News

I will be moderating a panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which takes place on the UCLA campus in about a couple of weeks, so I have been busy reading the novels of Tony Earley, Dinaw Mengestu, Stewart O’Nan, and Ann Packer. Tickets will be available starting this Sunday, April 20, and they are free. (Wait–it says there’s a nominal fee of $.75. Must be because Ticketmaster is handling the ticketing.) Here are the details:

April 26, 2008
2:30 PM
Fiction: Not So Ordinary People
Tony Earley, Dinaw Mengestu, Stewart O’Nan, Ann Packer and moderated by Laila Lalami
Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
Korn Convocation Hall
UCLA Campus
Los Angeles, California

Anyway, come to the panel. It will be fun. Do check out the event listing on the website. Several of my colleagues and friends will be moderating or participating in readings or panels, and I hope to make it to as many of them as I can.

Tingis, the Moroccan American magazine of ideas and culture, has published its new issue, which you can already preview online. Tingis, you’ll remember, is edited by Anouar Majid, who is also the author of A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent is Vital to Islam and America. I keep meaning to write about this book, and I keep getting sidetracked by other assignments. Here’s an interview with Majid on Bill Moyers’ show, just to give you an idea about his work.

Anyway, the new issue of Tingis includes a neat article about the use of the star of David on the Moroccan flag (prior to the French occupation, of course, and the ensuing tribalism), as well as a short story by a young Arizona-based writer, Abdennabi Benchehda: “The Daughter of Dr. Butrus.” Check it out.

I am running around this morning trying to finish off a few things that I neglected because of edits on my new book, but I wanted to direct you to this interesting piece by Steve Wasserman, in which he reviews Fidel Castro’s autobiography.

Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection, edited by Aimee Liu and Stacey Bierlien. Other contributors include Nathan Englander, Ana Menendez, Josip Novakovich, Wanda Coleman, Tony d’Souza, Samrat Upadhyay, Mary Yukari Waters, Luis Alfaro, Amanda Eyre Ward, and many others. My copy just arrived in the mail earlier this week and I was pleased to see what a hefty, exciting book it turned out to be. There should be a reading/signing at BookExpo in May. I’ll post details once I have them.

Rabih Alameddine, whose new novel The Hakawati will be published in a couple of weeks, has a nice piece in the Los Angeles Times about English words borrowed from other languages, and how the connotations for those words change once they are incorporated:

English has yet to incorporate these words fully, and history suggests it might never do so. The language is filled with words that are culture specific: “sahib,” “coolie,” “effendi,” “bey.” The word “emir” simply means prince in Arabic, but in English it is a prince or ruler of an Islamic state. When my sister in Beirut tells her daughter a bedtime story, the emir kisses the sleeping princess awake. No mother in the U.S. or Britain would let an emir anywhere near a princess’ lips. No princess will ever sing “Someday My Emir Will Come.”

That in some ways is how it should be. Language, after all, is organic. You can’t force words into existence. You can’t force new meanings into words. And some words can’t or won’t or shouldn’t be laundered or neutered. Language develops naturally.

I bring all this up, however, to get to the word whose connotation I would love to see changed — “Allah.”

Allah means God.

In Arabic, Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians all pray to Allah. In English, however, Christians and Jews pray to God, and Allah is the Muslim deity. No one would think of using the word “Allah” to talk about any other religion. The two words, “God” and “Allah,” do not mean the same thing in English. They should.

And brilliantly he explains why. By the way, something tells me that many, many stories will be written about The Hakawati (The storyteller) so you’ll want to get your copy soon.

(Photo credit: RAWI)