Two Related, Timely Books addressing Conflict and Conscience

 Two timely, related books: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message and Omar El Akkad’s One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This. Both are reporters and both make a plea for the humanization of those whose victimhood is conveniently ignored by the media. The world view of both writers springs from a personal history that is inextricable from the objective realities they witness and report.

Coates travels to Dakar, Senegal, to retrace the origins of the slave trade, and experiences a conflicting sense of himself as, simultaneously, belonging as Black but foreign as American. He then travels through Israel and the West Bank and is shocked by the systematic oppression of Palestinians under Israeli rule. When he notices that some houses have cisterns on the roof to catch rainwater and others do not, he learns that Israelis are given permits to have cisterns but Palestinians are almost always denied that permission. He relates these conditions to what his slave ancestors experienced in the South.

Omar El Akkad recounts his family’s journey from their native Egypt to Qatar then Canada and eventually the United States. In due course, after college, he becomes a journalist, a war reporter covering the invasion of Afghanistan and other conflicts for major Canadian and American newspapers. Years later, he is jolted out of his comfortable middle-class life in Oregon with his wife and child, by the Gaza war and its brutality. He is particularly shocked out of his complacency by the dehumanizing way in which the relentless bombing of Gaza is covere in the Western media. He had believed that American society would not violate its own rights, freedoms and principles beyond a certain point. But El Akkad does not absolve himself of the human struggle to fully empathize with the suffering of others: he notes that a momentary fright over the health of his five-year-old daughter terrifies him beyond anything he sees on the news.

Is This Really Iran’s “Arab Spring”?

 Is This Really Iran’s “Arab Spring”?

I remember the precise moment in February 2011 when I decided to go to Tahrir. I had been in Egypt on vacation that winter, as I often am, when the revolt against the thirty-year dictatorship of President Hosni Mubarak erupted on January 25th. My initial caution was shared by many: dread of chaos and pessimism about a democratic outcome. The tipping point for me came when Mubarak’s police forces started shooting at peaceful civilian demonstrators. For the first time, I joined the throngs finding their way to Tahirir in support of the young protesters camping there.

I wonder, now, how Iranians are feeling. Is the tipping point for many of them the massacre of student protesters in January? By all reports the majority of the population is young, well-educated, and chafing under a cruelly repressive regime. Are they now welcoming the chance to topple the regime, even at the cost of foreign intervention? For others, is the bombing of their cities and collateral deaths of their fellow Iranians at the hands of Israeli and American forces too high a price? Do they look at Iraq after the American invasion of 2003 and want none of it?

In Egypt in January 2011, there was no bombing by foreign forces. There may have been covert intervention, as some have claimed, but whatever the case, the young idealists in Tahrir acted in good faith. If there had been an aerial attack by Israel in support of toppling Mubarak, there is no doubt in my mind that it would have spelled the end of any support for a revolutionary movement. Case in point: when Egypt was attacked in 1956, and again in 1967, even those who hated Nasser, those he persecuted most, like my father’s family, did not hesitate for a moment as to where their loyalties lay.

Liberal-minded Iranians today are in a hard place, whether they were hoping for foreign intervention to free them from the yoke of draconian mullah rule, or distrusting it. The odds of a democratic outcome are problematic, to say the least, and the lessons of the Arab Spring are cautionary in this respect. Egypt today, after months of turmoil and a brief, unserious flirtation with an Islamist party, has defaulted back to military dictatorship. 

military 

Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell

Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell

Italian Shoes sounded like an intriguing title for a Henning Mankell novel, a departure from the police procedurals he is best known for, so I embarked on it as a sort of neutral “palate cleanser” between other more controversial books. It defied my expectations. The protagonist is an aging, misanthropic former surgeon, Frederick Welin, who self-isolates on a rocky outcrop of Sweden’s remote northern archipelago after a disastrous surgery mistake. For twelve years his only regular contact with the world is the postman who comes on his hydrocopter every week. In winter the ice is so thick even the sea is frozen, and he can walk across to the mainland. The day by day, hour by hour shifts in the weather; the turning of the seasons; the details of every rock and inlet of this barren islet, form not the backdrop but an essential, active agent in the story.

One day, the hermit’s self-imposed isolation is invaded by a woman he brutally abandoned thirtyfive years ago, announcing she is dying of cancer and that he has a daughter he knew nothing about. Now he must face his ugly past, not only with them, but with the patient whose life he ruined on the operating table.

The characters are typically unforthcoming, but when they do engage in long expositions of their feelings, they sound stilted and totally unconvincing. No one speaks like that, not even in Swedish. Also, Mankell spells out every metaphor, even the most glaringly obvious. Finally, a caveat: the book can affect you with its Scandinavian gloom—even on a sunny Carolina day.

Deja Vu

Déjà Vu

Where does it come from, this overwhelming sense of Déjà vu I get watching the coverage of the Minneapolis protests? Then it hits me. Another city, fifteen years ago. Cairo. Tahrir Square. The Arab Spring. A particular incident, the torture and murder of a young man by savagely empowered law enforcement, proved to be the spark that set ablaze fury and resistance to encrusted brutal policing.

The same scenes as in Minneapolis, but to the scale of a city twenty times its size. Eventually a million protesters, mostly idealistic young people, camped out in Tahrir Square, ground zero in the city. Police and security forces, many out of uniform, cracking down on them with tear gas, clubs, violence. And in sympathy with the protesters, a citizenry mobilized to bring food, water, medical supplies and moral support. Even people who did not necessarily sympathize with the cause of the protest were shocked by the brutality of its repression.

At some point, army tanks rolled in, and the desperate protesters turned to the soldiers as saviors, protectors from the police. The same dichotomy, in reverse, as the role played by state as opposed to federal forces in Minneapolis. But in the case of Tahrir, this alliance between the army and the citizenry did not last. In the end, though , when public opinion had reached the tipping point, the regime of thirty years capitulated. Whether or not what replaced it was an improvement is not the issue here. But Tahrir Square reminded the world that the cycle of fear can be broken.

The determined citizens of Minneapolis must be tired of showing up for their most vulnerable communities, day after day, week after week, in freezing temperatures, at the risk of their own lives and safety. Who knows how this story ends? One thing is certain: they have reminded the country, and the world, that “this is not who we are as Americans” is not an empty slogan.

 

 

You Never Know: an essay I wrote for Writers for Democratic Action

 “You never know,” my mother used to say. And my father and I would shake our heads at her unwarranted optimism.

“There’s no hope for this country,” my father would tell me. “There’s no future for you here. Get out as soon as you can, go study abroad.” Nasser’s Egypt had slipped ever deeper into the Socialist bloc for nearly twenty years. Nasser’s grip on power was absolute, his one-man regime uncontested, his rubber-stamp parliament a transparent fig leaf; his very name struck terror in many and inspired blind adulation in the masses. After the shocking defeat of Egyptian forces in 1967, there was a stirring, a glimmer of hope, that public discontent, student demonstrations, and military humiliation might shake his seat. But that proved ephemeral.

The despair I sensed in my family was especially acute. As a politically powerful family under the ancien regime, we were targeted for arrest, sequestration, and confiscation of all assets. We still lived in a large, beautiful home filled with elegant antiques, but my father drove a fifteen-year-old car. A pall of gloom, of helpless despair and constant anxiety, pervaded the air as long as I could remember. It looked like the order of things was set in stone.

Yet my mother would repeat: “You never know. Only God knows.” Her faith was genuine, and she was of a naturally sanguine disposition, but now I realize that there was more to it. She was trying to keep my father from sinking into an irremediable depression. Still in his forties, he had already had several heart attacks, and indeed he was to die at fifty, years after I had indeed gone to study abroad.

And yet, my mother was right. The unimaginable happened. After Nasser died, his vice president Sadat, perceived for twenty years as Nasser’s yes-man, overnight veered sharply towards the West, kicking out Egypt’s Russian overlords, throwing in his lot with Western democracies, and flinging open the doors of the Egyptian economy to world markets. Egypt had its glastnost and perestroika avant la lettre. The pall of fear was lifted.

So this is the comfort I would share with you today: Don’t despair. Don’t be so overwhelmed by the hurricane forces sweeping through our America, upending norms and laws we thought as immovable as Mount Rushmore, laying waste to the democracy and freedom we held sacred.

It was that ideal of America, a country of laws, of rights and freedoms, that absence of fear, that my father had wished for me, and that I had sought when immigrating to this country forty years ago. And when I despair, I remind myself that what seems irrevocable, what seems entrenched forever, can change back. The pendulum never stops swinging. My American grandchildren still have a chance at a better world. As my mother said: “You never know.”

Samia Serageldin is a novelist and magazine and book editor. She is the author of The Cairo House, The Naqib’s Daughter, and Love is Like Water. She grew up in Egypt under Nasser, studied at London University, and emigrated with her family to the U.S. in the 1980’s. She is a resident of Chapel Hill, NC, for well over thirty years.

Evil Incarnate in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde vs The Picture of Dorian Gray

The problem of separating good from evil in human nature is addressed in literature through the guise of making evil incarnate: the Devil, in “Dr Faustus”; Mr Hyde, in R.L. Stevenson’s “The Curious Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”; or the portrait, in Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. Rereading the latter two revised my opinion. Stevenson’s short novel is an absolute page turner, and the sense of place is remarkable: his London is a character in the book, its changes of mood, time of day, and weather, as sensitively rendered as anything by Virginia Woolf. On the other hand, Wilde’s Dorian Gray, in the 1890 pre-censored edition, is almost unreadable. Stupefying, pointless pontification by “Lord Henry,” contrariness failing to pass for wit, let alone philosophy. London, as a city, is atmospherically absent, whereas the detailed descriptions of luxurious interiors serve no more purpose than Décor magazines.

In the end, though, the coexistence of good and evil in every human remains irreconcilable, at least outside of the realm of religion.

Blame it on the Algorithm!

 If I needed proof of how “algorithms” work, this is it: lately I discovered that Italian PM Georgia Meloni’s speeches and interviews are perfectly easy for me to follow with my limited Italian. I’m no fan of Italy’s hard right PM, but something about her speaking style—deliberate, clear, without regional accent—makes it good for practising Italian. Well, I soon found video clips of Marine LePen popping up in my feed! Apparently the “algorithm” inferred that I liked right wing female European leaders. It couldn’t be more wrong! Blame it on the medieval Arab mathematician Al Khwarizmi after whom Algorithm is named. Both these ladies are happy to blame Arabs for everything, anyway. 

“You Never Know.”

 “You never know,” my mother used to say. And my father and I would shake our heads at her unwarranted optimism.

“There’s no hope for this country,” my father would tell me. “There’s no future for you here. Get out as soon as you can, go study abroad.” Nasser’s Egypt had slipped ever deeper into the Socialist bloc for nearly twenty years. Nasser’s grip on power was absolute, his one-man regime uncontested, his rubber-stamp parliament a transparent fig leaf; his very name struck terror in many and inspired blind adulation in the masses. After the shocking defeat of Egyptian forces in 1967, there was a stirring, a glimmer of hope, that public discontent, student demonstrations, and military humiliation might shake his seat. But that proved ephemeral.

The despair I sensed in my family was especially acute. As a politically powerful family under the ancien regime, we were targeted for arrest, sequestration, and confiscation of all assets. We still lived in a large, beautiful home filled with elegant antiques, but my father drove a fifteen-year-old car. A pall of gloom, of helpless despair and constant anxiety, pervaded the air as long as I could remember. It looked like the order of things was set in stone.

Yet my mother would repeat: “You never know. Only God knows.” Her faith was genuine, and she was of a naturally sanguine disposition, but now I realize that there was more to it. She was trying to keep my father from sinking into an irremediable depression. Still in his forties, he had already had several heart attacks, and indeed he was to die at fifty, years after I had indeed gone to study abroad.

And yet, my mother was right. The unimaginable happened. After Nasser died, his vice president Sadat, perceived for twenty years as Nasser’s yes-man, overnight veered sharply towards the West, kicking out Egypt’s Russian overlords, throwing in his lot with Western democracies, and flinging open the doors of the Egyptian economy to world markets. Egypt had its glastnost and perestroika avant la lettre. The pall of fear was lifted.

So this is the comfort I would share with you today: Don’t despair. Don’t be so overwhelmed by the hurricane forces sweeping through our America, upending norms and laws we thought as immovable as Mount Rushmore, laying waste to the democracy and freedom we held sacred.

It was that ideal of America, a country of laws, of rights and freedoms, that absence of fear, that my father had wished for me, and that I had sought when immigrating to this country forty years ago. And when I despair, I remind myself that what seems irrevocable, what seems entrenched forever, can change back. The pendulum never stops swinging. My American grandchildren still have a chance at a better world. As my mother said: “You never know.”

 

The Elementary School Shooting in Minnesota

 Heartbroken, and terrified, about this elementary school shooting in Minnesota. The two children who died were exactly the age, 10 and 8, of my two elementary grades grandchildren. Like them, they must have been excited to start the first school week, planning the night before what to wear that first day, what lunch to pack, what accessories to attach to their backpack. I try not to imagine what their parents and grandparents are feeling right now, because I can imagine it all too well. I pray no one repeats in their presence the mantra “guns don’t kill people.”  Cars don’t kill people, and we regulate the hell out of them.

The thing is: guns are the weapon of cowards, the weapon of impulse. And especially and most dangerously, the weapon of our time. The weapon of the delusional loner who spends hours in front of violent video games and loses his sense of reality. Violence in our reality-bending age is disassociated from reality. The twenty-year-old who went to the school with murderous intent had a hand gun, a rifle, and a pistol. Could he have attacked seventeen children and killed two if he had only a weapon, like a knife, that required close body to body contact? 

Confessions of a Dante Dilettante

 Confessions of a Dante dilettante: I’ve dipped into Inferno over the years, fascinated to discover how Bosch’s triptych might have been influenced by Dante’s trilogy. But the awkward translations to English were discouraging, until I was recently introduced to a flowing, fluent verse translation that manages to preserve Dante’s terza rima. By Angelaurelio Soldi, a poet and native Italian speaker.