The laureate of all Arabs
August 12, 2008
‘Mahmoud Darwish is dead, but the voice of the Palestinian resistance will live on in all of us ‘, writes Ahdaf Soueif.
None of us really thought he’d die. Our loss is great, we tell each other. In our minds we think of Edward Said, of Haider Abdel-Shafi, of Faisal Husseini, and even – yes – of Yasser Arafat. The “big men” of Palestine. And now, Mahmoud Darwish.
He was seven when – in the Nakba of 1948 – he fled from Birweh, his village in the Galilee. At the age of 12, living in Deir el-Asad, in what had become Israel, with a reputation as a precocious child poet, he was asked to compose a poem for a public reading. The occasion was the celebration of Israel’s “Independence Day” and the poem he read described the feelings of a child who returns to his town to find other people sleeping in his bed, tilling his father’s lands. He was summoned to the military governor who told him that if he continued to write subversive material his father’s work permit would be revoked. That incident set the tone, I think, for Darwish’s life.
Surviving the Fourth of July
July 7, 2008
Chris Hedges, my favourite sage, on the habit of reading, and the decline of America. His comments about academia are also right on the mark. In his last article Robert Fisk complains about the same, with a genuinely funny anecdote: ‘Then there are the universities seeking lectures from me. The latest (I will keep this academy mercifully anonymous) invites me to speak on the Middle East and “to challenge the mainstream hegemonic and ethnocentric discourse about radicalism … in order to gain a better understanding of the multidimensionality of the problem”. Jesus, Joseph and Mary!!! This is enough to make you join the Taliban. I phoned back to tell the culprits that I will consider the invitation – if they write again without using this anthropological claptrap, as insulting to the writer as it is to the recipient.’
I survive the degradation that has become America — a land that exalts itself as a bastion of freedom and liberty while it tortures human beings, stripped of their rights, in offshore penal colonies, a land that wages wars defined under international law as criminal wars of aggression, a land that turns its back on its poor, its weak, its mentally ill, in a relentless drive to embrace totalitarian capitalism — because I read books. I have 5,000 of them. They line every wall of my house. And I do not own a television.
I survive the gradual, and I now fear inevitable, disintegration of our democracy because great literature and poetry, great philosophy and theology, the great works of history, remind me that there were other ages of collapse and despotism. They remind me that through it all men and women of conscience endured and communicated, at least with each other, and that it is possible to refuse to participate in the process of self-annihilation, even if this means we are pushed to the margins of society. They remind me, as the poet W.H. Auden wrote, that “ironic points of light flash out wherever the Just exchange their messages.” And if you tire, as all who can think critically must, of the empty cant and hypocrisy of John McCain and Barack Obama, of the simplistic and intellectually deadening epistemology of television and the consumer age, you can retreat to your library. Books were my salvation during the wars and conflicts I covered for two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans. They are my salvation now. The fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our existence are laid bare when we sink to the lowest depths. And it is those depths that Homer, Euripides, William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, Vasily Grossman, George Orwell, Albert Camus and Flannery O’Connor understood.
“The practice of art isn’t to make a living,” Kurt Vonnegut said. “It’s to make your soul grow.”
The Road From Damascus
June 21, 2008
 |
 |
My brief visit to London over the past weekend was a memorable one. Besides attending the award ceremony where my friend Dahr Jamail received the Martha Gellhorn Prize, dinner with John Pilger, meeting M. Shahid Alam, befriending Ghada Karmi, spending time with my friend and ever-generous host Paul de Rooij, I also had the pleasure of meeting Fanonite editor Robn Yassin-Kassab in person for the first time. Robin’s debut novel has just been published by Penguin, and has been garnering rave reviews. Here are a select few:
The Road From Damascus
by Robin Yassin-Kassab
350pp, Hamish Hamilton, £16.99
Beyond Belief
Robin Yassin-Kassab’s ambitious debut of faith and faithlessness, The Road From Damascus, impresses Maya Jaggi.
The Guardian
“Unbelief itself is a religion”, says an epigraph to this ambitious and topical debut novel. The words of the 12th-century Sufi sage Ahmad Yasavi, coupled with a Pascal pensée on the limitations of atheism, open a book that satirises a kind of secular fundamentalism that can, it suggests, be as blinding as dogma.
In early 21st-century Damascus, Sami Traifi, a 31-year-old “failed academic and international layabout” born in Britain to Syrian parents, truffles among ancestral roots for a credible thesis for his stalled doctorate. Instead he stumbles on a family secret, an uncle broken by 22 years in a Syrian torture jail. Back in London, Sami’s marriage to a teacher, Muntaha, crumbles as the astute, educated daughter of a refugee from Saddam’s Iraq resolves to wear a hijab.
The Road Well Travelled
May 29, 2008
Last night I finished Cormac McCarthy’s harrowing The Road, and it has left me deeply disturbed. The moral dilemmas presented therein are highlighted in the following section from a review by Michael Chabo in the New York Review of Books (while the passage presents the dilemmas in the context of relations between the novel’s protagonists, an unnamed father and son, they are equally applicable to any loved one).
The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent’s greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with. The fear of one day being obliged for your child’s own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, above all, the fear of knowing—as every parent fears—that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited. It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with which The Road extends the metaphor of a father’s guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself in a ruined, friendless world that The Road finds its great power to move and horrify the reader.
While McCarthy is addressing the consequences of social breakdown, in the following article, George Monbiot looks developments in the present that may lead to the realization of the bleak future envisioned in the novel.
A powerful novel’s vision of a dystopian future shines a cold light on the dreadful consequences of our universal apathy. Are we already shutting our minds to the consequences of climate change?
By George Monbiot. The Guardian 30 October 2007
A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world.
Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot. Some years before the action begins, the protagonist hears the last birds passing over, “their half-muted crankings miles above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl.”(1) McCarthy makes no claim that this is likely to occur, but merely speculates about the consequences.
All pre-existing social codes soon collapse and are replaced with organised butchery, then chaotic, blundering horror. What else are the survivors to do?: the only remaining resource is human. It is hard to see how this could happen during humanity’s time on earth, even by means of the nuclear winter McCarthy proposes. But his thought experiment exposes the one terrible fact to which our technological hubris blinds us: our dependence on biological production remains absolute. Civilisation is just a russeting on the skin of the biosphere, never immune from being rubbed against the sleeve of environmental change. Six weeks after finishing The Road, I remain haunted by it.
Wit and Wisdom
May 25, 2008
When you task an arse with covering one of the world’s greatest living intellectuals, you get something like this. Thats why I am only posting passages uncorrupted by the banalities of this plodder.
“Does age bring wisdom?” a questioner from the floor asked Gore Vidal? There was a short pause. “No, it brings senility.” Cue a wave of applause from the vast audience that had come to touch the hem of the man Adam Boulton, who had the tricky task of interviewing Vidal, called “the greatest essayist since Montaigne”.
That’s a big claim, but not necessarily wide of the mark: Vidal’s essays on politics and literature are magnificent and will live long after the weighty novels he is keener for us to read and remember are gathering dust.
The wind-lashed encounter with Boulton was a ramble — an old man (Vidal, not Boulton) peering into the nooks and crannies of a fascinating life — but, happily, it was punctuated by some memorable one-liners. Asked who his successor as the great contrarian would be, he said: “I’m not holding the door open.” Lifting his walking stick and brandishing it like a mitre, he intoned: “I’m still the bishop of Rome.”
A Life in Books
May 23, 2008
Voice of the people. ‘This country is finished,’ says Gore Vidal. ‘But, with a new republic like this, if you missed being here at the beginning, the next best thing is to be here at the end’. (Interview by James Campbell)
Gore Vidal’s collected essays, United States, a hefty volume incorporating the work of four decades in the form in which he is a modern master, won the US National Book Award for 1993. “It is the ugliest prize ever given to me,” says the author, gesturing with a brandy snifter towards the room in which the unloved object stands. “It’s two bronze cubes, my name is not on it, there’s no identification of what it is. It’s just like the country that gave it to me. Blank.”
Conversation at Vidal’s table has a tendency to flow towards the state of the union, no matter what the source. In America, he is admired — and more highly valued than he likes to admit — for an unorthodox liberalism that puts individual preference at the heart of everything, from sex to tax. For 60 years, through novels, plays and miscellaneous non-fiction, Vidal has preached the message that government is not only pervasive but corrupt; that while there are may be two political brands, Democrat and Republican, there is only one party: business.
The Years the Locusts Ate
April 26, 2008
John Gray reviews Tony Judt’s devastating critique of intellectual life over the past two decades, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century.
The period stretching from the collapse of communism up to the attack on Iraq was a time when western leaders prided themselves on their ignorance of history. They embraced the defining delusion of the post-cold war era: the conflicts of the 20th century are safely behind us, and we have nothing to learn from the past. Backed by America’s seemingly invincible military might and the superior productivity of western economies, the world had entered a new epoch of peace and democracy.
Tony Judt has always been a dissenter from this consensus. In Reappraisals the British-born historian, now a university professor in New York, collects 23 essays, written between 1994 and 2006, in which he undertakes a ruthless dissection of the ruling illusions of the post-cold war years – “the years the locusts ate”, as he calls them. A book of essays originally published over a period of 12 years may seem an unlikely place to find a systematic analysis of the follies of an era, and it is true that the pieces gathered here cover a remarkable range of writers and themes. There are illuminating assessments of Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt, a superb deconstruction of Blair’s Britain, a penetrating discussion of the fall of France in 1940, explorations of Belgium’s fractured statehood and the ambiguous position of Romania in Europe, analyses of the Cuba crisis and Kissinger’s diplomacy, and much else besides.
With friends like these . . .
April 23, 2008
David Mamet, the writer behind Wag the Dog, is the latest to join the ranks of Arthur Koestler to Kinglsey Amis to Christopher Hitchens: people who have moved to the right and attacked former allies. Playwright David Edgar challenges the new generation of deserters (thanks Paulo).
One striking aspect of the 1968 and post-1968 generation has been overlooked in the current nostalgia fest. Despite Robert Frost’s stern warning against the dangers of youthful idealism (“I never dared to be radical when young, for fear it would make me conservative when old”), remarkably few of those formed by 1968 and its aftermath have moved to the right in middle age. That is, until now.In the same way that a surprising number of Thatcher and Reagan’s key thinkers were former communists, the ideological campaign for the war on terror abroad and against multiculturalism at home has been dominated by people who were formed by the student revolt, feminism and anti-racist movement of the 1970s. As with the political defectors of the past, their critique of the left is validated by personal experience. Just as past generations sought to reposition the fault-lines of 20th-century politics (notably, by bracketing communism with fascism as totalitarianism), so, now, influential writers seek to redraw the political map of our own time. And, intentionally or not, they are undermining the historic bond between progressive liberalism and the poor.
Brave New World
March 18, 2008
MTV’s brave new world. Hard hitting ads on emerging police states.
On a related note, Ridley Scott and Leonardo DiCaprio are working on a film based on Aldous Huxley’s prophetic dystopia. ‘A prophet returns‘, writes Susan Salter Reynold.
A writer’s ideas are his legacy. After he dies, it’s up to executors, heirs, lawyers, agents and colleagues to keep them alive — and perhaps especially up to us, the readers, to thread those ideas through the weave of history, the passage of time, our own lives. Writers are the most potent of ghosts. Their spirits lodge in our quotidian decisions; we turn to them in times of change and times of terror. When their wisdom is unavailable, our choices get harder.Aldous Huxley — born in England in 1894, visionary author of 11 novels (most famously “Brave New World,” in 1932), seven short-story collections, seven books of poetry, three plays, two books for children and countless essays — is there for us when we need him most. All his life, Huxley concerned himself with the most pressing issues facing humanity: environmental degradation, capitalist greed, totalitarian oppression, scarcity of resources, war, human cruelty and human potential. After his death — on Nov. 22, 1963, the day JFK died — his widow, Laura, tried to keep his memory and his work alive, but a perfect storm of factors — personalities, family politics — kept most of the work from getting the wide distribution and range of media it deserved.
‘Why I Will Not Participate in the 2008 Turin Book Fair’
February 5, 2008
Tariq Ali on why he has rejected the celebration of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
When I agreed to participate in the Turin Book Fair, which I have done before, I had no idea that the ‘guest of honour’ was Israel and its 60th birthday. But this is also the 60th anniversary of what the Palestinian call the ‘nakba’…the disaster that befell them that year, when they were expelled from their villages, some killed, women raped by the settlers. These facts are no longer disputed. So why did the Turin Book Fair not invite Palestinians in equal numbers? 30 Israeli writers and 30 Palestinian writers (and I promise you they exist and are very fine poets and novelists) might have been seen as a positive and peaceful gesture and a positive debate might have taken place. A literary version of Daniel Barenboim’s Diwan Orchestra, half-Israeli, half-Palestinian. Such a move would have brought people together, but no. The cultural commissars know best. I have argued vigorously with some of the Israeli writers visiting the fair on other occasions and would have happily done the same again if conditions had been different. What they decided to do is an ugly provocation.
