RANDA JARRAR

The Malmoe Library in southern Sweden has started something it calls “the Living Library project”, which “will enable people to come face-to-face with their prejudices in the hopes of altering their preconceived notions”:

Nine people, including a homosexual, an imam, a journalist, a Muslim woman and a gypsy, will be available at the Malmoe Library for members of the public to “borrow” for a 45-minute conversation in the library’s outdoor cafe.

The only thing that caught my eye was this sentence:

[T]he nine “items” on loan were not hard to find but… will be paid “a small sum” for their efforts.

Eureka! I’ve already written up my ad in case this catches on in the US:

Want to gain some useful insight regarding what it’s like to be a minority? A single mom, an Arab-American, a (lapsed) Muslim, and a bisexual woman will be available at Austin Public Library for members of the public to borrow for 45 minutes. The item is actually just one woman, and she will be paid several small sums.

Link via Bookninja

El-Ahram asks Edwar El-Kharat, Gamal El-Ghitani, Mourid El-Barghouti, Radwa Ashour, Hala El-Badry, and others what they’re reading.

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits
By Laila Lalami
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
208 pp. (2005)

So many of us know Laila Lalami through her blog, Moorishgirl.com, which reflects her Moroccan roots by often covering—and confronting—literary news relating to the “other” in our society. Specifically, Lalami has accorded non-Christian and non-white writers the kind of respect and analysis not usually offered in the “mainstream” press or even most blogs, for that matter. If this were Lalami’s sole contribution to the literary world, she would have much of which to be proud. But now she brings us her first book, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill), a collection of interlocking stories, which also reflects her connections to Morocco.

The structure of Lalami’s collection is as elegant as it is powerful. The title story, “The Trip,” serves as a prologue where she introduces us to the four main characters who will reappear in the eight subsequent stories. It is dark and cold as four Moroccans huddle with twenty-six others in small boat—a six-meter Zodiac inflatable meant to accommodate eight people—to cross the Strait of Gibraltar. Their hope: to avoid the watchful eye of the authorities as they travel fourteen kilometers to their haven, Spain. First, we meet Murad, who has dreamed of this trip for a long time: “He spent hours thinking about what he would do once he was on the other side, imagining the job, the car, the house.” Murad had made a less-than-meager living as a guide who regaled tourists “with anecdotes about how Tariq Ibn Ziyad had led a powerful Moor army across the Straits and, upon landing in Gibraltar, ordered all the boats burned.” And there’s the young, beautiful Faten who wears a hijab scarf and is too shy and frightened to make chit chat with the others. The tall, lanky Aziz “sits hunched over to fit in the narrow space allotted to him.” This is his second attempt to get to Spain. Finally, we meet Halima who keeps her arms tightly around her daughter and two sons. Lalami captures with clear and revealing language the brutality of the smugglers and the desperation of their human cargo.

The collection is then divided into two parts. In the first, entitled Before, we see what drove Murad, Faten, Aziz and Halima to risk their lives to escape Morocco. We learn in “The Fanatic,” the hijab-wearing Faten has upset the happily modern, Mercedes-driving Larbi Amrani who wishes for his daughter, Noura, to attend NYU and make good money some day. But Noura becomes friends with Faten, embraces the Qur’an without question, starts to wear the hijab and begins to reject her parents’ plans of an American education. The arguments that ensue between Noura and Larbi are, in many ways, universal and will remind most parents of teenagers that they are not alone. But in the end, the person who suffers most is Faten who is no match for Larbi’s wealth and connections.

We discover in “Bus Rides” that Halima is suffering an abusive marriage with Maati. When she runs to her mother’s house for safety, she’s met with an exasperated rhetorical question: “Again?” Halima’s mother, Fatiha, blames her daughter: “A woman must know how to handle her husband.” Halima must find a way to escape Maati even if it entails bribing a judge or something more dramatic. But she can expect no help from her own mother.

In “Acceptance,” Aziz has already made the decision to leave Morocco so that he can make money to send to his wife, Zohra. His boyhood friend, Lahcen, who has a less-than-hidden crush on Aziz, tries his best to keep Aziz from leaving. In one of the most moving passages, Aziz prepares to leave his family and try his luck with the illegal journey to Spain:
“As he sat for breakfast with his parents one last time, Aziz tried to memorize every sensation he could—the taste of the wheat bread, the smell of the mint tea brewing, the feel of the divan under him, the sound of his father’s beads as he fingered them. He knew that in the months that would follow, he would need each one to help him survive.”

And then there’s Murad who, in “Better Luck Next Time,” searches out English-speaking tourists with temptations of visiting the old haunts of Paul Bowles and with tales of ancient battles. Murad must reconcile his growing disgust for such tourists with his need to make money. It is a struggle that proves too much for him.

Part II is entitled After where we see how the lives of our four protagonists change after their desperate voyage across the Strait of Gibraltar. These stories will surprise the reader; lives get turned inside out, people do things that they normally wouldn’t absent distressed circumstances. And in the end, we don’t know which is more dangerous: the weary acceptance of poverty and brutality or the hope-driven risks people take to make life worth the effort. Lalami wisely doesn’t offer any answers. Rather, she gives us potent and perfectly-crafted portraits of those who both battle and embrace hope. And she lets us know that the lives of undocumented immigrants can’t be painted with one, broad stroke; their lives are as varied as anyone else’s.

What an auspicious debut this is. One hopes that Lalami will be telling her stories for many years to come.

Daniel Olivas is a writer living in Los Angeles. His most recent book is Devil Talk: Stories (Bilingual Press). Visit him online at www.danielolivas.com.

Read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.

On writing and rejection:

You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now…I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. There is only a single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write.

On boredom:

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourslef that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.

On “owning” your work:

…[I]f out of…turning inward, out of this absorption into your own world verses come, then it will not occur to you to ask anyone whether they are good verses. Nor will you try to interest magazines in your poems; for you will see in them your fond natural possession, a fragment and a voice of your life. A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. In this nature of its origin lies the judgement of it: there is no other.

Amen.

The diabolical Diana Souhami (Gertrude and Alice) writes up a list of her ten favorite books about lesbians. Go read it. Also, check out her newest bio, Wild Girls : Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks. I once mad-googled Souhami for essays about her own experiences, but found close to none. I hope she’s working on an autobio.

Major spoilers ahead

We humans love father-son stories: Oedipus and Polybus/Laius, Daedalus and Icarus, Abraham and Isaac, Jesus and “god”, Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. Broken Flowers is a small epic that reverses the age-old son-quests-for-father myth by setting the father himself (Don Johnston, played by a static and stately Bill Murray) off on a quest to find his son… because he just found out that his son is on a quest to find him. Stupid thing to do, really, but that’s what Jarmusch seems to be saying in this charming poem of a film: men do some very stupid things.

Don Johnston is an empty shell of a man. In his late fifties and still a “bachelor,” Johnston has to correct people who think his name is Don Johnson…someone whose glory he may have embodied in the ’80s but no longer does. Since the film’s focus is on mistakes our Don Juan (more like “don’t want”: don’t want to commit, don’t want to get off the couch, don’t want to do anything) made in the ’80s, namely the mistake of possibly impregnating one of five girlfriends, the name behooves him.

The frame of the story is whimsical: a pink-suited girlfriend takes off just as a pink letter arrives with worse news; a benevolent Ethiopian neighbor with an idyllic family and amateur detective skills books the quest for Johnston. What I really enjoyed were all the little gifts Jarmusch gives the keen viewer along the way. Not the obvious ones that should be the clues, like the pink objects all the ex-girlfriends possess. I’m talking about the streets Johnston’s ex-lovers’ live on having road-signs with heavy-metal band names, like Whitesnake and Danzig; the looping, never-ending Ethiopian CD that, like our protagonist, is perpetually stuck on the same song; the camera’s recurring focus on the images in the driver’s side mirror, as if to say, look at what’s behind you– at your past! It’s closer than it appears.

If I had seen Broken Flowers in my teenage years, I may have walked out thinking it was a misogynistic pile of crap rather than the celebration of all things female that I think it really is. There is a particular scene I may have had a problem with: early on in his quest, Johnston sees a flight attendant doing a crossword as she waits at an airport gate. She has her sexy legs up on her suitcase. Johnston gives her a foot-to-head glance (the first of many foot-to-head glances he will give in the hour to come). He then watches her hold her pen, lead point up, as she erases a mistake. Then with beautiful purpose, she wipes off the deleted pencil marks. The camera finally rests on her lips, as she mouths ideas that may lead her to the right word. It’s a gorgeous series of shots: Johnston’s idiotic gawk followed by her purposeful erasure and her moving on to focused thought. And it’s a gentle foreshadowing of the trip to come: he’ll look for clues, and make mistakes one after another, but he’ll be unable to erase them. For one thing, there’ll eventually be a bruise on his face to remind him of them. And the women he re-meets, they have all erased him, brushed off the remains of the mistake of him, and moved on, with focus. If only they hadn’t, Don’s face seems to reveal; if only one of them had carried his child and reared him, loved some part of him so tenderly, the way only a mother could.

One of my favorite scenes comes right before the film’s first dream sequence (there’re a couple). Johnston is seated on a plane next to two little girls, his head resting on a pillow by the window. As he is about to nod off, one of the girls presses a button on her toy pony, and the pony neighs loudly, three times, and wakes Johnston. Now, while the film is primarily concerned with male fantasy, in this scene, female fantasy – what little girl doesn’t want a real pony?– cuts in and jars the male out of his own. Besides all that…it’s just really funny.

I loved Johnston’s meeting with Lolita, his ex Laura’s daughter, who (this is my theory) calls her own cell phone from her home phone so she can come out of her room butt-naked (I laughed giddily, ecstatically, at the delicious sight of her) and pick up her own call. I also loved the obvious relationship between Carmen, the 3rd ex, and her assistant, played by Chloe Sevigny, who wore a sexy Seventies outfit. Finally, I loved Johnston’s final visit, bandage over eye, to the fifth, and deceased, ex. The camera does a foot-to-head glance of the headstone, and Johston says, “Hello, beautiful.” It’s the movie’s best line.

As the film draws to a close, Johnston glimpses several young men in tracksuits like his own; several men who could be his own son. He tells one of them that life isn’t about the past or the future, it’s about the present, nomatter how broken — a subtle theme throughout the movie has been a vase-ful of flowers which wilt and whither and eventually die; flowers are to be enjoyed in the moment, their presence is so fleeting. The film’s last scene is a dizzying, enveloping shot of Johnston and the roads surrounding him, the camera standing still as we look into his eyes. That’s when we see he was lying about the past and the future not mattering, because his eyes fill the screen, wondering not, “Who is my son?” but “who was I then, and where am I going?”

The quest for father/son/God/self, especially through women (muses?) is a perfect way to frame and (re)tell the oldest story in the world. If father and son myths are the product of and propaganda for a patriarchal culture, then what are Johnston’s women but the Godesses and matriarchs who beckon us all back to an older, better system?

Check out Schaukasten.

(Found via News of the dead.)

in the NYT today. The article’s finale, which includes a Darwish poem, is priceless.

Femme Feral on “the perks of being an writer-in-residence“:

One of my “jobs” this summer has been to copy hours and hours of video footage from readings and lectures and Q+A’s that have occurred in these here parts to DVD. Most of the tapes are old and crusty. Adjectives some people are eager to apply to academia.

Go read the rest for some cool Maragret Atwood trivia.

I was really pissed off by this retarded NYT article on the so-called “girl crush.” Here’s the most offending paragraph:

“The brain system for romantic love is associated with intense energy, focused energy, obsessive things – a host of characteristics that you can feel not just toward a mating sweetheart,” Dr. Fisher said, adding that “there’s every reason to think that girls can fall in love with other girls without feeling sexual towards them, without the intention to marry them.”

What? Is he fucking serious? Does he have a bird alarm and a car that’s made out of rocks?

I know a lot of people may not agree with me on this, but… are you a woman? Do you have a crush on another woman? Would you never admit, to yourself or to anyone else, that you want to have sex with her? Does that have to do with the fact that you live in a society that equates sex with love and love with marriage, and where marriage is only possible to a man?

Just a thought.