News

Twenty years ago today, Salman Rushdie received what he would later describe as a “funny valentine.” The Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on Radio Tehran, calling Rushdie an apostate and sentencing him to death for his work of fiction, The Satanic Verses. The fatwa followed weeks of protests by some people within the British Muslim community and led to further protests and riots in parts of the Muslim world. One translator, several dozen protesters, and many supporters were murdered as a result of the controversy. Hundreds of others—editors, publishers, booksellers, readers, bystanders—were injured. Rushdie had to live under police protection for nine years.

Nowadays, Rushdie often quips that, without seeking further argument with the Ayatollah, “I will point out that only one of us is dead.” I’m glad it was the novelist who survived the confrontation, not the politician/religious nutjob. I remember getting my hands on a copy of the book when I was in London in 1990; I couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about. But then again, I wasn’t someone whose identity was threatened by novels. The Satanic Verses is not my favorite of Rushdie’s books (those would be Midnight’s Children and Imaginary Homelands). I don’t always agree with what he writes, but whenever I think about what he and his family went through for several years, I feel enormous sympathy for him.

The BBC has a short interview with three people who took part in the original protests in Bradford.  Meanwhile, the Guardian catches up with Iqbal Sacranie (he who said that “death would be too easy” for Rushdie) and Lisa Appignanesi (the novelist and memoirist who tirelessly defended Rushdie.) As for the author, he’s been busy; the paperback edition of his tenth novel, The Enchantress of Florence, was released last month.

The spring quarter at UC Riverside won’t start for another seven weeks, and yet I am already having anxiety dreams. Last night, I dreamed that I showed up to teach my Introduction to Creative Writing course and none of my lecture notes were in my bag. I ran back to the office to print one of the assigned stories from the online file-management system, but my laptop was missing. So I went to the assistant’s office, but neither of her computers seemed to be working, etc. You get the idea.

I suppose this early bout of anxiety is because of the course itself. Intro to Creative Writing is a general education course, open to all freshmen, with an enrollment of 180 students every quarter. In their infinite wisdom, the scheduling gods have me teaching this course while I’m also supposed to be on book tour for my new novel, Secret Son.

The Egyptian novelist Alaa al-Aswany had an opinion piece this past weekend in the New York Times:

PRESIDENT OBAMA is clearly trying to reach out to the Muslim world. I watched his Inaugural Address on television, and was most struck by the line: “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers.” He gave his first televised interview from the White House to Al Arabiya, an Arabic-language television channel.

But have these efforts reached the streets of Cairo?

Al-Aswany argues that Obama’s deafening silence about Israel’s air-, land-, and sea-based bombing of Gaza during the first three weeks of January has significantly drained any reservoir of goodwill he might have had in the region. Meanwhile, in the New York Times magazine, the Israeli novelist and screenwriter Etgar Keret contributes a short piece to the Lives section, about running into an old friend while in a bomb shelter. Here is the closing paragraph:

On the train from Beersheba I read a paper that someone had left behind on a seat. There was an item about the lions and ostriches at the Gaza Zoo. They were suffering from the bombing and hadn’t been fed regularly since the war began. The brigade commander wanted to rescue one particular lion in a special operation and transfer it to Israel. The other animals were going to have to fend for themselves. Another, smaller, item, without a picture, reported that the number of children who had died in the bombing of Gaza so far had passed 300. Like the ostriches, the rest of the children there would also have to fend for themselves. Our situation at the level of the matchstick Eiffel Tower has indeed improved beyond recognition. As for the rest, like Kobi, I have my doubts.

You can read both pieces here and here.

In Africa, when an old person dies, a library burns. When the Malian writer and ethnologist Amadou Hampâté Bâ uttered these words at a Unesco assembly in 1960, he was attempting to draw attention to Africa’s tradition of oral storytelling. Little did he know that his aphorism would turn into one of the most persistent clichés about the continent, one that unfortunately reinforced the erroneous idea that there was no tradition of written literature in Africa prior to European colonialism. Early on in Alain Mabanckou’s new novel Broken Glass (to be published this month in translation from French to English), the proprietor of a seedy bar in Brazzaville, who is referred to only as Stubborn Snail, hears the slogan and derisively responds that it “depends which old person, don’t talk crap, I only trust what’s written down.”

In fact, Stubborn Snail is so sure of the power of the written word that he gives a notebook to his most regular customer, an old schoolteacher nicknamed Broken Glass, and asks him to write his customers’ stories. Broken Glass takes up the challenge, though he quickly warns the reader that “I’m writing this for myself as well, that’s why I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes when he reads these pages, I don’t intend to spare him or anyone else.” One suspects that Mabanckou shares these feelings, that he has no time for pious and well-meaning clichés about Africa, and that he intends to write as irreverently and as freely as he pleases.

You can read the entire piece here.

I’ve had a copy of the collected journals of Susan Sontag (Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963) in my office for a while, but somehow haven’t managed to get to it yet. Luc Sante’s thoughtful and generous review makes me want to read it. Here’s the opening paragraph:

You might say there are two kinds of writers: those who keep a journal in the hope that its contents might someday be published, and those who do not keep a journal for fear that its contents might someday be published. In other words, no journal-keeping by a writer who harbors any sort of ambition is going to be entirely innocent. The complicated, somewhat voyeuristic thrill the reader might derive from seemingly prying open the author’s desk drawer is therefore, to a certain extent, a fiction in which both parties are complicit.

This notion inescapably comes to mind when one reads the entries by the young Susan Sontag collected in Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947-1963 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25). Like any author’s journal worth reading, it contains items that anticipate prominent themes of her later published work, as well as others that seem terribly private. What’s unusual, maybe, is that sometimes the intellectual items sound more naked and the private items more hedged.

You can read the review in its entirety here.