Month: June 2006

John Gray’s review of Pankaj Mishra’s Temptations of the West : How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond makes me very curious to read it. The book is about the fluidity of cultural frontiers, and how cultures change in response to (peaceful or violent) contact with one another, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Here’s a snippet:

In a brilliant chapter Mishra observes that one of the central aims of India’s 19th-century anti-colonial movements was to invent Hinduism as a religion. As part of building a modern Indian nation that could resist and overthrow British rule, the Hindu elite simplified and remoulded India’s unfathomably rich inheritance of beliefs and practices into something resembling a western creed. Like Shinto in Japan, Hinduism as it figures in Indian politics today is a byproduct of an encounter with the west. In order to resist western domination, Asian peoples have found themselves compelled to copy them. As Mishra observes, India’s anti-colonial elites “denounced British imperialism as exploitative, but even they welcomed its redeeming modernity, and, above all, the European idea of the nation – a cohesive community with a common history, culture, values and sense of purpose – which for many other colonised peoples appeared a way of duplicating the success of the powerful, all-conquering west.” The result has been to exacerbate sectarian divisions, and create them where they did not exist before.

And in an op-ed piece in the same paper, Mishra argues that China and India made important gains when they adapted parts of the free market economy and rejected others.

Economic reforms in the 80s focused on boosting export-oriented industries on the coast. They made China a huge sweatshop for the west’s cheap goods and gave it an average annual growth of 10%. It may be tempting to credit the invisible hand of the free market for this, but, as in the so-called “Asian tiger” economies, the Chinese state has carefully regulated domestic industry and foreign trade and investment, besides maintaining control of public services.

More here.

There’s a very interesting article in Le journal Hebdo about a round-table that took place in Rabat about the use of Darija, the vernacular language of Morocco. Writers, poets, linguists, artists, and rappers took part in the debate, i.e. all those for whom language is an essential means of creation or scholarship. I was quite pleased to see a few misconceptions discussed and cleared up during the debate (e.g. the ridiculous idea that somehow Darija is not a proper language because it is not written. Piffle.) So hopefully this is the precursor to a wider national debate about the issue. I’m fully in favor of using Darija, because of the huge impact it would have on the creation of a reading culture. Imagine: All children’s books right now are in Modern Standard Arabic, which is a language no one learns until first grade (i.e. age 6 or 7), by which time reading habits are already in place for many kids.

I was asked to join a very cool reading this Saturday at Reading Frenzy, here in Portland. Here are the details:

Saturday, June 10th
7 pm
Reading Frenzy
921 SW Oak St.
Portland, Oregon
(503) 274-1449

Chris Abani will be reading from his novella, Becoming Abigail, Colin Channer will present work from Iron Balloons: Hit Fiction From Jamaica’s Cat, and I’ll be reading from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. Come one, come all.

This week, I’d like to give away a copy of Sayed Kashua’s second novel, Let It Be Morning, translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Schlesinger. (You can read a review of Kashua’s first book, Dancing Arabs, in the Moorishgirl archive.) In Let It Be Morning, the unnamed narrator moves his family from Jerusalem back to his native village of Tira, in the Galilee, where he hopes that life will be more bearable. Within a few days however, Israeli tanks surround the village, without warning. Is it an attack? A siege? Or something entirely different? It’s a gripping tale of displacement, isolation, and belonging. The first reader to email me with a request gets the book. Please use the subject line: “Kashua.” Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded.

Update: The winner is Shelley E., from Queens, New York.

Sandy Tolan’s new book, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, uses a house in Ramla to tell a very poignant story from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Twenty years after his family was forced to flee their house in Ramla, a Palestinian man named Bashir al-Khairi returned to visit it. Thus began an enduring friendship with the woman who now lives in his boyhood home, an Israeli woman named Dalia Eshkenazi. The two tales, one Jewish, one Palestinian, are entertwined in Tolan’s book, and you can listen to interviews with al-Khairi, Eshkenazi, and Sandy Tolan himself, on NPR. An amazing story.

A Moroccan man who was trying to migrate to Australia through Asia has been lying in a hospital bed for nine years, after having contracted Japanese encephalitis, which resulted in near complete paralysis. The man, 39-year-old Lahcen Ould Lhaj, has lost his passport, and now lives in the Port Moresby hospital in Papua New Guinea. Moroccan internet forums have picked up on the story, and, thanks to them, it appears that Lahcen’s family–who believed him dead–has now been notified. There is also a brief notice in Tel Quel, but as yet no official word from the Ministry in charge of Moroccan immigrants.