Laila Lalami

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.

I was somewhat surprised to discover recently that one of the most common search terms that lead readers to this blog is “Ahmed Marzouki.” You’ll remember that Marzouki is a former political prisoner who spent 18 years and 3 months of his life in the infamous Tazmamart jail. I wrote a review on this blog of his incandescent memoir, Tazmamart: Cellule 10, a few years ago.

I bring this up because I was recently reading Neil MacFarquhar’s new book, The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You A Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East. (Phew. What a mouthful!) This is a memoir of the years MacFarquhar spent in the region, and it includes a chapter on meeting Marzouki. Here is an excerpt:

“It is hard to find words to describe the horrors we lived—all alone, no light, no medicine, little food,” Marzouki said to me. Every time I asked him to remind me how long he had been a prisoner, he always responded “eighteen years, three months,” not rounding off a moment. “It was an eternal night.”

By bribing sympathetic guards, the men finally got word to their families that they were still alive despite the fact that King Hassan and his senior advisers denied that Tazmamart existed. The first significant break came after one officer’s daughter, a high school senior, scored among the top ten students in the entire country on the mandatory university entrance exams. During an audience with King Hassan, the king asked if there was anything they wanted and the girl bravely asked when her father was going to be released from Tazmamart. As Marzouki described it, the king calmly turned to an aide and asked, “Is anyone still alive in Tazmamart?” It took several more years before an international campaign finally pressured the monarch to release the men in September 1991. “We were ghosts, skeletons who could barely talk.”

MacFarquhar’s book came out in April; I picked up a copy at the lovely Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge.

When my first book was sold, several fellow writers suggested I hire an independent publicist. I think the common wisdom is that, because of the shrinking space devoted to books on radio, print, and television, debut authors need the extra help. But then I met Michael Taeckens, who is director of publicity for Algonquin, and I realized I had nothing to worry about: he is one of those rare people who is absolutely amazing at what he does. And he also happens to be a wonderful person and a good friend.

I’m very happy to report that Michael has an anthology coming out this summer. It’s called Love is a Four-Letter Word, and it includes contributions from Junot Díaz, Kate Christensen, Gary Shteyngart, Maud Newton, Jami Attenberg, and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, among many others. The essays are all true stories of heartbreak, but they are told with wit and wisdom, with humor and honesty. A great summer read.

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a huge fan of J.M. Coetzee, so I’m anxiously awaiting the release of his new novel, Summertime, which won’t be out here in the U.S. for quite a while. Fortunately, the most recent issue of the New York Review of Books includes an excerpt. Here’s a little taste:

By the time he arrives for his first stint, Mrs. Noerdien and the counter hands have gone home. He is introduced to the brothers. “My son John,” says his father, “who has offered to help with the checking.”

He shakes their hands: Mr. Rodney Silverman, Mr. Barrett Silverman.

“I’m not sure we can afford you on the payroll, John,” says Mr. Rodney. He turns to his brother. “Which do you think is more expensive, Barrett, a Ph.D. or a CA? We may have to take out a loan.”

They all laugh together at the joke. Then they offer him a rate. It is precisely the same rate he earned as a student, sixteen years ago, for copying household data onto cards for the municipal census.

With his father he settles down in the bookkeepers’ glass cubicle. The task that faces them is simple. They have to go through file after file of invoices, confirming that the figures have been transcribed correctly to the books and to the bank ledger, ticking them off one by one in red pencil, checking the addition at the foot of the page.

They set to work and make steady progress. Once every thousand entries they come across an error, a piddling five cents one way or the other. For the rest the books are in exemplary order. As defrocked clergymen make the best proofreaders, so debarred lawyers seem to make good bookkeepers— debarred lawyers assisted if need be by their overeducated, underemployed sons.

You can read the full excerpt here. Summertime features Coetzee himself as a character: the novel is about an English biographer who is working on a book about the now-dead writer “John Coetzee.”