Laila Lalami

Yesterday, in between writing and grading, I kept thinking about this line from Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians: “All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.” Over the last few weeks, people throughout the Arab world have been reconnecting with this memory and demanding change. The people of Egypt have taken to the streets today to pursue this goal; the Mubarak regime’s response has been, as always, violent repression.

The Guardian asked a group of writers, including me, what we make of the protests that are now rocking the region. Here is my contribution:

In Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, published in 1966, an unnamed university graduate returns to his home country, Sudan, full of hope about the new era of independence in his country. But an old man from his ancestral village warns him: “Mark these words of mine, my son. Has not the country become independent? Have we not become free men in our own country? Be sure, though, that they will direct our affairs from afar. This is because they have left behind them people who think as they do.”

As Salih predicted, the regimes that have followed European occupation of the Arab world have consolidated power in the hands of a small elite, which was often beholden to foreign countries and bent on repressing the civil and human rights of its people. Over the last two generations, the majority of young Arabs have known only two or three heads of state, each brought to office thanks to heredity, coup d’état, or sham elections. This is why, reading about the events in Tunisia earlier this month, it seemed to me I was witnessing the first national uprising in the Arab world since independence.

You can read it all here.

(Photo credit: AP/NYT)

Over the last few weeks, I have been following the unraveling of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, my emotions changing from surprise, to awe, and then to elation. As you probably know by now, the protests began on December 17 when Mohammed Bouazizi, a vegetable vendor who had suffered from police harassment for some time, had his unlicensed cart confiscated. He set himself on fire in the main square in the town of Sidi Bouzid, an act of desperation that inspired the country’s thousands of unemployed graduates to take to the streets in protest. It was perhaps understandable for some observers to initially dismiss the protests as another one of the region’s “bread riots.” But this was Tunisia, a country so tightly controlled that the protests themselves were highly unusual.

The police did what police do in dictatorships: they used tear gas, beat up protestors with clubs, and fired live ammunition, killing dozens of people. But the protests continued. Two weeks into the unrest, Ben Ali gave a television address, where he tried to show sympathy for the unemployed, while also blaming the country’s troubles on foreign hands and agent provocateurs. His speech was interrupted by a ringing cell phone, which turned a solemn affair into a comic one, as a flustered Ben Ali leaned forward and back in his chair without answering it. His patina of stern dictator seemed to crack. For the first time, his portraits were ripped from street corners. Trade union members and professionals joined students in the protests, which reached a fever pitch on January 4th, when it was reported that Bouazizi had died of his wounds.

Ben Ali dismissed a few members of his cabinet, but the protests grew even more popular, spreading from Sidi Bouzid to Kasserine, Sfax, Hammamet, and the capital. Then, on January 13th, he delivered a long litany of promises: he would create jobs, he would allow more personal freedoms, he would appoint an investigative commission, and, most significantly, he would leave office in 2014. Here was the dictator on television again, a man of seventy-four years with unnaturally dark hair and a chubby face, but the expression behind his eyeglasses was one of astonishment and fear. I had seen that expression before, a long, long time ago—on the face of Ceauşescu.

In the February 7 issue of The Nation magazine, I comment on the Tunisian events, and offer some context for them. Here is the opening paragraph:

In conventional thinking about the Middle East, perhaps the most persistent cliché is “moderate Arab country.” The label seems to apply indiscriminately to monarchies and republics, ancient dictatorships and newly installed ones, from the Atlantic Coast to the Persian Gulf, so long as the country in question is of some use to the United States. And, almost always, it crops up in articles and policy papers vaunting the need for America to support these countries, bulwarks against growing Islamic extremism in the Arab world.

A perfect example is Tunisia. Just three summers ago, Christopher Hitchens delivered a 2,000-word ode to the North African nation in Vanity Fair, describing it as an “enclave of development” menaced by “the harsh extremists of a desert religion.” This is a country with good economic growth, a country where polygamy was outlawed in 1956, a country with high levels of education, a country with perfect sandy beaches. And, Hitchens wrote, it “makes delicious wine and even exports it to France.

You can read the piece in its entirety here. And you can subscribe to the magazine here.

(Photo Credit: AP)

Not long ago, I received a kind email from a reader in Pakistan, telling me how much he enjoyed reading my first book, which he had read in its Urdu translation. An “excellent work,” he called it, and he wanted to know whether I was working on something new. This is very flattering, of course, and I was touched by the compliment, but I confess my first thought was: what Urdu translation? My collection of short stories, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, was published in a bunch of different foreign languages, but I was pretty sure Urdu wasn’t one of them. I asked this gentle reader if he wouldn’t mind sending me a copy. He said yes, and about four weeks later, I received a book wrapped only in a white band (which I imagine made it easier for customs officials to check the package). So here it is, a pirated translation of my book.

Now, I don’t speak Urdu, but, as it happens, this language uses an Arabic-like script, so I’m at least able to decipher a few words. I could read my name, and I could decipher a title, and I could even make out the name of the translator. It seemed vaguely familiar. Hmm, where had I heard it before? A quick search through my email showed that this gentleman had gotten in touch with me in the fall of 2006, to ask how he could spell my name in Arabic. I gave him the information, but when I asked why he needed it, I didn’t hear from him until early 2007, when he wrote to inform me that he had translated Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits into Urdu. And, he added, he was doing this sort of work for the greater good and he hoped I could find it in my heart to do the same.

After I got over my shock, I forwarded the message to my publisher, who wrote him directly to say that he needed to secure copyright permission if he wanted to publish his translation. “I was thinking of publishing the translation eventually,” the translator replied, although “no publisher commissioned me for [it].” And, well, why don’t I just quote the rest of the email:

As I wrote to Ms. Lalami, literature doesn’t sell well with Urdu readership. What does sell is mostly travel writing, women’s digests, bittersweet romances, and religious books. No mainstream publisher would even touch novels, etc. in the hope of making money Those who print this kind of literature are people like me, I mean people whose main source of income is a profession other than publishing or writing. I was not exaggerating when I said that the ordinary print run for novels is only a few hundred copies. Of these, twenty copies will come to me, if I’m fortunate enough to find a publisher, about 40 to 50 will go as complimentary copies to other writer friends, and the remaining copies will take a few years to sell. There is no question of a reprint. (I might also add here that the price of a book of about 200 pages would be between 2 to 3 US dollars.)

Pretty bleak picture, wouldn’t you say? But that is the fact. What some of us wrongheaded people do makes no sense in this country. But we do it anyway, wrongheaded or not. After all, one of our poets says to his beloved: “Come one day … if only not to come.” Paradox?! Whatever. But we instinctively know what all it means.

No, I didn’t clear the copyright issue with you. But this is just as good a time as any. I’d be personally grateful if you would consider granting it. Of course, I can’t pay for it. In recognition of the favor, and as a gesture of thankfulness, I’d be happy to share some of my copies, assuming we will get to that stage, with you and Ms. Lalami. And, of course, I’ll make sure that your permission is acknowledged on the translation, in a wording of your choice. If this isn’t what you were expecting, I’m very sorry.

The person in charge of copyright clearance at Algonquin Books replied that permissions were normally granted to publishing houses, not to freelance translators, and that he should have his publisher contact us directly. We never heard back, and I thought that was it. Until a few weeks ago, when this gentle Pakistani reader wrote to tell me about the translation he had bought in a Karachi bookstore.

Part of me feels like, hey, how cool is it that my work is pirated? How edgy. And the other part of me is outraged that someone, a professor at a major American university no less, would simply translate and publish a work of literature abroad without proper copyright permission. I’m not into writing for the money, God knows, but these translations are illegal, there is no guarantee that they are faithful to the original, and they punish other publishing houses and translators, those who do sign the proper agreements. And that’s neither cool nor edgy. That’s destructive. How do you translate that in Urdu?