Category: literary life

The magazine Granta, which recently changed editors, has a new issue out, and a newly refurbished site to go with it. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Online Only section has an opinion piece by Ngugi wa Thiong’o on the crisis in Kenya:

The title of Alan Paton’s novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, best captures the complex mixture of emotions I felt as I watched televised images of fire and death stalking Kenyan streets. An otherwise smooth election marked by a spirited competition of views among citizens went awry at the moment of tallying. The result of the tallying became a dance of absurdity, with claims and counterclaims of rigging by the main contesting parties: Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) and Mwai Kibaki’s Party of National Unity (PNU). The chairman of the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK), whose word would have helped those not at the scene make sense of it all, declared a winner, handed him the winner’s certificate and then said he knew the true presidential winner. The aggrieved party went to the streets but refused to go to the courts.

The dance of absurdity became a dance of death.

The article is available in full here. There is also a photo essay by Nick Danziger of the infamous French banlieues: The Paris Intifada. To read Andrew Hussey’s article, though, you will need to be a subscriber.

This year the London Book Fair hosted the Arab World as its special guest, so the focus has been on Arabic literature. The Guardian caught up with a number of Arab writers and asked them which works they think should be read today and The Independent‘s Boyd Tonkin has a very good overview of recent developments in the Arab literary scene. There’s even a mention of the detective novel by Abdelilah Hamdouchi that I keep hearing about. It comes out here in the U.S. in May, under the title The Final Wager.

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.

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)

What a delightful surprise: This year’s Reading the World initiative includes a collection of poems by Taha Muhammad Ali, translated by Gabriel Levin, Yahya Hijazi, and Peter Cole. (Cole, you’ll remember, is a certified Genius.) The book is called So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005. Here is a sample poem by Taha Muhammad Ali. (Original Arabic here). I dare you not to cry when you read it.