Month: September 2006

Novelist and activist Edwidge Danticat has a lovely opinion piece in the Washington Post about torture:

For many who remember — just as these women do, and my own parents do — what it means to live under a dictatorial regime, a regime in which citizens must leave work or school to witness public executions, torture is not just an individual affliction but a communal one. And now, when political leaders in the United States are asking us as a society to consider not only the legal and moral ramifications of torture but its effectiveness, we are brought closer to these regimes than we may think. If we are part of all that has touched us, as Alfred Tennyson wrote, then we are all endorsers of torture when it is done in our name.

Torture aims for a single goal — obtaining information — but it achieves a slew of others.

The piece is quite au point, considering the fact that the Cheney-McCain deal has essentially given Bush free reign to define what torture is.

I’m going to be doing a reading for our local library’s Banned Books Week, which is “an annual celebration of the freedom to read that highlights the importance of intellectual freedom and reminds us not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted.” Here are the details:

Saturday, September 23
2:30 – 4:00 PM
Café Banned – Celebrating the Freedom to Read
Central Library
Multnomah County Library
Portland, Oregon

Open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

Predictably, Elif Shafak has been acquitted of the charge that she had “insulted Turkishness” in her most recent novel, Father and Bastard. Shafak was not present at her trial–she delivered her first child on Saturday. The name of that baby girl is Sheherazad. A wise choice, and one that prosecutors ought to pay attention to. Their intimidations will not stop the woman from telling stories.

Article 301, which made the charges against Shafak possible, is still in the books, although there is a tiny hope that the government might reform its ways:

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan also welcomed the verdict and signalled that the government would consider amending Article 301 of Turkey’s penal code. It envisages up to three years in jail for “denigrating Turkish national identity”.

“The ruling party and the opposition can sit down together again to discuss this issue as laws are not eternal,” Anatolia news agency quoted Mr Erdogan as saying.

So it’s wait and see at this point.

(Thanks to N. and S. for the link.)

One of the fall 2006 books I was most excited about is Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. Set in the 1960s, during the aborted attempt to set up an independent state in Biafra, the book tells the story of three characters whose loyalties to their ideas, ideals, and one another, are tested. There’s thirteen-year-old Ugwu, a houseboy for a university professor, Olanna, the professor’s mistress; and Richard, an Englishman infatuated with Olanna’s twin sister. You can read some of the early (and mostly excellent) reviews of the book: Janet Maslin in the New York Times, Martin Rubin in the San Francisco Chronicle, Merle Rubin in the L.A. Times.

Some related links:
Adichie’s website.
Debbie Elliot’s interview with Adichie on NPR.
Adichie writes about the books that have influenced her in the Guardian.