Alia Malek's Arab-american Stories

During the funeral of an american-palestinian activist, Alex Obeidah, murdered by ultra-zionists :

      «even during the church service, reporters swam through the crowds in front of the church. Asked as to the significance of Alex's death, a rabbi responded with the question, «who will I speak to now ?» » 

 P. 119 

After the first election of George W Bush, for whom arab-americans had massively voted : 

      «Weeks later, Spence stuck his head in Randa's office. They had been granted a meeting with the president to discuss (arab) community matters. He told Randa to do a prep memo for him detailing all the issues in a format that could be passed on to the president if it were requested during the meeting. 

Randa was exuberant. 

The meeting had been set for 3:30 p.m. At the  White House on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.» 

P.225 ( Only reality can be that ironic really ...) 

    As usual my quotes don't really represent the book, because it's too hard to sum up a book so full of nuances and stories and details with a few quotes. but it is wonderful book for anyone who wants to know more about what it is to be an arab-american. It relates personnal stories that covers the span of the arab immigration to the United States, all kinds of stories, incredible, sad, marvelous ones, with all sort of people of all political leanings, all kinds of beliefs, all having in common to be of arab descent. A book that will surely catch the interest of anyone who wants to know more about US history and immigration, with a lesser known side of this history (alongside the better known hispanic and african ones). 

Andalus Publishing House - the end of a dream ...

... Though I still hope for a resurrection, one day.

    «Should a visitor from another planet happen to arrive here and look around at the reality between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea without the usual lenses of distortion, she would see that in Israel/Palestine—the land stretching from the river to the sea which has been under one rule for over forty years—almost half the population is Palestinian Arab and Arabic is their mother tongue, as well as that of nearly half of the Israeli Jewish population. Should our guest distinguish—as does the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, as well as the Israeli academy and media—between Israeli citizens and occupied Palestinian subjects, she would find that within the category of “Israeli citizens,” the majority is of Arabic-speaking (and to a large extent reading and writing) origin. Our guest would likely notice that Israel is located in the heart of the Arab world and that each and every one of its neighboring countries is Arab.

    Out of a desire to familiarize herself with local culture, our guest might walk into a nearby bookshop, where she would expect to find books in Hebrew and Arabic—the two official languages of the state of Israel. But alas, at the first store: Hebrew books only. At the second store: some English books too. The third store, she will find, is dedicated to Russian literature. “There are no Arabs here!” they would all inform her. “This, my dear, is Tel Aviv.” The guest, who has been to Paris and Rome and London and Moscow and Nairobi and Johannesburg and Buenos Aires, might be a bit surprised: “A city without Arabs? Without Arabic? Here? In the center of the Middle East?”

    Then our guest might meet up with a friend, also from another planet. Unlike our guest, the friend does not look at reality but rather at its representations. She watches current affairs shows and nightly news on TV; she reads newspapers, especially the “leading liberal daily” Haaretz; she goes to the theatre and the opera; she attends faculty meetings at the university; and, like our guest, she browses bookshops. “Why are you so surprised?” she admonishes our guest, “After all, this is a European country!” This is because by and large the friend only encounters middle-aged secular Ashkenazi men. They are practically the only ones to be seen, heard, and read: the shelves are overflowing with their books, as well as those of their American, French, German, and Spanish counterparts. Our guest does not manage to convince her friend that middle-aged secular Ashkenazi men make up less than ten percent of the land’s people. Nor does she manage to get her to believe that Israel is not in Europe.

    It was into this reality, and its representations, that Andalus Publishing was born. But when I launched a publishing house that would specialize in translating Arabic literature into Hebrew, I had the impression that this reality was going to change. It was in the late 1990s, on the eve of the second intifada, and despite my critique of the so-called “peace process,” I hadn’t altogether internalized my own criticism.»

     Great article you should read entirely here. I heard of this publishing house project a few years ago, and I was thrilled, I was looking forward to buy their books, and then I read this article ... The situation «over there» is decidedly much worse than what I thought ... But do read the article, through this publishing house story, you get to the core of many problems you find in this country, It That Must Not Be Named (because really no-one will ever agree on its name, Palestine, Israel, Holy Land ... I like «IsPal». Shorter. Though the naming thing can seems to be the least important of all ...) 

(and why did I get started on this subject ? If there is one subject I can both go on for hours or not talk about it at all because it strike too close to my deepest feelings to stay objective and rational, it's this one, The Land That Cannot Be Named ...)

رجالي - كتاب لملكة مقدم

بدأت أقرأ كتاب لكاتبة جزائرية الأصل ولكن تكتب بالفرنسية وتُترجم كتبها الى العربية، مثل ”رجالي”. هذا الكتاب سيرة ذاتية ويظهر أن اتجاهها هو عكس اتجاهي في الحياة في كثير من المواضيع (مع أن في أشياء اخرى أنا موافقة تماما) وحتى أن ما تكتبه هو ما قد أكتبها 

  :مع تبديل كلمة واحدة - في المقطع التالي مثلا اذا أبدل الكلمة ”جزائرية” مع ”فرنسية” كأن كتبته لتصف سيرتي 

 الآن بت مقتنعة أن وحدهم الرجال القادمين من بعيد، من أرض أخرى، بوسعهم أن يساعدوني على التحرر نهائيا من البلبلة الجزائرية. ولا علاقة لذلك إطلاقا بتوق إلى الإكزوتيكية، لا بل إنها، قبل كل شيء، حاجة للهروب من الاستنطاق والقسوة والتمييز والغباء والقمع الذي يمارسه المألوف، وفك التصاقي بالعادات، ومحاكاة الجماعة، والمرور بالغريب كما بنخرط المرء في المقاومة السرية، لإنقاذ نفسي، للاهتداء إلى سبيلي. 

رجالي” - ملكة مقدم"  

 وذلك قطعة أخرى وجدتها جميلة، خاصة الجملة الأخيرة الذي لا كنت سأقولها بشكل أفضل : 

 ”لقد انتصرت القوى الاستبدادية لتقاليدنا على هذا الحب، ولكنها رسخت ادي يقينا: حاجتي إلى رجل حر.” 

Sick sad world for too many women

     I just read about the lastest cases of so-called «honour» crimes in Jordan. It just scares me out my mind that the human being can become so vile, so in-human. And how laws in that country aren't changed when they're obviously totally stupid, and so contrary to any culture's logic ... 

     What frightens me too is that when it come to arab countries, the vast majority of people think this sort of horror is inherent and part of the arab culture (most westerners think that way, but some arabs too - when the western soft-power have done a good job of brain-washing). It's as stupid as the said laws : if violence, rape and discrimination against women were part of the arab culture, then how come you find violence, rape and discrimination against women about everywhere on the damned planet ? And more often than not, in incredible high proportions ? It's a bit like saying genocide is part of the german mind ... Stupid, and it certainly doesn't help the women concerned by that violence. 

   We should first stop thinking in this way, and help all the people who want to help these women, whether these people are arab or not, religious or atheist or whatever ... It's not a matter of culture, it's a matter of letting the human being become inhumane. «You're not born human, you become one» said Erasmus. And the despicable men comitting these crimes obvisously never learned how to become one. We should focus on children's education and law reform, instead of stupidly dismissing it as a «cultural norm» in any given society. Even though a good education and good enough laws in France don't prevent the killing of one women by her husband/boyfriend every two days ... But it helps. So I hope some people in Jordan, men and women, will have the courage to stand up and suppress some of these insane laws ... And as the original article says, the biggest problem right now is the silence. 

    This defeaning silence you find everywhere : for example we heard of a case a few weeks back, in France, of a mother who had to kill her husband in self-defense because after years of violence and forced prostitution imposed on her by him, and after having gone to the police a great many times to file a complaint and getting nothing more than a "oh well, go back to your house and talk to him and you'll see, things will get better", she had no choice left but kill him or getting killed ... Mentalities are hard to change, and the silence is killing every effort. She had to kill him to be heard. And yet, some people thought she should be put in prison for life because of this act of self defense ! And that's in a country supposedly advanced on women issues.

PS : I just learned that one week ago, the law against sexual harassment has been purely and simply suppressed. You can't go and file a complaint against a sexual agressor anymore ( unless you're actually "properly" raped ). And that's in France too. The only argument they found to justify that measure is "the texts are not clear enough, so we'll suppress the law for now, we'll see later".
     The next person I hear telling me that we french are a civilized people as compared to the rest of the world, I might just punch him/her.

On Hanif Kureishi's works, follow-up

I finally read (and watched) other works by Hanif Kureishi which I find much more interesting than what I've been reading so far : The Black Album (book) and My Son The Fanatic (movie, adaptated from one of his short stories). It's essentially about the same subjects : a young student coming from an sub-continental family living in England, muslim «but open-minded and well integrated», experiencing a great sense of bewilderment, lost betwen two worlds (the religious one, typically made up from young adults looking for their «roots» as a reaction to the racism they're subject to, and the liberal world made up by «white» english people with «loose morals», intellectuals and revolutionaries ranging from the drug dealers to the university professors). The book is more about the point of view of the son, whereas the movie is more about the father's point of view, watching his son turning from a «average» boy to a «fanatic». The son in the book ends up choosing the liberal world while the son in the movie goes definitely fanatic and leaves the house (as do the mother, leaving the father alone with his english girlfriend). Though I'm not entirely convinced of both works, the characters are convincing, real-looking. The only bad critic I would make is about the plots themselves, which do not allow any space to the majority «in between» worlds, theses worlds where english people might be white but conservative on many things, where immigrants and their children might be both midly religious and liberal on many things, all these «in between» reflecting the negociation ground in the life of so many people who have not and don't want to choose either of the «absolute» worlds he describes (the totally liberal one and the fanatic one). It's as if these middle grounds don't exist in his fictions, when anyone's day to day experience shows that they concern the majority of people ...  But then I guess they were works of their times, following the Rushdie Episode and all this, and above all knowing that a plot evolving between fanatics and liberals is much more appealing to audiences. But that doesn't mean these work don't represent some realities (otherwise the characters wouldn't be convincing), it is just only showing a very small part of the reality ...

51,7%

Ouf !