At the PEN website, be sure to check out the suggested actions on behalf of writers in Ethiopia, China, Mexico, Bahrain and Turkey. Write a letter today or print them out and bring them to Amnesty International's Global Write-a-thon in December.
Checking in with Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic novel Persepolis, her tale of growing up during the Iranian revolution which we enjoyed a few years back, it seems the animated-film version of the comic was shown in Tunisia recently and not everyone was happy about it. Protestors objected to a scene in which God is depicted teaching Satrapi about forgiveness. The Guardian reports,Police arrested around 50 Islamists before they could reach the offices of the Nessma private television channel, which broadcast Persepolis on Friday. "Three hundred people attacked our offices and tried to set fire to them," Nessma chairman Nebil Karoui told AFP.In happier news for the Satrapi, she has a new film out in Europe (no US release date that I can find yet) based on her book Chicken with Plums. Variety likes it:
Conservative Muslims have become increasingly vocal in Tunisia since the fall of long-time president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali following an uprising in January. However, the main Islamic party condemned the demonstration. Ennahda, which is expected to do well in elections for a constitutional assembly in a fortnight's time, described the incident as "isolated" and said it should not spark concern.
What Satrapi and Paronnaud have really achieved is an evocation of a lost world, much as they did in "Persepolis." They've beautifully re-created the fiercely proud, Western-leaning life of the Persian middle class of the 1950s...Check out the trailer:
Meanwhile, there's another Iranian comic, a sort of Persepolis: The Next Generation, called Zahra's Paradise, we may want to read in 2012:Set in the aftermath of Iran’s fraudulent elections of 2009, Zahra’s Paradise is the fictional story of the search for Mehdi, a young protestor who has vanished into an extrajudicial twilight zone. What’s keeping his memory from being obliterated is not the law. It is the grit and guts of his mother, who refuses to surrender her son to fate, and the tenacity of his brother, a blogger, who fuses tradition and technology to explore and explode the void in which Mehdi has vanished.Read sample chapters at zahrasparadise.com. Reza Aslan's (No god but God) Aslan Media Group is discussing it this month. You can participate via Good Reads or Aslan Media Book Salon.
This month we are reading The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah has his own website that provides a lengthy biography, copious linkage to his print and audio interviews and in the "updates" section some friendly blog posts. You'll even find a friendly plug for Amnesty's Global Ethics Book Series. It turns out that one of the biggest things that explain the different murder rates in different parts of the American South is whether you’re in a region that was significantly settled by Scots-Irish. If you are from a region that was significantly settled by Scots-Irish who brought with them the kind of honour code that comes from a rural society that kept cattle, in those regions the rate of honour-related reasons (you flirted with my wife and such) are much higher than in other parts of the United States.
Is that now?
These data would be from the 60s, 70s, 80s.
That’s bizarre.
In fact, attitudes to honour in the South are very different from attitudes to honour in the North. Someone did a nice survey recently where they sent imaginary CVs applying for jobs, and in these CVs there were people who been in prison. If the CV showed that the reason they were in prison was that they had reacted violently to a threat to their honour, then in the South they could get a job but in the North they couldn’t. The point is that there is plenty of evidence of the pervasiveness of these issues of honour today, including in such things as the murder rates and the rates of assault. You have to face up to that and look for the possibilities for reform – unless you think you can get rid of it, and I don’t think you can. So, as I say, it can be and has been reformed and been moralised. It has changed from motivating people to do what’s bad to motivating them to do what’s good. Hard as it is to imagine when you’re stuck in the middle, we have historical evidence to show that it can be changed.Hmmm... going back to his weak answer to an audience question about honor and the death penalty in the Aspen interview, let me see if I can help Appiah out. If the states of the former Confederacy accounted for approximately 90 percent of total executions in the two decades following reinstatement of the death penalty in the late 70s, could attitudes about honor be a factor in some way? Could it explain the disconnect between the audience reaction to Rick Perry's execution record at the recent Republican debate, and that damned Yankee moderator Brian William's surprise at the cheers? Discuss...
For February, we have selected Susan Choi's novel of paranoia in the age of terrorism, A Person of Interest,With its propulsive drive, vividly realized characters, and profound observations about soul and society, Pulitzer Prize–finalist Susan Choi’s latest novel is as thrilling as it is lyrical, and confirms her place as one of the most important novelists chronicling the American experience. Intricately plotted and psychologically acute, A Person of Interest exposes the fault lines of paranoia and dread that have fractured American life and asks how far one man must go to escape his regrets. Professor Lee, an Asian-born mathematician near retirement age would seem the last person to attract the attention of FBI agents. Yet after a colleague becomes the latest victim of a serial bomber, Lee must endure the undermining power of suspicion and face the ghosts of his past.
For January, we have selected The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars, by Andrew X. Pham. A few years back, we read and greatly enjoyed Pham's Catfish and Mandala and I am looking forward to reading this critically-acclaimed book about his father,Once wealthy landowners, Thong Van Pham’s family was shattered by the tumultuous events of the twentieth century: the French occupation of Indochina, the Japanese invasion during World War II, and the Vietnam War. Told in dazzling chapters that alternate between events in the past and those closer to the present, The Eaves of Heaven brilliantly re-creates the trials of everyday life in Vietnam as endured by one man, from the fall of Hanoi and the collapse of French colonialism to the frenzied evacuation of Saigon. Pham offers a rare portal into a lost world as he chronicles Thong Van Pham’s heartbreaks, triumphs, and bizarre reversals of fortune, whether as a South Vietnamese soldier pinned down by enemy fire, a prisoner of the North Vietnamese under brutal interrogation, or a refugee desperately trying to escape Vietnam after the last American helicopter has abandoned Saigon. This is the story of a man caught in the maelstrom of twentieth-century politics, a gripping memoir told with the urgency of a wartime dispatch by a writer of surpassing talent.
This month we are reading Your Republic Is Calling You by the South Korean novelist Kim Young-ha. The author has a website with biographical information and an overview of his other books and a Facebook page which offers a few links to interviews and events. Interviews and material in English are a little scarce, but there is this PEN American Center panel appearance--you may want to start around the 37 minute mark for where Kim comes in:Between a widespread diaspora and the division of North and South, Korean identity is wrought with questions of nation, race, belonging ... how much does this background influence your desire to write, and your choices for the topics of each book?When I was a child, my father was an army officer. My family had to live near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), where I was always hearing the North Korean propaganda speeches. That experience made me think a bit about strange themes like border, nation, prohibition, death, belief and so on. Growing up near the DMZ, one of the most dangerous areas in the world, is quite a rare experience. I think my childhood was the most crucial thing for my ability to write novels. Your Republic Is Calling You, my fourth novel, is the story about a forgotten North Korean spy. It is not just a coincidence that I pick this kind of 'borderline' character. He lives half his life in the North and the other half in the South. I have always felt myself standing on that border.A few more nuggets might be gleaned from this KBS interview.
This month we are reading the Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America by Kati Marton. After finishing this memoir about her parents' struggles as journalists in Cold War era Hungary and noting Marton's own career as a journalist it is unsurprising to learn that she serves on the Board of Directors for the Committee to Protect Journalists and that she recently won an award from the United Nations Association for her human rights advocacy work. Her acceptance speech makes a good, brief self-introduction and is worth checking out. She draws parallels between the Hungarian Uprising and the Arab Spring, explains her motivations for her work with CPJ, and presents how she aims to connect past and present in her books. The Millions has an interview with the author where she summarizes,This is a book about terror and surveillance and how the terror state functioned… which is by fear, which is by implicating the whole population, making everybody in a sense complicit in the way that it turned even our closest friends and relatives into informers. I think that is the theme. And how these two people, my mother and father, survived. More than survived. They survived with their heads held high.Also, this short interview from Hungarian Watch shows Marton's attentiveness to on-going human rights issues in Hungary. Amnesty covers current concerns here.
