RANDA JARRAR

The skies are blue and the weather is warm and I have a sunburn.

Lots of taco-eating. It’s wonderful. If you’re going to AWP in Atlanta this weekend, be sure to check out the following panels:

Friday, 9AM
Ballroom B, 2nd Floor
Emerging Voices: Arab-American Writers in the 21st Century. (Randa Jarrar, Hayan Charara, Steven Salaita) Arab-American writers have been producing poetry and fiction in the US for over a hundred years, but with the exception of Khalil Gibran, their voices have been marginalized. With the attacks of 9/11/2001 and subsequent war in Iraq , interest in this community has grown, yet its diversity and strength remain hidden from mainstream literary discourse. This panel discusses past and contemporary Arab-American writers, journals, anthologies and cultural festivals, with a special focus on teaching issues in the college classroom.

AND…

Saturday, 1:30
Salon B, 2nd Floor

Writing Islam. (Khaled Mattawa, Raza Hasan, Randa Jarrar) This panel will discuss the difficulties and opportunities of writing poems and stories dealing with the Islamic World. We will talk about the strategies for managing references to political events, places, and people unfamiliar to American readers. As outsiders as well as insiders, we will discuss how we negotiate that position in our writings. Our discussion will raise awareness of an emerging body of poetry and fiction dealing with the Islamic World and the West published in the US .

I can’t believe it took me this long to read Gwendolyn Brooks’s amazing Maud Martha. In a slim 180 page prose poem, we see Maud battle mice and cockroaches, racist hat-store employees, n-word slinging lipstick peddlers, and mean santas. Highly recommended.

I just ran a spell check on my novel, and I had to spend 80% of it calming the checker down. It freaked out because of all the weird names. Apparently, Napoleon is in the checker, but the names Fakhr, Hatim, Waheed, Nidali, Gamal, Ruz, Abdo, Madeeha, and many others aren’t. Grandma is, but Yia Yia, Sitto, Tetta, Geddo, and Sido are not. That poor checker. It was having a small technological-style cardiac arrest.

I’m working on the final manuscript of my novel, ironing things out and adding clarifications for the final delivery. It’s fun and not fun. I’ll be in my house drinking copious amounts of coffee and working on this until friday…

You know, sometimes, when I read a sentence, I’ll remember exactly where I was when I came up with it, and where I was when I wrote it. I was in a brass bed (the middle of which was broken, so that my mattress sunk in and I had to sleep as though on the precipice of an abyss) in a tiny bedroom when I came up with the novel’s first line. It was really early in the morning and I crawled out of the abyss and went to my old huge desktop and typed it in. I don’t remember where I was when I came up with the last one, though.

I started this thing 6 years ago. I was 23 and ambitious, but utterly confused about how to go about writing a novel. I’m glad I figured it out, but as I work on the final draft, I’m sometimes shocked that I did.

The blog is three years old this week! I’ve had so much fun posting and hearing from you all.

The next year will be an exciting one, and I’m really looking forward to blogging about it and sharing the new-book smell with you…

El-Ahram‘s Youssef Rakha profiles Sonallah Ibrahim, whose newest novel, Al-Talasus (Voyeurism) is just out. The novel, which is set in 1948, explores inter-male relationships and is “a study in the absence of woman.” Ibrahim says, “While working I asked myself why this was important, other than the fact that it contained some things of a personal interest to me. And the answer is that it’s about the need for woman — as mother, as wife.” I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable about Ibrahim’s portrayal of women in his work. In The Smell of It, the only female character is a prostitute. In August’s Star, it’s the loose Russian blondes whose bodies get more description than anything else. And here, Ibrahim reduces women’s roles to caretakers: mommies and unpaid cooks/house cleaners/sex slaves. I know, I know, I’m overreacting, but I do wonder why nobody calls him out on this.

The following poem is from The Butterfly’s Burden, a new book of Mahmoud Darwish’s poems which collects all three of his most recent manuscripts. It includes the Arabic text. I highly recommend it. This poem seems appropriate today…as always, I love how Darwish writes about love and nationhood, men and women, Jews and Arabs, in one breath (or is it two?).

the stranger stumbles upon himself in the stranger
We are one in two
There’s no name for us, strange woman, when the stranger stumbles upon himself in the stranger. Of our
garden behind us we have the force of shadow. So show
what you want of your night’s land, and conceal
what you want. We came in a hurry from the twilight
of two places at one time, and searched together
for our addresses. Go behind your shadow,
east of the Song of Songs, a shepherd of the sand grouse,
you’ll find a star dwelling in its death, then climb a neglected
mountain and you’ll find my yesterday completing its cycle in my tomorrow
You’ll find where we were and where we’ll be together.
we are one in two/
Go to the sea then, man, west of your book,
and dive lightly, lightly as if you were carrying
yourself at birth in two waves,
you’ll find a wetland forest and a green sky
of water, then dive lightly
lightly as if you were nothing in anything,
and you’ll find us together…
we are on in two/
We need to see how we were here,
stranger, as two shadows opening and closing on what
has been shaped of our shape: a body disappearing then reappearing
in a body disappearing in the mystery of the eternal
duality. We need to return to being two
to embrace each other more. There’s no name for us,
when the stranger stumbles upon himself in the stranger!

Translated by Fady Joudah

Rockslinga pal Hayan Charara writes in to alert me of David Mamet’s visit on Charlie Rose: apparently, Mamet claimed that a main facet of a liberal arts education was “anti-Semitism” and that “200 million Arabs” want to kill Jews.

First: if it weren’t for my liberal arts education, I would have never learned much about the holocaust, about Jewish literature, or about Jewish history and culture. I studied three years of Hebrew shortly after graduating from the most liberal of liberal arts colleges; an institution which grants bachelors’ degrees in only “Liberal Arts.”

Second, I grew up in a post 1967 household with parents who witnessed and were deeply affected by the formation of the state of Israel, the 1956 bombings of Egypt, and the 1967 war. I was raised among anti-zionists and spent my childhood surrounded by evidence of Israeli aggression. Never in my life have I heard an Arab say that they wanted to kill a Jew.

But I’m just one Arab with a liberal arts education. What do I know?

Just to clarify something: I fucking LOVE my workshop and my MFA program. My defense of pat is simply that: a defense of something I love, too. I was simply venting and giving my POV on why pat is underrated. My workshops have been helpful and my classmates are awesome, including the ones that dislike pat. My writing has improved and I’ve been happy here. So, those who are linking to the pat defense and framing it as “workshop bashing”: no, no, no, no, no.

The lovely Naomi Shihab Nye sends along this sad and beautiful video. I want to visit Teheran.