Isak

The Best Writing Group Ever Met in 1977

 

This image captures Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, June Jordan, Lori Sharpe, and Audrey Edwards, among others, who met together in Walker's apartment on Garfield Place for a black women's writing group. Poet Patricia Spears Jones was also part of the group. The photo on the wall is of Bessie Smith. The earth shook.

 

UPDATE: Let's unravel a little context here. In 1977, Alice Walker had just published Meridian, and was a few years away from The Color Purple. Toni Morrison won the National Book Critics Circle award for Song of Solomon; she'd also already published The Bluest Eye and Sula. In 1977, June Jordan published Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poems, 1954–1977. Ntozake Shange was two years past having seen her poetic play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf nominated for Tony, Grammy, and Emmy awards. Her play A Photograph: Lovers-in-Motion was about to debut off-Broadway. Audrey Edwards was writing biographies for young people on the likes of Stevie Wonder and Muhammad Ali.

 

Image Credit: Toni Morrison's Facebook page.

Worldwide Writers Bloc

Zadie Smith introduces the Writers Bloc series over at Guernica as an international project that brings together "people who have a knack for compelling narratives, who like to try to represent people’s lives in all their curious detail—in short, people with a patience for the third dimension." With help from the Soros Foundation, these writers were sent tell stories about education and schools around the world in a way that departed from the typically "pius, charitable or analytical" writing that tends to come when development or missionary organizations are the singular stortellers about what unfolds in global classrooms.

What's emerged is an uncommon and beautiful collection of narrative nonfiction, each with an urgency that is peculiarly honest. In the Writers Bloc series are:

• Aleksandar Hemon on Bosnia
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Nigeria
• Rachel Holmes on Palestine
• Kamila Shamsie on Pakistan
• Zukiswa Wanner on South Africa
• Tahmima Anam on Bangladesh
• Nick Laird on Nepal
• Nathalie Handal on Haiti
• Hardeep Singh Kohli on India
• Petina Gappah on Zimbabwe

Zadie Smith said that she "found myself struck by the rejuvenating force of this ‘nonprofessional’ language, and the clarity a well-constructed narrative can bring to even the most complicated national histories and labyrinthine government interventions."

I don’t think I have ever understood, for example, the consequences of the Yugoslavian war and the 1995 Dayton Peace accord as intimately as I did while reading Aleksander Hemon’s dispatch from a nursery school in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A policy writer would likely not use a group of five-year-old children as a metaphor for the history of a nation, but under Hemon’s pen an intimate anecdote becomes a powerful conduit of information. His report concerns the ethnicization of Bosnia’s schoolrooms (where Muslim and Christian students are taught separately in a “two-schools-under-one-roof policy”). It’s interesting to note how many of the Writers Bloc essays reveal the ways in which classrooms all over the world are used as proxy ideological battlegrounds. ...

The other thing that seems, to me, useful about Writers Bloc, is its tone of subjectivity, of passion. It is natural that development organizations should attempt a “neutral” voice, express little outrage, and try not to offend the governments with whom they work. But it is also natural, upon entering the gap between first world and the third, to feel something, to be moved, and to have opinions, to express anger. The correspondents for Writers Bloc express their feelings not in the flat blandness of the TV camera nor the news-hungry enquiry of the press reporter but as human citizens rather than professional advocates in prose that hopes to cut through that most depressing first world malady: “Charity fatigue.”

While I understand that, particularly given the universal education mandate of the UN Millennium Development Goals, this project centers on sending first world world writers into third world classrooms, I wish that it had moved in the other direction as well. After all, there is not a bright line between the viability or success of education in the West and elsewhere. What would an Indian novelist write about a classroom in Detroit? What might a Chinese writer make of elementary schools in Chicago, or Glasgow, or Belfast? Smith points to how classrooms everywhere are used as "proxy ideological battlegrounds"; there is a story here as well.

Image Credit: Guernica Magazine

Reading Africa

Kinna Reads is hosting what looks like a very fun Africa Reading Challenge, a prompt inviting you to read at least five books in 2012 that are "written by African writers, or take place in Africa, or are concerned with Africans and with historical and contemporary African issues." The guidelines are simple: at least three books must be written by African writers and at least one must be a work of fiction.

For the novice, if you have not read any African lit or if you’ve read one book (E.g. Achebe’s Things Fall Apart):  I would advise a mix of at least two regions, two languages, classic and contemporary, with both male and female writers.  A sample reading list could be:

• Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih (North Africa, Arabic, classic)
• Maps by Nuruddin Farah (East Africa)
• Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Southern Africa, contemporary)
• So Long a Letter by Mariama Ba (West Africa, classic, Francophone)
• Zoo City by Lauren Beukes (Southern Africa, contemporary, modern fantasy)

For the advanced reader of African literature:  perhaps there is some gap (country, region, language, theme, gender)  you want to fill or author(s) whose works you want to explore further?

You could also, for example:

• Read only collection/anthologies of short stories
• Stick to the literary tradition of one country
• Read only Lusophone literature
• Explore the literature of contemporary South Africa
• Read the books of North African countries of the Arab Spring

Complementing the challenge, Kinna Reads will provide reading materials, suggestions, host the reviews and commentary of readers, and feature reading events like Ghanaian Literature Week. See this Kinna Reads list for further reading recommendations.

Speaking: Dubravka Ugrešić

 

 

Unfortunately, it’s a fate of writers coming from so-called small literatures. I deleted my ethnic, national and state identity because there was nothing much to delete there. But I found myself in a very ironic position: in Croatia I am not a Croatian writer anymore, but abroad I am always identified as a Croatian writer. That means that I became what I didn’t want to be and what I am not. Still, what I can’t delete as easily is my experience. Even if I could, I would not erase it or exchange it for a less traumatic one. That experience is rich and enriching, as well as pretty unique. Not so many people in the world were born in a country that doesn’t exist anymore. ... I experienced the taste of life under communism. Later I experienced a war and fascism, because it was fascism. The word nationalism is just a euphemism. I also experienced life in Western Europe and the United States. ... I have had the experience of dislocation, call it exile or something else. I have had the experience of the disappearance of one’s own environment, the destruction of the basic values of human life. I also experienced the process of reinventing and reconstructing one’s own life in a new environment.

By the way, it is interesting how people in power, Western European and American politicians, the media and even academics accepted a brutal ethnic divorce between the former Yugoslav republic as “unavoidable,” almost as a “natural” end to the “communist federal state.” At the same time nobody noticed that a whole population—of a million Yugoslavs either ethnically indifferent or with multiple identities or from mixed marriages—silently disappeared. Nobody offered them any rights or supported their voice in the least.

-- Dubravka Ugrešić, speaking in a 2002 interview with BOMB magazine

 

Dubravka Ugrešić is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist; see, for example, Karaoke Culture and Nobody's Home, published by Open Letter Books. (See the Los Angeles Times review of the Karaoke Culture here, and Jessa Crispin's interview with the author in Kirkus Reviews here.) Born in the former Yugoslavia, in the part that became Croatia, she studied comparative literature and Russian at the University of Zagreb, and has been a translator from Croatian to Russian. Ugrešić learned the Bulgarian language from her mother and summers on the Black Sea. When she took an anti-nationalist stance after war broke out in the early 1990s, she faced a media backlash that was part of why she left Croatia in 1993. Among many other honors, Ugrešić won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award for her novel, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg. That is the novel that inspired Mary Gaitskill to write a hagiography in Bookforum about how the author "finds feminist mettle in an Eastern European witch." Ugrešić now writes from Amsterdam.

 

Image Credit: Kultura.

Book Banning in Michigan High School Ignites Community

Two books in the AP English Literature class at a Michigan high school are the target of a book-banning effort by local parents. Under fire are Toni Morrison's Beloved and Graham Swift's Waterland. The Isak reader who tipped me off to this story tells me that the Plymouth-Canton Community Schools superintendent banned Waterland upon parental complaint "without so much as reading it," outside of a couple pages that involve two fourteen-year-olds exploring each other's bodies.

I spoke with Brian Read, one of the three AP literature instructors at Plymouth-Canton, which is a school district comprising three communities outside of Ann Arbor. Read told me that Waterland was pulled from his students' hands when they were halfway through the novel, cutting off classroom conversations and diminishing the students' critical study. This novel was supposed to set up themes that are further explored in Beloved, which the class is now reading. Read and his students are waiting to hear if they will not be permitted to finish this book.

Last week, Beloved came up for review in a public hearing, with parents and teachers arguing on both sides about the legitimacy of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel authored by America's most recent Nobel laureate. Waterland, which was a finalist for the Booker Prize, is due to have its day in court soon. 

Here is what the supporters of keeping Beloved out of the hands of teenagers had to say:

Barb Dame argued that Beloved was a fictitious account set upon its real-life backdrop of slavery, and contained gratuituous (sic) language, violence and sex acts that provide no historical context for the reader.

She also argued the book was given an 870 Lexile rating, which rates the complexity of the language within a work. A Lexile score of 870 equates to about a fifth-grade reading level. She compared its Lexile rating to Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach.

"Mature, right?" Barb Dame said.

This is an amazing comparison. I don't know about this Lexile system, but I can testify that reading Roald Dahl and reading Toni Morrison are radically different experiences. Both good ones, mind you. But Morrison is known for her inventive, linguistically-dense novels and complex storytelling. I love her for this. Reading her for the first time at age 28 demanded my alertness. I hardly think a smart high school senior would be coasting through her education if she had Beloved in her back pocket.

Brian Read tells me that the Lexile comparison is "absurd." He says that the measurement is used as an algorithm to be a partial indicator of a text's usefulness in teaching people to read. So, it accounts for sentence length, word frequency, and similar indicators. But no one, Lexile executives included, "would say that it should be a gauge to measure the literary value of a work," Read said. "Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet has a low Lexile score, and no one would challenge the literary value of that."

According to the report from the school hearing, the parents also criticized what they saw as "gratuitous sex and violence in the book." This is startling, given that Beloved is pointedly about slavery, rape, and how state-sponsored human ownership influenced those who lived in its immediate aftermath -- particularly seen in how characters come to terms with living in their own bodies, bodies legally not their own for so long. To tell a story about this era in a way that does not integrate violence and sexuality would simply not be honest.

And speaking of honesty: It is appropriate for high school seniors to know about sex, and about violence. It is appropriate for them to encounter fiction that offers a picture for how these realities play into the culture they are about to step into as adults.

From the hearing report:

Additionally, Matt Dame said, the book contains passages containing sex with ghosts, forced oral sex and infanticide.

"I don't see the value of this novel in the school curriculum," Barb Dame said. "I just don't see it."

Matt Dame also criticized repeated instances throughout the novel where he said God's name was used in vain.

"If any of this was offensive to Allah or Hindus it would never be in our school district," he said.

What is surprising here is that Beloved is in many ways a religious book. Baby Suggs is a preacher who creates a kind of church in a clearing in the woods, and her sermon is one of the most moving and spiritual episodes in all of American literature. Baby Suggs speaks of the divinity of self-love and communal affirmation. I will quote from it at length because I love it dearly:

After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted, "Let the children come!" and they ran from the trees toward her.

[...]

It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women, and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and exhausted for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart.

She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.

She told them that the only grace they could have was they grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.

[...]

"Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. And oh my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it, and hold it up."

The challengers of Beloved also argue that slavery should be taught with nonfiction, not fiction. Incidentally, Morrison's novel was based on a newspaper account of a real-life slave killing her child to spare her a life of servitude. But the real point is this, and I say it even as I make my living as a journalist: not all truth can be found in true stories.

Brian Read points out that Beloved isn't so much about slavery, but "the legacy of that trauma, the psychological impact on the people who lived through that." It relates directly to contemporary race dynamics. "Students need to be challenged both intellectually and with difficult material that is relevant," Read told me.

The daughter of the parents leading the book challenge was apparently given William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying to read as an alternative. Which is a good book as well, though the student will not have the benefit of classroom discussions and supplementary material. And all this is beside the point anyway.

Most of the community, and the students themselves, know this. Read tells me that students who had to turn in their copies of Waterland have ordered their own editions. Parents ordered their own copies. A community book club is forming to read Beloved together, peopled in part by parents who want to approach the anti-censorship conversation from an informed point-of-view. A Facebook page called "Supporters of AP English Freedom" protests the banishment of books in Plymouth-Canton schools and is igniting thoughtful conversation among parents, teachers, students, and former students.

Brian Read is seeing his students more avidly approaching Toni Morrison's novel in his classroom.

"Students feel much more privileged reading Beloved because they had the other one taken away from them. They feel insulted by it, and rightly so. Most of them are seniors, six months away from attending college, and they are ready to engage with difficult material. They have come out beautifully for the books. They've spoken at the school board meetings with a clarity and eloquence of speech that shows how capable they are."

The Board of Education is accepting feedback on the proposal to remove Beloved from the school curriculum. Tell them what you think about this at suggestions@pccsmail.net. The final decision is expected tomorrow.

 

Related:

• Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read
• American Library Association: Censorship in Schools
• Freedom to Read Statement

 

UPDATE: Even my niece, at five months old, knew Beloved was worth reading. See her roving eyes below the jump.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s Less-Heard Words

For all that he spoke and wrote, most of us return each year to the same selection of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s words. This year, let's look at the less-heard things he had to say.

Upon accepting the Margaret Sanger Award from Planned Parenthood in 1966:

In our struggle for equality we were confronted with the reality that many millions of people were essentially ignorant of our conditions or refused to face unpleasant truths. The hard-core bigot was merely one of our adversaries. The millions who were blind to our plight had to be compelled to face the social evil their indifference permitted to flourish.

After centuries of relative silence and enforced acceptance, we adapted a technique of exposing the problem by direct and dramatic methods. We had confidence that when we awakened the nation to the immorality and evil of inequality, there would be an upsurge of conscience followed by remedial action.

We knew that there were solutions and that the majority of the nation were ready for them. Yet we also knew that the existence of solutions would not automatically operate to alter conditions. We had to organize, not only arguments, but people in the millions for action. Finally we had to be prepared to accept all the consequences involved in dramatizing our grievances in the unique style we had devised.

There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist — a nonviolent resister. She was willing to accept scorn and abuse until the truth she saw was revealed to the millions. At the turn of the century she went into the slums and set up a birth control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions. Margaret Sanger had to commit what was then called a crime in order to enrich humanity, and today we honor her courage and vision; for without them there would have been no beginning. Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her. Negroes have no mere academic nor ordinary interest in family planning. They have a special and urgent concern.

Recently the subject of Negro family life has received extensive attention. Unfortunately, studies have overemphasized the problem of the Negro male ego and almost entirely ignored the most serious element — Negro migration. During the past half century Negroes have migrated on a massive scale, transplanting millions from rural communities to crammed urban ghettoes. In their migration, as with all migrants, they carried with them the folkways of the countryside into an inhospitable city slum. The size of family that may have been appropriate and tolerable on a manually cultivated farm was carried over to the jammed streets of the ghetto. In all respects Negroes were atomized, neglected and discriminated against. Yet, the worst omission was the absence of institutions to acclimate them to their new environment. Margaret Sanger, who offered an important institutional remedy, was unfortunately ignored by social and political leaders in this period. In consequence, Negro folkways in family size persisted. The problem was compounded when unrestrained exploitation and discrimination accented the bewilderment of the newcomer, and high rates of illegitimacy and fragile family relationships resulted.

For the Negro, therefore, intelligent guides of family planning are a profoundly important ingredient in his quest for security and a decent life. There are mountainous obstacles still separating Negroes from a normal existence. Yet one element in stabilizing his life would be an understanding of and easy access to the means to develop a family related in size to his community environment and to the income potential he can command.

In December of 1963, King spoke at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, as the first guest in a three-part lecture series on "Conscience in America." He took an interesting international approach, speaking first of the rise of independent nations in Africa and the end of the colonial way of thinking. Indeed, he gave this speech the very month that Kenya became independent. King also said this:

Some time ago, it was our good fortune to journey to that great country known as India. I never will forget the experience. I never will forget the marvelous experiences that came to Mrs. King and I as we met and talked with the great leaders of India, met and talked with hundreds and thousands of people all over the cities and villages of that vast country. These experiences will remain dear to me as long as the chords of memories shall linger. But I must also say that there were those depressing moments, for how can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes millions of people going to bed hungry at night? How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes millions of people sleeping on the sidewalks at night, no beds to sleep in, no houses to go in. How can one avoid being depressed when he discovers that out of India's population, more than 400,000,000 people, some 380,000,000 earn less than ninety dollars a year. Most of these people have never seen a doctor or dentist. As I notice these conditions, something within me cried out, "Can we in America stand idly by and not be concerned?" Then an answer came, "Oh, no, because the destiny of the United States is tied up with the destiny of India and every other nation." I started thinking about the fact that we spend millions of dollars a day to store surplus food. I said to myself, I know where we can store that food free of charge, the wrinkled stomachs of the millions of God's children that go to bed hungry at night.

{...}

I am still convinced that nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. There is power and real power in this method. First it has a way of disarming the opponent. It exposes his moral defenses. It weakens his morale and at the same time it works on his conscience. He just doesn't know how to handle it. If he doesn't beat you, wonderful. If he sets out to beat you, you develop the quiet courage of accepting blows without retaliating. If he doesn't put you in jail, wonderful. Nobody with any sense loves to go jail. If he puts you in jail, you go in that jail and transform it from a dungeon of shame to a haven of freedom and human dignity. Even if he tries to kill you, you develop the inner conviction that some things are so precious, that there are some things so dear, some things so eternally worthful, that they are worth dying for. If an individual has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.

{...}

May I reiterate the problem will not work itself out. May I reiterate that it is not a sectional problem. No area of our country can boast of clean hands in the realm of brotherhood. It is one thing for a white person of good will in the north to rise up with righteous indignation when a bus is burning in Anniston, Alabama with freedom riders or when a church is burned or bombed in Birmingham, Alabama killing four, unoffending, innocent beautiful girls. When in Jackson, Mississippi a Medgar Evers is shot down or when in Oxford, Mississippi, some fifteen or sixteen thousand troops are necessary for our courageous James Meredith to go to a university of that state. A white person of good will in the north must rise up with as much righteous indignation when a Negro cannot live in his neighborhood, when a Negro cannot get a job in his firm, when a Negro cannot join his professional society, when a Negro cannot join his fraternity or her sorority. In other words, if this problem is to be solved there must be a sort of divine discontent all over this nation.

There are certain technical words within every academic discipline that soon become stereotypes and cliches. Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in modern psychology. It is the word "maladjusted."  ...

But I say to you, my friends, as I move to my conclusion, there are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize. I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self-defeating effects of physical violence. But in a day when sputniks and explorers are dashing through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can win a war. It is no longer the choice between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence, and the alternative to disarmament. The alternative to absolute suspension of nuclear tests. The alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation. This is why I welcome the recent test-ban treaty.

And finally, from King's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1964:

I accept the Nobel Prize for Peace at a moment when 22 million Negroes of the United States of America are engaged in a creative battle to end the long night of racial injustice. I accept this award on behalf of a civil rights movement which is moving with determination and a majestic scorn for risk and danger to establish a reign of freedom and a rule of justice. I am mindful that only yesterday in Birmingham, Alabama, our children, crying out for brotherhood, were answered with fire hoses, snarling dogs and even death. I am mindful that only yesterday in Philadelphia, Mississippi, young people seeking to secure the right to vote were brutalized and murdered. And only yesterday more than 40 houses of worship in the State of Mississippi alone were bombed or burned because they offered a sanctuary to those who would not accept segregation. I am mindful that debilitating and grinding poverty afflicts my people and chains them to the lowest rung of the economic ladder.

Therefore, I must ask why this prize is awarded to a movement which is beleaguered and committed to unrelenting struggle; to a movement which has not won the very peace and brotherhood which is the essence of the Nobel Prize.

After contemplation, I conclude that this award which I receive on behalf of that movement is a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time - the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.

Video Book Review: Best European Fiction 2012

There is a lot of fascinating reading in the new issue of The Collagist, including a long poem by Rose McLarney, whose work you know I adore. Be sure to also look up Laird Hunt's fiction, a new "creative audio" segment, and some fierce nonfiction by Shena McAuliffe.

My contribution is a video review of Best European Fiction 2012, edited by Aleksandar Hemon and with a preface by Nicole Krauss. Thirty-four stories from 26 countries appear here, most in translation. This is the third edition of this dynamic annual anthology (see my review of the 2011 editions here), and it comes after an especially intense year in European politics.

 

 

 

After the jump, you can see a more-or-less transcription of my review.

 

Arab Writers Say Revolution

 

Today is the one-year anniversary of when a Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire. His tragic act gave birth to his country's successful democratic revolution and ignited the Arab Spring across North Africa and the Middle East. While memorial celebrations overtake Tunis, the uprisings are still unfolding. A collection of Arab poets and writers offer thoughtful reflections on the extraordinary year over at The Guardian.

Moroccan novelist Laila Lalami tells of the February 20 Movement in her native country, and what was missed by American and European television news. "The past year has made patently clear that no Arab regime will reform unless it is pressured to do so by the people and unless that pressure is maintained," she writes. Says Tunisian writer Nouri Gana: "Tunisia's obligation to the Arab world – indeed, to the world – is not to let the democratising process fail and to continue to inspire insurrection and revolt – and, at the same time, bring economic stability." Lebanese author Joumana Haddad questions the patriarchal overlay of both the dictatorships and the uprisings. She writes:

Are the revolts that occurred and that are occurring in the Arab world real revolutions? Are they also women's revolutions? The prognostics of the Egyptian, Tunisian and Lybian revolutions are not promising, to say the least, and we are still far from being rid of the patriarchal monopolisation of private and public life. One form of dictatorship seems to be getting replaced with another form: religious integralism. What kind of revolts are these if women are content to be just pawns "mobilised" at will, and neglected when decisions should be made? What revolutions, if these revolutions did not turn the tables of patriarchy on the heads of those oppressors, and if they will only bring forth a new form of backwardness and subjugation?

Meanwhile, Samar Yazbak of Syria is a writer and journalist who was detained after a demonstration in her country's ongoing, complicated, fraught, and powerfully persistent revolution against a vicious strongman. She writes (in a translation):

Those shouts for freedom and dignity rang out from the most impoverished and marginalised and miserable cities and small towns, before engulfing all of Syria. Despite all the attempts on the part of the regime to force the intifada into the furnace of a civil war and to encourage people to take up arms in order to strangle the essence of the uprising, it remains unable to turn this revolution into a guerilla war fought by the citizens of our united country. A danger looms on the horizon in the form of distractions arising from the regional, Arab and international situations. But the tricks concocted by the regime and implemented by the security apparatus and the shabbiha against the people of our united country have been unmasked.

The real fear now is from the scorched-earth policy pursued by the regime in those cities that have risen up against besiegement and starvation and bombardment, risen up against those who would redirect the intifada away from its moral and nonviolent course in such a way that people would have to take up arms in order to defend themselves. But weapons are the opposite of freedom's essence.

The heroism displayed by the Syrian people allows me to be optimistic. Their path of resistance makes me ever more certain that this intifada is destined to become a precedent for the whole world. The pure meaning of courage is to stand unarmed and alone in the face of murder and all the firepower that can be mustered by cowardly oppression.

 

About the Image: Journalist Tawakkol Karman won the Nobel Peace Prize this year for her leadership in Yemen's democratic revolution, an uprising that is still very much in process. It was a significant win for many reasons: she is the first Yemeni, the first Arab woman, the second Muslim woman, and the youngest person ever to earn the honor. She is the founder and leader of the organization Women Journalists Without Chains. Image credit to Deutsche Welle.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Nigeria's Crisis

There are two simultaneous crises in Nigeria right now: one that is explicitly sectarian, with Muslim extremists attacking Christians, and Christians violently retaliating, and the other, a national strike to protest the government removal of fuel subsidies. In Half of a Yellow Sun (which is reviewed at Isak here and here), Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie centered her story in the sectarian violence in the 1960s that led to the horrors of the Biafran war. As present-day news unfolds its own horrors, Adichie tells The Guardian that there needs to be great empathy and vision preached by Christian and Muslim leaders. The root of the troubles in Nigeria, she says, is a crisis of governance. As she puts it:

"Right now, all over Nigeria, from Kano in the north to Port Harcourt in the south, people are protesting the same things: the increase in fuel prices and the lack of basic government services.

"Nigerians have divisions but they are largely united in their dissatisfaction with and distrust of their government.

"The divisions we see today would, in my view, be greatly reduced if people had regular and affordable electricity, good roads, affordable transportation – all of which are political problems."

Book Review: You Deserve Nothing by Alexander Maksik

My reading has been afire lately. It was only a matter of time before I felt the flames on my own skin. Last night I stayed up late, late, late to finish the last ... 200 pages or so of Alexander Maksik's novel, You Deserve Nothing. When I finally closed the book, sleepily dropping it to the floor, I still couldn't sleep. My mind whirred along with the novel, still. My body hummed.

However, I began the novel feeling only sedate interest in it, even mild disappointment: the story slides among the first-person narratives of three characters, and I was still feeling maddened by the way that Colum McCann uses a similar tactic in Let the Great World Spin. In my mood, multiple shifting viewpoints seemed to preclude my ability to feel immersed in a novel. Maksik proved to be the cure. I slunk in, and didn't come up for air.

Set in Paris in 2002, You Deserve Nothing introduces us to William Silver, a young talented literature teacher at an international high school that caters to the children of wealthy diplomats and military officers. The immensely popular instructor puts his greatest effort into a senior seminar, which specializes in provocative discussions about Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, William Shakespeare, and William Faulkner. We also meet Gilad Fisher, an intelligent introvert who moves with his parents to Paris just before the start of his senior year. And we meet Marie de Cléry, a French young woman who is at once a seeker, a student at the school, and Silver's lover. You Deserve Nothing balances the three vantages by using their narration to both double back in time and to propel the story forward. Secondary characters -- the teacher who is kind of in love with Silver, the manipulative pseudo-best friend of Marie, the crude and cursing Irish student, the diminishing parents of Gilad -- provide unnerving, unresolved texture.

I was skeptical about the relationship between Silver and Marie, thinking it was a storyline too familiar for me to find revelation. "Oh, it's this guy," I thought with inner sarcasm in the early pages of Silver's narration. But the brilliance of the book is that it does not hinge so wholly on the teacher-student affair -- though it, of course, is the engine of the novel, and particularly evocative about the consequences of moral ambiguity.

What gives this big-hearted book its heft, its heat, is the wise way that it interacts with other texts. Maksik is an artist in how he moves through the stories and theory behind literature in a way that is aptly integrated with the novel at hand, giving it dimension and texture. Though he sometimes repeats them, Maksik's use of quotations never overwhelms You Deserve Nothing; rather, it does give readers meaningful perspective -- even a sense of exhileration. There is, for example, these lines from Camus' essay, "The Sea You Live By", which Silver reads to his seminar on a cold Friday afternoon:

Space and silence weigh equally upon the heart. A sudden love, a great work, a decisive act, a thought that transfigures, all these at certain moments bring the same unbearable anxiety, quickened with an irresistable charm. Living like this, in the delicious anguish of being, in exquisite proximity to a danger whose name we do not know, is this the same as rushing to your doom? Once again, without respite, let us race to our destruction. I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.

But here is what moved me most.

The novel brought me back to that time in my late teens when my hunger for heroes turned passionate, almost desperate. Many of us -- all of us? -- share this experience. We are believers. We want to have faith in the purposeful human life, and in the select people who can guide us into it. "You changed my life." We want to say that to someone, and mean it. There is a worthy way of being in the world, we begin to feel, and when we discover someone who seems to be living it, we fall in love and hang on tight.

Both Gilad and Marie find their hero in Silver, in their different ways, though Silver himself has lost his center and is spiraling into the black hole left behind. Gilad thrills at Silver's way of seeing students as adults, suggesting they spend an autumn weekend reading Hamlet.

'Just go sit in a cafe and read the play,' he told us. 'Have a coffee. Take a pen.'"

He said these things as if they were obvious, as if they were what any normal person would do. But they weren't obvious to most of us. Even if I explored Paris on my own, even if I sat by myself from time to time on the banks of the river, when he suggested them they were different, as if we'd be crazy not to listen. And so those many of us who loved him, we did what he asked. And we felt important, we felt wild, we felt like poets and artists, we felt like adults living in the world with books in our hands, with pens, with passions. And when we returned to school, how many of us prayed he'd ask what we'd done over the weekend? Not only if we read but where.

And that's something.

'Just go sit in the Luxembourg Gardens,' he said. 'Get one of those nice free chairs, sit in the sun and read, watch the people, eat a sandwich, get out of your houses. Jesus.'

And so I did. And I started wearing a scarf.

Silver's urging of his students to take literature off the page and "engage with the world" prompts some students to participate in a massive anti-war protest in Paris, part of that season's global resistance to the United States' looming war in Iraq. This, in turn, sets up a pivotal scene when frightening tensions emerge among different bands of protesters. And this leads key characters to lose their courage, and their faith.

Powerfully, the novel also shifted me back to the dark time when we realize that everyone will disappoint us. The acid taste on the tongue. The profound dislocation at our core. Everyone. In a world of senseless violence and cruelty, pettiness distorts where society places its moral outrage. For individuals, there is distance between desire and action, and conviction is rarely enough to carry us across.

This is a novel about fear.

How do you live a good life? What means something, and what means nothing? What is this ghost of decency and conscience, and what, if anything, does happiness have to do with it? What are we to do with the space between our birth and death? These are the existential questions that are at the core of You Deserve Nothing. It kept me awake at night.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow: The Classics

Today, I wrote in a cafe. An attractive law student was flirting with the barista behind the counter, and who was I not to eavesdrop? He told her of an extraordinary production of King Lear that he saw at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. He told her about how King Lear had been a gap in his reading of Shakespeare, so he made a point of not reading it before the show: he was in search of an authentic theater-goer's experience of Shakespeare's titanic play. What he saw moved him to tears, he said. It was so powerful, so good. The barista: "Oh, I've never heard of that one." Meaning King Lear. The law student was startled into silence before saying awkwardly, "Well ... it's one of his most famous plays." She shrugged mildly. I smiled to myself, took another sip of my Ethiopian dark roast, and thought, "Babe, she's not for you."

Do the classics have a future? That's what Mary Beard wonders in the New York Review of Books. But she's not talking about literature that is generally old and wonderful; she's talking about the Classic classics.The originals. Homer and Virgil. Sophocles and Plato. Good old Aeschylus. Beard asks: "How far can the ancient world help us to understand our own? What limits should we place on our reinterpretation and reappropriation of it? ... To put it another way, how do we make the ancient world make sense to us? How do we translate it?" She also examines "our fixation on the decline of classical learning."

To put this as crisply as I can, the study of the classics is the study of what happens in the gap between antiquity and ourselves. It is not only the dialogue that we have with the culture of the classical world; it is also the dialogue that we have with those who have gone before us who were themselves in dialogue with the classical world (whether Dante, Raphael, William Shakespeare, Edward Gibbon, Pablo Picasso, Eugene O’Neill, or Terence Rattigan). The classics (as writers of the second century AD had already spotted) are a series of “Dialogues with the Dead.” But the dead do not include only those who went to their graves two thousand years ago.