Laila Lalami

What happens when I try to cook.

Sad news this morning: Novelist and critic Elizabeth Hardwick, who co-founded the New York Review of Books, has died.

Pindeldyboz has announced that it will cease publication of its print magazine on December 10, 2007. They’re having a party in New York to celebrate the final issue. Check it out.

I have been battling with every ounce of my strength the urge to respond to Martin Amis’s latest comments on Muslims. I have succumbed to that urge before, mind you, but not this time. Instead, I offer you, gentle reader, a quote from James Baldwin.

[I]ndeed, within this web of lust and fury, black and white can only thrust and counter-thrust, long for each other’s slow, exquisite death; death by torture, acid knives and burning; the thrust, the counter-thrust, the longing making the heavier that cloud which blinds and suffocates them both, so that they go down into the pit together. Thus has the cage betrayed us all, this moment, our life, turned to nothing through our terrible attempts to insure it. For Bigger’s tragedy is not that he is cold or black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being sub-human and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria, bequeathed to him at birth. But our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult–that is, accept it.

Excerpted from “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” reprinted in Notes of a Native Son.

As I mentioned a few days ago, Words Without Borders has asked me to lead a book club discussion of Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King. My first post is already up on their site. Here’s how it starts:

When my friend Mark Sarvas introduced his book club discussion of Sándor Márai’s The Rebels, he wrote that “as an American of Hungarian descent, taking on Márai was an obvious and overdue choice for me.” I confess to a very similar bias in my own choice. When I was presented with a list of books to pick from, I naturally gravitated to a novel by a fellow African, in this case Camara Laye, whose Radiance of the King I had not read before. Generally speaking, African authors who write in French, or indeed in any of the native languages of Africa such as Gikuyu or Berber or Swahili, are not nearly as known or read in the United States as those who write in English. So the opportunity to discuss Camara Laye was also an opportunity for me to invite readers to consider a different African book and a different African author than those with whom they may already be familiar.

Camara Laye was born in 1928 in Kouroussa, a small village of Guinea, which at that time was under French occupation. He attended Qur’anic school as well as elementary school in his village, but moved to Conakry, the capital, in order to continue his education. In 1947, he moved to Paris to attend engineering school. His experience of double dislocation—from his village to the city, from Guinea to France—appears to have inspired in him a deep nostalgia for home. His first novel, the semi-autobiographical L’Enfant noir (usually translated as The Dark Child), was published in 1953, and was met with a mixture of admiration and hostility: Admiration for Camara’s storytelling skills, and hostility for his depiction of an idyllic village childhood at a time when the country was under colonial rule. These reactions remind me of those reserved for Moroccan novelist Ahmed Sefroui’s La Boîte à merveilles, published in 1954, and which also depicted a happy childhood under/despite French rule. Some scholars today may consider both novels ethnographic works, while others may emphasize the tribute they pay to ways of life later disrupted by French rule.

You can visit the book club area for the rest of this entry, and to post some comments.

One of the advantages of being on vacation is that, despite having brought my laptop with me, I did not keep up with the news. So until I came back, I had been unaware that riots had ignited in the suburb of Villiers-le-Bel in France, following the deaths of two teenagers of North African and West African descent; that there had been a circus at Annapolis, in which nothing was achieved (well, except for Mahmoud Abbas getting to try on the local haberdashery); that the Sudanese government was using a stupid teddy bear to divert attention from the killings in Darfur; and that my beloved Tangier lost its bid to host the 2012 World Expo.

(The above picture is from Glass Beach in Kauai.)