I’ve received word that RAWI, the Arab American Writers’ association, is organizing a literary contest for 2006. Short stories, essays, memoir, drama, vignettes, and prose poetry will be considered. The deadline is March 20, 2006, and the competition will be judged by Joseph Geha and Sahar Kayyal. Send your (new, unpublished) entry to Alice Nashashibi, 95 Mercedes Way, San Francisco, CA 94217. Good luck to all.
Gabriel García Márquez says he has stopped writing. In an interview with Barcelona-based La Vanguardia, he revealed he hasn’t written a single line in 2005, and doesn’t know if he will again.
After revelations that crucial portions of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces were either fabricated or largely exaggerated, and after reports that the writer J.T. Leroy was a middle-aged mom, and not, as she had claimed, a transsexual teenage ex-prostitute, a third writer has found himself in hot waters, so to speak. The L.A. Weekly reports that the writer who goes by the name of Nasdijj, and whose account of a life spent on Navajo reservations, dealing with alcoholism, childhood sexual abuse, and other horrors, may not be Native American at all. Suspicions about him started as far back as 1999:
[A]s his successes and literary credentials grew in number so did his skeptics – particularly from within the Native American community. Sherman Alexie first heard of Nasdijj in 1999 after his former editor sent him a galley proof of The Blood for comment. At the time, Alexie, who is Spokane and Coeur d’Alene, was one of the hottest authors in America and was widely considered the most prominent voice in Native American literature. His novel Indian Killer was a New York Times notable book, and his cinematic feature Smoke Signals was the previous year’s Sundance darling, nominated for the Grand Jury Prize and winner of the Audience Award. Alexie’s seal of approval would have provided The Blood with a virtual rubber stamp of native authenticity. But it took Alexie only a few pages before he realized he couldn’t vouch for the work. It wasn’t just that similar writing style and cadence that bothered Alexie.
“The whole time I was reading I was thinking, this doesn’t just sound like me, this is me,” he says.
Alexie was born hydrocephalic, a life-threatening condition characterized by water on the brain. At the age of 6 months he underwent brain surgery that saved his life but left him, much like Tommy Nothing Fancy, prone to chronic seizures throughout his childhood. Instead of identifying with Nasdijj’s story, however, Alexie became suspicious.
“At first I was flattered but as I kept reading I noticed he was borrowing from other Native writers too. I thought, this can’t be real.”
The L.A. Weekly article suggests that Nasdijj is in fact a white man from Lansing, Michigan named Tim Barrus. It’s easy enough to imagine that Barrus turned in a novel that he called a memoir, and since publishers do not fact-check memoirs, no one saw anything suspicious. But how could the public have been fooled for so long? Alexie provides a possible answer:
On many issues, preachy whites simply lack the political and cultural cachet of someone perceived to be Native American.
“My stepfather once told me, if you want anyone in the world to like you, just tell them that you’re Indian,” says Sherman Alexie. “For some reason we are elevated simply because of our race. I’m so popular I could start a cult. I could have 45 German women living with me tomorrow.”
Read the rest of the article here.
Have you been reading the Lit Blog Co-Op this week? If you haven’t, here’s what you’ve missed: a podcast interview with Ander Monson, the author of Other Electricities, a discussion about the book, a review, and, finally, an appearance by the writer himself. Next week will be devoted to All This Heavenly Glory by Elizabeth Crane. So tune in!
The Turkish government has dropped its case against Orhan Pamuk. The writer had been accused of “insulting Turkishness” because he had spoken about the (well documented) genocide of Armenians in 1915.
Though I’m sure, dear reader, that you’re relieved to hear that such ridiculous charges have been dismissed, it isn’t actually a victory for freedom of speech. Quite the contrary, it is a loss, because the law which made it possible to try Pamuk (article 301 of the new penal code) is still, apparently, in effect. While it is true that the law is open to interpretation (the prosecutor who brought charges against Pamuk was reported to be someone who was trying to make a name for himself) the fact remains that such prosecutions are likely to continue to happen. The difference is that we probably won’t hear about it.
I’d heard about The Colony, John Tayman’s history of the Kalawao leper settlement on Molokai, in Hawaai, from a reader with whom I correspond on occasion, and I was very intrigued. Mary Roach’s excellent review of the book in the Sunday NYTBR has certainly whet my appetite:
The kicker here, the monumental inequity, is that people with leprosy were exiled for no good medical reason. Leprosy is not an especially contagious disease. Only 5 percent of the population are genetically susceptible to it. And even they would probably emerge untainted: only a third of untreated leprosy patients have the disease in its active, infectious state.
Yet so great was the hysteria surrounding leprosy that hundreds, probably even thousands, of people who only appeared to have the disease were packed off to colonies. At one point, patients in Kalawao were allowed to request a rediagnosis. Ten out of the first 11 to do so did not have leprosy. A diagnosis of leprosy, accurate or inaccurate, amounted to a criminal conviction. By law, people deemed lepers could be hunted down, stripped of their rights and torn from their families. And most of them were – until well after effective treatment was established, in the 1940’s. The story of Kalawao is the story of an injustice as deep and complete as any in human history.
“The Lepers of Molokai,” an essay that Jack London wrote for Woman’s Home Companion in 1908, and in which he “kept himself in check” about the horrors of the place, is available online here.