Dove's Eye View

The Plague of Doves: "Magical" Realism

Claire Massud writes about Louise Erdrich's new book:

there is no such thing as "magical realism." There are, instead, culturally specific experiences of the real which, when rendered in fiction, produce different results. Raised in an essentially Protestant setting, I had in youth absorbed, unawares, an essentially Protestant understanding of the world: one that strives for a rational grasp of events, one that espouses clarity, directness, and mastery. In fiction, this leads to largely linear narrative, in which the lines between cause and effect can be clearly traced, and in which, in spite of welcome complexity, there remains an underlying certainty of limits, boundaries, and order."

...Massud's grandmother's family subscribed to "a worldview unlike that to which I had been largely accustomed. Mystery, silence, downright oddity, the overdetermined symbolism of the artifact, of its presence, of its placement —this, I realized then, represented an alternative approach, a different way of experiencing, and hence of fictionalizing, the world."

The novel is The Plague of Doves. Reviewed in Blood Relations - The New York Review of Books. I'm ordering it from my local bookseller - I need to read this story of a mixed native American middle-class girl and her grandmother's tales.

I'm also interested in Massud's take on so-called magical realism. What is real depends on what your culture says is real. "Magical realism" is what you call somebody else's view of reality because it can't be "real" in your paradigm.

Dumbing Down

Colonel Patrick Lang over at Sic Semper Tyrannis wrote the following about The Republican "Brand" as metaphor:

A classics professor once told his class in my presence that there no longer existed the possibility of the creation of an American national epic poem, something like the Iliad, Aeneid, the "Divine Comedy," "John Brown's Body," etc., because the declining cultural level and the lack of common values among the "American people" had destroyed the basis of wide comprehension and acceptance that would be needed for such an effort. That was fifty years ago. What would he think now?

I wrote in comments:

Poetry - any kind, whether epic or not - depends upon a spoken culture, whether literate or not. Very few of us today sit around in groups talking to each other, except at business meetings. Perhaps because of TV, or the automobile, or both (internet makes it worse but this began happening much earlier during radio era) - we no longer sit around and gossip to pass the time with our friends and relations. Therefore we no longer sit around and recite poetry.

In Lebanon (and Peru, Greece, and many other traditional societies, by report) people were still sitting around and talking within my memory, and I'm 45. This casual gossip sometimes led to poetry competitions. Some poems were self-composed and of low-medium quality; often they were poems, ancient or contemporary, by great poets. Simple country people would memorize sections of epic national poetry to recite for the amusement of their friends and relations. Men (and women - see Lila Abu-Lughod's research on Bedouin women's poetry) competed with each other to recite poems, their own or others', which would move or impress or amaze. Nowadays in Lebanon at least, the TV is always turned on, and it's the size of the living room wall, so idle chatter and spontaneous verse are drowned out by CNN or LBC.

My dad wrote Arabic poetry as an avocation.* I was always impressed at how the silliest, most materialistic Lebanese housewife would listen to his poetry with attention and offer intelligent comment. The fact that he wrote and recited poems made him worthy of attention and respect, and even people I thought were uneducated and uninterested in culture became alert and happy if Dad decided to recite. Whereas we Americans, including his ungrateful children, thought the whole business embarrassing.

Did Applachian mountain people recite poetry to each other? I don't know, but they sang each other songs, which are *lyrics*.

I don't know about the Irish either but they have such a gift for gab and verse that I assume there must have been an Irish tradition of popular poetry.

Great epic poetry, or great poetry of any form, needs the fertile soil of a living poetic culture. It can't arise out of a sterile medium. It needs plenty of manure, bugs, worms and weeds around it in order to take root, flower and thrive. I say that popular poetry is the manure etc. The true critics among you can discuss whether Bob Dylan is manure, earthworm, cover crop (vetch? clover?) or the coveted flower itself. (an earlier commenter had offered Dylan as an American bard)

Today the poetry slam has become popular among younger folk. People get together at a cafe or auditorium and read or recite their poems aloud, usually with lots of emphasis and pizazz, looking to wow the crowd. Whatever you may think of the poems arising from this movement, at least it's popular and it's poetry and it's face to face.

I believe a poem spoken aloud has greater power when heard in the presence of the speaker - the breath is spirit you know. Recordings give you a flavor but nothing beats being in a room with other human beings, listening to a poet (preferably acoustic, unmiked) recite.

When the oil runs out and we have to turn to homemade amusements, we have a better chance of developing some national epic poem or another. Maybe in the future an anonymous Lebanese-Irish-Japanese-African-American bard in the camps of California will compose an epic poem about the wars of Iraq and Iran and the bloody trials of Americans therein. (end comment).

I was on vacation when I wrote this so the internet ban was temporarily suspended. (Told you I'd be sneaky.)

*The poem reproduced here was written in casual, dialect Arabic. I doubt my Dad would want it to stand for all of his work, but it's the only Arabic poem I have of his scanned into a JPEG file. He cared about classical Arabic very much and was careful to write with clarity and formality. He also spoke Lebanese dialect with care in casual conversation, eschewing elisions and foreign words, and enunciating clearly.

Arab American Poetry Anthology

Inclined to Speak: an Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry, edited by Hayan Charara, from

The University of Arkansas Press.

At no other time in American history has our imagination been so engrossed with the Arab experience. An indispensable and historic volume, Inclined to Speak gathers together poems, from the most important contemporary Arab American poets, that shape and alter our understanding of this experience. These poems also challenge us to reconsider what it means to be American. Impressive in its scope, this book provides readers with an astonishing array of poetic sensibilities, touching on every aspect of the human condition.

You must read this book. So many great poets are in it, including my neighbor and teacher Elmaz Abinader, as well as Fady Joudah (translator of Darweesh, as seen in the New Yorker), Mohja Kahf, Etel Adnan, Lawrence Joseph, Khaled Mattawa... the list is long. Radio program here.

My Father the Arab Feminist

Just now on the radio (Fresh Air with Terry Gross) I heard a snippet of an American woman's story about her custody battle with her Arab ex-husband.

I'm certain that there is more to Deborah Kanafani's memoir than "I unveil the terrible way Arab men treat women" but boy, that's sure what I heard driving down the road. Maybe it's all true - for her.

But I wonder if my own story, about my feminist Arab father, would ever get a book deal or air time on NPR. It's not about scary Arab men oppressing their women and children, you see. There's no conflict, no villain, and it doesn't fit the story that sells books in America.

My father was a feminist before he came to America. He was strongly influenced by the new ideas roiling the Arab world in the nineteen-fifties: nationalism, yes, and socialism, and democracy, and the rights of women. He was determined to modernize his country, his people, and he believed that making women equal members of society was part of that. In his personal life, he tried to get his parents to keep his youngest sister in school. Later, he paid for his orphaned niece to go to a very good private school, giving her English skills which helped her support her family during the upheavals of the civil war.

When he went to America for graduate school and met my American mother, Dad found that some of his ideas were too forward for the USA in 1959. He didn't think women had to get married before having sex, for instance. My mother disagreed. Since he respected her - and all women - he didn't force his ideas upon her.

When they married, he encouraged her to start graduate school right away. She did, but decided she really wanted to have babies. So she had me, and very soon after began teaching part time. Fine with Dad. Mom always taught and did other work throughout my childhood. Then after my younger brother and I began school, she went back to grad school for her masters degree and then Ph.D.

This was the 1960s. Some of my readers don't know what America was like in the 1960s. It wasn't all hippies and Gloria Steinem. The college professors in my parents' circle (all men, with wives who mostly stayed at home and didn't work) were rather traditional fellows. My dad ruffled a lot of feathers among his colleagues, because he insisted on doing laundry, caring for us kids, and cooking meals. One of his friends got very offended when my dad bragged too much about washing his socks, and how he (Dad) washed his socks by hand and made them last a really long time. (My dad was eccentric about being thrifty) The friend told my dad that he was causing problems in the friend's marriage, because HIS wife was wondering why she had to do all the laundry?

When my mother got her Ph.D. my dad completely supported her in her career goals. We were always clear in our house that my parents made all decisions together, that they each earned money and contributed to the family finances, and that they were autonomous people who worked together in partnership as well.

Much later, in the 1990s, my mother got a teaching position at the American University of Beirut, and my dad retired from his job earlier than he had planned. He went to Beirut with her and basically kept house so she could do a very demanding job. He cooked and dealt with the daily details of life. His egalitarianism persisted - they were living in an apartment hotel, with daily maid service, but my father insisted on doing the dishes himself, before the maids could come in. He didn't want the maids cleaning after him.

As a young girl growing up, I was told that I should study and go to college and have a good career. In fact, when I did badly in algebra in 8th grade, my father got upset, because he said girls in Lebanon didn't have the same chances I did. He helped me with my homework, natch, but he also let me know that it was really important to him that I do well. He tried to be supportive of me, even when I careened about being a slacker American bohemian. Later in life, when I settled down and began putting together a more normal, grown-up career, my father encouraged me. He was so happy when I went to grad school (at age 42). He believed everybody deserves a second chance - and a third chance too.

Oh yes, and when my cousin N, a girl, wanted to come to America to study, even though she wasn't married or even engaged, my father welcomed her. N's father, my beloved, departed uncle Adib, was also enlightened, and sent N to us to get her college education. Most other fathers in our village would not do the same. The war in Lebanon had made it too dangerous for her to commute to Beirut to university, so he took the risk of sending her across the world. N became a successful computer engineer, and later married a great guy. Now her daughter is a recent college graduate with a terrific job in corporate America, climbing the ladder. This is normal now, but thirty years ago it was new, for Americans as well as Lebanese. We have to give credit to men like my Dad, who adapted with the times, and encouraged their wives and daughters to succeed.

There are more stories I could tell, but they're all positive, about what a mensch Dad was, how much women loved him, how he loved women, how he was a big hit in the lesbian community in North Carolina where they lived for years, how he loved and respected my mother. Oh yes, and how he told all the Lebanese male immigrants why they ought to help their wives with the housework, and support them in developing their own careers. It got through, to some of them, more or less.

That's it. That was my dad, the Arab feminist. The picture shows him on my 44th birthday, just after he received the diagnosis of the lung cancer which killed him two months later; he stands behind the tabbouli he insisted on making to celebrate my day.

Do you think Terry Gross will put me on Fresh Air with a story like that? Probably not. There's no story there, the editors would say. Just some guy doing the right thing by his women, a little ahead of his time. Plus he's an Arab. Who wants to know about feminist Arab men? Doesn't sell papers.

Not celebrating

Regarding Israel's 60th anniversary and the Palestinian Nakba, British Jews and others write: Letters: We're not celebrating Israel's anniversary | The Guardian.

Hat tip to Philip Weiss, who is running a Nakba watch at his blog. He celebrates Lila Abu-Lughod and her book, Nakba, published last year.

As'ad Abu-Khalil alerts us to this letter to Nadine Gordimer from a professor in Gaza whose students are literally starving while reading her books.

My cold and hungry students have divided themselves into two groups, with one group adamant that you, like many of your courageous characters, will reconsider your participation in an Israeli festival that aims to celebrate the annihilation of Palestine and Palestinians. The other group believes that you have already crossed over to the side of the oppressor, negating every word you have ever written. We all wait for your next action.

The most interesting people

Another personal post. I was visiting my friends Scott and Julie and telling them about how I put my high school music buddy, now of the Mexico State Orchestra, together with my cousin the violinist, and they're plotting a guest solo gig for her in Toluca, Mexico, to which I am invited.

"You know the most interesting people," Scott said. Well of course he too is an interesting person I know, so it takes one to know one.

Today my college friend Eva called, and we were reminiscing, and I brought up my ex-sister-in-law, Diane Pernet.

"I saw her wandering around Paris one day in 2002", Eva said. "She was being trailed by a video camera. I thought about saying hello but I skipped it."
"Do you remember how she had that teased black hair," I said.
"She looks exactly the same," Eva said. "You'd never know twenty-five years have passed."
"The long dripping black lace?"
"Yes."
"Amy Winehouse," I said. "Amy Winehouse copied her look to the life."
"Amy Winehouse channels Diane Pernet," Eva said.

Diane Pernet was married to my first husband's brother. So she was my sister-in-law in the 1980s for about four years. It seemed improbable even then, and utterly so now. She has a well-regarded fashion blog and puts on a festival of short films about clothes and style. Nothing could be further from the world I live in, but I used to be a regular at her atelier in Greenwich Village, circa 1984.

Other interesting people I have known or still do: him, her, him, her, him, her, them, him , him and her. I left out a bunch more of my interesting friends who don't have websites... and the list of my teachers has to wait for another day.

I am so cool even when I'm not

The New York Times has pronounced my neighborhood cool: Sisters in Idiosyncrasy - New York Times.

Much the way Hollywood people have shuttled between Los Angeles and Manhattan for decades, or academics commute on the Acela between Morningside Heights and Cambridge, Mass., there is a young, earnest population that is beating a path between artsy, gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn and their counterparts in the Bay Area, especially East Oakland and the area south of Market Street in San Francisco, or SoMa.

Richard Florida, the author of “The Rise of the Creative Class,” which argues that urban renewal is sparked by high concentrations of high-tech workers, artists, gay men and lesbians, ranked San Francisco No. 1 on his “creativity index” and New York City No. 9. Although Mr. Florida did not break out data for Brooklyn, “anecdotally it has a large concentration of creative people who have moved from Manhattan and elsewhere,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “I am confident if such data existed, Brooklyn would do very well.”

When I moved from Brooklyn to Oakland in 1993, I discovered the cities have much in common: cheaper, funkier, more working-class sister cities to the glamorous newsmaking metropoli across the water.

I've owned a house in East Oakland for nine years. At first I was dismayed to be so far from the hip neighborhoods of Berkeley and North Oakland where I'd lived in the 90s, but now I'm bemused to find out how hip my own area has become. The first hint was when all my young MFA colleagues expressed envy that we owned a house here - the way I envied my older artist friends who owned lofts and buildings on the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn when I was young. Then I noticed that my young, hip, bestselling author teacher lived in a Fruitvale loft not far from the taquerias, Spanish library and train station we frequent. This guy could afford to live anywhere but he chooses the funky neighborhood two miles due west of mine.

My neighborhood doesn't feel all that hip, but it's a good place for writers, artists, musicians and others to nest. We can afford to own property and still live near coffee houses, organic produce, and independent bookstores. And yes, as the NY Times points out, we are close to San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where we can earn enough $$ to afford to live here. Express buses to SF stop four blocks from my house, and by car in light traffic it's 17 minutes to downtown. Mountain View and San Jose are farther but people do commute.

To prove to you how cool my neighborhood choices have been since my teens, here's the list:

Lower East Side (East 3d & Ave. A) 1981-1984
Brooklyn 1984-1988 and 1989-1993
Astoria Queens, 1988-89
Rockridge, Oakland, 1993-1996
Gourmet Ghetto, Berkeley 1996-1999
East Oakland (The Laurel District) 1999-present.

So if I decide to move somewhere else, I'll let you know, because clearly anybody with spare cash ought to buy there early.

Preppies Farm Organic

I see myself in this new young generation of farmers: urban, college-educated, they have been studying the connections between food and the environment and they've decided to farm to live out their values. I never took such a step but I understand it.

Some will sneer at elitism but if it takes trust funds and land-banks and upscale markets to revive the small farm, why should you complain? All that excess money at the top of the US economy ought to trickle down to the land somehow or other.

God Loves Gays And So Do I

I've been friends with gay Arab men since I was twenty years old, and later made Arab lesbian friends, too, so when I read about these fellows I said - there go my homeboys: Palestinian drag queens at odds with nearly everyone.

The article says:

"His friends call him "The Bride."

"This night, he was standing behind a storefront art-gallery window in a bloodied wedding dress. His face was ghostly, and he was clutching a large rock in his right hand.

"A small crowd had gathered on a south Tel Aviv street as The Bride opened his mouth and began to sing — in Arabic. To be more accurate, The Bride was lip-synching the words of a political anthem by one of Lebanon's best-known divas.

"Let the jails' door be destroyed," he sang as bewildered Israelis on dates wandered by. "Let this madness be defeated, and let anyone who betrays us become stones."

I really, really wish I could see this guy perform. Bless his heart and may he survive and thrive in Free Palestine, insha'allah.

The article also covers Arab Lesbians in Israel. I'm always chatting up religious tolerance here at Dove's Eye View, but I rarely speak up for Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender rights. Why is that? GLBT culture exists in the Arab world (all over the world) as an indigenous part of the culture. I am of the first generation of Americans to grow up in a GLBT-friendly world; the feminist and sexual revolution of the 1970s meant that by the time I was an adolescent, queer rights were part of my political and social milieu.

I may be heterosexual, married and the mother of sons, but I believe utterly in the right of grown-up human beings to choose their lovers and their living arrangements to suit themselves. And I believe that if there is a God, She loves gays - as do I.

Hat tip Pierre Tristam for finding this fabulous article.

PS, that's me on the right in the photo, but the gorgeous drag queen with me is NOT "The Bride" from the article; nor is he an Arab as far as I know. He's just a handsome fellow I met at a comedy show in Hollywood last January.

Oh yes, and the Fairuz song I linked to above is not the song quoted in the article. I couldn't find that one on YouTube. I linked to my all-time favorite: Habbaytak Bi Sayf - "I loved you in the summer." It is out of print, so I couldn't find it for my wedding ten years ago. (and it's a bit sad for a wedding, since it's about waiting for a guy who never comes back) When I did find this video clip on YouTube last year, I wept.

What makes us happy is not stuff but each other

My moral values exactly, from No Impact Man: What makes us happy is not stuff but each other.

In a nutshell, the degradation of our planetary home is caused by overconsumption of resources. We in the developed world consume so many resources--we feel we need so much stuff--in part because we are alienated from each other and need consolation prizes. If we build proper communities, not only will we help the planet by sharing resources and therefore using less, but we will be happier, because we will have each other, and we won't need to console ourselves with stuff.

One thing my Lebanese relatives all lament about coming to America is how lonely life is here. They have all succeeded very well and live in big houses, drive new cars, send their kids to top colleges, and live the American dream. But they all complain that life here is so isolated. People work too hard. The streets of our lovely suburbs are empty.

In 1975 my uncle Y came to visit the States for the first time. We were living in a ritzy neighborhood in a small Midwestern city then, with 1920s era gracious homes and some veritable mansions. Grass lawns, big cars, wide streets. My uncle said "where is everybody? If I had such beautiful grass outside my house, I would be sitting on it, saying hello to all the neighbors. I have been here a week and I have not seen a single human being except the ones who drive by in their cars!" How true, dear uncle, how true.

Today my husband and I live in an older urban neighborhood in California, with yards and sidewalks and a shopping district to which we can walk. Many children live in the neighborhood, but you almost never see them outside, and since my children go to a different school, they know only one child their age for blocks around. We don't send them outside to play as my generation did - America has become so fearful that children must be accompanied in public places at all times, until they are ten, eleven or even thirteen years old. So my kids live under house arrest. They can only see their friends at school or if we plan to meet them - which usually involves getting into the car.

We do our best to socialize in the neighborhood, and we have some nice friends nearby. But we don't have the village-like atmosphere I knew in Lebanon, and even had for a few brief years in a college town in Illinois, where friends, neighbors and relatives drop by to ask a question, borrow a cup of sugar, bring news, or just say hello.

One thing I have learned in this illness is that I need to see people. I tell my friends to come and visit me or invite me out. Going to graduate school for two years was in part such a delight because I could go to campus and always run into a writing friend or a teacher with whom I could chat. I had to pay $20,000 a year tuition to have the experience of an agora, a public space where people meet to talk about ideas and art. (in fact, I used to gesture at our now ten-year-old Honda sedan and say - I don't want a new minivan or an SUV, I have graduate school instead).

Now I'm done with that but I still need to see people. So I have to plan it. My writing group meets every two weeks - that's "free" although we all spend money on food and wine to share.

We really don't need more shopping, more food, more cars, more stuff. We need to spend time together.

A private note - I love kitchenware, crockery, table linens and such, but I told myself several years ago that I own plenty of these things and really don't need to buy any more. I have enough platters and serving bowls around to host a party for fifty. My "every day" dishes don't match, but I have two sets of party dishes that do. For this recent birthday party I determined to use as little disposable ware as possible, so I put out almost all the metal cutlery I own, including the silver service for 12 my mother passed on to me. I also got out my collection of linen napkins (serviettes) inherited from my American grandmother. No paper napkins!

My glassware is quite motley - two different sets - but there's enough of it. No plastic disposable cups! So the tableware for the party won't win any prizes from design magazines, but does it matter? People enjoyed the food (homemade soup, store-bought frozen pizza, homemade hummous, bread and cheese, chips and dip, crudites for the dips). Most of all, people enjoyed just being together. At least a dozen guests hung around for two hours after the official "end" of the party.

I realized that we just need to have people come to our house more often - not only close friends and family, but random people, like the parents of our children's schoolmates, and anybody else we meet and like. It's not hard to make a little extra food and share it. It's not hard to get out a game and play it, or sit around talking over coffee or wine. That's it.

We need each other more than we need to buy stuff.