Month: December 2010

I just got back from two weeks in Cuba—not the easiest place in the world to get to from the United States, especially in these times of heightened scrutiny. (The recent relaxation of rules by the Obama administration made the trip possible for family and research.) My first impression upon leaving Aeropuerto Internacional José Martí-La Habana was of the ubiquity of street placards with revolutionary slogans. “Comandante en Jefe, tus ideas son invencibles,” said one, under a picture of a younger-looking Fidel Castro. Another warned, “La vigilancia revolucionaria: tarea de todos.” Perhaps my favorite sign was the one that boasted, “250 milliones de niños en el mundo duermen hoy en las calles. Ninguno es cubano.”

For all the revolutionary slogans, Cuba has inched further and further toward a free market economy, of sorts. There are now many private businesses: paladars and guest houses, for instance, which are frequented almost exclusively by tourists. The introduction of convertible pesos has created a system in which a few Cubans have access to this valuable currency, while the majority does not. As a result, people are always trying to get their hands on the convertible pesos and now you see street hustlers in a country that used to be mercifully free of them. The revolutionary ideals have become little more than a selling point, a way to attract foreign tourists.

There was so much to see and so little time to do it. We took a walking tour of Habana Vieja, with its stunning architecture; visited the Museo de la Revolución, where you can see the American yacht Granma, used by Fidel Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos, Che Guevara and 79 others to launch the Cuban revolution; saw a performance by the Ballet Nacional de Cuba in an old church; waited for the cannon shot at the Fortaleza de San Carlos; took a tour of the Partagas Cigar Factory, which was smelly, loud, and frankly a bit Dickensian; and browsed many, many bookstores. By far the oddest sight for me were the Afghan students in Cienfuegos, amid scantily clad tourists and locals. They were apparently there to train as doctors, as part of the country’s own efforts to win hearts and minds. (I’m going to take a wild guess and say that training doctors might work better than dropping bombs.)

So this wraps up this very quiet and productive year for me. Thank you all for continuing to read my blog and to write to me with your thoughts. I wish you all a happy and healthy new year, filled with joy and prosperity.

At about this time last year, I decided that I wouldn’t send out any stories or essays and that I would turn down requests for contributions to magazines or anthologies. A vow of public silence, you could call it. I wanted to spend all of 2010 doing two things only: reading and writing. So, whenever I wasn’t teaching or traveling, that’s precisely what I did. I read and I wrote. It wasn’t always easy, especially at the beginning.  It was difficult to resist the temptation to write a review of a book I particularly enjoyed or an opinion piece about the latest political outrage.  (Oh, sure, I had short pieces coming out here or there, but these were written before my resolution.)  And now it’s been a year, and I realize this was one of the best things I could have done for myself. I feel as if I’m still under the spell of that working silence, so that I hesitate even to tell you about the novel I’ve written or the essays I’ve completed. But all in good time.

This review I wrote for The Nation is the first one I’ve written in a year. (It occurs to me that my last piece was also for them, from last November.)  It’s about the Moroccan writer and critic Abdelfattah Kilito, who has recently released a collection of short fiction with New Directions, in a translation by Robyn Creswell. Here is how it opens: 

On Idriss al-Azhar Street in downtown Rabat, not far from the Muhammad V Mausoleum, there is an unassuming but wonderful little coffee shop, the Café Jacaranda, where book readings are held and young artists’ paintings exhibited. There, on a warm spring afternoon three years ago, I went to hear two of Morocco’s foremost intellectuals discuss the feminine and masculine in classical Arabic literature. One was Fatema Mernissi, the world-renowned feminist, sociologist, and memoirist, the author of some twenty books on feminism and Islam, and co-winner, along with Susan Sontag, of the Prince of Asturias Award. Her arrival at the café was met with murmurs of awe. A throng of admirers immediately surrounded her, so that the only part of her that remained visible from the other end of the lobby was her fiery red hair.

The arrival of the other panelist, Abdelfattah Kilito, went unnoticed until it was time for the event to start. Where Mernissi was gregarious and funny, Kilito was reserved and bookish. Once the panel discussion started, however, the audience got to hear Kilito speak knowledgeably about Maqamat al-Hariri, the classical work of rhymed prose that until the end of the nineteenth century was one of the most widely read books of Arabic literature. Kilito spoke about the use of the sun and the moon as symbols for the masculine and feminine, the popularity of the Maqamat, the miniatures that the artist al-Wasiti created to illustrate the manuscript, the reasons why these miniatures are nowadays more widely disseminated than the text itself—and much else besides.

Among Moroccan writers, Kilito has always cut an unusual figure. He is equally at home in French and Arabic, in a country where language lines are drawn early and barriers are rarely crossed. He is not particularly known for his politics, in a society that routinely expects—and occasionally even demands—of its writers that they be politically engaged. His is not the name you will see mixed up in the kind of controversy that attracts the international press. But one would be hard-pressed to find a Moroccan writer who is more respected by his peers and more appreciated by his readers than Abdelfattah Kilito.

The full piece is available to subscribers only. (You can subscribe to the magazine here, for as little as $18.)

(Image credit: Wickednox)