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Over at Slate, Stephen Metcalf deconstructs reactions to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, starting with how it affected 19th century readers to how it is loathed (or rehabilitated by more modern readers, including African-Americans and women.

James Baldwin, in a famous essay for The Partisan Review in 1949, saw the priority of Tom over Harris as anything but innocent and pious. Harris, Baldwin argued, is a “race apart” from the novel’s blackest characters the little girl Topsy, and Tom himself. Harris’ dignity is therefore tied, as Baldwin puts it, to his being “sufficiently un-Negroid to pass through town, a fugitive from his master, disguised as a Spanish gentleman, attracting no attention beyond admiration.” It is tied, in other words, to his whiteness. Tom is therefore Stowe’s “only black man,” whom she has “robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex.” Baldwin loathed the novel, which he felt yoked a terror of blackness to a “terror of damnation,” then “saved” Tom by rendering him an intellectual and sexual eunuch who gives himself over entirely to martyrdom. Baldwin finally sets his thermometer on roast: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin then, is activated by what might be called a theological terror, the terror of damnation; and the spirit that breathes in this book, hot, self-righteous, fearful, is not different from that terror that activates a lynch mob.”

Metcalf also cites Jane Smiley’s reactions to the work (she considers it passionate and insightful). I tend to agree more with Baldwin than Smiley on this one. Metcalf concludes by saying that “maybe we can delineate the understandable limits of its heroism and admit its manifest crudity as a work of literary art.”

Michael at Lit Saloon links to this Observer article about Penguin’s plans to celebrate its 70th anniversary by issuing 70 short titles–but only two of the authors are non-whites.

Although Penguin has published two of the most important figures in modern black literature, James Baldwin and Chinua Achebe, neither is included on a list that finds room for popular modern names such as Jamie Oliver, Marian Keyes, Gervase Phinn and India Knight, as well as paying tribute to significant white landmarks of world literature such as Gustave Flaubert, Albert Camus, Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Theroux, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vladimir Nabokov, Sigmund Freud and even Homer, a segment of whose Odyssey gets a look in.

The only two black authors included are Zadie Smith, the young Briton who made her name with the award-winning novel White Teeth, and Hari Kunzru, who is best known for The Impressionist and Transmission, and has a worldwide following.

If this is a list meant to represent the best of Penguin’s work, then the exclusion of Achebe makes no sense. And if it is meant to represent their best selling authors, then Achebe–who is routinely assigned in high school and college classes–should certainly have fit the criteria. The publisher’s response is that they weren’t going to do “quotas,” that they were looking at “sales only.” In that case, what about Salman Rushdie? Isn’t he published by Penguin (through Viking)? The sales from The Satanic Verses alone probably surpass those of any writer on that list. And he’s not included either. Next time I hear someone moaning about a minority-only prize, I’ll have to remind them of things like this, which are far more common than people think.

Hedgebrook‘s latest initiative, in partnership with the Arab American Community Coalition, is nothing short of groundbreaking. It’s called Women Writers of the Arab World and it brings together six writers from different countries and different experiences: Raja Alem of Saudi Arabia, Suheir Hammad of Palestine and the US, Choman Hardi of Iraqi Kurdistan and the UK, Alia Mamdouh of Iraq and France, Somaya Ramadan of Egypt, and Ibtihal Salem of Egypt. The women were awarded a month-long residency at the Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, where they worked on a fiction or non-fiction project. In addition to this gift of time and space, the writers were given the rare opportunity to meet with each other and with readers from the Northwest, through readings, panels, and workshops (listed here.)

This weekend, Alex and I drove up to Seattle to attend one of the events, which was held in a packed auditorium at the University of Washington. Moderated by Therese Saliba, the panel featured Raja Alem, Choman Hardi, and Ibtihal Salem. They read from their work (poetry for Hardi, short fiction for Salem and Alem) and discussed the role of translation in their lives. Hardi made a conscious choice to start writing in English; she was dissatisfied with translations of her poetry from the Kurdish, which came out sounding ‘precious’ and so she preferred to write directly in English and to reach English readers that way rather than through translations. Salem stressed the importance of culture in translation. “It’s important,” she said, “that the translator be not just familiar with the language but with its people. Ideally the translator has lived in the cuture he/she translates.” And Saudi-born Alem talked about how, despite her country’s censors, she has managed to have her voice heard within the Kingdom. “The trouble,” she said, “is getting heard outside of it, because all the outside world wants is stereotypes of veils.” After writing seven novels in Arabic, Alem has now written her first in English.

Later, at the post-event reception, I spent way too much money at the Elliot Bay Book Company stand, which had a very impressive array of literature by Arab and Arab American authors. I also got to meet and chat with uber-cool poetess Suheir Hammad, and with the amazing Fadia Faqir, who was due to fly back to the U.K. the next day. A wonderful event. I only wish that there were more like these in the Northwest.

Related:
Seattle P.I.: Arab women writers take part in ‘an amazing event.’
Seattle Times: Arab women writers making Seattle appearances.
Seattle Weekly: Unveiling the Middle East.
Moorishgirl: At Hedgebrook, Peace and Quiet, At Last.

Over at the Guardian, Caryl Phyllips reports on how he and Russell Banks climbled Mount Kilimanjaro earlier this year.

Russell and I first talked about this climb in Saratoga Springs during the 2004 summer programme of the New York State Writers Institute. One night, in a bar called The Parting Glass, we found ourselves bragging to each other, and the assembled writing students, about how we had both climbed Kilimanjaro. I had done so three times, and Russell once, but it was some time now since either of us had been on the mountain. Also, Russell had gone up the easier Marangu route, and over drinks I was trying to introduce him to the idea that the more difficult Machame route was the way to go. Predictably, by the time the barman called last orders we had talked ourselves into an expedition.

I read the article with a mixture of awe and dread. In one of my weaker moments, I promised Alex (an inveterate hiker/backpacker) that someday within the next ten years, I would hike up Kilimanjaro with him. We’re now three years into that promise, so I have some time yet, but I can’t imagine how I will do it–I can barely summon enough energy or excitement to do Mount Whitney. Besides, I find reading about the Kilimanjaro hike much more exciting.

Over at the Telegraph, Philip Henscher reviews Tim Winton’s The Turning, and wonders:

What is this book? Is it a novel? Is it a collection of stories with recurrent characters? Well, it might just be an example of a new literary genre. Genres don’t come into existence every day, but in the past few years a good number of writers have started exploring the previously blank territory that lies between the collection of short stories and the novel proper. It starts to look like a new form altogether.

Why worry what to call it? I mean–Shouldn’t we be asking if it’s any good? But Henscher’s point isn’t really about quality. It’s more about a trend he’s noticed over the last 10 years:

first noticed that something was in the air when I started being asked to judge competitions for novels, about 10 years ago or so. In one competition after another, a book came up for consideration and someone on the panel would say: “This is a terribly good book: but isn’t it really a collection of short stories, rather than a novel?” Judging the 2001 Booker Prize, for instance, we finally shortlisted two books of this sort – Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room and Ali Smith’s Hotel World. Another writer on that shortlist, David Mitchell, clearly finds the form congenial; his first book, Ghostwritten, and his third, Cloud Atlas, are constructed out of a succession of near-unrelated narratives.

These, and others, such as Rachel Cusk’s beautiful The Lucky Ones, shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel prize, don’t follow exactly the same tactics. The Dark Room is three separate stories, bound together by a single theme; despite their lack of connection, you couldn’t really excerpt one of them for an anthology. Hotel World is a single narrative, told from such different perspectives that the reader does have the sense of starting freshly with each episode.

This resonates particularly strongly with me because my debut book Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, has been described by one reader as “neither fish nor fowl,” an expression I tried my hardest to take as a compliment. My publisher has billed it as a short story collection, but in its overall themes it feels more like a novel where the chapters build on one another. Even while I was focused on details of the individual narratives, I always had the overall picture in mind. So it’ll be interesting to see, when the book comes out, whether this is something that readers and reviewers respond to.