Via Infoshop News
By William Hastings
Industrial Worker / June 2011
In America, where our major book reviewing outlets plaster novels about upper-middle class angst all over their front pages, Arab literature is a welcome middle finger to the dilettantes praised here. What modern mainstream American writer is willing to risk citizenship, imprisonment, or their life to say what should be said? To stop making art for art’s sake, but instead for the broken and lost? Certainly, the American state is slow to strip the citizenship of its writers, but that’s not to say the influence of advertising dollars isn’t helping to decide what the American reading public doesn’t hear about. The Washington Post, owners of the for-profit Kaplan University, needs federal student loan dollars in order to draw students. Does that not affect what is excluded from the Post’s book review pages? In light of the government’s need to justify neverending wars in the region, why would it be beneficial for American readers to find out that the subjects of Arab books have much more in common with them than they are told to believe? A Syrian cab driver working for $60 a month in Kuwait is grinding himself to dust for pennies. That’s not any different than the immigrant cabbies of Baltimore, San Francisco, or New York. To review works such as Alaa Al-Aswany’s masterpiece, “The Yacoubian Building,” or Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s classic, “Midaq Alley,” would be to show the desperate masses in our ghettos that the ghettos of Cairo aren’t much different. There has also been no coverage of Al-Aswany’s latest book, “On the State of Egypt: What Made the Revolution Inevitable.” This is not surprising considering that in it he writes: “Tahrir Square became like the Paris Commune. The authority of the regime collapsed and the authority of the people took its place. Committees were formed everywhere.” The New York Times Book Review wouldn’t go anywhere near that.
Not once since the Arab Spring began has any reviewing outlet in this country given focus to Arab literature. That willful ignorance reflects cooperation with official doctrine and helps to continue the manipulation of understanding and the cutting off of empathy that is required to perpetuate two endless wars. It allows the American public to continue to see Arabs as the enemy: By not reading their literature we close our ears to their voices.