Month: June 2006

A couple of months ago, I mentioned the Paris book fair, where the theme was “Francophonie.” I did not realize, until I read this article in the Hindustan Times, however, that for all the celebrations of ‘Francophone Literature,’ not a single native French writer had been invited:

The absence of French writing at the Fair had much to do with a very widespread interpretation of the term Francophone literature as covering writing in French by the non-French. This implicit definition touched a raw nerve. ‘Isn’t France Francophone?’, asked one delegate ironically evoking what is a sensitive topic at the best of times. The first salvo was fired by Amin Maalouf, the Paris based Franco-Lebanese writer-journalist who raised his voice against this appellation.

After all, who is a Francophone writer? It is a person who writes in French. This is obvious but yet it is true only in theory. For the French, the term Francophone writers should mean us (the French included), says Maalouf, but it actually means ‘them’, ‘the others’, ‘the foreigners’, the ones from the former colonies.

And they are often relegated to a separate shelf in bookstores, whereas the work of white writers writing in French, like Milan Kundera, are placed on the regular French literature shelves.

It’s been a whole fifteen seconds since the last Lit Feud, so I guess it’s time for another one. In this corner, we have Ziauddin Sardar, author and critic, who, in his review of Anthony McRoy’s book, From Rushdie to 7/7 for The Independent writes:

But occasionally [McRoy] draws bizarre conclusions from the plethora of material he quotes. For example, he suggests I labelled Rushdie as a “brown sahib” because I feared that the new generation of Muslims would become “contaminated” with “infidel ideas”. This is laughably absurd. The “brown sahib” is a recognisable sociological type on the Subcontinent: an uncritical Anglophile. My point was that Muslims should not be surprised by what Rushdie had done. A brown sahib, somewhere, sometime, was bound to do just that.

In the other corner, we have Salman Rushdie, who was understandably incensed at being characterized in this way, and fired off a letter to the editor:

Sir: I have not yet read Anthony McRoy’s book From Rushdie to 7/7, but Ziauddin Sardar’s review of it (28 April) is so parti pris as to demand some sort of reply. There is much in this review that is, to use terms of which Sardar himself is fond, “skewed”, “ludicrous” and “half-baked”.

His assertion that “jihad is never offensive” will come as a surprise to those of us who live in the real world, not the ideological fantasy-universe he prefers, in which language loses its meaning, aggression becomes “defence”, and aggressors become victims. His claim that “all Muslims see themselves as part of the ummah” could have been uttered by a dedicated clash-of-civilisations hawk, and blithely ignores the profound divisions, political, intellectual, tribal, nationalist and theological, within the Muslim world, and the struggles of genuinely courageous Muslim writers and intellectuals against the repressive Islam that is so much in the ascendant everywhere in that world.

As for his cheap shots at me for being a “brown Sahib”, something I have never been called, to my knowledge, by anyone in India, where, Sardar tells us, it is a “recognisable sociological type”, I wonder if you would so readily publish an attack on a well-known black writer which used the term “Uncle Tom”?
Sardar describes me, bizarrely, as an “uncritical Anglophile”, which suggests that it is he, not Mr McRoy, who “needs to read much more widely”. By the immoderation of his tone and his argument, he goes some way to proving McRoy’s point that “Islamic radicalism has become mainstream”, which was not, presumably, his intention.

Now it looks at though Sardar wants to have another go at it, but unfortunately his column at the New Stateman is hidden behind a subscription wall. Thanks to reader H. for sending me the piece–which turns out to be a rather nasty and grossly unfair characterization of Salman Rushdie. Among Sardar’s claims, for instance, is the assertion that Rushdie has nothing but “contempt” for “cultures of the subcontinent” and that he’s no different than V.S. Naipaul. It sounds to me like someone needs to read Imaginary Homelands.

The Whitbread Book Awards, which last year lost its corporate sponsor, will be taken up by the Costa Coffee chain.

Now that Morocco has considerably hardened its stance toward African immigrants trying to pass through on their way to Europe, alternative routes have appeared. Ships leave from Nouadhibou in Mauritania, heading toward the Canary Islands, or even from as far as Senegal. The distances they cross are much larger now, and tragic headlines have quickly followed. The latest one comes from The Guardian, which reports that a small yacht appeared on the coast of Barbados this past weekend. Inside were the petrified bodies of eleven young men. They appear to have left from somewhere in Africa, most likely Senegal, and were en route to the Canaries when their ship was lost at sea. In Senegal, all efforts to warn young people of the dangers that lie ahead seem to fall on deaf ears:

But during a radio talk show last week, young Senegalese callers such as Mass were unmoved by tales of death. “Even if it means ending up dead, I’ll leave, I’ll never give up trying, there’s nothing to do here,” he said. “It’s Barsa or Barsakh,” quipped a 22-year-old girl in Woloff, meaning “It’s Barcelona or the hereafter.”

There are a host of reasons for leaving, including high youth unemployment and the reputed success of Senegal’s “Modou, Modou” traders in Europe. “But the biggest problem,” radio manager Oumar Seck Ndiaye told IRIN, “is that people have lost all hope of ever bettering themselves here. So between never and maybe, they choose to take a chance.”

Even the mosque preachers have been telling youngsters not to take a risk, but to no avail.