Laila Lalami

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.

Between my teaching at UCR, my semester commitment at Warren Wilson, my new novel, and two essays that were due this past month, I simply haven’t had a moment to update my blog.  And now that I do have time, I’m actually in Portland, Oregon. I’m visiting my sister, watching the blizzard of ‘08, and looking forward to being unplugged for a few days. But I’ll be back here on Monday, January 5th.  See you then.

Photo credit: The Oregonian via Flickr.

I’ve been asked to write an introduction to Tayeb Salih’s seminal novel, Season of Migration to the North, for a new edition that will be coming out in the New York Review of Books Classics series. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, then you’re probably aware that Salih’s book is one of my favorite Arabic novels. So it was a delight to be asked and a treat to do this piece.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this book, here’s a little blurb about it:

After many years of study in Europe, the young narrator of Season of Migration to the North returns to his village along the Nile in the Sudan, eager to make a contribution to the new postcolonial life of his country. Back home, he discovers a stranger among the familiar faces of childhood—the enigmatic Mustafa Sa’eed. Mustafa takes the young man into his confidence, telling him the story of his own years in London in the early part of the twentieth century, of his brilliant career as an economist, and of the series of fraught and deadly relationships with European women that led to a terrible public reckoning and his return to his native land.

But what is the meaning of Mustafa’s shocking confession? Mustafa disappears without explanation, leaving the young man —whom he has asked to look after his wife—in an unsettled and violent no-man’s-land between Europe and Africa, tradition and innovation, holiness and defilement, and man and woman, from which no one will escape unaltered or unharmed.

In a happy coincidence, this book will be coming out on April 14, a week before my novel, Secret Son, is released.

What a thrill it was to find that the New York Times Book Review’s Notable Books of 2008 includes the collection of poems Half of the World in Light by my friend and UCR colleague Juan Felipe Herrera!  Felicidades, JFH!

The December 1 issue of the Nation includes a review by Siddhartha Deb of Elias Khoury’s most recent novel, Yalo. Here is the opening paragraph:

The fragments of the past never add up to a whole in Beirut. The city seems to communicate in images rather than in narrative, presenting a kaleidoscope of car bomb assassinations and refugee camps, Israeli warplanes and Hezbollah fighters, shards that whirl before our eyes without yielding much meaning. And these pieces are only from recent years, thrown up by a city that already holds in its subterranean layers the 1975-90 civil war, with its militias and massacres, and long before that the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and colonial occupation by the French. When a writer attempts, then, to make Beirut the source of his work, one can understand why the first principle of his aesthetic is that a fragmented city demands a fragmented novel.

Aside from Yalo, Deb also covers Little Mountain and Gate of the Sun. (I reviewed Khoury for the Los Angeles Times a few months ago; if you’re curious about my take, you can click here.)

Interesting piece by Slavoj Žižek in the LRB.  I think he’s right that far too many political observers get caught in cynically realist positions and don’t see what is happening in front of their noses:

The paradigmatic cynic tells you confidentially: ‘But don’t you see that it is all really about money/power/sex, that professions of principle or value are just empty phrases which count for nothing?’ What the cynics don’t see is their own naivety, the naivety of their cynical wisdom which ignores the power of illusions.

The reason Obama’s victory generated such enthusiasm is not only that, against all odds, it really happened: it demonstrated the possibility of such a thing happening. The same goes for all great historical ruptures – think of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although we all knew about the rotten inefficiency of the Communist regimes, we didn’t really believe that they would disintegrate – like Kissinger, we were all victims of cynical pragmatism. Obama’s victory was clearly predictable for at least two weeks before the election, but it was still experienced as a surprise.

And he goes on to connect the power of illusion and narrative to the way in which the financial meltdown is currently being framed. The piece is freely available here.

I noticed The World is What It Is—Patrick French’s biography of V.S. Naipaul—last week at the bookstore, but I wasn’t particularly in the mood to read 500 pages about someone as unpleasant as Naipaul. Dwight Garner’s review of the book makes me want to reconsider:

Well, the reader thinks, here we go: Mr. French’s 550-page biography will be a long string of bummers, a forced march through the life of a startlingly original writer with an ugly, remote personality.

The good news is that Mr. French, a young British journalist, is certainly unafraid to face unpleasant facts about his subject. But the better news about “The World Is What It Is” is this: it’s one of the sprightliest, most gripping, most intellectually curious and, well, funniest biographies of a living writer (Mr. Naipaul is 76) to come along in years.

Mr. French is a relative rarity among biographers, a real writer, and at his best he sounds like a combination of that wily bohemian Geoff Dyer and that wittily matter-of-factual cyborg Michael Kinsley.

Even the cameos in Mr. French’s biography are crazily vivid. Here is his hole-in-one description of the editor Francis Wyndham: “Popular, gentle, solitary and eccentric, Wyndham lived with his mother, wore heavy glasses and high-waisted trousers, gave off random murmurs and squeaks and moved with an amphibian gait.”

You can read it all here. Read the rest of this entry »

Even though I had a formidable migraine and could hardly stand to read by the lamplight, the opening to Mark Danner’s new piece in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books completely drew me in:

Scandal is our growth industry. Revelation of wrongdoing leads not to definitive investigation, punishment, and expiation but to more scandal. Permanent scandal. Frozen scandal. The weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist. The torture of detainees who remain forever detained. The firing of prosecutors which is forever investigated. These and other frozen scandals metastasize, ramify, self-replicate, clogging the cable news shows and the blogosphere and the bookstores. The titillating story that never ends, the pundit gabfest that never ceases, the gift that never stops giving: what is indestructible, irresolvable, unexpiatable is too valuable not to be made into a source of profit. Scandal, unpurged and unresolved, transcends political reality to become commercial fact.

We remember, many of us, a different time. However cynically we look to our political past, it is there that we find our political Eden: Vietnam and its domestic denouement, Watergate—the climax of a different time of scandal that ended a war and brought down a president. In retrospect those events unfold with the clear logic of utopian dream. First, revelation: intrepid journalists exposing the gaudy, interlocking crimes of the Nixon administration. Then, investigation: not just by the press—for that was but precursor, the necessary condition—but by Congress and the courts. Investigation, that is, by the polity, working through its institutions to construct a story of grim truth that citizens can in common accept. And finally expiation: the handing down of sentences, the politicians in shackles led off to jail, the orgy of public repentance. The exorcism of shame, the purging of the political system, and the return to a state, however imperfect, of societal grace.

It is a myth, of course, but a lovely one.

You see what I mean? You can read the whole piece here.