Category: literary life
I’ve been reading Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, picking up different essays at different moments, depending on my mood. This morning, I finally read the opening piece, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” which originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. Didion writes about the death of a dentist named Gordon Miller, a Seventh-Day Adventist from San Bernardino County, California, and the subsequent trial of his wife, Lucille Maxwell, for his murder. Didion begins the piece not with an examination of the tabloid trial, but with a reflection about dreams–of love, of wealth, of happily ever after–in a part of California where “it was easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book.” And then she writes, “The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”
Why do I have the feeling that her words could just as easily apply to Morocco? It’s interesting to me that foreign journalists, those who visit the place on assignment, love to play up the fact that this is an “ancient” country, with its millennial history, its customs, and its religions. And yet it’s hard to escape the future here. This is, after all, a place where historical sites are discarded in favor of shiny new developments, where everyone keeps talking about that new government plan or that five- or ten-year initiative, the strategies that will finally end poverty, eradicate illiteracy, and bring democracy and financial prosperity. It’s all in the future. How many remember that those things were said thirty years ago?
I was very upset to have missed Mahmoud Darwish‘s appearance in Morocco last week. (In my defense, I should say that the organizers had originally listed him as reading in Casablanca, and then moved him to Rabat at the last minute and I couldn’t make arrangements to go.) I feel horrible to have missed him. Who knows when an opportunity to hear him might come again?
By the way, Copper Canyon Press is publishing a translation by Fady Joudah of three recent works by Darwish, under the title The Butterfly’s Burden. And here’s the best part: The volume is bilingual, so you can feast on the Arabic as well as the English. Get your copy. Now.
As if one needed further examples of how extremists, of all stripes, dominate public discourse and political action all over the world: According to the Daily Telegraph, Turkish novelist and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk has moved to New York, in the wake of Hrant Dink’s murder by secular nationalists.
Related:
Interview with Elif Shafak
Hrant Dink’s Murder
Best news I’ve heard in a while: Arundhati Roy is said to be working on a new novel.
My friend Cliff has been raving about Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul. “It’s one of the best books I’ve read in years,” he told me. And then in a separate note to a reading group we belong to he called it “an excellent book.” The novel, already a major bestseller in Turkey, just came out in the United States this month. Shafak was due to travel to several cities in the U.S. in support of the novel, but in the wake of Hrant Dink’s murder, she cut her tour down to just one appearance in New York, during which she was also interviewed by Terri Gross for NPR. Of the secular nationalists who attacked her and others, Shafak says:
This group is one of many voices in Turkey. They do not represent the majority of the voices in society, and frankly my opinion is they are targeting intellectuals and writers precisely because they want to stop the E.U. process. They have made it very clear that they are against Turkey’s E.U. membership, and they would like to see the country as a more insular place, a more xenophobic nation-state, a closed society. That’s what they would like to see happening.
You can listen to the interview here.
>A discussion is taking place this week over at the Lit Blog Co-Op about Ngugi’s latest novel, his first in many years: Wizard of the Crow. I’ve mentioned this book before, and I am thrilled to see it make the LBC’s Winter Read This! selection. Check it out.