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I’m taking a break from the metafiction this week to once again speak out about a cause I believe in (if I had more time I would have written a metafictional short story about this, since metafiction is so often used for social critique, but alas).
Many of you don’t live in Pennsylvania, but that’s okay. Rather than focusing on jobs and the economy like they said they would, legislators are attacking the LGBTQ community by proposing a marriage amendment that would outlaw any marriage or civil union not between a man and a woman. This is not the first time Pa officials have tried this, hence my post for Blog for Equality Day 2010.
Part of me feels like I should keep politics out of my blog. A bigger part of me feels that any art worth a damn is somewhat political, social or religious in nature, and the “issue” of equal rights for the LGBTQ crowd is a mix of all of those.
So, metafiction fans, please take the time to sign this petition for Equality Pennsylvania, especially if you actually live in Pennsylvania, and tell your own state and federal representatives that you support equal rights for ALL people in this country, regardless of gender, religion or sexual orientation.
Speaking of equal rights, Pa lawmakers are also trying to pass a law that would force many abortion clinics in the state to close. There’s a somewhat complex background behind this law that I won’t bore you with, but suffice it to say that a white man has decided what is best for the medical community to do with abortion clinics against the advice of actual medical professionals… but that’s somewhat of an over-simplification.
My point is this: If you are not gay, lesbian, transgendered, transsexual, bisexual or queer, if you have the full rights that this country affords, how can you possibly justify walking around telling these people they are wrong? If you do not have a uterus and will never, ever have to worry about an unwanted pregnancy, a pregnancy with complications, or needing an abortion, how can you possibly tell women that abortion is wrong and make it almost impossible for low-income women to get the services they need? If you are one of those people, you should be ashamed of yourself.
I suggest the following tactic: Select an organization that either advocates for LGBTQ rights (like Equality Pennsylvania) or the rights of women (like Planned Parenthood), make a donation, even a token donation, in “honor” of the reps who sponsor these bills (Daryl Metcalf and Matt Baker, respectively), and have the notification sent to their Harrisburg offices.
P.S. check out Blog for Equality Day’s sponsor, Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents.
I decided to read Leila Marouane’s The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris after reading a brief review in The New Yorker. At first I agreed with the reviewer, who thought the “postmodern hijinks” at the end of the book were a bit much.
As I thought about it, though, I came to believe they were essential in telling the story of this confused man trapped between identities and lives.
The basic plot follows Mohamed, an Algerian immigrant to Paris who has changed his name to Basile, whitened his skin and straightened his hair in order to fit in with all the white people. Basile/Momo has lost his faith, and decides that at age 40 it’s high time he ditched his v-card. So, he moves out of his mother’s house into a nice apartment in a better Parisian neighborhood.
As soon as he moves out, he meets an Algerian woman in a cafe. She’s reading a book called Djamila and her Mother. The author of the book is Loubna Minbar, a name rather similar to Leila Marouane. From that point on, Minbar comes up constantly, and the women that Basile/Momo meets all seem to know the author personally. They tell sometimes conflicting stories about her, that she will take your life and turn it into a book and then run away, and that she’s really an Arab who changed her name to sound more white (as Leila Marouane herself did when she moved from Algeria to Paris–her birth name is Leyla Zineb Mechentel).
Basile so desperately wants to lose his virginity that I can’t help routing for him, but when he has an encounter with a woman named Djamila I knew something was up. The beginning of the book was very linear: it was the straightforward story of Basile getting his apartment and trying to get away from his mother. As time went on, it got increasingly less linear. We missed the beginning or ending of his sexual encounters (none of which ended with actual vaginal intercourse), and got bits and pieces of the story in fits and starts.
Loubna Minbar is the one thing that keeps all the stories together, and toward the end Basile/Mohamed begins to worry that the concierge at his apartment is actually the author Minbar, and that she’s writing a book about him.
And she is. Or at least Leila Marouane is. The beginning of every chapter goes like this: “I went back to my apartment, he said, thinking about blah blah blah.” “He said” or “he continued” is always right there, so you know from the beginning that while it appears the book is in first person, someone else is relating the story Basile himself told the narrator.
The concierge, who’s name is Lisa (another “L” name…), at the end tells Basile’s mother that he never leaves the house and that he’s constantly reading these books and thinks she is the author, which confirmed my suspicions that none of Basile’s sexual encounters actually happened.
While I did find this ruse frustrating, and I did feel slightly cheated and jerked around at the end, these “postmodern hijinks” did accomplish one thing fairly well. They illustrated with clarity how it must feel to be stuck between two worlds: Algeria and France, religion and secularism, mother and girlfriend or sexual partner(s). And indeed, that is what Basile/Mohamed is. Half the people in his life know him as Mohamed, the other half know him as Basile. He wants nothing more than to have sex, but he can’t get away from his mother (she calls him constantly). He constantly quotes Muslim scholars and poets, yet no longer prays or goes to the mosque.
Were these sexual “encounters” with these book characters actually real, Marouane would have been exploring a different set of problems (like feminism/masculinity and how men from patriarchal religions view women–a little bit of which we do see in the book). As it is, she’s wormed her way into the deep psychological cleft in Basile’s mind that is neither one thing nor the other that affects a good many young Muslim immigrants in France.
Basile’s delusions were rather quixotic in nature, and the whole book had a Don Quixote vibe to it. The purposes of the two books are also similar: Cervantes parodies popular Spanish culture, Marouane parodies and explores the issues surrounding Muslim immigrants in France. While Sexual Life was funny, I think Don Quixote is funnier, especially because we know he’s delusional, while we have to guess with Basile.
The book doesn’t conclude so much as end, rather unlike Don Quijote. After I shut the book, I was left with a vague sense of unease, which usually means a story has struck a nerve, or at least got me thinking. The lack of ending in this case is entirely appropriate. Basile/Mohamed has yet to reconcile the differences between his two selves, much as the rest of Muslim France has yet to figure out its own balance.
During the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s 2011 Winter Read-a-Thon, Jan. 8 – Feb. 19, I will be blogging about the books I read. For more information, to see a list of books I’ve read, go here.
- Hours read as of 2/19: 50
- Funds raised as of 2/19: $235
*Join the Facebook group, or Follow @metafictionblog on Twitter!
During the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s first ever Winter Read-a-Thon, I read a total of 50 hours and raised a total of $235 for my library!
I read the following books (links are to my blog posts concerning each book):
- Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut (audio book)
- Don Quixote by Cervantes (I’m still reading this… I’m taking my sweet time with it)
- Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O’Malley (You can read a review I did of these books here)
- The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris by Leila Marouane (I just finished this last weekend and didn’t really like it, but didn’t really hate it, so I’m not sure what to say about it beyond that; article forthcoming)
- Close Range by Annie Proulx (an audio book that took over Timequake’s spot in my car since I didn’t have any other metafictional audio books; I’ll have to work on that)
In addition to those 4 1/2 books (since I’m only halfway through Don Quixote), I discovered just how much time I spent reading blogs, newspapers and magazines. Those five minute breaks at work and when I’m waiting for something really add up!
The Read-a-Thon was a lot of fun and I’m glad I was able to participate. Now I’ve got the fun job of collecting all the money and getting it into the library by March 7. Hopefully I’ll be able to collect my thoughts on The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris enough for a real post next week (I was traveling over the weekend, hence the late post this week… sorry!). I had put a hold on House of Leaves at the library at the beginning of the Read-a-Thon but it just came in late last week so I expect to start reading it this week or next week, so there should be lots of fun stuff coming up here at The Narrative in the Blog!
Oh, and if you’d like to participate in the Read-a-Thon, it’s not too late to make a one-time donation. Just shoot me an email at narrativeintheblog@gmail.com and let me know how much you’d like to donate!
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February is Library Lovers’ Month, and Pittsburgh’s City Council will declare Feb. 15 “Love My Library Day.”
To celebrate and show my support, and to wish the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh a happy Valentine’s Day, I am sharing all the reasons I love my library. Please share why you love YOUR library in the comments!
One of the dinosaurs you can see from the library. Photo (c) 2008 Kelly Thomas
1. On the second floor of CLP Main in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Oakland, a bank of windows let you look into the dinosaur exhibit of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. There are a ton of great nooks up here to browse some books, check out the dinosaurs and watch all the kids stare up in awe at the giant skeletons.
2. CLP has an enormous book collection, and you can request books from any CLP library and have them sent to your neighborhood branch for easy pick-up and drop-off. My local branch is one of the smaller ones, but thanks to this feature I can get any CLP book, and walk a few blocks to pick it up. Pittsburgh has more than 80 neighborhoods, and while there aren’t 80 library branches, wherever you live in the city you’re never too far from one of the 19 neighborhood branches.
3. It takes me about 10 minutes to walk to my local branch, the Allegheny Library. The Allegheny Library was actually the first Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1895. It was housed in its original building until 2006, when lightening struck the clock tower and caused a lot of damage. (No, seriously, it happened! Read about it in the Post-Gazette and Tribune-Review.) In 2009 a new Allegheny library opened up the street. I attended the grand opening, and I got to sign the original 1895 guest book, which has the signatures of everyone who attended the opening in 1895, the signatures of everyone who attended the centennial celebration in 1995, and now everyone who attended the grand opening of the new building. Pretty cool, huh?
4. The Pennsylvania Room on the third floor of the main branch is the first place I go whenever I want to learn about my adopted city. I especially love the books of old photos, or the ones like Pittsburgh Then and Now which shows photos of various Pittsburgh locales in the past and the present. Another of my favorite finds from this section is The Steps of Pittsburgh, which in addition to detailing the history of the city’s more than 700 public staircases, provides walking tours for many neighborhoods.
5. CLP also has a large multimedia collection. DVDs, CDs, ebooks, audio books, eaudio books and more. I just bought a Sony eReader, and the ability to borrow electronic books from my library was a big factor in my decision. I especially love CLP’s collection of foreign movies. A few years ago I worked my way through most of the Spanish movies and found a lot of gems. They even have anime, documentaries, TV shows and work out DVDs.
During the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s 2011 Winter Read-a-Thon, Jan. 8 – Feb. 19, I will be blogging about the books I read. For more information, to see a list of books I’m reading, and to make a pledge, go here.
- Hours read as of 2/14: 42.75
- Funds raised as of 2/14: $202.38
*Join the Facebook group, or Follow @metafictionblog on Twitter!
