Skulking Around Queen Anne

November 16

Moving to Seattle has thus far been a bumpier experience than expected. First, our housing arrangements fell through, leaving us homeless hotel-bound vagabonds for several days while we walked (literally, walked) the length and breadth of the city looking for “For Rent” signs. Fortunately that bump had a silver lining: the place we ended up is much nicer than the place we originally intended to move. Queen Anne is a pretty neighborhood--blessedly quiet--and reminds me a little of a cleaned-up, less rowdy Allston, where I spent a lot of time during college.

The second bump was getting the news that my husband’s father passed away. Since then, we’ve both felt like we’re on the wrong continent--like we should have been there. Muslim funerals take place as soon as possible after death, so even if we got on a plane immediately after hearing the news, we would have missed the burial. Instead we’ve been on the phone more or less constantly with relatives and friends. Grief makes you reclusive. Neither of us wants to venture far, so we’ve been combing over Queen Anne, getting to know our immediate neighborhood. I’ve found used bookstores and piano bars and tiny movie theatres--a lot of the public bric-a-brac I missed in Egypt. The sun even came out today, a small mercy in a grey city.

Still, I’m pretty tired. When I get untired you may see more of the political world on this blog--originally I intended to keep the place pretty basic, but there have been things going on lately that I’d like to talk about.

Make sure to catch Talk of the Nation on NPR this Tuesday--I’ll try to make it worth your while.

Tova

November 12

So my graphic novel CAIRO came out this week. The day it was released, artist MK Perker and I spent an hour on the phone, alternately basking in our glory and worrying about how the book would be received. There have been some good reviews and some postmodern ones, but overall the response has been positive. Bill Willingham, creator of the hit comics series FABLES and the only Neocon at my chest-heavingly leftie publisher, actually gave the thing a glowing cover-quote. In other words, it’s been a good week, and I should be pleased. And I am, but it’s a pleasure complicated by politics.

On the afternoon of the day the book came out, I did a signing at Zanadu Comics. One of the guys who stopped by--trench coat, glasses, archetypal--picked up the book and flipped through it, then looked up at me with the air of a connoisseur of useless miscellany.

“Clearly she hasn’t learned that a ninja never hands over her weapon,” he said, pointing to a character swathed in a black face-veil and robe, who was giving her gun to a skeptical-looking man in a burnoose. The character’s name was Tova. She was an Israeli soldier, not a ninja. I held my peace. The guy went on to tell me he hoped I was ready for the big-leagues of fiction after something so trivial as journalism. (Journalism is like falling out of bed, he drawled, It’s like, woah, did I just write something? Fiction takes actual work.) Guys like this are an occupational hazard of comic-writing, and if they’re buying what I write, far be it for me to mock. I let him talk, nodding at appropriate intervals. But I had been thinking about Tova too, and about the other people who would look at her and see something she is not.

I knew I was walking a fine line when I wrote an Israeli soldier into the novel. I knew that no matter how complex or conflicted or human I made her, bringing her into a story about Arab Muslims as a protagonist would burn up much, if not all, of the literary street cred I built up in Cairo among Cairenes. Now when I get an interview request from an Egyptian publication (we really like your work; so few westerners take the time to understand these things; what else are you writing?) I cringe. I know my days on the good side of the City Victorious are numbered. After he read CAIRO, my husband sat me down and asked me gently if I realized it was possible I’d put myself in danger if I marketed the book in the Middle East. I knew, but I went into the bathroom and cried for awhile anyway. I want so much for tenderness to be universally understood, and it isn’t. I want not to have to separate the people I love to keep them from hurting each other. At the very least, I want the space to pretend, in fiction, that this is possible. But I may not even have that.

My husband wanted to know why I needed an Israeli character. Without her, the book is a shrine--a sometimes paradoxically irreverent shrine--to Islamic, Arab and Egyptian mythology, fit for all but the most hardline bookshelves. As one reviewer observed, the only unequivocal image in the entire book, the only symbol that is not polluted by shades of grey, is the Qur’an. Without the Jew, the book is kosher. I told him I didn’t need an Israeli character. But I did need the Israeli who was one of my most steadfast friends through my conversion; and the Israeli who held my hand while I was getting a large, pretty but idiotic Arabic tattoo in the days leading up to it, who joked that speaking Arabic would help me learn Hebrew; and the Israeli refusenik who was one of the first people to read a draft of the book, who was robbed of his Nobel peace prize by the tree woman from Africa. I needed those Israelis, and Tova was--is--for them.

I have not yet been asked to choose between the people I love in any lasting way. I have managed to keep an exhausting but worthwhile balance. There are friends I will never be able to introduce to my Palestinian in-laws, and in-laws I will never be able to introduce to my friends. I’ve made peace with that. But when I write a more perfect, bizarre, serendipitous, forgiving world, I sometimes forget not to hope I will someday be able to live in it.

This entry was cross-posted from Dean’s World. 

Strolling the Islamsphere

November 07

Right: Pakistan under emergency law (this is a charming expression that essentially means codified autocracy; Egypt has been under emergency law for twenty years), Mubarak jailing police officers for torture and then asking that foreign powers (read: the US) not interfere in the politics of the City Victorious, and bombings targeting politicians in Afghanistan. Here’s how the Islamsphere is covering things:

Aziz has a comprehensive roundup on the unfolding situation in Pakistan.

Taking a more literary view, Muse posts an appropriate poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz and laments that she’s chosen to spend the past few months in Cairo and not in Lahore (personally I’m glad, because if she had she’d be in jail right now and we’d have to call in the media calvary).

Ali is setting a land-speed record for typing by writing for Jewcy, his own blog, and new site Pakistanpolitics.net. Simultaneously.

Yahya Birt analyzes the current dialogue about Wahhabism.

This is interesting as well.