The Moroccan Cultural Studies Center in Fes has published an English-language edition of Hope. My book has been used in college courses in Morocco for a while, but this edition (priced at 50 Dirhams) will make it easier for college students to get their hands on it. (Previously, they had to order it on Amazon or–gasp!–photocopy it.) The cover art is by Mohamed Mrabet. I’m thrilled!
Some people will probably not believe me when I say I’m a big procrastinator (“How do you get so much done?” is usually the retort. Mine is: “You should’ve seen what I had planned!”) It’s taken me four and a half years to finish my new novel. I’m now slowly trudging along with edits, and I’ve devised a new system for positive reinforcement. After every two pages of my work, I allow myself two pages from something old (Life and Times of Michael K., at the moment). At night, if I’ve finished a chapter, I read something new (the new Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence.) More soon.
From a brief piece in the London Review of Books on immigration detention centers:
Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea living in Brooklyn, is one of 71 detainees to have died in the last four years in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. An illegal immigrant confined to a detention centre after his green card application was rejected, Bah died after a fall that no one seems to have witnessed. ICE, which was set up by the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11, is responsible for the detention of a staggering number of people: 311,213 last year, a million since 2004. They are held in prisons in which, according to Mark Dow, the author of American Gulag (2005), ‘extreme forms of physical abuse are not just aberrations.’ The centre where Bah was detained is managed by Corrections Corporation of America, a firm set up in 1983 in Nashville by a group of investors that included a former chairman of Tennessee’s Republican Party. A pioneer in running private prisons, it has also been quick to specialise in immigrant detention, the fastest growing branch of the incarceration business.
CCA describes itself as the ‘nation’s largest provider of outsourced corrections management’, with 70,000 inmates and 16,000 staff. Its website speaks proudly of ‘similarities in mission and structure’ with the US army and makes a special appeal to veterans in search of work: ‘How will you make the transition from military to civilian life? CCA features a paramilitary structure: a highly refined chain of command, and policies and procedures that dictate facility operations.’
Things are similarly bleak for immigrants and refugees in the UK, as Adam Shatz explains.
In class yesterday, we talked about stories that use history as a starting point, and the challenges that come with this undertaking. Daniel Beaty’s one-man show Emergency (currently playing at The Geffen Playhouse) does just that. It’s about a slave ship that rises out of the Hudson River, in front of the Statue of Liberty; the people of New York are all stunned, but they each react differently to the intrusion of history into their lives. Beaty performs approximately 40 characters, ranging from a little girl to an old widower, from a dispassionate newscaster to a reality TV show contestant. Some of the characters he brings to life are more fully realized than others, but their testimonies ring with truth–as painful, shocking, thought-provoking, and liberating as it may be. Emergency is playing until May 25, so don’t miss it.
While working on line edits for my new novel, I’ve been trying to justify my glacial pace to myself: it must be because I am busy with teaching; or because I spend too much time writing nonfiction; or because I am a perfectionist; or because English is my third language; or because I am lazy; and so on. In a fit of despair, I decided to read up on Vladimir Nabokov’s editing process, and stumbled upon an article by Maxim D. Shrayer: “After Rapture and Recapture: Transformations in the Drafts of Nabokov’s Stories,” which was published in Russian Review. Shrayer cites Nabokov’s preface to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin:
Rough drafts, false scents, half explored trails, dead ends of inspiration, are of little intrinsic importance. An artist should ruthlessly destroy his manuscripts after publication, lest they mislead academic mediocrities into thinking that it is possible to unravel the mysteries of genius by studying canceled readings. In art, purpose and plan are nothing; only the results count.
This makes the upcoming publication of The Original of Laura, the unfinished manuscript that Nabokov wanted destroyed, a tad problematic, but that’s not my subject here. I was more interested in the distinction Nabokov drew between ‘Rapture’ and ‘Recapture,’ the former being the state of conception, a process not to be interrupted but to be followed wherever it leads, and the latter the state of composition, which is a more laborious, conscious process, and begins with the very first draft. Shrayer’s article demonstrates the extent to which Nabokov recaptured: everything from stylistic revisions to structural changes. I think I needed to read this to be inspired. Back to work.