Month: April 2005

The shortlist of the Caine Prize for African Writing has been announced. The finalists are:

• Doreen Baingana (Uganda) for “Tropical Fish.” (This story is part of her excellent debut collection, which I hope to feature on Moorishgirl very soon.)
• Jamal Mahjoub (Sudan) for “The Obituary Tangle.”
• SA Afolabi (Nigeria) for “Monday Morning.”
• Ike Okonta (Nigeria) for “Tindi in the Land of the Dead.”
• Mutual Naidoo (South Africa) with “Jailbirds.”

The Guardian has further details about the finalists. I’m a little disappointed that North Africa is left out of the running (yet again) but still delighted by the choices.

This is an interesting, long-ish interview of Salman Rushdie (I didn’t have a problem accessing it but if you hit a subscription wall, use bugmenot.com). Rushdie talks about novelists as “bloody-minded” people, magical realism, the fatwa, why it was a victory for him, his new book, Shalimar the Clown, and a bunch of other things. Here’s a snippet.

R: [O]ther than the occasional rhetorical noise coming out of Iran – which there are unpleasant people there who occasionally say unpleasant things – there haven’t been any real, actual threats for probably seven years now.

W: Well, it’s interesting that during the years that there were threats you were still able to put out some really, well-written, critically acclaimed books. I’ve always been curious as to how that period of seclusion affected your writing habits.

R: Well, you know, I think that writers are quite often disciplined people. And I think that one of the things as a novelist that you do have is the discipline of a daily habit and a daily routine to do your work. You know, just simply because a novel is a long piece of work that if you don’t have the kind of discipline, it never gets written. I think most novelists that I know, in some degree, are very good at simply buckling down and simply getting on with it. And one of the feelings that I had very strongly during those years was that I wished to simply continue down the path I’d set for myself as a writer. And in a way, it was an aspect of my resistance, you know, to not be silenced, to not in anyway be deformed by it as a writer. I though it would have been easy for me to not write or to writer very embittered books or to writer very frightened books. And all of that seemed to me to be a terrible defeat. And I thought the best thing I can do is to go on trying to write the kind of books that I’ve always wanted to write. And go on being myself. And I guess I found in myself the bloody-mindedness to do that (laughs).

Read the rest here.

The Book Babes devote their latest column over at the Book Standard to the LBC.

MG friend Joshua Roberts, who has a new story in AGNI 61, sends along a notice of the magazine’s release party, which will take place Thursday, April 21, 2005, at 7:00 p.m. at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre (949 Commonwealth Avenue.) Readers include Suzanne Berne, Gail Mazur, Ben Miller and Lan Samantha Chang. For details, go here.

The Village Voice has a brief piece about literary blogs, with mentions of worthy blogs like Maudnewton, the Elegant Variation, Beatrice, Bookslut, and several others, as well as movements within the blogging community, such as the Virtual Book Tour and the Lit Blog Co-Op.

Michael Orthofer offers up a critique of the article, as do Scott Esposito and Bud Parr. In general, I feel like the journalist (the aptly named–or perhaps pseudonymous?–Joy Press) is trying to raise opposition where there might not be any.

I was a tad surprised, upon reading the article, to find out that the VBT is a rather costly service (rates start at $1,500 for one-day coverage on the blogs). Ed has some interesting comments about this pay-for-placement service, much of which I agree with. I’d also like to state, for the record, that the authors who’ve guested on Moorishgirl in the past have done so entirely free of charge (and yes, it means I’ve read their work and like it enough to invite them over for a day.)

I finally had a chance to read this interview over at Salon with Alicia Erian, the author of a new novel, Towelhead. Here’s a snippet.

Speaking of complicated reactions, did you choose the book’s title?

I did choose it. Under duress. [Laughs]

How did that happen?

Originally, it was called “Welcome to the Moral Universe.” Daddy has a speech where he tells Jasira something about the moral universe, and I liked the speech. Probably, I also really loved the movie “Welcome to the Dollhouse.” [Laughs] My editor, who’s a very sharp woman, didn’t say anything until I completed the manuscript, and then she was like, “OK, time for a new title!” So I was flipping through the book — when I find titles, I try to find them in the text first — and there’s only one word that’s coming up repeatedly. And I passed it over a million times and I thought, you know, you cannot call a book that. That is horrifying. And so I go all over the book, and it’s the only thing you can call it. A lot turns on the use of this word. And then I started thinking, you know, this is what a title is supposed to be: a little rough, ideally one word, and something that will get people’s attention. And it didn’t feel like a cheat because it really is of the book. So I wrote to my agent and said, What do you think of this? And he said yep, and I wrote to my editor, and she said, yep, and then we had this bizarre discussion about whether it should be “Raghead” or “Towelhead.” [Laughs] I talked to my [now ex-]husband and he said, “Tell them it has to be ‘Towelhead,’ because ‘Towelhead’ is funny. ‘Raghead’s’ not funny. There’s whimsy in ‘Towelhead.'” [Laughs] It’s the stupidest slur! There are better slurs. If you really want a powerful slur, that’s not the one you want.

The title is likely to set off alarm bells for a casual reader who doesn’t know anything about the book. Did you worry about that?

Sure. It’s offensive. I hope the fact I’m half Arab allows me to use that title. Which I assume it does. It’s not like I’m some white person who’s calling the book “Towelhead.” I think that would cause a lot more trouble.

It could just be me, but when I hear ‘towelhead,’ the word ‘funny’ isn’t the first one that comes to mind. In fact, I find it obscene to make light of the slur when you consider that there are people who have lost their lives because of it (men like Adel Karas or Ali Almansoop or Abdo Ali Ahmed, whose only crime was to be Arab in a post-September 11 America.)

Erian, who, by her own admission, never had to deal with the anti-Arab slur that she uses as the title of her novel, is a little misguided if she thinks that her ethnicity gives her the “right” to use it. Claiming the right means that one also accepts the responsibility that comes with such a horrendous word–do something with it, challenge it, turn it on its ear. Don’t just slap it on your book because “it’s a publisher’s wet dream.”

So, while I think Erian has the right to call her book whatever the hell she wants, I do hope that she has the courage to stand by her choice and listen up to what her audience, this ‘towelhead’ included, will have to say about it.

Tune in tomorrow for my review of the book.