Laila Lalami

From Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.”Cheshire-Puss,” she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. ‘Come, it’s pleased so far,’ thought Alice, and she went on: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where-,” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“-so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another question. “What sort of people live about here?”

“In that direction,” the Cat said, waving its right paw round, “lives a Hatter: and in that direction,” waving the other paw, “lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.”

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

This pretty much sums up how I feel this morning.

A poem for this Friday: “Waiting for the Barbarians,” by Constantine Cavafy:

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

More poems by Cavafy here.

Every time I read through Tayib Salih’s Season of Migration to the North I notice how the book remains as relevant today as it was when it was first published.

Professor Maxwell Foster-Keen continued to draw a distinctive picture of the mind of a genius whom circumstances had driven to killing in a moment of bad passion. He related to them how I had been appointed a lecturer in economics at London University at the age of twenty-four. He told them that Ann Hammond and Sheila Greenwood were girls who were seeking death by every means and that they would have committed suicide whether they had met Mustafa Sa’eed or not. “Mustafa Sa’eed, gentlemen of the jury, is a noble person whose mind was able to absorb Western civilization but it broke his heart. These girls were not killed by Mustafa Sa’eed but by the germ of a deadly disease that assailed them a thousand years ago.” It occurred to me that I should stand up and say to them: “This is untrue, a fabrication. It was I who killed them. I am the desert of thirst. I am no Othello. I am a lie. Why don’t you sentence me to be hanged and so kill the lie?” But Professor Maxwell Foster-Keen turned the trial into a conflict between two worlds, a struggle of which I was one of the victims.

This, of course, from the scene in which Professor Maxwell Foster-Keen pleads with the jury to spare Mustafa Sa’eed’s life.

If you’ve sat for baccalaureate exams anywhere in the Arab world, this little passage from Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun will bring about a bout of nostalgia (or perhaps panic, depending on your grammar skills):

The afternoon is the time for memorising and the morning the time for brainwork. Not that there is much brainwork to any of this. Arabic grammar is about the only thing that can count as brainwork, parsing sentences: the Deed, the Doer, and the Done-To; the Added and the Added-To; the Attribute and the State; the Circumstance of Time and Place and, most problematic of all: the Built upon the Unknown, in which the logical Done-To assumes the form and function of the Doer. These have to be worked out.

When is Soueif coming out with a new novel? It’s been almost ten years since the last one.

From the second chapter of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, when Verloc first hears of Vladimir’s plan to get the F.P. society to bomb a scientific institution of his choosing:

And Mr. Vladimir developed his idea from on high, with scorn and condescension, displaying at the same time an amount of ignorance as to the real aims, thoughts, and methods of the revolutionary world which filled the silent Mr. Verloc with inward consternation. He confounded causes with effects more than was excusable; the most distinguished propagandists with impulsive bomb throwers; assumed organisation where in the nature of things it could not exist; spoke of the social revolutionary party one moment as of a perfectly disciplined army, where the word of chiefs was supreme, and at another as if it had been the loosest association of desperate brigands that ever camped in a mountain gorge. Once Mr. Verloc had opened his mouth for a protest, but the raising of a shapely, large white hand arrested him. Very soon he became too appalled to even try to protest. He listened in a stillness of dread which resembled the immobility of profound attention.

Does it, I wonder, remind you of someone?

Recently, I had my students read a couple of essays from Salman Rushdie’s collection Imaginary Homelands. I particularly like these lines from “Is Nothing Sacred?”:

What is more, the writer is there, in his work, in the reader’s hands, utterly exposed, utterly defenseless, entirely without the benefit of an alter ego to hide behind. What is forged, in the secret act of reading, is a different kind of identity, as the reader and writer merge, through the medium of the text, to become a collective being that both writes as it reads and reads as it writes, and creates, jointly, that unique work, ‘their’ novel. This ’secret identity’ of writer and reader is the novel form’s greatest and most subversive gift.

This was originally published in Granta in 1990. If you’re looking for something more recent by Rushdie, try “The Shelter of the World,” which appeared in the New Yorker last week (or was it two weeks ago?), and is an excerpt from his forthcoming novel.

(Photo credit: Eamonn McCabe)

I’m about half way through final edits for my new novel, The Outsider, and I am so tired these days I can barely keep my eyes open past eight p.m. While reading Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year the other day, I had to smile at this exchange between Señor C., an aging novelist, and Anya, the attractive neighbor he has hired to be his secretary:

A novel? No. I don’t have the endurance any more. To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up a whole world on your shoulders and supporting it there for months and years while its affairs work themselves out. It is too much for me as I am today.

Still, I said, we have all got opinions, especially about politics. If you tell a story at least people will shut up and listen to you. A story or a joke.

Stories tell themselves, they don’t get told, he said. That much I know after a lifetime of working with stories. Never try to impose yourself. Wait for the story to speak for itself. Wait and hope that it isn’t born deaf and dumb and blind. I could do that when I was younger. I could wait patiently for months on end. Nowadays I get tired. My attention wanders.

I love the comparison with Atlas. How apt.

A few weeks ago in my non-fiction class, we discussed James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son. Here is how the essay “Stranger in the Village” concludes:

One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

Published originally in Harper’s Magazine in 1953.

(Photo credit: Mottke Weissman)

From Achebe’s second novel, A Man of the People:

Max began by accusing the outgoing government of all kinds of swindling and corruption. As he gave instance after instance of how some of our leaders who were ash-mouthed paupers five years ago had become near-millionaires under our very eyes, many in the audience laughed. But it was the laughter of resignation to misfortune.”

The book was published in 1966.

(Photo credit: Frank May)

From the opening chapter of The Year of Magical Thinking.

Life changes in the instant.
The ordinary instant.
At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what happened, I considered adding those words, “the ordinary instant.” I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word “ordinary,” because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster, we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy.

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking.