Laila Lalami

From Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album,” which is on the required reading list for a class I am teaching this fall:

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

The essay appears in the collection by the same name.

Photo credit: Village Voice.

Here is a brief excerpt from Ian McEwan’s Atonement, from the scene in which thirteen-year-old Briony laments having written a play for her brother Leon, instead of a short story:

The title lettering, the illustrated cover, the pages bound—in that word alone she felt the attraction of the neat, limited and controllable form she had left behind when she decided to write a play. A story was direct and simple, allowing nothing to come between herself and her reader—no intermediaries with their private ambitions or incompetence, no pressures of time, no limits on resources. In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world; in a play you had to make do with what was available: no horses, no village streets, no seaside. No curtain. It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled. You said the word castle, and it was there, seen from some distance, with woods in high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the blacksmith’s forge, and a cobbled road twisting away into the green shade…”

I just started work on a new short story, which, I suppose, is what reminded me of this passage from Atonement.

Photo: Eamon McCabe.

I love Saramago’s work, and now that summer is here and I am not tied to any deadlines I have been able to indulge myself by reading those of his novels I hadn’t yet gotten to. Here is a little excerpt from The Double:

What do you do when you’re not at school, Oh, I read, listen to music, occasionally visit a museum, And what about the cinema, No, I don’t go to the cinema much, I make do with what they show on TV, You could buy a few videos, start a collection, a video library if you like, You’re right, I could, except that I haven’t even got enough space for my books,Well, rent some videos then, that’s the best solution, Well, I do own a few videos, science documentaries, nature programmes, archaeology, anthropology, the arts in general, and I’m interested in astronomy too, that sort of thing, That’s all very well, but you need to distract yourself with stories that don’t take up too much space in your head, I mean, given, for example, that you’re interested in astronomy, you might well enjoy science fiction, adventures in outer space, star wars, special effects, As I see it, those socalled special effects are the real enemy of the imagination, that mysterious, enigmatic skill it took us human beings so much hard work to invent, Now you’re exaggerating, No, I’m not, the people who are exaggerating are the ones who want me to believe that in less than a second, with a click of the fingers, a spaceship can travel a hundred thousand million kilometres,You have to agree, though, that to create the effects you so despise also takes imagination, Yes, but it’s their imagination, not mine,

Photo credit: here.

Years ago, when I was an undergraduate student at Mohamed-V university, I was assigned Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. I remember very clearly reading that stunning first line (“You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you.”) and not being able to put down the book after that, despite having to reach for the dictionary so many times. That book resonated deeply with me for reasons that really didn’t become clear to me until a long time later. Yesterday, in my introduction to creative writing class at UC Riverside, my students and I discussed the opening chapter, “No-Name Woman.” This is how it closes:

The real punishment was not the raid swiftly inflicted by the villagers, but the family’s deliberately forgetting her. Her betrayal so maddened them, they saw to it that she would suffer forever, even after death. Always hungry, always needing, she would have to beg food from other ghosts, snatch and steal it from those whose living descendants give them gifts. She would have to fight the ghosts massed at crossroads for the buns a few thoughtful citizens leave to decoy her away from village and home so that the ancestral spirits could feast unharassed. At peace, they could act like gods, not ghosts, their descent lines providing them with paper suits and dresses, spirit money, paper houses, paper automobiles, chicken, meat, and rice into eternity essences delivered up in smoke and flames, steam and incense rising from each rice bowl. In an attempt to make the Chinese care for people outside the family, Chairman Mao encourages us now to give our paper replicas to the spirits of outstanding soldiers and workers, no matter whose ancestors they may be. My aunt remains forever hungry. Goods are not distributed evenly among the dead.

My aunt haunts me-her ghost drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her, though not origamied into houses and clothes. I do not think she always means me well. I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in the drinking water. The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute.

It was a useful chapter for our discussion of truth, whether in fiction or nonfiction.

In my class yesterday, we discussed “Tu Do Street” by Yusef Komunyakaa, which appears in his collection Dien Cai Dau:

Music divides the evening.
I close my eyes & can see
men drawing lines in the dust.
America pushes through the membrane
of mist & smoke, & I’m a small boy
again in Bogalusa. White Only
signs & Hank Snow. But tonight
I walk into a place where bar girls
fade like tropical birds. When
I order a beer, the mama-san
behind the counter acts as if she
can’t understand, while her eyes
skirt each white face, as Hank Williams
calls from the psychedelic jukebox.
We have played Judas where
only machine-gun fire brings us
together. Down the street
black GIs hold to their turf also.
An off-limits sign pulls me
deeper into alleys, as I look
for a softness behind these voices
wounded by their beauty & war.
Back in the bush at Dak To
& Khe Sanh, we fought
the brothers of these women
we now run to hold in our arms.
There’s more than a nation
inside us, as black & white
soldiers touch the same lovers
minutes apart, tasting
each other’s breath,
without knowing these rooms
run into each other like tunnels
leading to the underworld.

That line–we fought/the brothers of these women/we now run to hold in our arms. It gets me every time.

In my advanced fiction class, we’ve been reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a novel my students seem to have fallen in love with, much to my delight. Here’s a small excerpt we discussed last week, when we talked about all the rules women (and men) are subjected to in the Republic of Gilead:

Women were not protected then.

I remember the rules, rules that were never spelled out but that every woman knew: Don’t open your door to a stranger, even if he says he is the police. Make him slide his ID under the doo. Don’t stop on the road to help a motorist pretending to be in trouble. Keep the locks on and keep going. If anyone whistles, don’t turn to look. Don’t go into a laundromat, by yourself, at night.

I think about laundromats. What I wore to them: shorts, jeans, jogging pants. What I put into them: my own clothes, my own soap, my own money, money I had earned myself. I think about having such control.

Now we walk the same street, in red pairs, and non man shouts obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us. No one whistles.

There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.

(Photo credit: George Whiteside/House of Anansi)

I’m teaching J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians in my advanced fiction class and while writing down page numbers for my notes I came across this lovely passage, where the Magistrate reflects upon the role he and Colonel Joll play in the functioning of the empire:

For I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid colonel. I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow. Two sides of imperial rule, no more, no less.

If you haven’t read this gem of a novel, you really should.

Here is one of my favorite poems by Taha Muhammad Ali: “Thrombosis in the Veins of Petroleum”:

When I was a child
I fell into the abyss
but didn’t die;
I drowned in the pond
when I was young,
but did not die;
and now, God help us—
one of my habits is running
into battalions of land mines
along the border,
as my songs
and the days of my youth
are dispersed:
here a flower,
there a scream;
and yet,
I do not die!

*

They butchered me
on the doorstep
like a lamb for the feast—
thrombosis
in the veins of petroleum;
In God’s name
they slit my throat
from ear to ear
a thousand times,
and each time
my dripping blood would swing
back and forth
like the feet of a man
hanged from a gallows,
and come to rest,
a large, crimson mallow
blossom—
a beacon
to guide ships
and mark
the site of palaces
and embassies.

*

And tomorrow,
God help us—
the phone won’t ring
in a brothel or castle,
and not in a single Gulf Emirate,
except to offer a new prescription
for my extermination.
But …
just as the mallow tells us,
and as the borders know,
I won’t die! I will not die!!
I’ll linger on—a piece of shrapnel
the size of a penknife
lodged in the neck;
I’ll remain—
a blood stain
the size of a cloud
on the shirt of this world!

Here is the poem in the original Arabic: ترمبوزة في شرايين النفط. You can find it in the collection So What: New and Selected poems, 1971-2005 translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin. Next month, Yale University Press will be publishing a biography of Taha Muhammad Ali.

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.