Category: literary life
After slapping novelist Orhan Pamuk with a lawsuit over his remarks regarding the genocide of Armenians, and after the international outcry that ensued, the Turkish government appears to think it has found a solution. Justice Minister Cemil Cicek has called on Pamuk to apologize for his remarks. In exchange for this apology the Minister is dangling this carrot: Charges will be dropped.
I doubt Pamuk will take the Minister up on the offer, so we will all have to wait until the public hearing on February 7th to find out more. If the case goes forward, it might shed more critical light on the ridiculous law that makes it a criminal offense to “insult Turkishness” and thus, possibly, hopefully, force its repeal.
Read older posts about Pamuk here.
The Library of Congress has a new online exhibition of ancient manuscripts from Timbuktu, which once was a thriving commercial and cultural center. The exhibited manuscripts date from the sixteenth to eighteenth century, and are “remarkable artifacts important to Malian and West African culture.” You can view images from the books here. Notice that the script used in the leaves is Moghrebi (or Maghrebi), a curviform style typically used in Morocco, Algeria and elsewhere in North Africa.
Related posts:
Kenya’s Book Mobiles
Africa’s Written Tradition
LOC link via Metafilter.
Over at the Guardian, Pankaj Mishra examines the lure of a good hotel and room service for many of the past century’s famed authors, people like Nabokov (post-Lolita, of course), Hemingway, Conrad, etc.
Indeed, it remains hard to think of some writers – Coward, Somerset Maugham – without thinking of room service and the cocktail hour. Their brittle cynicism about human nature could only have been manufactured in the anonymity and solitude of a hotel room. The posturing and emptiness of the later Hemingway may have something to do with his long stints at the bar of the Gritti Hotel in Venice. Nabokov’s already well-developed ego seems to have expanded further in the isolation of his Swiss hotel, resulting in the unreadable Ada Certainly, Naipaul’s futile struggles with the Kashmiri staff at his hotel in Srinagar contributed to the bleakness of Mr Stone.
These days, though, a long stay in a hotel is out of the question for the vast majority of working writers, unless, like Mishra, they are willing to explore what Asia or Africa have to offer.
The latest issue of Granta, is now available. I was thrilled to find out that the theme is “The View From Africa,” but a tad disappointed that not a single article appears to be about North Africa. (I suppose this is because Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania, and Libya are all lumped together with the Middle-East.) Still, I look forward to reading the magazine, especially considering it has such favorites as Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie and Binyavanga Wainaina.
Given the international attention that Orhan Pamuk’s case had drawn, both in and out of Turkey, I had hoped that the suit would be dismissed before it went to trial. This has not been the case, unfortunately for him (and for freedom of speech in Turkey.) Pamuk, you’ll recall, stands accused of “denigrating Turkish identity” because he dared to speak of the genocide of Armenians by the Turks, in an interview he gave to a Swiss magazine. If found guilty, Pamuk faces up to three years’ imprisonment.
No word yet on the outcome of today’s hearing, but, according to this article, it could still be postponed.
(Update: The BBC reports that the trial has indeed been postponed, due to a legal technicality. The prosecutor sent the case back to the Justice Ministry to decide whether Pamuk should be tried under the old penal code or the new. The next hearing is set for February 7, 2006.)
(Another update: The BBC article states that 60 other writers have been accused under the same law that Pamuk is being tried under. So perhaps a high-profile case like this will actually help get the law repealed.)
Pamuk has received wide support, from individual writers like Jose Saramago and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from writers’ organizations like PEN, and from government bodies as well (the EU has been pretty vocal). But that has not stopped the Turkish prosecutor from moving forward with the case.
Moorishgirl’s stats file indicates that it has readers in Turkey. If you are one, I’d love to hear from you. What is the local press saying? What are the reactions among your friends?
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times (reprinted in the Star Tribune), E. Annie Proulx describes the kind of imaginative work she had to do to create the characters in “Brokeback Mountain.”
“Put yourself in my place,” the author says. “An elderly, white, straight female, trying to write about two 19-year-old gay kids in 1963. What kind of imaginative leap do you think was necessary? Profound, extreme, large. To get into those guys’ heads and actions took a lot of 16-hour days, and never thinking about anything else and living a zombie life. That’s what I had to do. I really needed an exorcist to get rid of those characters. And they roared back when I saw the film.”(…)
It was 1995 and Proulx, who lives in Wyoming, visited a crowded bar near the Montana border. The place was rowdy and packed with attractive women, everyone was drinking, and the energy was high.
“There was the smell of sex in the air,” remembers Proulx. “[B]ut here was this old shabby-looking guy. … watching the guys playing pool. He had a raw hunger in his eyes that made me wonder if he were country gay. I wondered, ‘What would’ve he been like when he was younger?’ Then he disappeared, and in his place appeared Ennis. And then Jack. You can’t have Ennis without Jack.”
A year after the story was published, Proulx says, Matthew Shepard was killed in Wyoming and she was called to be on the jury.
Shepard’s murder partly inspired Percival Everett for his new novel, Wounded. In it, a horse rancher hires a laborer who eventually becomes accused of a hate crime against a gay man. The book was released to generally positive reviews earlier this fall.