Since a few months before the launch of All the Light There Was, I have been sending out a newsletter to friends, family, and interested readers. Below is my latest missive with instructions on how to sign up to receive the newsletter yourself.
5 Jun 2015
Dear Friends,
Well, I didn’t go to Book Expo America as planned. I was flattened by a virus and had to cancel pretty much everything for the week. I was sad to miss the event at the Republic of Armenia pavilion, and even sadder to miss a private dinner with Archipelago Books and translator Maureen Freely to celebrate the publication of Sait Fait’s A Useless Man: Selected Stories. While I was sick in bed, I read and loved the stories—the working class people, the scenes in and around Istanbul, and the humane, often melancholy, and yet sharp voice of the narrator.
For the past two months I have been enjoying Skype calls and email exchanges with a young Palestinian writer and translator in Gaza as part of a mentorship program called We Are Not Numbers. Please read the first harvest of our collaboration: Enas Fares Ghannam’s piece, FORCED: A Story from Gaza.
And for those who are following the upcoming Turkish elections, you might find this amusing: Erdogan accused journalists, gays and Armenians as being ‘representatives of sedition’ through supporting the opposition, Kurdish-friendly HDP party. In The Nation, Maria Margaronis offers a good overview of the issues at stake in this election, along with some paragraphs about Armenian Genocide Centennial commemorative events in Istanbul.
At the end of May a novelist named Nicola Griffith wrote an essay about the fact that books about women tend not to win big awards and a second piece on the topic that offered solutions. Nothing in the data Griffith collected was surprising (disheartening yes, surprising no), but the pie charts were great. The inimitable Ursula Le Guin also wrote an excellent piece entitled Up The Amazon about Amazon, books and capitalism that I highly recommend.
Thanks, as always, for your support and interest. Please feel free to forward to a friend. Anyone can sign up to receive this newsletter by sending a note to nkbookgroup@gmail.com.
Under the aegis of We Are Not Numbers, I have been working as a mentor to a talented young Palestinian writer and translator based in Gaza. I’m thrilled to present the first harvest of our collaboration: Enas Fares Ghannam’s short fiction piece, Forced: A Story from Gaza, which was inspired by a true story.
Enas Fares Ghannam
Forced: A Story From Gaza
The three days of mourning ended. Ruba and her 4-year-old daughter Yasmin were staying with her in-laws after their own home was destroyed in the summer war. Ruba sat on the bed with Yasmin next to her, looking at the photo album from her wedding that she managed to rescue.
Ahmed, her husband, was a medic. During the summer assault on Gaza by Israel, he was rarely at home. He wasn’t at the house on the day she received a phone call from an Israeli soldier telling her she had only two minutes to evacuate the house. Ruba had quickly picked up her daughter and grabbed a few things—this album among them—and fled. Two minutes later the house was bombed. Two days later, she received the news that the ambulance her husband was in also was bombarded, and the blast had been so powerful it was hard to identify the bodies.
“And this is when we entered the wedding hall, “Ruba said to her daughter, pointing at a photo of the bride and groom. Ruba was wearing a white dress, while Ahmed held her arm and pressed her palm close to his heart.
For four months and 10 days she stayed at home with her parents-in-law for her Eda (the legally prescribed mourning period before a widow is allowed to remarry in Islam). Sad as she was, grieving and really unable to think of anything, others in the family had plans for her. Her sisters-in-law were always grumpy with her. Her parents-in-law talked most of the time with their three surviving sons, alone. She didn’t understand at first, but then it became clear when she heard them talking about Yasmin.
One afternoon when Ruba was within earshot, her mother-in-law said in a low voice to her husband, “How can we accept our granddaughter Yasmin living at someone else’s house? Ruba is young; she will marry one day for sure. Better she should marry one of our sons and stay in the family.” Ruba’s heart started to beat fast and she was afraid. She recalled the image of her sisters-in-law, sitting together in a corner whispering to each other, and looking worried during the mourning period. They were afraid of her; she would become a second wife to one of their husbands.
When Ruba decided to avoid the problem by returning to her family, her parents-in- law told her that she would have to leave Yasmin with them. So she stayed.
Muhammad, Ahmed’s younger brother, had been married to Dina for four years without children. Dina—the shy girl who barely spoke at the beginning of her marriage—had found comfort in the company of Ruba. In time, they became close friends, confiding almost everything to each other. Dina was afraid her husband would take another wife so he could have children, but Ruba kept telling her that Muhammad wouldn’t do that. As she nodded her head in agreement, Dina knew in her heart that his mother would one day convince him.
The mother-in-law decided that Muhammad and Ruba should get married for the sake of Yasmin. But Ruba, unable to betray her husband or to do such a thing to her friend, refused.
Ruba took Yasmin to visit her family and didn’t come back.
But Ruba didn’t have job or a provider. Her father was dead, and her brothers could hardly manage to provide for their own families. Her parents-in-law, trying to pressure her to marry Muhammad, didn’t offer any help or money for their granddaughter.
When Muhammad and his parents arrived at her parents’ house with a formal proposal, Ruba was confused. Muhammad was sitting on the same sofa that Ahmed had sat on six years earlier. She couldn’t help but compare the two brothers. Ahmed was lively and talkative. He made everyone laugh. His brother Muhammad was reserved. He didn’t talk unless someone asked him a direct question. It was his mother who brought up subjects to make him talk.
What about Dina? Ruba thought, as she imagined her friend crying. Ruba then remembered her own words to Dina: “Muhammad won’t do this to you.” Ruba felt angry at herself, at her helplessness and the bombing that had flattened her home and killed her husband, putting her in this terrible situation. “What if I could find a job?” she asked herself, with a glimmer of hope. “I could depend on myself. I wouldn’t need anyone to support me, and no one could tell me what to do.”
Yasmin gripped Ruba’s hand. Ruba looked at her daughter, who was so often isolated and lonely these days. There was no one to protect or defend the child anymore. Yasmin had stopped going out to play with the other children. She seemed older than her five years.
“Arrogance won’t do me or my daughter any good,” Ruba thought. “It’s better to be Muhammad’s wife than to marry anyone else.”
As if someone else was talking, as if someone else was thinking, Ruba said yes, feeling deep in her heart that she was making a big mistake, but not knowing what else to do.
Five months into her new marriage, Ruba was living with Dina, who barely talked to her except to argue. The door opened; Dina and Ruba, who walked slowly with her right hand on her back and the other on her growing belly, welcomed Muhammad. His face was white, and he was unable to speak, holding a paper in his hand
“What’s wrong?” Dina asked.
“We received a letter from an Israeli prison,” Muhammad whispered.
“Israeli prison?” asked Ruba. “Who do we know in there?”
Muhammad, looking into her eyes, said: “My brother Ahmed; he’s alive.”
Eric Bogosian, Ronald Suny, and Nancy Kricorian at PEN World Voices Armenian Genocide Panel, 6 May 2015
On May 6, I participated in the PEN World Voices Festival Armenian Genocide: A Dark Paradigm panel along with Peter Balakian, Eric Bogosian, Maureen Freely, Robert Jay Lifton, Ron Suny, and Ragip Zarakoglu. The audio recording of the full session has been posted online.
If you live in New York, New Jersey or Boston you probably saw the super-obnoxious “happy butterfly” Armenian Genocide denial roadside billboards sponsored by a group calling itself “Fact Check Armenia.” This piece from Boston Magazine takes The Boston Globe to task for running the print ad on the same day that they called for genocide recognition in an editorial. There is also discussion of The New York Times’ refusal to run similar ads.
The Armenian Church has filed suit in Turkey for the return of church properties in historic Sis, now called Kozan, in Adana Province. In Istanbul, Nor Zartonk and human rights activists have been staging an occupation of the site of Kamp Armen, an Armenian orphanage and summer camp that was expropriated by the Turkish state, to save the buildings from demolition. The late Hrant Dink’s affiliation with the camp has aroused local sympathies and inspired Istanbul Armenians to take to the street in an unprecedented fashion.
Occupation of Kamp Armen
Next week I’ll be attending Book Expo America for the first time since I closed my foreign literary scouting business in 2000. I’ll be doing a book presentation on Wednesday, May 27 at the “Armenian Pavilion,” and on Thursday, May 28 I’ll be helping to staff the She Writes Press booth.
I’m looking towards June as a time when my life will calm down and I’ll get back to work on my Beirut novel. As part of that project, I’ve signed up for an elementary Arabic language class. In a month-long summer course, I’m not expecting to learn the language as much as to be in its presence. There is an Armenian saying, “You are as many people as the languages you know.” The research I do for my novels and the creation of the characters and their worlds enrich my life in manifold ways.
You wake up in the morning and forget where you are. The smell of coffee from the kitchen. The sound of slippers across the linoleum floor. It could be any country.
When you look in the mirror you see the eyes of your grandfather. He expects something from you, but he won’t tell you what.
Better to go into captivity with the whole village than to go to a wedding alone.
The fabric was torn. With scraps you have made a tent, you have fashioned a kite, you have sewn a dress, you have wrapped yourself in a flag.
They have separated you with gun, grenade, barbed wire, wall, prison, passport. They have underestimated your will.
The hungry dream of bread, the thirsty of water.
Passing from one village to the next, without obstacle, without document, without your heart thumping up near your throat.
Turning the key in the lock, you enter through a door you have never passed through before except in your grandmother’s stories and in your dreams.
This week, controversy erupted when six writers who were scheduled to be “table hosts” at PEN’s Gala Fundraiser on May 5th pulled out of the event because they didn’t believe that French newspaper Charlie Hebdo should be awarded the PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award. This was first reported in the New York Times, and then Glenn Greenwald posted about it at The Intercept, also including the texts of letters exchanged between some PEN members and PEN Executive Director Suzanne Nossel.
This morning I was among the first thirty PEN members to sign an open letter on the issue. The circulation of the open letter was reported by Vulture this afternoon, and now there are discussions raging in the comments sections of various articles, on Twitter and Facebook, with people lining up on one side or other of the debate. As this is going on, more writers are adding their names to the open letter.
My spouse James Schamus offered a clarifying comment.
I mourn the terrible murders of the Charlie Hebdo staff.
I stand in solidarity with those who fight against the scourge of intolerance, censorship and bigotry.
I know that the defense of free speech and a free press means defending principles that allow, in practice, for speech that offends and that is often, at its worst, even hateful.
But defending the rights of all to free expression should not require of me the obligation to award, condone, or applaud any particular expression, even expression made by those who have been cruelly and violently silenced.
I will stand beside Charlie Hebdo and all others in the fight to guarantee freedom of expression for all. I will not, however, stand and applaud for Charlie Hebdo, at a gala awards dinner or anywhere else.
I am not Charlie Hebdo.
UPDATE:
2 May 2015
The list of signatories has grown to close to 200 by this morning, and the vitriol against the writers who signed is intense. I am dismayed that some people don’t seem to understand the distinction between supporting Charlie Hebdo’s RIGHT to publish what they will and declining to support the granting of this award. Clearly the dam has broken among New Yorkers who no longer want their commitment to free speech to become conflated with crude bigotry.
