Month: July 2005

Tahar Ben Jelloun Detained At Airport

In an article published in the Spanish paper La Vanguardia (full text here), IMPAC-award winning author Tahar Ben Jelloun recounts an airport anecdote that I thought worth quoting:

El pasado mes de marzo fui invitado a Estados Unidos por la prestigiosa Universidad de Princeton para dar una serie de conferencias. Subo al avion, si que la compania tiene que comunicar la lista de los pasajeros que se disponen a entrar en suelo estadounidense. Como todos, relleno los impresos que nos distribuyen y que hay que entregar a la policia de fronteras. Tengo un pasaporte frances. Lo presento. En cuanto el policia estadounidense ve un nombre arabe, se pone a teclear en el ordenador durante cinco minutos, entrega mis documentos a otro agente y luego me pide que lo siga a un despacho situado al final del aeropuerto. Me instalan en una sala donde observo la presencia de otros arabes. Angustiado, no digo nada. Espero. Lo si, soy sospechoso. ” De que? ” Que he hecho? Empiezo a preguntarme que puedo haber hecho. Me digo que quize he cometido un delito y que mi memoria lo ha borrado. Espero. Pienso en K., el personaje de El proceso de Kafka. A veces basta con una naderea para caer en el absurdo. No es posible leer nada en el rostro del agente encargado de mis papeles. Lo miro y bajo los ojos. Empiezo a tener miedo. Me digo: ” y si me confunde con otra persona que se llama igual que yo, con alguien buscado? Para cuando se demostrara el error ya estaraa en Guantanamo. Crece la tension. Espero, no me atrevo a preguntar que pasa. Me han dicho que nunca hay que protestar en estos casos.

Al cabo de cuarenta minutos, el agente me llama y me hace una serie de preguntas. Mi ingles es deficiente. Respondo en frances y luego en ingles aproximado. Me hace preguntas trampa: ” quien es Amin? Es mi hijo. ” Cual es su fecha de nacimiento? De pronto sufro un lapsus de memoria. Doy la de otro de mis hijos. Le muestro la invitacion de Princeton. No queda muy intimidado. Sigue escribiendo en el teclado del ordenador. Entonces me acuerdo de un articulo que escribo sobre la guerra de Iraq donde pedia que Bush fuera llevado ante el Tribunal Penal Internacional por haber matado a inocentes en Iraq. Me digo que la policia me retiene por eso. Tras un momento de silencio en que habla con otro agente, me devuelve el pasaporte. Salgo, veo mi maleta sola en la cinta. Los otros pasajeros, europeos, no han sido sometidos a interrogatorio alguno.

Essentially, Ben Jelloun says that he was invited to give a series of talks at Princeton last March. Upon arriving at the airport, he presented his French passport. The officer looked at his Arab name, spent a few minutes typing on his keyboard, then took him to a waiting area at the other end of the airport with other Arabs. After a 40-minute wait, he was asked a few questions, like “Who is Amin?” “My son.” “What is his date of birth?”

Ben Jelloun showed the officer his invitation from Princeton, but, he said, the man “didn’t seem impressed.” Then, Ben Jelloun remembered an article he’d written the year before, in which he suggested that President Bush be tried by the International Tribunal for the killing of innocent Iraqis*. After some delay, he was given his passport back and allowed to collect his luggage.

Ben Jelloun uses the anecdote to illustrate the clash between Occident and Orient, one a powerful, easily-recognizable mass, the other a mosaic of countries sometimes situated in Asia, the Middle-East, or North Africa. He argues that while the clash of civilizations is a simplistic way of looking at how cultures interact, the clash of ignorances is a reality, and until we begin to know each other, we have no hope of understanding and respecting one another.

Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun is the Goncourt- and IMPAC-award winning author of more than ten novels, four collections of poetry, several memoirs, plays, and anthologies. He resides in Paris.

Link via Label ASH.

*Thanks to David R. for the clarification



Neale Desousa Recommends

“With all that is going on in Iraq and the world, all the Harry Potter and chick Lit discussions need to take a hiatus,” Desousa says. “Not that I do not read strictly for entertainment. But we are running out of time and in this frame of mind I went out and bought The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer. It’s a story of a white South African woman’s journey to the village of her Muslim lover. I think there is no way to understand a religion without experiencing the culture that nurtures it and this book takes its time (another virtue one needs to develop when reading serious lit). It’s a slim novel and it’s amazing how I am not feeling rushed to finish it, but instead am savoring it, one awkward compromise at a time. Ever since I read The House Gun, I have liked Gordimer’s writing. Her treatment of gay men in the novel was so subtly woven into the broader conflict of race.”

Born in Kenya, raised in Goa, corrupted and educated in Bombay, Neale Desousa now lives in Los Angeles. His work has been published in Chiron Review, Slipstream, and is forthcoming in Swink.




Danticat on Iraq

Novelist Edwidge Danticat contributes an Op-Ed piece to the Albany Times Union, in which she compares the U.S. invasion of Haiti in 1915 with that of Iraq. The war that was supposed to bring democracy to the Carribbean island lasted 19 years, though its effects would last many more years. Now, Danticat writes,

Few Americans are aware their country once occupied ours, and for such a long time. This is not surprising, for as one Haitian proverb suggests, while those who give the blows can easily forget, the ones who carry the scar have no choice but to remember.

While it takes American leaders and their armed enforcers just a few hours, days, weeks, months to rewrite another sovereign nation’s history, it takes more than 90 years to overcome the devastations caused by such an operation, to replace the irreplaceable, the dead lost, the spirits quelled, to steer an entire generation out of the shadows of dependency, to meet fellow citizens across carefully constructed divides and become halfway whole again.

Read the entire piece here.