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While in Cleveland to accept an award, novelist Edwidge Danticat told the Plain Dealer that Hurricane Katrina reminded her of Jeanne, which devastated the Haitian city of Gonaives:

“There, again, the people most vulnerable were the most affected. It’s extraordinarily striking to hear people of the first world called refugees in their own country. People try to distance themselves from the dispossessed, asking, ‘Why didn’t they get out?’ – the same question asked of Gonaives.”

Over at NPR, writers Fannie Flagg and Richard Ford offer call in to offer comfort to the survivors. (Scroll to the last few minutes of the program.)

Elsewhere, Poet Ishmael Reed calls the media on its handling of race during the hurricane and on other major current issues.

I wish that some of these smug individuals [those who profess ‘tough love’] would serve as block captain in an inner-city neighborhood for a year, as I have since 1989. They would discover that the official indifference and apathy and neglect expressed toward the black residents in New Orleans happen on a smaller scale to black neighborhoods throughout the nation. That nation is not color-blind. It’s colored blind.

My review of Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Desertion appears in the September 26 issue of The Nation. I have talked about the novel several times on Moorishgirl, but this (longer) piece was an opportunity to critically examine it and put it in context with other works by Gurnah. The review is available to subscribers only online. Here’s a snippet:

The desertion of the title should, by now, be fairly straightforward. White men desert their native lovers, Muslim men desert liberated partners, and young, educated men desert Zanzibar for the comforts of Britain. But there is another kind of desertion that haunts the novel: the British colonial experience. Indeed, Gurnah seems to suggest that Britain “deserted” its colonies, like the islands of Zanzibar, before the time was right. In a postcolonial novel this might seem like a startling assertion, but it is not new to Gurnah. One of the main characters in By the Sea remarks that he married in 1963, “a year before the British departed in a huff and left us to the chaos and violence that attended the end of their empire.” Gurnah appears to fault the British for not living up to their responsibilities, for disrupting a social order without being asked and then leaving the resulting problems for others to solve. One could even argue that the disjointed narrative in Desertion is deliberate, that it is Gurnah’s way of reflecting a world in which relationships between people, between countries, are interrupted before they have run their course. Seen in this light, the novel has a staying power that belies its quietness.

The issue hits newsstands next week.

The Levantine Cultural Center, in conjunction with PEN, will hold readings of the anthology of Iranian literature, Strange Times, My Dear, which I’ve talked about at length in a previous blog entry. In today’s edition of the L.A. Times, Susan Carpenter talks about the event, and gives some background on the legal fight that had to take place to enable the book’s publication.

In addition to featuring readings from the book, it will include a performance by L.A.-based Farsi jazz vocalist Ziba Shirazi and Middle Eastern cuisine. Iranian comedian and actor Maz Jobrani will be the host.

“A lot of people fled Iran for freedom of speech, and here we are in America suffering what we left there for,” Jobrani said. “Being a comedian and knowing that it’s important to be able to say what we want to say, and also having come from Iran, where there’s censorship, it kind of made me think: If that’s happening here in the U.S., it’s something we need to bring to people’s attention.”

“For PEN, this [event] is part of our main mission of freedom of speech and freedom to write,” said Adam Somers, executive director of the L.A.-based PEN USA. “It’s part of our mission to nurture the literary community, in this case the Iranian community, as well.”

Southern California is home to the largest Iranian population outside Iran. It’s been estimated that 600,000 to 800,000 Iranians live here.

Read it all here.

This week, I’m giving away a copy of Esmeralda Santiago’s The Turkish Lover. It’s a memoir of her seven-year relationship with Turkish filmmaker Ulvi Dogan, a candid account of the tumultuous and abusive times they spent together, traveling from Florida, through New York, to Boston, where Santiago finally settled down and started attending college. The book was released to very good reviews last fall, and is now coming out in paperback. Here’s how it works: First person to email me at llalami at yahoo dot com with the subject line ‘The Turkish Lover’ gets the book. Previous winners excluded, obviously.

Update: The winner is Suzanne K.