News
The paperback edition of my book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, is due to be released by Harcourt a week from today, on October 2nd. But it has already started appearing at bookstores, as well as on Powells.com, Amazon.com, and BarnesandNoble.com. The vast majority of the books I own are soft covers, and it will be nice to finally place my book next to others like it on the shelf.
I will be doing several events in the fall for the promotion of the paperback release. Please check my events page for details, and come by and say hello.
The latest issue of the Boston Review includes my essay about writing in a non-native language, looking specifically at Sayed Kashua’s novels Let It Be Morning and Dancing Arabs. Here’s an excerpt:
Those who write fiction in a language other than their own are often asked what motivates their decision, even though this literary choice has a long and rich history. Joseph Conrad, for instance, did not write in Polish, his mother tongue; instead, and after 20 years of world travel, he settled in England and embraced its language in his work. Milan Kundera chose French rather than Czech for his later books because he wanted to free himself of expectations and censorship. Elias Canetti, whose native language is Ladino, opted for German, though he lived most of his life in England and Switzerland. But for others, the decision to give up their mother tongue was not a choice at all. It was the inescapable result of colonial education—witness, for example, the vast literature in French that came out of Africa in the wake of France’s century of hegemony: Assia Djebbar, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Camara Laye, and Léopold Sedar Senghor, to name just a handful.
What is striking about these shifting linguistic allegiances is that they tend to favor the language that is culturally dominant on the international scene. Thus, despite the great diversity of reasons for writing in a foreign language, the writer’s choice is often interpreted as a political statement, and in particular as a form of capitulation. This was precisely what prompted the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o to abandon English and return to Gikuyu, his native tongue, and what led him to argue, in Decolonizing the Mind, that other African writers should do the same.
But does creative expression in a foreign language always equal the rejection of native culture and the embrace of another? Or can it also be a way to challenge readers’ assumptions? The work of the young novelist Sayed Kashua raises just these questions.
Read the rest here.
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.)