Month: June 2006

Assia Djebbar, who earlier this year was elected to the Académie Française, has officially joined ‘Les Immortels’ at a ceremony last Thursday. She will take over fauteuil numéro 5 from Georges Revel. You can read her (very moving) speech here.

L’Afrique du Nord, du temps de l’Empire français, – comme le reste de l’Afrique de la part de ses coloniaux anglais, portugais ou belges – a subi, un siècle et demi durant, dépossession de ses richesses naturelles, déstructuration de ses assises sociales, et, pour l’Algérie, exclusion dans l’enseignement de ses deux langues identitaires, le berbère séculaire, et la langue arabe dont la qualité poétique ne pouvait alors, pour moi, être perçue que dans les versets coraniques qui me restent chers.

Mesdames et Messieurs, le colonialisme vécu au jour le jour par nos ancêtres, sur quatre générations au moins, a été une immense plaie ! Une plaie dont certains ont rouvert récemment la mémoire, trop légèrement et par dérisoire calcul électoraliste. En 1950 déjà, dans son “Discours sur le Colonialisme” le grand poète Aimé Césaire avait montré, avec le souffle puissant de sa parole, comment les guerres coloniales en Afrique et en Asie ont, en fait, “décivilisé” et “ensauvagé”, dit-il, l’Europe. (…)

La langue française, la vôtre, Mesdames et Messieurs, devenue la mienne, tout au moins en écriture, le français donc est lieu de creusement de mon travail, espace de ma méditation ou de ma rêverie, cible de mon utopie peut-être, je dirai même ; tempo de ma respiration, au jour le jour : ce que je voudrais esquisser, en cet instant où je demeure silhouette dressée sur votre seuil.

Je me souviens, l’an dernier, en Juin 2005, le jour où vous m’avez élue à votre Académie, aux journalistes qui quêtaient ma réaction, j’avais répondu que “J’étais contente pour la francophonie du Maghreb”. La sobriété s’imposait, car m’avait saisie la sensation presque physique que vos portes ne s’ouvraient pas pour moi seule, ni pour mes seuls livres, mais pour les ombres encore vives de mes confrères – écrivains, journalistes, intellectuels, femmes et hommes d’Algérie qui, dans la décennie quatre-vingt-dix ont payé de leur vie le fait d’écrire, d’exposer leurs idées ou tout simplement d’enseigner… en langue française.

Depuis, grâce à Dieu, mon pays cautérise peu à peu ses blessures.

As has been widely reported, Bill Moyers is doing a series of interviews on faith and reason for PBS. His first guest was Salman Rushdie, and I was lucky enough to catch the show on TV the other day. Rushdie’s answers were, as usual, quite thoughtful, and I agreed with much of what he said (though I disagreed with a couple of his positions, particularly in regards to women.) Other interviewees will include Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, David Grossman and Jeanette Winterson, and the shows will be aired throughout the summer.

Some articles from the July/August issue of Poets and Writers are now available online, including a profile of Emily Barton and Gary Shteyngart and an interview with Chris Abani about his novella Becoming Abigail. You might also like to read C. Max Magee’s piece on the new book-cataloguing website Library Thing, which brings joy to book nerds everywhere.

Ron Suskind’s new book, The One Percent Doctrine, a rather damning portrait of the Bush administration, has been getting loads of attention, but I must say I wasn’t particularly interested because, really, how many times does one have to be told about the lies and corruption and belligerence of this administration? That’s precisely the point that Gary Kamiya addresses in his review for Salon:

At this point, one could forgive readers for asking, “How many more damning portraits of the Bush administration do we need?” From yellowcake to Joe Wilson to Abu Ghraib, the list of Bush scandals and outrages is endless, but nothing ever seems to happen. As the journalist Mark Danner has pointed out, the problem is not lack of information: The problem is that Americans can’t, or won’t, acknowledge what that information means.

More of this thorough review here.

I have a very special giveaway for one lucky reader this week: A signed first edition of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. This graphic memoir tells of Alison Bechdel’s relationship with her closeted gay father, Bruce, and of the discovery of her own sexuality. It’s set in a small Pennsylvania town, where Bruce Bechdel ran a funeral home (the ‘fun home’ of the title), where he taught high school English, and where he spent years restoring his house, an 1857 Gothic revival house. It’s an honest and bittersweet portrait of a father-daughter relationship, and easily the best graphic memoir of this year.

The title page reads “To a Moorishgirl.com reader” and is signed by Alison Bechdel. (You can thank Alex for this. I was in DC that night, giving a reading myself, but he took an extra copy and had it signed.) The first reader to write gets the book. Please use the subject line: “Bechdel.” Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded. Update: The winner is Sheila O. from Jackson, MS.

The board of the Miami-Dade County school district has voted 6-3 to remove certain books from its libraries, including one titled Vamos A Cuba! which depicts Cuban children wearing communist uniforms. The district’s position is that the books are “inappropriate for young readers because of inaccuracies and omissions about life in the communist nation.” Wow. Don’t you feel safer with these people guarding your kids’ virtue? The ACLU and the Miami-Dade County Student Government Association have filed a lawsuit.