Boldtype #30
Boldtype #30 is now available, and the theme for this issue is “Secrets.” In the magazine, my pal Mark Sarvas reviews Sheila Heti’s Ticknor, which he’s recommended to me several times by phone, and which I plan on reading soon.
Boldtype #30 is now available, and the theme for this issue is “Secrets.” In the magazine, my pal Mark Sarvas reviews Sheila Heti’s Ticknor, which he’s recommended to me several times by phone, and which I plan on reading soon.
As has been widely reported, Luis Alberto Urrea’s excellent novel, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, has been awarded the Kiriyama Prize. The book is now out in paperback, so you really have no excuse anymore for not reading it.
Related: Review: The Hummingbird’s Daughter.
As our nation is in the grips of its once-per-decade, obligatory-hand-wringing about immigration, Sonia Nazario’s book couldn’t come at a better time. Nazario, you’ll remember, was the Los Angeles Times journalist who covered the story of a young Honduran boy’s journey to North Carolina to find his immigrant mother. The CSM has a positive review of the book, Enrique’s Journey.
In the current issue of The Boston Review, Khaled Abou El Fadl reviews Messages to the World: Statements of Osama bin Laden, edited by Bruce Lawrence, and translated by James Howarth.
But how are we to read this book? On one level, reading bin Laden is like reading the writings of a criminal who aims to rationalize his acts by explaining the circumstances of political and social oppression that forced him into criminality. At another level, reading bin Laden is not materially different from reading the tracts of a committed revolutionary who is struggling to liberate his people from foreign domination. But bin Laden himself insists that he be read neither as a criminal blaming the system nor simply as a radical defending its overthrow. He fancies himself a theologian and jurist who, besides acting to defend Muslim lands, is struggling to educate and exhort Muslims to act according to the dictates of their faith.
So who is bin Laden? Is he a criminal, a revolutionary, a theologian, or perhaps a historically unique and significant blend of all three—one who, like a medieval Crusader (perhaps a Bernard of Clairvaux), is armed with a righteous sense of aggression and feels compelled to preach violence while crying out, “Deus lo volt!” (“God wills it!”)?
I am not quite finished reading the essay, but it’s so interesting I wanted to bookmark it and post it here.
Hamsa (Hands Across the Middle East Alliance) is sponsoring an essay contest about civil rights in the Middle-East, under the theme “Dream Deferred.” (The title comes from a poem by Langston Hughes.) The first prize is $2,000, and the panel of judges includes a whole bunch of people we at Moorishgirl approve of, including Tel Quel editor Ahmed Reda Benchemsi. The deadline is coming up, so hurry up and submit your essay.
Here’s something quite au point. In the current issue of The Nation, Corey Robin reviews two interesting books about immigration: Caroline Moorehead’s Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees and Seyla Benhabib’s The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens.
Despite the efforts of postmodern theorists to convince us that exile is the emblematic condition of modern life, when it comes to immigrants and refugees we still seem incapable of the barest gesture of recognition, much less empathy. We remember Oedipus Rex: lover of one parent, killer of another. We forget Oedipus at Colonus: exiled king who wandered twenty years in search of “a resting place” near Athens, “where I should find home” and “round out there my bitter life.” We feel Medea’s rage over Jason’s betrayal, driving her to kill their two sons. We scarcely notice her equally poignant–and more frequent–lament that she is “deserted, a refugee,” with “no harbor from ruin to reach easily.”
Read it all here.