Short trip (mostly medical) to New Delhi

A few impressions from New Delhi India where I recently traveled for 10 days or so partly to check out India's medical resources and partly to use up a bonus break given by the university (but not in the usual dolce far niente style of the carefree tourist). I’ve wanted to visit India, yes, for quite some time but to be honest with you this was no travel adventure due to the medical issues I mentioned. I still count it as a semi successful trip though since I was able to satisfy some of my cultural and geographical curiosity about this vast country.

But first, some impressions of the famous, fabulous, mysterious, and supposedly frightening place. During my first week in “Delhi,” as everyone calls, it I saw not one skyscraper, saw many pleasant treelined boulevards, noticed little blue sky but no lurid, abject poverty either. Moreover, the amount and intensity of the street touts, hawkers and unwanted sales corps was much less than I’d expected. Overall, I found ordinary Indians pleasant, polite and helpful – and more than competent at English.

On the medical side, I was able quickly to locate the neurosurgeon recommended by my Indian doctor in Al Ain who took a look at an old MRI then told me pretty much what I already knew; damage in the lower back, for which I would have to keep doing physiotherapy and not contemplate anything more drastic until all other recourses were exhausted. My local doctor is a urologist whom I've known for many years as a patient. He'd had neck surgery with this surgeon and had high praise for him. Although the hospital (Sir Ganga Ram) was the busiest one I'd ever seen, it was very decent and clean--probably a very good hospital for India. However, the pain relief prescribed me was mild to the point of unnoticeable.

I also took advantage of this hospital to do a couple of physiotherapy sessions and also saw another doctor for a new ailment in my right knee, alas. It may be some kind of arthritic or rheumatoid attack, but whatever it is it hindered me more than the old back problem; once again the pain relief prescribed wasn't very effective. Since coming back to the UAE, I've gone back to good old-fashioned volteran and swimming which does help fortunately.

My overall impression of Indian medicine is positive; all of the medical personnel I met were kind, competent, and spoke English fantastically well. The facilities of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital were incredibly crowded, granted, but still clean, decent and well maintained. As for the cost, well, for a 40 minute consultation with a well-known neurosurgeon, I was billed for a total of 700 rupees. At 50 to the dollar, I paid a mere $14. Shockingly cheap in fact; so much so that I should have felt guilty (but didn't of course). The medicine prescribed in fact was almost as much.

This is the first time I’ve ever gone to a foreign country purely for medical reasons, in other words, for medical tourism. And of course my first time to India. In other words a very odd kind of trip. In view of how little I did or saw in India, the reader may be surprised to know that the trip was still worth it. As for trusting myself to the strangeness of a new country, I felt that I had actually been in India many times before. No I don’t mean in previous reincarnations (as I’m sure you think I’m going to describe) but right here in AL where hundreds of thousands of citizens from India live and work. Actually most of the Indian immigrants in this town are from Kerala, a southern province with a popular tropical coastline that I’ve heard described and praised dozens of times by colleagues on holiday there.

At any rate, I’ve long appreciated the hard work, friendly attitude, intelligence and nearly inexhaustible serviceability of Indians I’ve known working on many levels here, from taxi drivers, store clerks, and restaurants to travel agents, doctors and nurses; not to mention the high achievements of people I know at the University, teachers and professors.

So you can see that after all this friendly and mostly intelligent interaction with Indian immigrants in AL, I had few qualms about going to a strange country that wasn’t all that unknown. I can also say that my positive preconceptions about India weren’t disappointed. Also more surprisingly perhaps, my negative pre-conceptions about the country went unfulfilled.

Though I tried on several occasions to break out of the New Delhi syndrome (spending two afternoons in Old Delhi) and the pseudo London pretense of the place, I failed to find any truly ghastly lurid poverty on the scale described by countless visitors to India.

There’s not a whole lot of literature available on American-Indian relations (as there is for the Brits of course), so this gives Paul Theroux’s stories in Elephanta Suite a certain rarity value. As the stories demonstrate, despite this lack, there is a definite shape to American and Indian narration in the new successful India. These generally well received novellas are definitely worth reading for the India traveler although they paint a fairly dire portrait of the place; a pair of rich Yanks die in a mob riot (in unexplained circumstances), and the book’s most appealing heroine, a young American college graduate named Alice is raped by a fat repulsive Indian whom she later arranges to have trampled to death by a male elephant in heat. In the most believable tale, an American businessman and an ambitious young Indian go-getter exchange places and values; the Indian heads off to Boston to move up in the academic-business elite while the American adopts his one time employee's Jainist puritanical belief system.

Another recent Theroux title Ghost Train to the Eastern Star dealt with India at about the same time in a reprise of the routes he made famous in The Great Railway Bazaar (he said he was doing it before someone else got the idea!); I tried to get my hands on a copy of the book (whh I'd read and liked a couple of years ago) before I left – but no go, & no ecopies. I remember the Indian section as fairly mellow and even affectionate toward the country. All I had in hand to read was Naipaul’s ancient Million Mutinies Now of Bombay/Mumbai. Still worth reading (20 years old) and not totally out of date.

As Theroux’s stories show, Americans and Indians seem to have a sentimental sympathy for and friendly impulses toward each other based perhaps on ex-colonial solidarity (?), a penchant for mysticism and idealism…? Or an intuitive understanding and acceptance of each other’s sentimental form of religiosity? Americans (as in these stories) seem to be "shopping" for religion, particularly some personal kind, as opposed to the abstract God of Protestantism, that can be practiced concretely; and Indians as is obvious have quite a few of these on offer. Indians also give touchy Americans the “space” they need on sidewalks and in public. Whatever it is the common language (at least among the educated city-dwelling English speakers) allows them to explore their curiosity about each other – and feel attraction if it’s warranted as well as the greed and lust that motivate the characters in Elephanta Suite. The kinds of dubious sexual involvements Theroux’s characters get into with negative outcomes are entirely believable.

For post-Asian veterans, India is less of a problem, less shock, less fear, less irritation and annoyance (travelers come in two types: pre-Asia and post Asia. The dividing line). Hardly any more difficult to deal with than a country I usually think of as tourist friendly – Turkey. A distinct improvement on Sri Lanka whose street hawkers struck me as a tad aggressive, (ready to take umbrage at the slightest impatience on the part of the hawkee).

I’ll spare you my story of the ultimate tourist cliché the Taj Mahal (it was still interesting to me as an example of Islamic architecture). The Gandhi Museum in New Delhi, however, was very worthwhile; I felt a renewed interest in his life and ideas.

What about the dreaded “Delhi belly” rumored to be latent in the most innocent ice cube? I didn’t get it anyway – took only the usual precautions such as drinking bottled water and avoiding street food and drinks.

Maybe a more serious concern -- certainly in this area of northern India – is the climate’s narrow visiting window. I arrived at the end of the high season – late March – when most tourists had left (hence the empty hotels). Despite traveling from residence in one of the hottest climates in the world – the Arabian Gulf – the Delhi heat with humidity was serious business – and I more or less fled the Taj Mahal site (on the one day I managed to tour) due to furnace like temperatures. Fortunately I found a restaurant with A/C nearby where I parried imminent collapse with cold beer and a hot curry.

No cease fire, no pull back, no compliance

Many excuses as always to everyone for more rants but living in the Middle east what can you do but scream? (the place has become obsessively interesting since last "spring" but exasperating as well) The scream is as always on Syria since we live close by in the ME and can't ignore what's going on there-- please excuse us for obsessing on this point -- but when you live in a place, u can't avoid observing, knowing and feeling responsible for what's going on. Even though I'm not.

Nevertheless a year of bloodshed and continued cries for help from the Syrian population cause me once again to get on the blog site and say: that although we have heard much of the Kofi Annan "cease-fire" peace plan in fact we have seen not one iota of change from the stance and behavior of the Basher government. yes, "a measurable decrease in violence" but how hopeful is this when Basher hasn't allowed one measurable iota of change on Syrian streets. Shelling in Homs for example, reported today. Does that sound familiar? Basher's batallions still occupying the main squares and intimidating the population. Killing demonstrators (but on a reportably smaller scale). Does that sound familiar? Kofi Annan's plan is really impressive so far -- no compliance,not one concession by the main malefactor. Not one significant change on behavior since all the Kofi Annan intervention began., Of course a miracle could occur any minute and Basher and fellow criminals could turn themselves in at the local crimes against humanity police station, but this is doubtful. Basher's almost perfect integrity as a tyrant -- he doesn't deal with anyone -- is at this moment almost perfectly preserved.

I think the best comparison would be with Hitler in the 1930 & 40s. A population has been screaming for help for over a year. Don't they have the right to defend themselves? Think of rebels against Basher as Jews revolting from Hitler. Wouldn't we automatically fly to their rescue? if Hitler managed a plan whereby he only killed one hundred Jews per day, would we say, well, that's too small a number to concern us? Or would we rather float off to a place called "Desolation Row" where nobody has to think too much? (Dylan, 1968).

PS My dearest hope sis that Kofi succeeds; but the deep misguidedness of his mission-as others have pointed out is that it strengthens Basher. If his plan succeeds nevertheless and he is seen to have saved lives, I will say hurray and (give him the) Nobel peace prize! Unfortunately though at this point, it seems his idealistic UN guided intervention will have to be revised.
PPS The point I didn't make is the lack of any clear way to verify what's going on in Syria; Kofi should have insisted on an unrestricted press at least, so as to remove the "we don't really know what's gong on there anyway" cop out I hear on the part of many.
For a keen witted comment on the situation by a local source, see J. Kechichian "Syria Deserves Better than Kofi Annan plan". Gulf News Op ed page 19 April. (Dubai).

Cheers etc.
James

More Useless thoughts on Syria year 2 daily massacres

[Why anyone thought that negotiation with basher would do any good is beyond me, I may be terribly wrong and totally naive but it seemed obvious from the beginning that Basher & associates would listen only to the language they speak. He continues to discredit himself with every move and I'm looking forward to the day when Syrians’ demands for such things as freedom, dignity democracy & human rights will be taken seriously. If we let the slaughter continue, we’re saying in effect Syrians and Arabs don’t deserve the same basic rights that we take for granted in the West. Not only Syrians but the world too would be a lot better off without the Basher daily death quota –cannily limiting his murders to a fixed quota every day just short of the "massacre" limit, say around 100 per day, but all the more intolerable for a normal conscience. Of course without any professional press permitted inside Syria, no one can prove any of it is happening, so maybe that should be Annans's non negotiable first condition: to let in the press to verify any agreement. I write out of anger at Basher and concern for the gutsy Syrian people of whatever sect who have braved the onslaught for over a year and deserve admiration but even more help. If liberals don't start making more noise about the basic rights being demanded by Syrians today, it may be the McCains who eventually get the credit for saving this population... We know a monster like basher can't last forever with most of his population and the world against him so to whom will the Syrians be grateful in the end?]

[[I bracket these thoughts to emphasize their uselessness and the fact that we live here in a less drastic but analogous way.]]

Yours truly,
Harry James

Two Opposing Views of Homelessness

The Pale of Settlement. Stories by Margot Singer. University of Georgia. 213 pages. 2008. $24.95.
A Map of Home. By Randa Jarrar. 292 pages. Other Press, 2008. $24.95
 
Reviewed by James Dalglish
 
Two works of fiction, one Jewish in origin by Margo Singer, the other Palestinian by Randa Jarrar, clash violently in tone – just as their nations do in reality – yet bear a common theme: the drift of homelessness.
 
The collection of stories The Pale of Settlement by Margo Singer is tied together by the character of one young woman Susan, an American Jew with relatives in Israel whose peregrinations back and forth between Israel and the US connect most of the stories and themes. She seems to be a sexually sought woman of uncertain commitment whether in her love affairs, place of residence or profession.
 
The collection is full of insights on its principal theme--the process of self-dissociation through displacement. Singer’s characters are Jewish Americans and Israelis for the most part, so Jewish problems and migration patterns of course concern her the most. She is an expert at describing the various shades of change and loss that afflict them but which apply to the typical expatriate as well.
 
The author also tries to situate her characters within a historical context so that their decisions and desires are seen in relation to real events. In “Hazor” she tries to connect the theme of the difficulty of digging out other people’s secrets to the archeology of Israel whose layers of rock reveal differing interpretations depending on you’re Arab or Jew. This is perhaps the most profound story.
 
Another impressive tale, “Expatriate,” features a Jewish family who originate in Israel but move to New York City (violating the stereotype) and lose their Israeliness while not becoming fully Jewish-American either. The family’s first-born, conceived in Israel, may have had an Arab father, but we never find out for sure. The most interesting thing about them though is not this suggested scandal but all the shades of time-and-space alienation the author discerns in their situation.
 
Singer writes well and often with lapidary polish but sometimes her metaphors go awry:
She [an infant] gazed at Leah as if there was a certain knowledge sealed inside her, like a crystal hidden in a geode sharp and bright... She lost that look with time of course, .... As self-consciousness came trawling like a fisherman’s long net across her mind.
 
With the first image you cheer, with the second (“fisherman’s long net”?) you wish she’d had a tougher editor.
 
In The Pale of Settlement, the Jewish characters are always off to someplace, most often to Israel, but also to Berlin or simply touring--in Nepal for example. Unlike in Saul Bellow’s or Philip Roth’s fiction there are few important non-Jewish characters in these stories; Jews and Israelis circulate, immigrate and become tourists largely among themselves.
 
The greatest crisis of conscience toward the Palestinian issue is experienced by Susan, working as a journalist in the story “Body Count” which refers to a real incident in the West Bank during the Second Intifada when the Israeli Army was accused of a massacre in the city of Jenin. Susan’s greatest worry is that she may have been suckered by the Palestinians into exaggerating the body count in the Jenin incident (the actual one was bad enough).
 
It might seem cruel and perverse to include in the same review a novel by an Israeli and a Palestinian, representatives of two warring tribes since time immemorial, but strangely enough the two works bear many resemblances. A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar is similarly obsessed with roots and the lack of them as its very ironic title suggests. You almost wish the two authors would sit down together to share notes, so identical are the themes that preoccupy both.
 
But in all probability they wouldn’t find much in common.
 
Whereas Singer writes a cool disciplined prose inherited from Flaubert, Randa Jarrar’s aggressive temperament expresses itself in hyperbole, slang and a good deal of unabashed obscenity. (This was shocking to me until I passed the book to a compatriot of the lead character I knew who said she liked precisely that about it.)
 
Yet Jarrar’s Palestinian family ranks as high on the scale of displaced sensibility as does Susan’s. The architect father Waheed is automatically an exile by virtue of being a Palestinian; her mother is half-Egyptian, half-Greek so Nabila, their daughter and heroine of the story, is sufficiently mixed in her origins to boast about it. They have lost their secure middle class status (like many Palestinians) but appealingly still have pretentions to artistic and intellectual accomplishment.
 
Narrated by the sharp tongued heroine Nabila, her family (previously expelled from Palestine) is forced out of Kuwait by Saddam’s invasion in 1990, escape to Egypt through Iraq (the most exciting episode), survive for a while in Alexandria, and finally move to America, landing in rural Texas no less, where the narrator succeeds in losing her virginity and getting into a ‘good school on the East coast.’
 
They are hardened travelers but not tourists. “On the plane to Egypt,” Jarrar writes, “I watched the tourists that surrounded us and thought how nice it would be to travel just for the sake of traveling, how nice it would be to leave one country for another willingly... for fun!”
 
You can hear the tone of the eternal aggrieved adolescent in almost every sarcastic line of Nabila’s account of her family’s woes. When she isn’t writing her eccentric, competitive essays, her typical interests are unsurprisingly sex, boys and pop music. We believe in her brilliance—though there are perhaps too many demonstrations of her wit.
 
The most touching theme in A Map of Home is the family’s search for precisely that--a home. Father Waheed often draws maps of the lost Palestine the ‘map’ of the title, so his daughter will remember a place where she never lived. A short episode takes the family back to Palestine for the funeral of a grandfather where Nabila sees how the original loss took place. Baba explains: “I lost my home ...and gained an education... which later became my home. That can also happen for you.”
 
The close and sometimes violent father-daughter relationship is at the heart of the book. In anarchic America, however the father’s tyranny collapses, which he takes well, in a series of comic pratfalls. With the support of her mother, Nabila emerges from the Oedipal conflict without too many scars.
 
Both works offer a paradoxical mix of internationalized but still essentially tribal fiction. The title that has the better chance of escaping its tribal origins and addressing a wider audience is no doubt the boisterous, uninhibited A Map of Home.
 
Review originally published in Bloomsbury Review March-April 2009: page 17.
 
(In fact, Jarrar’s novel won some prizes, and the author gained a fair amount of fame – and was seen recently at the Dubai Lit Festival. I hope her second act is as good or better.)

Confessions of a Paper Addict

Confessions of a Paper Addict

After listening to many wise comments in support of an initiative to replace paper textbooks with electronic equivalents in hundreds of courses at a local university during a high level departmental meeting, I didn’t think the discussion’d exhausted the topic so sat down and wrote some reflections on a topic I feel strongly about: the future of readable print.

First, I agree that paper is one of the heaviest substances on earth – and yes, carrying around a whole set of behemoth hardbacks or just one specimen, say, of the mighty Norton Anthologies series of British or American literature can be a nearly back-breaking task.

Before we rush into that paperless utopia, however, please consider these points. First, have you ever tried reading an ebook? Did you enjoy the experience? During break I found myself forced to read ebooks due to lack of proper illumination in my ecotouristically remote hotel room (and a boring print choice, Desert by JMG Le Clezio in French). I read grudgingly on my laptop till late at night (I can’t sleep unless I read a bit beforehand) a collection of Chekhov short stories downloaded from Gutenburg. It wasn’t a great deal of fun for some reason (maybe because Chekhov is a poor fit for the tropics & I’d already read most of the stories), so I tried to buy and download a bestseller as well, one of those “Girl who Kicked the Hornet Nest” series that I imagined would be more fun to read in a Nippon hut. Even after shelling out, however, it failed to jive with several e-readers I’d acquired. The Adobe reader showed only one page at a time – horrors!

I wondered if my negative experience was due to using a poor e-reader program, and so the next step was to download a better reading program. Which I did pronto and indeed found that “BookReader” was an improvement, showing two pages for example, and emitting a papery “whoosh!” when page clicking--but of course not allowing mimetic finger swipes (as on ipad). I haven’t used an Ipad for any extended time, so can’t pronounce on that device. I suspect that I would prefer it to other ereading gadgets but would probably ultimately give it up for the reasons I mentioned.

I’m still trying to get thru an ecopy edition of Huxley’s Brave New World and don’t know if it’s the turgid late chapters of that novel or the annoyance of having to constantly “click” the page that turned me off. At this moment I can’t say I have ever finished reading an ebook.

Even if you don’t mind the clumsy electronic apparatus, however, this kind of reading is superficial because you can’t jot marginalia – nor compile notes inside the back-cover. I know, I know, I’ve seen the clever ipad marginalia system, and it might work for the younger generation, but for me this is actually inefficient compared to what I can do more quickly with primitive tools such as a pencil and paper. Besides, I like the tactile impressions those two objects make on each other.

If I were using a book for research or reviewing it professionally, I would never use an ebook; it would be impossible to read the text thoroughly enough by flipping through screens; the fact is a paper book (I mean a book made of paper) gives more random access than the fastest computer. Besides, the small screens block scanning and skimming tactics that readers sometimes need to “cheat” or review at whim. I think it’s possible those small screens block a lot of the peripheral text I like to play with while reading in depth. E-readers, no matter how well intentioned, make reading more linear.

The esthetic aspects of reading are also important to my mind. To take a book seriously, I need a physical object in my hands – the heft of pages of a certain brightness and the resistance of the binding. Paper and actual print –such as Goudy Old Style or Garamond and not hideously ugly efonts. The publisher’s imprint tells me a lot too about the physical quality of the book. I also like to note my progress thru the book as the divide between read and unread pages gradually moves from left to right and the ratio of read to unread diminishes to zero. In the case of a difficult book, what an accomplishment; in the case of a fascinating page turner, a happy melancholy.

My more serious arguments against e-book media are these. First of all ownership of content. I don’t know if you read the recent news about Amazon customers who had content—ebooks—removed from their devices that they had purchased from Amazon. This struck me as a poor way to treat double customers having bought both “Nook” and an ebook file. But the incident is highly significant about the medium in question. You may “buy” a “book” from Amazon but the content is still under the company’s control. For someone who grew up with an extensive personal library, this is a chilling prospect. Apple’s itunes has one of the same limitations—Apple can and does control all the content you download from the itunes store. I can’t even make another copy of music I buy to play on another device. At least with books, you have a clear right of ownership – and the company can’t reclaim it.

(I'd like to see a representative from Random House have my house surrounded, knock on my door at midnight and "repo" my copy of "Ulysses.")

The other objection I have against e-books is based on the well-known tendency of computer companies and media merchants who adopt electronic media to enforce upgrade cycles on their customers. For ebook buyers, the idea of one’s library going out of date due to some hardware or software upgrade, unless they pay up, is certainly a possibility, no better an inevitability given the nature of the electronics business. Whereas for old-fashioned paper addicts like myself hooked on Gutenburg’s, system, no system 2.0 can come along to make it unreadable.

There is a place for ebooks in my opinion – reference works that you can’t carry around & only use for a few minutes, but I’ve seen few on the market I would use.

My last argument is semi mystical: to me a book is a living thing (almost). One develops a deep relationship with a book through its physical manifestation – yes – but the spirit deep inside it can’t be released unless its pages are turned by living fingers and oxygenated in the actual air. Only paper and ink can preserve the living spirit deep inside books. Finally, electronic media will never allow the mystic-physical interpenetration between book and reader that is essential to the life of the mind.

My final conviction: the life of the mind depends upon books, not ebooks, real books printed on paper in recognizable typography that you can carry around with you, show to others, discuss & build up a culture. If you get rid of real books and those quaint institutions we used to call bookstores but the French rightly call libraries then farewell life of the mind. A recent news story indicating the mental benefits to those who read long and complex works of fiction should give pause for thought.

A paper addict and Gutenburg throwback to the bitter end!
James Dalglish (poor sap!) has reviewed hundreds of books in Japan, Hong Kong, London, the USA and Middle East (including for the Review).

Fall of a another tyrant -- Bravo!

Good work! Good work the Libyan people! Good work the “rag tag” army of the NTC with their amusing inefficiency and lightly armored pick up trucks. Good work the NTC that starting out as a tiny unconvincing group in Benghazi eventually against all odds got its act together and achieved its goal of defeating the man known as “Colonel” (what is it about that rank that seems to appeal to some people) and getting international recognition. Good work NATO and (for a change!) good work Obama. But what kept him for so long from recognizing the vast political and economic opportunity? Good work Bernard Levy, who did, & first talked Sarkozi into intervening. The French, British and Obama get credit for stumbling into the principle of humanitarian intervention which seems to me a new and promising concept. This liberal form of international activism is more positive and constructive than Bush’s conservative version practiced in Iraq. Good work Qatar whose al Jazeera publicized the lengthy uprising. As for the Arab league, they deserve credit I’m sure but a local news blackout on the related facts kept this contribution secret. And finally good work, “Colonel” who did a good job of dying the way he said he would.

I imagine these events weren’t lost on a certain pointy headed narrow eyed dictator to the north whose nights will be more sleepless.

A few quibbles, however, with the news channels who brought us the events. CNN and Wolf Blitzer seemed incensed that Gaddafi may have been executed and at one point was threatening to study every frame of the videotape for evidence of that in one part of the tape G was alive and in a later one dead. --a theme picked up by Hala Gorani whose eyes glowed with moralistic fervor. They seemed ready to start playing Great World Media Pontificator and condemn the Libyans for abandoning the script they were supposed to follow and rule of law – the Libyan ambassador however (a certain Jajani?) when grilled by Blitzer asserted his view that the way Gadaffi died wasn’t important – only the fact that he was dead so that the nation could begin rebuilding without distractions. He admitted that it might have been useful to have Gadaffi around for questioning so as to get to the bottom of all his corrupt dealings and hidden loot – but on the whole felt that the “Colonel’s” survival and trial would have presented more conflicts and problems than benefits.

The celebrants interviewed on Tripoli’s main square that night by Al Jazeera similarly seemed unfazed by the seemingly disorderly and casual nature of the demise of Gadaffi – it was a bit much to expect the citizens of a country in the throes of celebrating a revolution – in a country moreover that hadn’t seen any rule of law in 42 years to appreciate the legalistic questions of TV reporters. James Bays seemed particularly preachy when he kept asking the crowd, if it “wasn’t time to put the guns away.” He interviewed one young militia man, carrying a rifle, who replied patiently and reasonably, then asked a young woman the same question, pointing to the young man with the rifle. It was all done with an annoying air of superiority. He and & Al Jezeera would have done better and come off as less self-righteous if he’d simply reported the jubilation rather than lecture the Libyans having their first party in 42 years. It seems clear that the Libyans dealt with the situation in a way consistent with their beliefs, practices and expectations. Good luck to the Libyans'democratic revolution -- too bad that our country seems bent on choosing plutocracy instead.

Written at Massa Hotel #5, AlAin, where I am batching it due to necessary departure of family for the Philippines. I’m working a handy load this term; and am recovering from a back injury sustained when moving out of the family apartment last July. This set up is the usual one required in Visiting contracts, so the hotel is full of other university staff and professors in the same situation. I have to rest most of the time, am in physio-therapy and hope to be better by Christmas when I plan to visit the family.

Edward Said's Orientalism & 9/11

Note: I originally planned last year to publish a list of books useful for comprehending the events of 9/11 but of course that never came about. The problem was and still is lack of time to do much independent reading of any kind... So what follows are the few fragments I did manage to put on paper... while resting from a back injury in Istanbul and Bodrem, Turkey. Your frank opinion on these opinionated lucubrations wood as always be greatly appreciated along with suggestions for publication. Why do I keep harassing you with this guff? Unfortunately, it’s lack of any outlets or kindred spirits in the vicinity. --JD

1. Orientalism by Edward Said. This book though first published in 1978 would seem on the surface to have no direct bearing on 9/11; since it purportedly deals with the history of Western conceptualization and exploitation of Said’s native region, however, focusing for the most part on how Arab cultures and Islam have been misunderstood and misinterpreted by the West, perhaps this book is more relevant than it would seem. I undertook the task to reread the book this year and try to overcome my old hostility toward it – I hate to have sitting on the shelf a book that has defeated my patience but still requires a response. The first installment of my “rereading” is published here – a comment on Said’s preface to the latest edition of the book in 2003. I will publish detailed comments on the rest of the book

The suicide bombing phenomenon has appeared with all its hideous damage, none more lurid and apocalyptic of course than the events of September 11 and their aftermath in the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq.

Edward Said’s preface to the 2003 edition Orientalism (Penguin Books, 2003) barely does more than allude to the catastrophe of 9/11 but it’s the very minimalism of the author’s response/comment that strikes me as most significant –in dealing with an event that was, when he wrote, still recent in public imagination.

The preface on the whole is relatively light reading, written in a direct and accessible style as though Said wants to encourage new readers who have heard about the notorious difficulty of his writings and of Orientalism in particular. The author reiterates many of his by-now familiar positions and arguments in favor of “worldliness” as a critical point of view as opposed to other-worldliness (I suppose) and the inclusion of political & historical contexts in literary or cultural studies; he also restates his objections to purely formal studies that exclude these. In fact, Said hardly needs to remount this rampart since his assault on formalism – in subsequent works by Said and his epigones – pretty much permanently disabled almost all of the various schools of formalism (and structuralism & post structuralism) that flourished in American academies up until about the late 1970s or early 1980s. He also boasts about the huge success of his book in terms of its influence and number of translations. At one point he expresses regret for the prewar tranquility of the field of comparative literature, singling out the great Eric Auerbach whose seminal work Mimesis symbolizes the greatness of spirit and depth of mind of the grand old tradition of philology that had no ax to grind but only an admirable generosity of spirit for all great works regardless of provenance and nationality. What Said doesn’t mention is that he is one of the main scholars responsible for the present warlike state of literary and cultural studies.

Overall Said is on solid ground when he reiterates his chosen academic and theoretical positions and defends them with common sense and the idiosyncratic appeal of his powerfully recognizable voice. If the author had stuck to the academic side of his work, there would be little to object to in this preface. But as we know, Said likes to pontificate on a wide variety of subjects, especially political ones, and he does so again here. Those who agree with Said’s political opinions will be regaled of course: others may be less enchanted. Let’s get to the (as we used to say) nitty gritty.

If one wonders why literary scholars are entitled to pontificate on the political issues of the day, the answer might be that, for Said, the issues of Orientalism continue in any number of US-related disasters in the ME you might name.

One paragraph for example lists the major political events, wars, and other disasters since the publication of Orientalism that have provided context and atmosphere for his writing. There is unsurprisingly a harsh condemnation of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, which was just erupting as Said wrote this essay. For Said, it is the perfect example of an “orientalist” policy gone awry. The events however that precipitated that invasion–9/11–are alluded to but just barely as if Said realizes that a full discussion of these specifically Islamist atrocities may weaken his tactic of blaming the West and the USA in particular for everything that goes wrong in the Middle East. Said writes:

The suicide bombing phenomenon has appeared with all its hideous damage, none more lurid and apocalyptic of course than the events of September 11 and their aftermath in the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. (xiii)

Is it just me who finds this sentence a bit strange? First, it’s amazing to hear 9/11 described as a “suicide bombing”; I was under the impression that the terrorists, having dispensed with mere bombs, were using large bodied passenger jets as explosive devices and the human passengers inside as kindling. By calling 9/11 a “suicide bombing” Said is showing how reluctant his mindset is to take in the simplest facts of the post- 9/11 world. And isn’t it a bit illogical as well? If I’m not mistaken, the sentence confuses cause & effect in implying the same agents for “suicide bomb phenomenon” and its “hideous damage” with the “aftermath” – that is the Iraq and Afghan wars.

Moreover, as a grammar teacher, I must point out that the sentence “suicide bombing phenomenon....with all its hideous damage” must be read as occurring again in the “aftermath” which is an absurdity.

For someone who lived in NYC at that time, as did Said, this is a remarkably thick skinned and perfunctory response to the unprecedented horror of those attacks.

One might also fault the phrase’s moral grammar as well. Said cannot finish even one sentence of condemnation of what is the single most stunning and (as he writes) ‘apocalyptic’ attack ever perpetrated by terrorists – many Americans are still trying to digest the implications of the incredible human & physical destruction perpetrated that day (incubated in a brilliant but evil mind whose possessor is fortunately dead) by the violent means we know by Saudi terrorists (and one Emirati) subscribing to Islamist ideology. The ultra violence that resulted in the deaths of nearly five thousand people was not a “suicide bombing” but the most destructive act of war ever carried out on US soil.

In any case, even before he has given a full mention of the destruction and horrors of 9/11 or named its perpetrators, or the number of American casualties, he rushes on to the next topic, which of course is a condemnation of US foreign policy. Later Said names his favorite enemies in the US foreign policy establishment (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle etc) but on the other side not a word about Mohammed Atta or Al Qaeda. Bin Laden is condemned in the rogue’s gallery of the final sentence of the preface, but Americans George Bush and Rumsfeld outnumber him in that gallery.

If Said had examined this event more carefully and honestly, he might have tried to place it in a meaningful historical and moral context, maybe even revised his anti-orientalist critique, and granted the validity of some Western fears and suspicion of Islam but he does not. The actuality of the horror of these attacks on four different sites in one day should have forced him to move beyond the old "blame America" paradigm & admit the autonomy of motivation of these “Oriental” subjects – as the expression of an equivalent misguided “Occidentalism” on the part of Arab Muslims. (Said reveals a moral and intellectual obtuseness in these statements that could well alienate potential readers before they even get to his book.)

The other mention of 9/11 comes in a paragraph devoted to the evil influence of mass media on education in the way these institutions portray the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Said claims that the media have created “… the demonization of an unknown enemy, for whom the label ‘terrorist’ serves the general purpose of keeping people stirred up and angry…” He goes on: “… media images command too much attention and can be exploited at times of crisis and insecurity of the kind that the post-9/11 has produced.” (xx)

This is a reasonable fear on the part of Said, and many other liberal commentators have deplored the degradation of public discourse caused by these events. It’s curious to note nevertheless that this is one of the only two mentions of terror or terrorism in the piece – and in both cases quotes indicate Said’s rejection of these terms.

As far as I’m concerned, however, a statement later in the essay is so questionable as to cast doubt on the basic premises of the book itself. It comes in the midst of a discussion of East West misunderstandings caused by the Iraq War in which Said first deplores the abandonment of “rational argument” and “moral principles” by US ideologues and officials in favor of jingoism and contempt for other cultures and then examines the obstacles to rationality by Mid Eastern governments and societies.

Admitting that the mindset isn’t much better in “Arab and Muslim countries,” he writes,
citing another source:

The region has slipped into an easy anti-Americanism that shows little understanding of what the US is really like as a society. Because the governments are relatively powerless to affect US policy toward them, they turned their energies to repressing and keeping down their own populations, which results in resentment, anger and helpless imprecations that do nothing to open up societies where secular ideas about human history and development have been overtaken by failure and frustration, as well as by any Islamism built out of rote learning, the obliteration of what are perceived to be other, competitive forms of secular knowledge, and an inability to analyze and exchange ideas within the generally discordant world of modern discourse.(xxi)

Said also notes significantly the disappearance of “critical thinking” in favor of “orthodoxy and dogma” in public discussions in these countries. I can agree and sympathize with his concern.

But what strikes me as less reasonable is sentence two (“Because the governments are relatively powerless to affect US policy toward them, they turned their energies to repressing and keeping down their own populations, which results in resentment, anger and helpless imprecations that do nothing to open up societies...”). This idea is, recycled, one of the oldest excuses for inaction heard in the Middle East since time immemorial. It is nothing more than the expression of the perennial blame game, in which the US is to blame for everything that goes wrong in the Middle East because middle Easterners are “powerless and helpless.” Said here is guilty of stereotyping the people he’s trying to defend. So instead of looking lucidly at the political situations in these countries, Said provides one more excuse for middle Easterners to duck responsibility, and entirely misses the the self-directed political movement that came out of the Arab Spring.

[This kind of reasoning plays very well in the ME of course because official censorship makes all criticism of heads of state off-limits, so discontent is always channeled to the USA, the safe target; hence the liberal dose of hypocrisy in the stream of anti-Americanism in this region.)

Poor powerless dictators and a helpless populace--in short the usual suspects.

Even more important is the recent fact that the Egyptian people, inspired by the example of the Tunisians, lost the fear that previously had made them helpless against the big strong man with all his thugs. And triumphantly showed they were not helpless or powerless. They revolted against a blight that at thirty years and counting seemed permanent, fighting for their rights in the streets using their own ideas, impulses and tactics until they toppled the stone face.

So the revolutions of the “Arab Spring” significantly challenge the old blame America game—and, better, impress us with Arabs’ self-directed talents & abilities to act independently and for their own purposes.

If Said were alive, I wonder what he’s say about all this? He might genuinely celebrate the powerful movement toward democracy and freedom or he might regret the loss of one of the biggest propaganda weapons in his arsenal.

Said ends by a grand and noble statement- to the effect that “the human ... desire for enlightenment and emancipation is not easily deferred, despite the incredible strength of the opposition to it that comes from the Rumsfelds, bin Ladens, Sharons and Bushes of this world. I would like to believe that Orientalism has had a place in the long and often interrupted road to human freedom.” (xxiii)

This statement might have seemed more plausible six months ago, but now we can clearly see who Said left out of his list of oppressors: Pres. Ben Ali, Pres. Mubarak, Pres. Saleh of Yemen, Basher Al Assad and many more tyrants who for decades have been ruling Arab countries in the Middle East or North Africa.

As for Said’s views on 9/11 expressed in this preface, as already noted, they are shockingly minimal and schematic. He does not complete one sentence about the event. His real vitriol in the piece, sadly enough, is reserved for two fellow scholars, Bernard Lewis and Fouad Adjami. And although he places Bin Laden in the rogues’ gallery at the end, the al Qaeda mastermind is outnumbered by two Americans.

In deflecting attention from who was really ruling, oppressing, imprisoning, torturing and assassinating his fellow Arabs, Said may not have been leading his fellow Arabs toward freedom at all but toward one more form of political futility, which when you look at it closely, resembles the kind of victimology Said is supposedly against.