My friend D. emailed me to say that my book appeared in the best-seller list compiled by the Moroccan magazine Le Journal. It’s really lovely to see the Moroccan edition (published by Le Fennec) getting into the hands of readers.
What happens when I try to cook.
One of the advantages of being on vacation is that, despite having brought my laptop with me, I did not keep up with the news. So until I came back, I had been unaware that riots had ignited in the suburb of Villiers-le-Bel in France, following the deaths of two teenagers of North African and West African descent; that there had been a circus at Annapolis, in which nothing was achieved (well, except for Mahmoud Abbas getting to try on the local haberdashery); that the Sudanese government was using a stupid teddy bear to divert attention from the killings in Darfur; and that my beloved Tangier lost its bid to host the 2012 World Expo.
We are leaving for a week’s vacation in Hawaii tomorrow (in fact, I should probably be packing instead of blogging.) Last night, while choosing which books to take with me, I ended up pulling out Joan Didion’s essay “In The Islands,” which was published in her collection The White Album. The opening paragraph reads:
1969: I had better tell you where I am, and why. I am sitting in a high-ceilinged room in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu watching the long translucent curtains billow in the trade wind and trying to put my life back together. My husband is here, and our daughter, age three. She is blonde and barefoot, a child of paradise in a frangipani lei, and she does not understand why she cannot go to the beach. She cannot go to the beach because there has been an earthquake in the Aleutians, 7.5 on the Richter scale, and a tidal wave is expected. In two or three minutes the wave, if there is one, will hit Midway Island, and we are awaiting word from Midway. My husband watches the television screen. I watch the curtains, and imagine the swell of the water.
The bulletin, when it comes, is a distinct anticlimax: Midway reports no unusual wave action. My husband switches off the television set and stares out the window. I avoid his eyes, and brush the baby’s hair. In the absence of a natural disaster we are left again to our own uneasy devices. We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.
Isn’t this the best of Didion, and the worst? The precise adjectives, the varied syntax, the parallel between natural and personal calamity–any writer would envy her those qualities. (I know I do.) And yet, the paragraph also has the worst of her, doesn’t it? Did you really need to know that she stays in a “high-ceilinged room” at the expensive Royal Hawaiian Hotel? The best and worst compete with each other for the rest of the essay, and yet of course I felt compelled to finish it, and read the best sentences out loud to my husband.
I have an essay titled “Why I Write,” in the Dutch literary magazine Nexus. I wrote this piece last spring in Casablanca, at the invitation of editor Rob Riemen, who wanted a piece on the subject of childhood dreams–you can easily guess what my dream was. The essay was translated into Dutch by Ineke van der Burg. I haven’t submitted the essay anywhere in the States yet (maybe if I stopped traveling so much…) but maybe someday the original English-language edition will appear somewhere. For those of you who read Dutch, the table of contents is available here, and you can purchase a copy here.
I will be taking part in a reading tonight at the Los Angeles Public Library to honor the victims of the bombing of Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad last year. I will be reading two brief poems (one by Mutanabbi himself, one by Darwish) in the original Arabic, followed by English translations. My wonderful UCR colleague Chris Abani will read, as will Beau Beausoleil, Suzanne Lummis, Marisela Norte, Sholeh Wolpe, and Terry Wolverton. Please come.