February 22, 2009 – 6:01 pm
They are dying by the day. First, there was Edward Said, then Mahmoud Darwish, and now Tayeb Salih.
If Said sang about the pleasures of the “placeless place,” Darwish wrote like a jealous child unwilling to share the page with any one, a ruthless occupier in particular. Salih, on the other hand, spent most of his life on borderline between East, West, and the Rest. As a thinker, citizen, and writer, he towered quietly over our time with extraordinary luminosity. He also had a prodigious capacity for understanding people no matter where they came from.
A sign well defined in his chef-d’oeuvre, Season of Migration to the North, where the narrator intones: “The [the Sudanese people] were amazed to learn that Europeans with some differences were much like us, marrying and raising children in accordance with tradition and that generally they were a moral and honest people.” A humanist voice at its best! This is not the nonsense one finds in shabby screeds likes the “clash of cultures” or “what went wrong?” Read More »
Aly barely fit the bed,
which occupied its own snug little cubbyhole
off the wall of the largest room in Dar Tasfaout,
and twice, in his passion, he sat up abruptly
and cracked his head on the low-slung ceiling.
Lalla Khaddouja had to laugh,
lying there naked beneath him,
because he was so earnest,
so eager in his application. Read More »
November 16, 2006 – 11:26 am
There is in Le Louvre a diorite stela from the 18th century BC, on which are inscribed the 282 laws of the Code of Hammurabi: pretty much the earliest recorded set of laws we have (centuries older than Exodus, it includes the principle of “an eye for an eye”)–at a stretch, it might almost be called the world’s first written constitution.
A picture of it is displayed in the British Museum, that Aladdin’s cave of looted treasures from Britain’s former colonies, near the Stela of Nabonidus. Made of basalt, 58 cm high by 46 cm wide, and dating from the 6th century BC, this has carved upon it in bas-relief is a figure wearing the traditional dress of a Babylonian king, who is thought to be Nabonidus, the last ruler of Babylon before it was conquered by Cyrus the Great of Persia in 539 BC. Read More »
January 5, 2006 – 12:16 pm
The recent events that set La Belle France ablaze are rooted in its colonial past; a past full of shame and mortification. The French, who still hold a remarkable sway over their ex-colonies, are conducting their little secret colonial war in Ivory Coast without a peep from the rest of the West which delights in disciplining and punishing at will anyone who does not toe the line: Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan.
This time, though, the unrest comes from within La Métropole : the immigrant who has been languishing to find the stable strikes back with a vengeance. Although it remains doubtful, his late revolt may force Maman Fouance to take a hard look at herself in the mirror and face up to its anti-Semitic, xenophobic, and racist past and present. Beleaguered and sandwiched between Germany to the East, Great Britain and the US to the West, the country that used to be the envy of the world can hardly breathe today. Read More »
