Laila Lalami

Lately, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Hannah Arendt’s work, so it was a special treat to come across Adam Kirsch’s excellent article about her in this week’s New Yorker. Here is the opening paragraph:

In 1999, the Croatian novelist Slavenka Drakulić visited The Hague to observe the trials for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia. Among the defendants was Goran Jelisić, a thirty-year-old Serb from Bosnia, who struck her as “a man you can trust.” With his “clear, serene face, lively eyes, and big reassuring grin,” he reminded Drakulić of one of her daughter’s friends. Many of the witnesses at The Hague shared this view of the defendant—even many Muslims, who told the court how Jelisić helped an old Muslim neighbor repair her windows after they were shattered by a bomb, or how he helped another Muslim friend escape Bosnia with his family. But the Bosnian Muslims who had known Jelisić seven years earlier, when he was a guard at the Luka prison camp, had different stories to tell. Over a period of eighteen days in 1992, they testified, Jelisić himself killed more than a hundred prisoners. As Drakulić writes, he chose his victims at random, by asking “a man to kneel down and place his head over a metal drainage grating. Then he would execute him with two bullets in the back of the head from his pistol, which was equipped with a silencer.” He liked to introduce himself with the words “Hitler was the first Adolf, I am the second.” He was sentenced to forty years in prison.

None of Drakulić’s experience in creating fictional characters could help her understand such a mind, which remained all the more unfathomable because of Jelisić’s apparent normality, even gentleness. “The more you realize that war criminals might be ordinary people, the more afraid you become,” she wrote. What Drakulić discovered, in other words, is what Hannah Arendt, at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in Jerusalem, some forty years earlier, called “the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”

The essay covers a lot of ground—including Arendt’s troubled, and troubling, relationship with Heidegger and how the experience contributed to her intellectual growth. You can read the entire piece online, here.

I was so overloaded with work last fall that I didn’t have time at all for any pleasure reading, which is why I came so late to my friend Randa Jarrar’s debut novel, A Map of Home. This is a traditional bildungsroman, but one in which the hero is actually a Greek-Palestinian-Egyptian heroine named Nidali, who grows up in Kuwait and Texas, who puts in a strong argument for why the Egyptian crooner Abdel Halim must have been gay, and whose attempts at college entrance essays include one titled “I Come From Crazy Stubborn, Mad Lovin’ Hoes.” I read the book in one sitting. Jarrar writes with honesty and humor about what it’s like to be a Palestinian girl in Kuwait, or an Arab in Texas. Here’s a small excerpt from the middle of the book, when Nidali’s father decides he will write his memoir:

Your father was the #1 student in all of Jenin!” Baba said proudly one afternoon after supper. “I blew fear into the other boys’ hearts. No one surpassed me. I rode the donkey down to school every morning and sat in the classroom–which was freezing in wintertime since some of the windows were broken–and I always had my hand up: I could answer any question. Without fail, my name appeared first on that list every year.”
I wanted Baba to tell me more about this donkey, about growing up in Palestine on the small hill in the small house, spreading mats for beds on the floor of the one-room house. “I’d rather hear your stories than study any book,” I said, and, unfortunately for me, he took this announcement literally.
“Then bring me a piece of paper!” he commanded. “And bring me a pen!” he said, so I did, and then he said, “Sit! Now write: Ever…wait.” He stared off into the window, or at the branches in the fake forest we painted on the wall. “Evergreen,” he said, “write it,” so I did. Then he said, “Now write, A Memoir, Waheed Ammar,” so I wrote, A Memoir, Waheed Ammar. Then he stared off again and anxiously bit the inside of his cheeks, his mouth twisted to the side and his lips pouting.
“There…No! Don’t write that. Wait! The hills in 1901…No! Did you write that? Don’t write it. Wait till I say full stop. Wait! Fuck, you’re ruining my inspiration. Kids! You can’t be an artist and have kids! Now sit, don’t stand there leaning that paper against the couch, didn’t you hear? I said a memoir. So sit.”

You can find out more about the book here.

I’m thrilled to hear that the Moroccan novelist, essayist, and critic Abdelfettah Kilito has a new book out in the United States, Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, which is billed as a meditation on the role of language, translation, and bilingualism in Arabic literature. The book is translated into English by the talented Wail Hassan (the author of an excellent critical evaluation of Tayeb Salih’s fiction.)

(Via the Literary Saloon.)

Israel’s siege of Gaza, which began on November 5 with the blocking of food, medicine, fuel, animal feed, supplies, and other basic necessities to the Palestinian population, and which culminated on December 27 with the bombing and ground assaults that killed more than 510 people and injured as many as 2500 others, is the largest military action against Palestinians since 1967.  Palestinian rockets fired from Gaza have killed 4 people in Israel.

When I think about all those who have died (like the five daughters of the Balousha family, Tahir Balousha, 17; Ikram Balousha, 14; Samar Balousha, 12; Dina Balousha, 8; and Jawaher Balousha, 4, all of whom were killed by an Israeli bomb that fell on the mosque next door to their house) I feel that our collective humanity is diminished.  This war is a crime.

It is also the biggest gift Israel could have given to Hamas.  Hamas will now almost certainly gather more support among the survivors, a fact that is unlikely to make a political solution to the conflict any easier. Iran will also seek to capitalize on the fact that the Arab League buffoons implicitly or explicitly condoned the strikes.

While the Palestinians were being bombed, Mahmoud Abbas (who only fifteen years ago would have been labeled a terrorist because of his membership in Fatah, but who is considered an acceptable partner now that Hamas is around) was sipping coffee with his good friends, the Saudi princes.  In fifteen years, Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh will be sipping coffee with someone else while Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni, and the other Israeli leaders who support this illegal occupation bemoan the lack of a real partner in peace.  And so it goes.