Guess what? I’m traveling again; I’m going to Portland to visit my sister. I’m also trying to finish a new piece before I start teaching in January, so things are a bit hectic at the moment. Posting is likely to be light over the next few days.
My friend D. emailed me to say that my book appeared in the best-seller list compiled by the Moroccan magazine Le Journal. It’s really lovely to see the Moroccan edition (published by Le Fennec) getting into the hands of readers.
The two car bombs that exploded in Algiers yesterday have made anywhere from 31 to 60 victims, depending on the source. Gaddafi pitched a tent in Paris and signed billions of dollars’ worth of armament deals with France; Sarkozy and his government quickly forgot about Libya’s poor human rights record. Meanwhile, the Bush administration continues to put pressure on Iran, despite the latest National Intelligence Estimate. One could go on all day in this vein, so here’s an uplifting story, for a change: A Muslim college student breaks up train beating of two Jewish youths.
Over the past year, novelist Cliff Garstang has been commenting on short stories published in the New Yorker, and now he promises he will reveal his five favorites soon. I canceled my subscription to the magazine when I moved back to Morocco to finish my book, and I was often grateful to be able to read the stories online, although I didn’t always keep up with them, so I just spent the past hour browsing though the posts and reading (or rereading) some of the pieces.
Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden, which appeared in the United States in a translation by Fady Joudah almost a year ago but has not gotten a single review in a newspaper or magazine, was written up this weekend in the Guardian. Here’s what Fiona Sampson said about the book:
This most public of Palestinians is the master not of reductive polemic but of a profoundly lyric imagination, one that draws together the textures of daily life, physical beauty - whether of landscape or of women - longing, myth and history. Using poetry complex with personal experience, he has recreated an entire society’s sensibility.
Read it all here.
My discussion of Camara Laye’s novel The Radiance of the King continues over at Words Without Borders. Here’s a snippet:
I want to start our discussion of The Radiance of the King by talking about the story itself. In the novel, Clarence, a white man of undefined origin and occupation, lands on the coast of Africa (which coast, you ask? We are not told) and in short order he loses all his money, in a gambling game, to a group of white men. He is evicted from his hotel, and the owner decides to keep Clarence’s trunk as collateral for the unpaid bill. Now Clarence is desperate; he wants to figure out a way to get his belongings, since his only possessions now are the clothes on his back, which are already showing signs of wear. He stumbles onto a street celebration for a local monarch, and immediately and rather arrogantly thinks that the king might hire him as an advisor, or at least vouch for him to the hotel owner, or, at any rate, know what to do to save Clarence from the misery in which he finds himself.
I love reading the profiles Maya Jaggi writes for the Guardian, don’t you? Her latest one is of Orhan Pamuk.
This past weekend, the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies hosted a conference on the work of Clifford Geertz, the famed anthropologist who wrote extensively about Morocco (and Indonesia.) The conference was organized by Susan Slyomovics and Lahouari Addi, and featured conversations between anthropologists from around the world. Unfortunately, I was working on a new piece, so I wasn’t able to attend any of the panels, but I managed to get away on Saturday night to attend the musical performance that took place at the Fowler museum.
The Aza music ensemble played Tamazight-language songs that fused indigenous Moroccan beats with modern sounds. They used the oud and qraqeb, but also the guitar, tabla, clarinet, and banjo. I don’t speak a word of Tamazight, but the music touched me and their rhythms made me want to get up and dance. I took a photo of them with my phone, but as you can see I was a bit far from the stage. You can listen to some excerpts from their music here. Aza was co-founded by two Moroccan-Americans from Santa Cruz, Fattah Abbou and Mohamed Aoualou, and includes four talented artists from the area as well.
Afterwards, the municipal orchestra of Sefrou took to the stage, accompanied by two guest artists from the Los Angeles area. The featured vocalist was the amazing Abderrahim Souiri, who performed an array of Andalusian songs; he was joined on stage by the equally amazing Raphael Skouri, who I believe is the cantor of the Baba Sale synagogue. Souiri and Skouri alternated singing verses in Arabic and in Hebrew, and their voices complemented each other beautifully, culminating in a rousing rendition of the late Abdessadek Cheqara’s “Bent Bladi.” It was nice to have an evening in which so many different components of the Moroccan music scene were present. The lyrics were in Tamazight, Arabic, and Hebrew, and were sung by Arab and Berber, Muslim and Jewish, male and female musicians.
Seattle writer Valerie Trueblood contributes the column below about the famed traveler Isabelle Eberhardt, who, for much of her short life, lived and wrote about Algeria during the French occupation.
Hardly anybody who met the writer Isabelle Eberhardt at the turn of the last century thought she was an Arab man. But all of her physical and mental powers went into making believe she was one: she dressed like one, she rode and camped like one, she lived hand to mouth in the Algerian desert as a nomad and disciple of Sufism. At the same time, she wrote for the French newspapers and even sought to embed herself with the troops expanding French “protection,” having vague ideas of a fusion of Islamic and French culture in her adopted country. For herself, she chose firmly against European life in any form. The French in Algiers—other than officials who kept an eye on her movements—shunned her, despite their intense interest in her disguise and her exploits. As for the undeceived Algerians, they courteously received her as a man.
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