised for his insights into the “Muslim mind.”

This is the question posed by Khalid Saghiyyah in this opinion piece for Al-Akhbar.

الصحافة ممنوعة من دخول مخيّم نهر البارد، وكذلك آلات التصوير، على الرغم من مرور أكثر من شهر ونصف شهر على انتهاء المعارك. والجولات الإعلامية الرسميّة لم تكن أكثر من مسرحية لم يُسمَح للمشاركين فيها بتجاوز عتبة المخيّم.
من يخاف الصحافة؟ سؤال نجد الإجابة عنه عبر بعض الصور المهرّبة، وبعض الصرخات التي تصاعدت، على رغم الحصار، من الأهالي «العائدين» إلى المخيّم الجديد، ناهيك بالأفلام والصور الفضائحيّة التي بدأ تداولها على شبكة الإنترنت

A month and a half after the end of the fighting in Nahr el Bared refugee camp, the press has still not been allowed in.

(Via.)

I am happy to report that Moroccan publishing house Le Fennec is issuing a French-language edition of my book for the local market. Here is the cover art:

I am in Portland today, at the invitation of a local high school, to give a reading from Hope. Driving in from the airport last night, I cried nearly all the way home. The city is so beautiful, so green, so expansive. (Could it be that a condition of my nomadic life is that I always pine for the place I have just left?) After having dinner with my sister, I hurried to Powell’s to browse for books. I found a rare, bilingual edition of al-Mutanabbi’s poems, which I had been eyeing for some time now, and I also replaced a couple of essential books that got damaged when they were shipped from Morocco last summer. More later.

Someone asked me how come I’m on the road so much this fall when I’m supposed to be teaching creative writing at UC Riverside. Short answer: I asked for (and received) a course reduction in the fall, so I will not be unleashed onto students until the winter quarter. Poor things.

Monica Ali wrote a piece for the Guardian in which she derides the media (including the newspaper that published her article) for giving so much attention to the handful of people who protested the making of her book into a film. Here’s a very quotable excerpt:

As seems to be the way with these things, press coverage began (in this newspaper) with the reporting of the views of a couple of self-appointed “community leaders”. I love it when a journalist does this. I think of him stumbling around Tower Hamlets, waving a notebook and echoing the old colonial cry from down the ages: take me to your leader.

Of course, writers who have ancestral roots in Muslim nations are used to this: Any kind of a protest over a supposedly offensive book is blown way out of proportion in the West, and the author turned into a martyr, whether she likes it or not.

See also:
Department of WTF.
Tempest in a Teacup.

This week’s New Yorker includes a nice opinion piece by Lawrence Wright on American occupation of Iraq:

In the upcoming Presidential primaries, Americans will have the chance to choose among candidates who propose immediate withdrawal from Iraq (Richardson), rapid drawdowns (Edwards and Obama), open-ended commitment to the war (Giuliani, Romney, McCain), or a resigned middle ground, notably Hillary Clinton, who acknowledges that the occupation will likely endure well into the next Presidential term no matter which party occupies the White House.

The Iraqi people have no such choice, even though it’s their future that is at stake—and even though the creation of a democratic republic, one in which the Iraqis command their own destiny, has been a stated goal of the war. According to President Bush, American troops will leave whenever the Iraqis ask us to. “It’s their government’s choice,” he has said. “If they were to say, leave, we would leave.” But while the Iraqi government is divided and uncertain about the presence of occupying forces, the will of the Iraqi people has been clear from the beginning: they want the troops withdrawn.

Read all of it here.