Laila Lalami

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, a writer, and we found ourselves doing that thing that writers often do: sharing horror stories about the book world. Here is one (among many) I told her. Several years ago, at a summer writers’ conference, I met a magazine editor who happened to be from the same city I lived in at the time. The editor said she was looking for slush pile readers, and I naively expressed some interest in helping out, on a volunteer basis. She sized me up, then asked, “How old are you?”

I didn’t quite understand why she asked me my age, but I answered, almost mechanically, “Thirty five.”

“Oh,” said the magazine editor. “Well, if you would like to volunteer your time, we really need help with office work.”

In a swift second, I had been reclassified from a potential reader of undiscovered gems to the person who stuffs rejection notices in envelopes. Needless to say, I never submitted any work to her. Eventually, I published a bunch of stories, then a book, and then another book. The kicker? A few years later, the editor, too, published a book. Then her publicist emailed me to ask me whether I could review it.

As some of you may know, A Public Space, the magazine founded in 2005 by Brigid Hughes, occasionally publishes ‘Focus Portfolios,’ which introduce the reader to the literature of a particular country. Issue 9, edited by the scholar Brian Edwards, is about Cairo. You can read Edwards’ introduction, Cairo 2010: After Kefaya, online. Contributors to the special issue include Mansoura Ez Eldin, Ahmed Alaidy, Magdy El Shafee, Muhammad Aladdin, Mohamed Al-Fakhrany, Ibrahim El Batout, Omar Taher and Khalid Kassab.

The picture above was taken at the British Museum, which is, sadly, as close as I ever came to seeing Cairo antiquities.

The American Scholar has a rather interesting piece about Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s constant struggles with money. I am not entirely convinced by the mathematical conversions of Fitzgerald’s income into today’s dollars, but the article provides some good insight into how the novelist and short-story writer handled in real life something that constantly occupied him in his fiction:

In “How to Live on $36,000 a Year,” Fitzgerald wrote that in 1920, three months after marrying Zelda, he ran out of money. “This particular crisis passed” when he discovered the next morning that publishers sometimes advance royalties. As he put it, “So the only lesson I learned from it was that my money usually turns up somewhere in time of need, and that at the worst you can always borrow—a lesson that would make Benjamin Franklin turn over in his grave.”

You can read the full article here.

Photo of Robert Redford in the film adaptation of The Great Gatsby: Forbes.

Who says Twitter is useless? Although I find the ceaseless posting somewhat overwhelming, I have also come across some really interesting material there. Yesterday, for instance, I discovered (via Maud Newton’s feed) this incredible 1963 footage of James Baldwin visiting San Francisco. Because the sound quality is not perfect, the film has been subtitled (with a few typos). You can watch the clip here, on the website of San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive.

When I heard that Ralph Nader had written a book called Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, I thought, based on its title, that it had to be some sort of satire. But, according to the publicity materials posted by Nader’s publisher, Seven Stories Press, the book is about a group of fabulously wealthy individuals who decide that it is time to make good on the promise of “liberty and justice for all.” Led by the billionaire Warren Buffet, they start working for the common good: workers’ unions, clean elections, human rights, and so on. So Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us is really a fantasy, but its sheer length (780 pages!) causes NPR’s Alan Cheuse to call it “an unconscionable attack on America’s trees.”

Perhaps anticipating the confusion, Nader has said that this book is not a novel. It is “a fictional vision that could become a new reality.” Me, I’m just curious how he plans on getting those super-rich to read his book.

The Dutch translation of my novel, Secret Son, is being published this week in Amsterdam, under the title De Geheime Zoon. Since this blog has a fair number of Dutch readers, I thought I’d mention this. Go out and get it! I won’t be traveling to the Netherlands this time, but I hope that readers who read the book will report back with their thoughts.

One of the books I’m most excited about this fall is Chinua Achebe’s The Education of a British-Protected Child, a collection of essays about his life in Nigeria and America. It’s being published this week and I believe this is his first book since Home and Exile, which was based on lectures he gave at Harvard. There is some coverage at Reuters, though it follows the usual, predictable track: famous novelist, Things Fall Apart, grandfather of African literature, etc.

This week, the American Library Association observes Banned Books Week, an effort at raising awareness about censorship and the freedom to read. Many books have been challenged, or entirely banned, over the years in the United States, including, at various times, Beloved, The Great Gatsby, Catch 22, The Grapes of Wrath, and (my personal favorite) The American Heritage Dictionary, which was removed from a Missouri library in 1978 because it contained “objectionable” words. Interestingly, the most common initiators of book challenges are parents. You can find a list of classics that have been challenged or banned over the years here.

The most recent issue of the London Review of Books includes a thought-provoking cover story by the writer and academic Walter Benn Michaels. The essential argument of “What Matters” is that, while the United States has made some progress in the last forty years in matters of sexual and racial equality, it has remained virtually unchanged when it comes to class inequality.

No group dedicated to ending economic inequality would be thinking today about declaring victory and going home. In 1969, the top quintile of American wage-earners made 43 per cent of all the money earned in the US; the bottom quintile made 4.1 per cent. In 2007, the top quintile made 49.7 per cent; the bottom quintile 3.4. And while this inequality is both raced and gendered, it’s less so than you might think. (…)

An obvious question, then, is how we are to understand the fact that we’ve made so much progress in some areas while going backwards in others. And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we’ve made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven’t isn’t. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism. Hence the extraordinary advances in the battle against discrimination, and hence also its limits as a contribution to any left-wing politics. The increased inequalities of neoliberalism were not caused by racism and sexism and won’t be cured by – they aren’t even addressed by – anti-racism or anti-sexism. (…)

American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity.

I found the article to be refreshing; I’ve always thought that class is a huge taboo in the United States. It’s rarely ever discussed, and when it is, it’s usually in terms of its interaction with race. But I also think Michaels overstates his points considerably. Take, for instance, the case of the recent arrest of Henry Louis Gates, which Michaels describes thus:

The recent furore over the arrest for ‘disorderly conduct’ of Henry Louis Gates helps make this clear. Gates, as one of his Harvard colleagues said, is ‘a famous, wealthy and important black man’, a point Gates himself tried to make to the arresting officer – the way he put it was: ‘You don’t know who you’re messing with.’ But, despite the helpful hint, the cop failed to recognise an essential truth about neoliberal America: it’s no longer enough to kowtow to rich white people; now you have to kowtow to rich black people too. The problem, as a sympathetic writer in the Guardian put it, is that ‘Gates’s race snuffed out his class status,’ or as Gates said to the New York Times, ‘I can’t wear my Harvard gown everywhere.’ In the bad old days this situation almost never came up – cops could confidently treat all black people, indeed, all people of colour, the way they traditionally treated poor white people. But now that we’ve made some real progress towards integrating our elites, you need to step back and take the time to figure out ‘who you’re messing with’. You need to make sure that nobody’s class status is snuffed out by his race.

Michaels’ assertion that “in the bad old days…cops could confidently treat all black people, indeed, all people of color, the way they traditionally treated poor white people” is simply inaccurate. All other things being equal (which of course they never are, but bear with me for the sake of the argument), race does play a role in the way in which cops treat people. And you don’t need to take my word for it; just look at statistics emanating from police departments in cities like Los Angeles. If a poor white man drove a Rolls Royce in Beverly Hills, he would not necessarily be stopped, while a rich black man might, as famously happened to the lawyer Johnnie Cochran in 1979. The fact remains that racism does play a role that cannot be entirely explained away by an appeal to class. Still, I think the article is interesting, because it explains why the focus on race and sex at the expense of class legitimates disparities and perpetuates prevailing power structures.

I recently came across Princeton University’s Online Arabic Poetry Project, which presents excerpts from the work of five great Arab poets: Imru al-Qays, Yazid ibn Muawiya, Rabia al-Adawiya, Abu Nuwas, and al-Mutanabbi. You can listen to the poems in the original Arabic and then read the English translation.