love and other demons

I was recently asked if any piece of art or writing I consumed particularly resonated with my state of being at the time. The first thing that came to mind was Orhan Pamuk’s exquisite love story, The Museum of Innocence. Through the protagonist, Kamal Bey’s eyes, Pamuk journeys the entire gamut of emotions that loving fosters with a writing that is both real and magical at the same time. I don’t admire this book only because I am a silly romantic but because it managed to restore my faith in love and passion. The novel has anything but a fairy tale end leaving all its characters exhumed by the passions that drive them. But when I took it up, I was beginning to feel weary by the pragmatic notions of time and tracks, things that had no particular significance to me by themselves, but the discourse of which I could not escape. It was tiring to have to constantly justify a stance which in my mind seemed the most natural or logical, that one must always pursue love for its sake and not as a conduit to things that follow in its wake. If the former happens to bring about the latter it is one thing, but to pursue it in a pragmatic manner would kill my soul I often argued. I would like to share the following two excerpts from the book. The first speaks of passion (even though the protagonist had not fallen in love yet, or didn’t think he had) but manages to be exalting, sophisticated and intensely romantic. The second one is an uplifting passage and something that always calms my sense of disappointment and impatience with any given situation. I don’t think I can ever stop believing in love even if I never actually find it and no matter all the disappointments I have been dealt. And I will always be grateful to Pamuk for the kinship he offered me through his beautiful novel. 

“I would like to say a few things about kisses, though I have some anxieties about steering clear of trivialities and coarseness. I want to tell my story in a way that does justice to its serious points regarding sex and desire: Fusun’s mouth tasted of powdered sugar, owing, I think, to the Zambo chiclets she so liked. Kissing Fusun was no longer a provocation devised to test and to express our attraction to each other, it was something we did for the pleasure of it, and as we made love we were both amazed to discover love’s true essence. It was not just our wet mouths and our tongues that were entwined but our respective memories. So whenever we kissed, I would kiss her first as she stood before me, then as she existed in my recollection. Afterward, I would open my eyes momentarily to kiss the image of her a moment ago and then one of more distant memory, until thoughts of other girls resembling her would commingle with both those memories, and I would kiss them, too, feeling all the more virile for having so many girls at once; from here it was a simple thing to kiss her next as if I was someone else, as the pleasure I took from her childish mouth, wide lips and playful tongue stirred my confusion and fed ideas heretofore not considered, and the pleasure grew to encompass all the various personae I adopted as I kissed her, and all the remembered Fusuns that were evoked when she kissed me. It was in these first long kisses, in our lovemaking’s slow accumulation of particularity and ritual, that I had the first intimations of another way of knowing, another kind of happiness that opened a gate ever so slightly, suggesting a paradise few will ever know in this life. Our kisses delivered us beyond the pleasures of flesh and sexual bliss for what we sensed beyond the moment of the springtime afternoon was as great and wide as time itself. Could I be in love with her? The profound happiness I felt made me anxious. I was confused, my soul teetering between the danger of taking this joy too seriously and the crassness of taking it too lightly.” 

“Thus, did we enter what I have called the happiest moment of my life. In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant “now”, even after living such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happy moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could get worse. If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happier moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so.

But when we reach a point when our lives take on their final meaning shape, as in a novel, we can identify our happiest moment, selecting it in retrospect as I am doing now. To explain why we have chosen this moment is to acknowledge that it far in the past, that it will never return, and that awareness, therefore, of that very moment is painful. We can bear the pain only by possessing something that belongs to that instant. These mementoes preserve the colors, textures, images, and delights as they were more faithfully, in fact, than can those who accompanies us through those moments.”

poems for palestine

by Pedram Harby

Palestine made its bid for statehood at the United Nations today. While Abbas' tight half-smile reflected his years of fatigue with the situation, the standing ovations and the rapturous applauses to Abbas' speech affirmed that an international community stand behind him even though our now officially Israeli President Obama makes an aggressive move to veto Palestine's right to recognition. On an emotional day, lets reflect on some poems from, about and for Palestine....

We fear for a dream by Mahmoud Darwish
We fear for a dream: don't believe our butterflies.
Believe our sacrifices if you like, believe the compass of a horse, our need for the north.
We have raised the beaks of our souls to you. Give us a grain of wheat, our dream. Give it, give it to us.
We have offered you the shores since the coming to the earth born of an idea or of the adultery of two waves on a rock in the sand.
Nothing. Nothing. We float on a foot of air. The air breaks up within ourselves.
We know you have abandoned us, built for us prisons and called them the paradise of oranges.
We go on dreaming. Oh, desired dream. We steal our days from those extolled by our myths.
We fear for you, we're afraid of you. We are exposed together, you shouldn't believe our wives' patience.
They will weave two dresses, then sell the bones of the loved ones to buy a glass of milk for our children.
We fear for a dream, from him, from ourselves. We go on dreaming, oh dream of ours. Don't believe our butterflies.

9/11 must reads

There has been a lot written lately about books that appropriately represent 9/11 and the decade that followed. I have found some of these lists short-sighted and a little tone-deaf. It is definitely time for a counter list! The depiction of the day of 9/11 itself is of lesser concern to me and it is more important to find books that are tools to understand the world better whether geopolitically, culturally or emotionally in light of such an event. The travesties of something like 9/11 is that it immediately shifts the way history is discussed and in this particular case, it has allowed for the western world to obscure a lot of its past by hiding behind the tragedy. My list fills that gap by offering a context to understand why 9/11 happened and in what way it reflects relations between the west and the rest. 

Unthinking Eurocentrism by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam 

This is the most comprehensive and extremely analytical guide to understanding the sway of Europe upon our world today and of course, the United States which is a bastion of neo-European ideology. Through the use of film, popular culture and other media, Shohat and Stam unearth the truly astounding modes of Eurocentrism literally from "Plato-to-NATO." This book is pivotal for moving beyond mainstream rhetoric and to have clarity about why the so-called Third World is pissed off at the monolithic West. More importantly, this book addresses the failed phenomenon known as Multiculturalism. This is key since the witch hunt for terrorists continues in our own multi-culti American backyard. buy here

Epic Encounters by Melanie Mcallister

This is yet another heavyweight taking on the most controversial, contentious and impossible topic of them all - United States and its very unique relationship with the Middle East. Its disguises itself as a book about US popular culture and the way it shapes the discussion about the Middle East. But in truth, it is a tome about American foreign policy and the how that has boomeranged back into creating what we call an American culture. From the Bible to Black Power to Vietnam War to Israel to the politics of Oil, Mcallister connects all the dots fearlessly and with immense rigor. buy here

Patriot Acts, Narratives of 9/11 Injustice by Alia Malek 

The most recent contribution to the discourse of 9/11, Malek's book charts the discrimination faced by men and woman of Middle Eastern, South Asian, Arab or Muslim heritage. It is an unprecedented collection of oral histories told by a diverse set of people about the damage inflicted upon their daily lives with the coming of new security apparatuses, increased surveillance, legitimized racism and legally sanctioned rendition and abuse. Its a moving homage to the innocent victims of the War on Terror. buy here

Baghdad Blues by Sinaan Antoon

Poetry often offers the only way to authentically represent and simultaneously deconstruct places, spaces, history, events and emotions. From the very core of Baghdad comes this soulful, strong, stern and utterly tragic rendering of a completely shattered place - Iraq. A brilliant translator of Arabic poetry, an accomplished novelist and a poet of great intensity, Antoon's work is also important because it is well-timed and comes like a bullet to rip through lopsided narratives about the Arab world. buy here

Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Ahmed

A deceptively simple but lyrical book, this is a first person account of a young Princeton graduate from Pakistan whose love affair with America leaves him heartbroken and alienated. With the events of 9/11, his environment is transformed as he experiences overt racism and anti-Islamic sentiment everywhere. Though not necessarily substantial or deep, it resonates, in particular, with bourgeois westernized immigrants who are suddenly forced to be on the wrong side of privilege, prejudice and acceptance. buy here

Falling Man by Don DeLillo

A stoic, controlled account of the actual events of the day, it is the only work so far that recreates with accuracy the smell, sound and taste of a catastrophic moment. It is a truly humane American narrative and does not resort to cheap patriotism. DeLillo remains undefeated as the most exacting creator of a choral protagonist, which is the only way to depict an event of such monumental meaning. buy here

9/11 and aftermaths: mishra tells it like it is

I will let Pankaj Mishra do all the talking through this truly excellent piece on 9/11 and its violent aftermaths. It comes under the guise of a review of Jason Burke's book, "The 9/11 Wars." If you don't have time to read the entire article, below are some quotations that will give you plenty of food for thought:

"The sense of mad overkill, intellectual as well as military, grows more oppressive when you realise that, though al-Qaida murdered many people on 9/11 and undermined American self-esteem, the capacity of a few homicidal fanatics to seriously harm a large and powerful country such as the US was always limited. There is nothing surprising about their spectacular lack of success in rousing Muslim masses anywhere (as distinct from inciting a few no-hopers into suicidal terrorism). Their fantasy of a universal caliphate was always more likely to provoke fierce Muslim resistance than the globalising project of the west. Over-reaction to al-Qaida was by far the bigger danger to the west throughout the last decade; and, as it happened, groups of rootless conspirators, initially cultishly small and marginal, quickly proliferated around the world as a direct result of western military and ideological excesses after 9/11."

Pankaj Mishra

"The wars for which a small group of people in the west, essentially members of the military and their families, bore a disproportionate sacrifice were largely invisible to the rest. Unlike in the 1960s, the anti-war movement failed to animate political life; and there wasn't even a significant countervailing "support-the-troops" attempt at civic patriotism. "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths?" Barbara Bush, mother of George W, exasperatedly asked. "Why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?" Why indeed? The wars were kept invisible by such willed ignorance as well as governments eager not to advertise their high costs."

who writes? kashmir, 9/11 and literature

http://minutestocountdown.
deviantart.com/art/Blood-Ink-88568767

Literature is often a place of war. As a space for heated political contestation, it always offers the clearest possible insights into any realm of conflict. Two stories recently highlighted the enormity of the act of writing. Kashmir was preparing to host its first literary festival titled Harud and the website made its simplistic, "apolitical" agendas pretty clear - the emphasis on local writing, the evocation of a rich literary tradition and a way to celebrate "free speech." But after widespread protests and boycotts, they were forced to cancel the scheduled event. The opposing group of writers were shocked at the absurdity of an "apolitical" event in a place racked by repression, brutality, draconian laws, human rights violations and the lack of the most basic freedoms. In a joint letter, the group states: "We fear, therefore, that holding such a festival would, willy-nilly, dovetail with the state’s concerted attempt to portray that all is normal in Kashmir. Even as the reality on the ground is one of utter abnormality and a state of acute militarization and suppression of dissent, rights and freedoms." In light of this, the festival's focus on themes like "silenced voices" and "jail diaries" appeared nothing but trite. The whole issue also reinforced the fact that festivals which by virtue of their existence want to celebrate a flowering of literature and arts are often political tools to emphasize freedom and normalcy in places torn by violence and oppression.

Elsewhere, revealing a completely different mindset, BBC ran a piece about which novel best reflects the decade in the aftermath of 9/11. A chart showed that 1433 non-fiction works, 164 fiction and 145 juvenile works have been published that somehow depict the tragedy. While the writers from Kashmir wanted a deliberate, carefully thought-out process that would encapsulate the reality of Kashmir and its horrifying, violent history, the BBC story captured the rush to represent and solidify the event within the collective consciousness. Even though the comparison between the two may seem abrupt, what struck me was the fact that here are two different places contemplating the aftermaths of something very tragic and violent, yet, one story is so light and unfettered while the other is completely burdened by the very act of representation.

The BBC article also fails to grasp that while 9/11 may have happened in New York, the long term effects of it are also being felt in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and every other site of rendition, torture and other American atrocities in the name of a global war on terror. The exclusion of those stories also speaks volumes when it comes to the breezy light-hearted tone of the 9/11 article. The issue here is, of course, the shameless commercialism and consumerism attached to any event, big or small. That is the frame from which the article emerges and it focuses only on the bestseller English-language novels about 9/11 and leaves out almost everything else. If there is a true attempt to understand the history of the 9/11 aftermaths, there will be very different questions asked and articles like this one by will only serve to make us cringe.

5 books we are anticipating this fall

Crossbones by Nuruddin Farah

Following Links and then Knots, Crossbones will complete the Somali novelist's third trilogy. It will continue his reflection upon the state of civil war, piracy, family, brotherhood, healing and rebirth. More than anything, it offers the only illuminating perspective on what is Somalia today. It may not answer your questions but it is sure to ask all the right questions.

1Q84 by Haruki Marukami

Marukami's three volume narrative with the title spin on George Orwell's 1984 has been a sensation since its Japanese debut in 2010. Finally, the translation hits the shelves this October. Running well over a thousand pages, don't miss this master's surreal and intriguing reflections on Japan's contemporary culture. 

Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Mattar

Because it is time to understand Libya and it's most accomplished novelist in the English language, this novel is a much anticipated event. A coming of age story about a troubled family, it promises to be lyrical and poignant. Set in Egypt but depicting an interiorized Libyan universe, it will offer us insights into a region much-maligned by the West.