Found in Translation

The contemporary Arabic novel.

by Claudia Roth Pierpont January 18, 2010

Arabic novels offer a marvellous array of answers to questions we did not know we wanted to ask.

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Audio: Claudia Roth Pierpont on the Arabic novel in translation.

Keywords

Arabic Novels;

Arabs;

Alaa Al Aswany;

“Yacoubian Building” (Harper Perennial; $13.95);

Humphrey Davies;

Mahmoud Saeed;

“Saddam City” (Saqi Books; $12.95)

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What do you know about how people live in Cairo or Beirut or Riyadh? What bearing does such information have upon your life? There are, of course, newspapers to keep responsible Americans up to date when trouble looms, and public television or even the History Channel to inform us about the occasional historic battle or archeological discovery or civil war. What else do we need? The ways that people think and work and suffer and fall in love and make enemies and sometimes make revolutions is the stuff of novels, and Arabic novels, while not yet lining the shelves of the local bookstore, have been increasingly available in English translation, offering a marvellous array of answers to questions we did not know we wanted to ask. On such subjects as: the nature of the clientele of the elegantly crumbling pre-Islamist bars in downtown Cairo, straight and gay (“The Yacoubian Building,” by Alaa Al Aswany); what it felt like to live through the massacre in the Shatila refugee camp, in 1982, and how some of the people who still live there have been managing since (“Gate of the Sun,” by Elias Khoury); the optimal tactics that a good Saudi girl should use to avoid being married off, which appear to require that she study either medicine or dentistry (“Girls of Riyadh,” by the twenty-something Rajaa Alsanea, who has herself completed an advanced degree in endodontics). There is clearly insight as well as information in these books. And then, considering the reduced size and the volatility of the world we share, we might recall the essential lesson of a very old Arabic book that everyone knows, “The Thousand and One Nights”—that stories can have the power to save your life.

Cover of Girls of Riyadh

Our long history of indifference has made it difficult, down the years, to come by stories of Arab life that do not involve genies or magic lamps. True, the novel is a comparatively recent phenomenon in Arabic literature; poetry, an ancient art, has traditionally held wider prestige. The exciting new storytelling form, barely a century old, was adapted from the European novels that European armies brought in their wake: Napoleon’s troops were in Cairo for three years, but, thanks to Egypt’s Paris-worshipping nineteenth-century khedives, Balzac and Zola stayed for good. The form developed sporadically in the first half of the last century, and no more than three or four Arabic novels appeared in English before the mid-fifties. After the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize, in 1988, there was a significant surge of interest—Mahfouz himself finally got an American commercial publisher—but the burden of bringing Arabic books to English readers still falls mainly on devoted translators, and on the small and heroic presses that have performed this service from the start. Their joint efforts have rarely mattered more. The Arab reading public, although avid for all sorts of fiction, in a plethora of newspapers and cheap feuilletons, has (for evident economic reasons) not fully embraced the novel as a published book. Few Arabic novels sell enough copies to earn their authors anything like a living income; even Mahfouz kept a civil-service job until he was sixty. Today, the most sophisticated literary public is under siege. “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, and Baghdad reads” is a saying that prevailed in what now seems a dream of literary possibility, free of stifling fundamentalism, civic chaos, and bombs.

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Lately, there has been a concerted effort by forces of intercultural good will, Arab and otherwise, to bring newer Arabic literary works to our attention, with annual prizes—culminating in the so-called Arabic Booker Prize, established in 2007, in Abu Dhabi—whose principal aim is to secure international (but primarily English-language) publication. From the fifties through the seventies, the United States pursued a far more extensive project: the Franklin Book Programs translated and distributed American books in the Arabic-speaking Middle East, and not only textbooks and dictionaries but “Little Women,” “Ethan Frome,” and “The Bridge of San Luis Rey”—books meant to promote “the Western ideals of the dignity and freedom of individual men” and to “minimize the difficulty of Arab-Western collaboration.” These days, the privately sponsored Global Americana Institute is attempting to renew this sort of literary diplomacy, starting with the publication of selected essays by Thomas Jefferson in Arabic. Yet, if the goal is collaboration, isn’t it as important to listen as to speak? There is little danger of encountering anything like official propaganda, since the Arab novelist stands, almost by definition—as a thinker, as a conduit of intellectual life—in opposition to the retrogressive forces in the modern Arab state.

Six years after winning the Nobel Prize, Mahfouz, aged eighty-two, was knifed in the neck by a religious zealot carrying out a fatwa issued by an Islamic cleric outraged by one of the books the Nobel committee had cited. (Mahfouz survived, and lived for two more years, although he temporarily lost the use of his right hand and had to relearn how to write. The cleric is currently serving a life sentence in the United States, for his part in a conspiracy to bomb the United Nations and other New York monuments.) Nothing so grave has happened to Alaa Al Aswany, whose “Yacoubian Building,” a skillful page-turner with a winning cast of characters, takes on the subjects of class oppression, government corruption, torture in prison, the rise of fundamentalism, and the Egyptian state’s propensity to push even profoundly decent but poor young men to religious extremism and, ultimately, to killing.

Published in 2002, by a private Cairo firm—there being no way to get such a manuscript through the state’s official publishing house—“The Yacoubian Building” quickly became one of the biggest best-sellers that the Arab world has ever seen. In Humphrey Davies’s smooth English translation (Harper Perennial; $13.95), it has been an astonishingly big seller here, too, and the book has appeared in more than twenty other languages around the globe. Al Aswany believes that his international fame has kept him safe, although he has frequently been accused in the state-run media of the crime of “tarnishing Egypt’s image abroad,” and the public discussions that he used to host at a Cairo café were shut down by the police. (He quickly relocated the discussions elsewhere.)

Even Rajaa Alsanea’s breezy “Sex and the City” takeoff, “Girls of Riyadh,” was initially banned in the author’s native Saudi Arabia, apparently for suggesting that upper-class Saudi girls might wish to escape their luxurious designer cages. The details of life within the cage have riveted non-Saudi readers, and have made the suitably hip and chirpy English translation—by the estimable Marilyn Booth, in conjunction with the author—another rare example of the Arabic novel as American best-seller. In this tight-locked cultural milieu, college girls who defy the Religious Police by wearing red on Valentine’s Day take on the sheen of political subversives.

But what about literature? Is it possible for anything like the grandly traditional novel of character development and moral nuance to emerge from societies in extremis, from writers routinely constrained or assailed? A critic reviewing Orwell’s “1984” complained that it might be truth, but it wasn’t fiction. We have, of course, come to see the novel as a form with many variant possibilities. Mahfouz, who spun complex social tales out of the apparently unquenchable vivacity of Cairo life, was able to reanimate the models of Balzac and Zola, but more recent Arab writers tend, understandably, toward Kafka or García Márquez. It should be no surprise that the prison novel has become a major Arabic genre; the icy emptiness of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag has been replaced, in the literature of duress, with Arab writers’ crowded and sweltering cells. How could traditional fiction comprehend this reality? Whether any book will outlast its moment is impossible to say, but what follows is an account of some novels that are worth reading now, and that may prove to be worth reading even when newspapers divert our attention to wars and prisons somewhere else.

Iraq is clearly not an easy place to write a novel these days. Even the brave young blogger known as Riverbend, the author of two published collections titled “Baghdad Burning,” fled with her family to Syria in the fall of 2007, and was last heard from as she rediscovered the pleasures of walking without continuously looking behind her. The American occupation has been the subject of a number of documentary films—more documentaries have been made about Iraq than about any other active conflict, thanks to the light weight and low cost of video cameras—but the care and cogitation required for a novel (never mind the publishers and bookstores) appear to have been most obtainable among members of the far-flung Iraqi diaspora, free in foreign lands to publish works that have often been simmering for years.

Mahmoud Saeed’s “Saddam City” (translated by Ahmad Sadri; Saqi Books; $12.95) was written in the early nineteen-eighties, soon after the author was released from the last of six terms of incarceration under Saddam Hussein. Saeed left Iraq in 1985, and managed to publish his book in Syria, albeit with two chapters destroyed, in the mid-nineties. Since 1999, he has lived in the United States, and for the past few years has taught Arabic literature and calligraphy in Chicago. He is in his seventies now, with a substantial and award-winning body of work in Arabic behind him. “Saddam City,” published at last in English in 2004, is based on what he saw in jail—the original Arabic title is literally “I Am the One Who Saw”—which he recorded, he says, “so that it would remain for future generations.”

For all the horror it details, this is a startlingly warm and humane book. Saeed, despite the incitements of his subject, does not aspire to the Kafkaesque—Kafka, it must be admitted, is among the most impossible of authors to emulate, along with García Márquez—but maintains a specificity of place and history (this happened in Basra, that happened in Mosul) and of the individuals who inhabit them. Set mostly in the run-up to the Iran-Iraq War, in the late nineteen-seventies, this slender novel tells of a mild-mannered Basra schoolteacher who, although cautiously apolitical, is whisked off one day for “a simple interrogation.” His subsequent experience in six levels of hell—six prisons in all—is exactingly described, but the long ordeal is mitigated, both for him and for the reader, by a dose of bitter humor, a share of personal good will, and the mutual trust that he discovers among the prisoners, a trust long since forfeited in the larger prison of the informer-ridden society outside.

Saeed’s style is plain and direct, without literary pretensions, but with a tone of emotional delicacy that is as odd in the circumstances as it is touching: treated with courtesy by a single officer, after much cruelty, the prisoner refrains from asking questions about his arrest, because “I did not want to appear to be exploiting his kindness.” Some references to unfamiliar figures and events benefit from the book’s tidy footnotes. And although Sadri’s rendering begins stiffly, it soon becomes rhythmically fluent, and one’s sense of reading a translation fades away.

Resilience against all odds appears to be characteristic of Saeed: the same force rises to a point of madcap buoyancy in “The Soldier and the Pigs,” one of four Saeed stories available from Amazon.com, in uneven English, for forty-nine cents each. (A writer new to the country must try to make his work known any way he can.) In this riotously original little tale of a soldier’s plight among not only pigs but many, many frogs, also set during the Iran-Iraq War, we catch another glimpse of a writer with the power to translate foreign histories into stories that we can make our own.

Sinan Antoon’s “I’jaam” (City Lights; $11.95) is in many ways about translation, and although it is also an Iraqi prison novel set in the era of Saddam, it is hard to imagine a treatment of that terrible subject more different from Saeed’s. Antoon is Baghdad-born, in his early forties, and he left Iraq after the first Gulf War, in 1991; he has a doctorate in Arabic literature from Harvard. “I’jaam,” his first novel, was published in Beirut in 2004, and, impeccably translated by the author and Rebecca C. Johnson, appeared in English in 2007. Antoon, who currently teaches at New York University, has never been in prison. His brief novel is a self-consciously literary work, complete with references to Orwell and an epigraph from Akhmatova, and is alert to the uses of language, in a closed political society, for both indoctrination and rebellion.

The title refers to the practice of adding dots—diacritical marks—to various letters of the Arabic alphabet, some of which are indistinguishable without these marks in place. An undotted sequence of letters may signify a number of different words; the correct translation can be determined only by context. The story’s intriguing premise is that a handwritten, undotted manuscript has been found in a file in Baghdad’s Interior Ministry, and a functionary assigned to add the necessary dots and make a transcription: the resulting manuscript forms the body of the book. The text turns out to be the work of a university student whose gift for political mockery got him sent to prison, where he wrote the manuscript—leaving out the dots to avoid further incrimination. Its uncertain readings cause the scribe to offer footnotes to such perplexing references as “the Ministry of Rupture and Inflammation” (“Could this be the Ministry of Culture and Information?”) and to such obvious errors as occur in the well-known song lyric that details how the nation’s leader moves from house to house and “fucks us into bed.” (“Note: the original lyrics read ‘tucks.’ ”)

The student’s (and the author’s) delight in word games brightens the narrative but does not overwhelm it. At times, the prison almost disappears, as the student seeks refuge in his memories of soccer games, of campus romance, even of the mandatory political demonstrations in support of the person identified only as the Leader. Nevertheless, darkness closes in: the formerly dauntless young man, an aspiring poet, is raped by a prison guard and increasingly breaks down. In his delirium, his fantasies are alluringly, if postmodernly, alphabetical:

The laughter rose and the dots fell, one after the other. The letters that take no dots began to pick them up from the ground and put them in their buttonholes or on their heads, or to stand on them and look at themselves in the mirror. One began to fight with the others, and stole their dots. The sin stole shin’s dots and then raised its fingers to its lips, with a loud “Shhhh!” The mim lay down on his stomach and raised his head to swallow the two dots he had picked up off the ground. A lustful laughter swelled up, and the letters danced together, coupling in forbidden positions.

Still, the core of the experience is meant to be horribly real. Antoon has said that he required years to approach the harsher aspects of the story, implying that he feared seeming presumptuous in claiming experience not his own. What, after all, is the relevance of fact to fiction in a book like this? Should it be different from any other type of novel? There is surely a relationship between the density of detail in Saeed’s book and his experience, as against Antoon’s more formally focussed, internally preoccupied tone. Or is this to confound truth with style? When reality is framed and shaped by imagination—in novels, as opposed to memoirs or histories—all the truth that we can vouch for is emotional and intellectual, and on the page.

“Politics and the novel are an indivisible case,” the Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani wrote. But even Kanafani, who also worked as a newspaperman and a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, expressed the modern writer’s absolute faith in the primacy of art. “My political position springs from my being a novelist,” he explained. “I started writing the story of my Palestinian life before I found a clear political position or joined any organization.” Born under the British Mandate, in Acre, in 1936, he was initially educated in French missionary schools, and—a fitting irony for a writer who all but invented a new national literature—he had to improve his Arabic later on. He was twelve years old when Israel was founded, in 1948, and he and his family ended up in a refugee camp in Damascus. He worked as a teacher, first in the camp and then in Kuwait for several years, before moving to Beirut to begin his association with a new political magazine and a newly stirring Palestinian consciousness. There, in 1962, aged twenty-six and in hiding for want of a passport, he wrote “Men in the Sun” (Lynne Rienner; $12.95), a novella about three Palestinian refugees who pay a smuggler to take them across a swath of the Iraqi desert to Kuwait: a work as searing as the relentless desert sun that blinds and burns the men, a work in which politics and art cannot be told apart.

“Men in the Sun” is a classic of Palestinian writing, and mentioning it among recent Arabic books is a bit like mentioning a work by Hemingway in a discussion of up-and-coming Americans, except that Kanafani remains almost entirely unknown to English readers. A few of the stories that round out the present volume are polemical and coarsely melodramatic; Kanafani was nothing if not a man with a mission. But “Men in the Sun” is, on the simplest level, a gripping tale that unfolds with Hitchcockian suspense as the reader is reduced to fearfully counting the minutes on the smuggler’s wristwatch. The prose is lean, swift, and—in Hilary Kilpatrick’s translation—filled with phrases of startling rightness: “The lorry, a small world, black as night, made its way across the desert like a heavy drop of oil on a burning sheet of tin”; or, even better, “The speedometer leapt forward like a white dog tied to a tent peg.” The realistic intensity of Kanafani’s world tends to conceal his stylistic ambitions: the intricacy with which he weaves together past and present, fact and delusion, and the alternating voices of his characters, each of whom is drawn with the rapid assurance of a charcoal sketch. But on a deeper level Kanafani’s work is about the desperation that drove these men to such lengths to regain work and dignity; it is about the longing—just emerging in the Palestinian public voice—for the moist earth and the olive trees of the villages left behind in 1948. Most painfully, it is about the awakening of self-recrimination for acquiescence in the loss, as in the thoughts of an old man who has been living “like a beggar” and decides to risk the journey:

In the last ten years you have done nothing but wait. You have needed ten big hungry years to be convinced that you have lost your trees, your house, your youth, and your whole village. . . . What do you think you were waiting for?

More than one of Kanafani’s stories depict Israeli soldiers as bloodthirsty villains. Yet he also portrays Israeli settlers sympathetically—perhaps for the first time in modern Arabic literature—in the novella “Returning to Haifa,” written after the 1967 war and available in another collection of his work, titled “Palestine’s Children” (translated by Barbara Harlow and Karen E. Riley; Lynne Rienner; $14.95). This novella is less formally daring than “Men in the Sun”; stylistic experiment may have seemed irrelevant in the wake of the Arab defeat. But it is no less gripping, as it traces the daylong trip of a middle-aged Arab couple from their West Bank home, in 1967. The border has been newly opened, and, with much trepidation, they are travelling to see their old house in Haifa for the first time since they fled, nearly twenty years before. The elderly Jewish woman who comes to the door is anything but a stereotype: a Holocaust survivor and a widow, she is a complex and poignant figure, whose moral politics turn out to be not so far from those of her visitors. Her husband had been seduced by reading a pro-Zionist novel—“Thieves in the Night,” by Arthur Koestler—into half believing that the land itself was waiting for them. She had wanted to leave almost as soon as she arrived, in 1948, upon seeing the mistreatment of an Arab child, and after realizing the cultural cost of the victory. This realization came to her the very first Saturday that she and her husband walked through newly captured Haifa: He was immediately struck by the fact that he didn’t see any cars. It was a true Jewish Sabbath! This brought tears to his eyes for reasons he couldn’t explain. When his wife saw this, she too was surprised and said to him with tears in her own eyes: “I’m crying for another reason. Yes, this is a true Sabbath. But there is no longer a true Sabbath on Friday, nor a true one on Sunday.”

Yet she stayed, mostly because along with the house the childless couple were given a baby: the baby that the Arab couple left behind when the wildly fleeing Palestinian population swept them along to the port and the waiting boats. The confrontation between the now grown son, brought up by the Jewish family, and his Arab parents is the climax of the story, and what it loses in parablelike neatness it repays in emotional force. The message of generational failure and the new imperative of resistance is not so different from the message of the author’s earlier work, but it is more urgent, hectoring, and stark.

This may have seemed the only possible message at the time. It is also the message of Kanafani’s opposite number and comic doppelgänger, Emile Habiby. A Palestinian Christian who refused to leave Haifa after 1948, Habiby eventually served as a member of the Israeli Knesset. His own post-1967 novel, “The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist” (translated by Salma K. Jayyusi and Trevor LeGassick; Interlink; $12.95), is an excruciatingly funny tour de force about “an Arab who had remained, by some magic, in Israel.” Habiby’s antihero, an informer for the Israeli state, is a guileless fool (the book pays tribute to “Candide”) whose spinelessness is matched by his ineptitude, and who is as much a victim as a rogue. Then, one day in 1967, hearing a radio report that all defeated Arabs must surrender, he flies a white flag from his Haifa house as an “extravagant symbol of my loyalty,” and is thrown in jail for insinuating that Haifa is on occupied land. Beaten and left in a cell, too ashamed to admit his identity or even where he lives, he is transformed when he is mistaken for a resistance fighter: “A fierce desire gripped me to clap my hands, to sing, to ululate and scream until the layers of necessity, silence, humiliation, and submission were all gone. It had always been ‘Yes, sir!’; ‘At your command, sir!’ But now my spirit would fly free.”

For Kanafani, there was no significant later work: he was killed in 1972, aged thirty-six, when his car was booby-trapped, apparently by Israeli security forces, in reprisal for the Popular Front’s attack on an Israeli airport. Habiby died at seventy-four, in 1996, after a lifetime of arguing for the rights of Israeli Arabs; the only writer to win (and accept) important literary awards from both the P.L.O. and Israel, he chose an inscription for his tombstone that reads, whether in pride or in shame, “Remained in Haifa.” Both these works by pillars of Palestinian literature, so dissimilar in every way, are at once cries from the heart and calls to arms.

Kanafani plays a recurring role in Elias Khoury’s novel “Gate of the Sun” (Picador; $15), published in Arabic in 1998, to enormous acclaim, and in Humphrey Davies’s award-winning English translation eight years later (thanks to the tiny, not-for-profit Archipelago Books). A tremendously ambitious work, covering half a century of Palestinian history, it begins with maps of the region dotted with the names of old Palestinian villages, the way big Russian novels begin with family trees: here, through all the narrative advance and obliteration, is what you must keep steady in your mind. Set in a dilapidated hospital in the Shatila refugee camp, in Beirut, in the mid-nineties, the book’s many winding stories are told by a male Scheherazade, a fortyish Palestinian medic whose unceasing talk is intended to rouse a comatose old man, a resistance hero who spent decades sneaking over the Lebanese border into Israel, to carry out attacks that earned him the title the Wolf of Galilee. We do not see much of the attacks; instead, we see the warrior as a lover—not as the Wolf but simply as a man—paying secret visits to his wife, left behind on what has become Israeli land. As a result of these conjugal visits, the hero plants his children in Galilee, before going away again to fight to liberate them.

The medic, Khalil—an intellectual and a bit of a coward, who once memorized all of “Men in the Sun”—reports that Kanafani came to interview the old fighter once, during the nineteen-fifties, but did not find the mythic figure that he needed for his writing. It is Khoury’s intent to see through an earlier age’s myths, to expose the flawed and merely human at their core; this attitude lends his historical saga a contemporary feel, even while the debunking of heroism allows him to rescue, for a more cynical era, whatever sorely tested scraps of heroism remain. In true Scheherazade story-within-a-story fashion, the novel itself is foretold, in Khalil’s tale of a Palestinian fighter who had planned “a book without a beginning or an end . . . an epic of the Palestinian people, which he’d start by recounting the details of the great expulsion of ’48.” That fighter, however, died during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, reportedly of shock—“but I’m not convinced that is the reason,” Khalil confides. “I mean, after all those who were killed in fighting and in massacres, along comes someone who dies of sentiment!” It is just one of many, many signs that people dramatize, or lie, or remember things that never happened, and that stories are not to be trusted.

Elias Khoury is a Lebanese Christian who was born in Beirut in 1948, and whose sympathy for Palestinian refugees sent him to Amman to join the P.L.O.’s military unit, Fatah, in 1967, when he was nineteen. Unlike the would-be author in his book, Khoury was more a literary man than a fighter, and in the mid-seventies, back in Beirut, he took up work for the Palestine Research Center and began writing novels; during the next decade he collected thousands of stories from refugees about the “great expulsion of ’48,” an oral history that he felt required an “Arab Tolstoy” to wield into fiction. (“Everybody laughed,” he says.) “Gate of the Sun” is indeed Tolstoyan in scope: the expulsion stories are woven through a long first section, while the second focusses on the later lives of those who fled to Lebanon only to spend whole generations in the camps. “Over there you’d become the Jews’ Jews,” one character observes, “and over here you were the Arabs’ Arabs.”

But the book is far from Tolstoyan in the telling. Its difficulties are many: the loquacious storyteller’s voice at times becomes so irritating that one longs for the sick man to rise from his bed simply to make him stop talking; a strong gust of hot air blows about some truly ghastly phrases (“A woman only dies if her man stops loving her”); and the later pages (even a book without an ending must come to an end) lack energy. Moreover, Khoury’s structure is a patchwork, an assembly of fragments that intersect and repeat or simply disappear. Khoury has said that this approach most accurately captures the history he writes about; it is not postmodern literary affect but the plain reality where he comes from.

As a matter of style, the point is worth debating. The Palestinian writer Sahar Khalifeh has written several novels about the conflict in a purely traditional form. Her finest work, “Wild Thorns” (translated by Trevor LeGassick and Elizabeth Fernea; Interlink; $12.95), about two Palestinian cousins who take opposing sides—one shoots an Israeli officer, the other comes to the aid of the officer’s terrified wife and child—conveys the moral complexity of West Bank family life, and street life, with detailed conviction. The book is neatly plotted and easily read; it leaves us in no doubt about its characters’ desperate choices and inner lives. Khalifeh, who was born in Nablus in 1941 (and continues to live there, at least for part of the year), clearly understands her subject, and knows how to tell a story. But, then, she does not attempt to trace the surging history that has led to the daily turmoil she describes.

Khoury, by contrast, is working on a grand scale, and—even while one is chafing at his methods—his repetitions and dislocations become, in an almost visceral way, part of the reader’s sense of exile and, ultimately, part of the book’s rewards. If few of the characters are sufficiently sustained to carry our emotions over the long haul, there are many passing characters whose stories come to unforgettable life. I threw this book aside several times on first reading, but the power of these stories drew me back. “Gate of the Sun” is, as it turns out, worth reading twice—because it is so hard to see whole the first time, and because it is so insidiously rich.

There is Salim, who was five years old when, as he recalls, his mother carried him through the fire at the siege of Shatila (“ ‘There wasn’t a fire,’ I said”) and is now learning English so that he can follow her to America, although everyone knows that she died in the siege. There is Abu Aref, a Bedouin who went off one day with his family’s herd of buffalo and returned saying that the Israelis had killed them, but whose wife knew that they had really been stolen by his cousin, and that he’d invented the buffalo massacre to cover his shame. (“Everything foolish we do,” she says, “we blame on the Jews.”)

And there are the human massacres, in Palestinian villages, in 1948, by Israeli troops: in Ain al-Zaitoun, forty young men were slaughtered; in al-Safsaf, sixty men were executed wearing the white sheets they had worn to surrender; in Sha’ab, twenty old men were forced to march in the mud and nineteen died. The list goes on. The villages are real, the dates are real, and while some of the wildest embellishments are shown to be false—a crucifixion, most notably—the stories are told in the voices of those who were there, or those who heard the stories from them. The Israeli historians Ilan Pappé and Benny Morris have presented irrefutable evidence that atrocities occurred during the founding of the Israeli state, although arguments persist about the accuracy of reports, responsibility for actions, and degrees of brutality. When “Gate of the Sun” was published in Hebrew, in 2002, it won critical praise but was also severely criticized for mixing fact with incendiary fiction—because such stories, even in a novel that insists on the unreliability of stories, have the sound of reality and bear its charge. Khoury has countered that his book presents the truth, wholly inarguable, of Palestinian memory and belief.

Khoury was attacked in the Egyptian press for allowing his book to be published in Israel, although this seems to have been one of his goals: he has said that, in a metaphorical sense, he wrote the book not only in Arabic but in Hebrew. A self-confessed secular democrat, Khoury is one of the few Arab writers to recognize the Holocaust as part of the moral equation in the Middle East. Khalil, when talking about the Palestinian revolts of the late nineteen-thirties, demands of his ever-silent foil, “What did the nationalist movement posted in the cities do apart from demonstrate against Jewish immigration? . . . Tell me, in the faces of people being driven to slaughter, don’t you see something resembling your own?” In 2001, Khoury signed a statement opposing the holding of a Holocaust-denial conference in Beirut. Both the author and his character make their arguments in terms of keeping Arab culture free of soul-destroying European-style racism, and of preserving a larger moral dignity. It is crucial to have stood up to such a terrible history, and to face it in the present, “not because the victims were Jews,” Khalil says, “but because their death meant the death of humanity within us.”

For all its large ideas and its high-flown rhetoric, the novel’s most substantial character is the hero’s pragmatic wife, who turns both the nationalist epic and the great love story upside down when, after years of lightning visits by her husband, she makes it clear just who the true Palestinian hero is. It was she who fed and brought up their children, she who was in charge of the “ordinary and meaningless” details that allowed them all to survive. Now she has decided that the children will not spend their lives waiting for their lives to begin, as she has done: “I want the illusions to end.” She has become an Israeli citizen. She votes for the Arab Communist Party in the Knesset, “and I attend the meetings and demonstrations, in an attempt to preserve what’s left of our land.” She will raise the money for one of their sons to open a garage in the village. A daughter will get the wedding that she wants. Another son will receive his master’s degree, in Arabic literature, from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and begin his doctoral thesis on the works of Ghassan Kanafani.

Seven children in all. And, eventually, twenty-five grandchildren, about whom the Wolf of Galilee, giving the story one more twist, has the final word:

Here we are, thrown out of our country in ’48, and with only a hundred thousand of us left over there. The hundred thousand have become a million, and the eight hundred thousand who were thrown out have become five million. They bring in immigrants and we have children, and we’ll see who wins in the end.

George Orwell claimed that in a peaceful age he would have been not a political writer but, rather, an author of “ornate or merely descriptive books” (which lets us know what he really thought of nonpolitical writing). In America, where authors enjoy the right to be as ornate or descriptive as they wish, the political necessity that drives so many Arab writers may seem like a literary ball and chain. It is, of course, possible to find Arabic works about other subjects. Curiously, both of the Arabic Bookers awarded so far have gone to Egyptian historical novels: Bahaa Taher’s “Sunset Oasis” (translated by Humphrey Davies; McClelland & Stewart; $34.99), a solid, if stolid, piece of work that gains its interest mostly from being set in Egypt’s Siwa Oasis, during the late nineteenth century, and ends—just when we thought we were getting away from such things—with someone blowing something up; and Yusuf Zeydan’s “Beelzebub,” not yet translated, which is set in the relative safety of the fifth century A.D. But it isn’t necessary to escape our time in order to be free of politics; geographic distance can have the same effect, particularly in lands so vast and thinly populated. Go far enough and you can escape the entire modern world, as in the Libyan Tuareg writer Ibrahim al-Koni’s desert fable “Gold Dust” (translated by Elliott Colla; American University in Cairo; $17.95), in which a man trades his wife and son for a beloved camel, and the engrossed reader feels no doubt that he has chosen well.

Despite the continued existence of such pristine literary realms, there is some fear that the lure of English translation and American publication is a corrupting force—that Arab novelists, consciously or not, will begin to court the larger market, and leave their own audiences behind. As for us, we would end up reading only versions of what we want to hear. There is not much evidence that anything like this has happened yet, and the benefits for all seem to outweigh the risks. Alaa Al Aswany’s second novel, “Chicago” (translated by Farouk Abdel Wahab; Harper Perennial; $14.99), set amid Egyptian émigrés in that city, where the author went to graduate school, attempts to deal with both worlds, and comes down as hard on America for sustaining Egyptian tyranny as on Egyptian tyranny itself. It is, frankly, a disappointing book, in that the author’s typically ambitious reach proves beyond his grasp. Nevertheless, Al Aswany’s reputation and his undeniable storytelling ease have made “Chicago” the biggest Arabic best-seller since his first novel, and have won it many readers—frustrated, thinking, caught up—in the West as well.

Certainly, not every part of this literary exchange will be ideal. There will be good books and not so good ones, just as with American fiction. Still, it is unquestionably good to have stories that we hold in common. And it would be better to have more. Nobody is under the illusion that literature can change the world. But, as Al Aswany has pointed out, “literature does something much more important—it changes us.” Contemporary Arabic literature—which is not a monolithic literature but a series of imaginative works by individuals who happen to be Egyptian, Libyan, Syrian, Moroccan, Lebanese, and so on, twenty-two nations strong—is one of the few reliable forces working to impel these varied countries toward a cultural (and perhaps even a political) openness, in which Arab writers will one day be able to write about anything at all.

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May Asaki Ishimoto dies; created costumes for ballet stars

Image via Wikipedia

By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 17, 2010; C07

When May Asaki graduated from high school, her parents tried to find her a husband. They turned to traditional Japanese marriage brokers in their home town of Hanford, Calif., but their daughter -- independent and resourceful from an early age -- turned down the first three men she met.

"When suitor number four appeared," she wrote in an unpublished memoir she completed last year, "I felt sorry for my parents so I closed my eyes and said I would marry him."

Much to her relief, however, she found herself rejected by the prospective groom. His family had concluded that the slight and cultured May Asaki would not make a suitable wife for a chicken farmer.

Her mother quietly arranged for her to move to Los Angeles to attend a fashion and dressmaking school. May Asaki had been sewing for most of her life and designed her first dress, for a younger sister, when she was 12. In high school, she made clothes for her teachers.

Decades later, her skills as a seamstress would launch her on a globetrotting career with some of the greatest ballet stars in the world, but at 22 she was still living at home with her parents.

On Dec. 7, 1941, she went to a matinee at the only movie theater in Hanford. When she came out, there was an odd commotion in the street, and May learned that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

"I didn't even know where Pearl Harbor was," she wrote in her memoir, "but I was angry that Japan had attacked us."

Her Japanese-born parents had been in the United States for more than 25 years, but they were fearful and distraught. Her father dug a hole in the back yard and burned everything from Japan: books, letters, even clothing.

"When the fire was set," May recalled in her memoir, "we watched our possessions burn and I wept."

On May 8, 1942 -- May Asaki's 23rd birthday -- she and her family were loaded into the back of an Army truck and sent to a detention center. They were allotted one suitcase each.

May, who was the second oldest of 11 children, spoke only rudimentary Japanese and had known no home but California. Her older brother volunteered for the Army the day after Pearl Harbor, but his patriotism didn't help her family. U.S. authorities considered Americans of Japanese descent to be potential enemies during World War II, and the Asaki family eventually ended up at an internment camp in a snake-infested swamp in Arkansas. Within six months, May's mother was dead at 48.

"My older brother was serving in the U.S. Army while our family was incarcerated as criminals," May wrote in her memoir, "the stress of which was too great for our mother to bear."

The only good thing to be said for May's two years of captivity was that she met Paul Ishimoto, whom she married in April 1944. Three months later, when their internment camp was closed, they moved to Washington. The federal government gave them $25 apiece to start a new life.

Mrs. Ishimoto made shirts for her husband, who had gone from a prisoner of the United States to a member of its wartime spy agency, the Office of Strategic Services. She sewed slipcovers on the side and made outfits for her daughter's ballet class. When the dance teacher joined the National Ballet, Mrs. Ishimoto was hired to make costumes for the newly formed company.

By trial and error, she taught herself to make tutus and other dance outfits. They had to be lightweight and flexible, but they also required an almost architectural structure to withstand the rigors of ballet. She created hundreds of costumes during her eight years with the National Ballet and devised a novel way to adjust them to fit dancers of different sizes. When she left in 1970, it took three people to replace her.

She planned to return to her life as the mother of four children, but her work with Dame Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev and other world-famous dancers was already renowned in the ballet world.

In 1971, Mrs. Ishimoto received a call asking whether she could take a temporary assignment from the New York City Ballet, led by the acclaimed choreographer George Balanchine. Two years later, she moved to the American Ballet Theatre, often considered the country's finest classical dance troupe. As wardrobe mistress, she organized hundreds of costumes and instituted a set of inviolable rules, the most of important of which were that no one could smoke, eat, drink or sit while in costume.

"Dancers take it out on the costumes, like the baby kicking the dog," she told Newsday in 1989.

She was backstage at every performance. On her days off, she searched for the fabrics, buttons and brocades that she would stitch into exquisite costumes. One of her tutus, which she made for dancer Marianna Tcherkassky, is in the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American History.

Mrs. Ishimoto had to manage more than just costumes -- she had to deal with fragile egos, as well. In time, she learned to ignore temperamental dancers who blamed a poor performance on a costume or who threatened not to take the stage unless an alteration was made at once.

In her own way, May Ishimoto became almost as much a legend at ABT as Gelsey Kirkland, Cynthia Gregory, Mikhail Baryshnikov and the other ballet stars she worked with.

When she died of a heart ailment on Nov. 20 at age 90, Baryshnikov sent a note to her daughter Mary Ishimoto Morris, a former Washington Post Book World editorial assistant: "Her quiet spirit and dedication to the theater were reminders to every ABT dancer that beauty is found in the smallest details . . . a bit of torn lace, a loose hook and eye, a soiled jacket -- these were her opportunities to pour energy into an art form she loved, and we were the richer for it."

Mrs. Ishimoto, who lived in Chevy Chase, commuted to New York for the 17 years she was with ABT. Her husband worked as a translator for the State Department and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He died in 1997.

In addition to her daughter Mary, of Laurel, survivors include three other children, Norman Ishimoto of San Francisco, Janet Ishimoto of Silver Spring and Roger Ishimoto of Bethesda; four sisters, Fumi Inada of Gilroy, Calif., Aiko Imagawa of Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., Koko Wittenburg of Bethesda and Yo Seltzer of Silver Spring; four brothers, Sam Asaki of Huntington Beach, Calif., Jack Asaki of Lake Forest Keys, Calif., Steve Asaki of Stanton, Calif., and Goro Asaki of Pasadena, Md.; nine grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.

Mrs. Ishimoto retired from the ABT in 1990 and took up line dancing, swimming, bowling and golf. She played in a hand-bell choir, attended Palisades Community Church in the District and traveled the world.

There was one thing she didn't do in retirement, though. She put down her needle for good and never sewed another stitch.

Girls' academic hopes disrupted as family plans return to Afghanistan

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By Michael Alison Chandler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 17, 2010; C01

When Hussna Azamy was 5, she began her schooling in the living room of her family's apartment in Herat, Afghanistan. Her only classmate was a sister; their teachers were their parents. For up to five hours a day, they studied the Dari alphabet, fundamentals of math and science, and how to read the Koran.

Hussna and her older sister, Farah, came of school age in Afghanistan in the 1990s, when it was forbidden to educate girls and most of the country's schools had been destroyed. They yearned to see the inside of an actual school.

Their aspirations became real after the Taliban fell in 2001, and later, they carried their academic dreams thousands of miles to a country with one of the world's most renowned education systems.

But after less than a year in the United States -- where Hussna, 17, and her younger sister, Tamana, 13, quickly became A students in Prince William County schools -- the family plans to return to Afghanistan. Their father wants to help rebuild his country, work he has been unable to find here.

The girls, given a taste of American education, do not want to leave. They are afraid to entrust their ambitions to a system that is still vulnerable and far behind.

"I cry sometimes alone at night, sometimes with my sisters," said Hussna, a junior at Gar-Field High School in Woodbridge and an aspiring computer scientist. She worries that her lessons in Afghanistan will not be as up-to-date as those here or, worse, that girls might again be barred from schools.

Three decades of war left Afghanistan's schools in shambles, and many of its people are illiterate. Since the fall of the Taliban, the country has made strides in rebuilding, with help from foreign governments and international charities. There were 700,000 boys enrolled in primary or secondary schools in Afghanistan in 2001, according to Ministry of Education estimates. Since then, enrollment has swelled to about 7 million students, and 37 percent are female.

In recent years, the resurgence of the Taliban has brought fresh threats to the education of girls, particularly in rural areas in southern and eastern Afghanistan. But aid workers and analysts say the overwhelming demand for education and the momentum girls have achieved will continue.

The Azamys lived in Herat, a city in western Afghanistan, near the Iranian border. In 2001, the girls returned to school, donning black clothes and white head scarves to join hundreds of other girls at long tables under a big tent before moving into a renovated school building next door.

Each day, they checked around their desks for bombs and handed over their bags to be searched. Their mother, Farzana Azamy, walked them to and from school each day and worried for their safety in the hours they were away. But the girls enjoyed school and excelled in their studies.

Farah, now 21, received top marks on a grueling national college entrance exam, and in 2008, she became one of an elite group of Afghan women to enroll in a public university to study medicine.

She dropped out soon after she began college, though, because the family was preparing to move to the United States. The Azamys had long sought to join relatives in Virginia and to live far from bomb blasts in a place with good schools.

After years of waiting, their visas were issued by the U.S. consulate in spring 2008, and their departure seemed imminent. But paperwork continued to drag on. The family put schooling and jobs on hold and waited in Kabul and then Islamabad for a year before they could leave.

Last May, they moved in with a relative in Woodbridge, and their father, Ahmad Zahid Azamy, 46, began to look for work. The college-educated Azamy had spent nearly eight years working for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan. He traveled the country monitoring conflicts, human rights violations and the piecemeal development of local government institutions. He hoped to find related work in the United States as an adviser or researcher for one of the many Washington-based organizations focused on Afghanistan.

"I have done a lot for Afghanistan," he said. "I have this view that I can still do a lot . . . for peace in my country."

He was still unemployed in September when his family rented a townhouse in Woodbridge, spending savings accumulated over many years. Hussna and Tamana enrolled in school.

High school, U.S.-style

American high school was overwhelming and exciting for Hussna. Teachers helped her navigate the enormous building between periods, when hallways swarmed with students. She learned what it meant to be "tardy" and how to follow a schedule marked with blue days and red days.

She traded her head scarf and black clothes for brightly colored sweaters, jeans and sneakers. And she quickly adjusted to American-style education, with lots of student interaction.

Although not yet fluent in English, Hussna was bored at first by her courses, which included basic math and science, with extra help from an English teacher. Her teachers noticed her abilities, and within a few weeks she was enrolled in the school's rigorous International Baccalaureate courses for biology and advanced algebra.

One morning this month, she was surrounded by the bubbling sound of fish tanks in biology lab. The teacher divided the class into teams and asked them to draw pictures of the various stages of photosynthesis and respiration. Hussna grabbed a marker and began to sketch the Krebs cycle.

She easily explained to her classmates how the chemical reactions happen, ultimately yielding energy and carbon dioxide. Some students stared wide-eyed as she talked. One mumbled: "Wow. Someone who knows what she is talking about."

Biology teacher James Nolan said Hussna often takes the lead in class. "She has set the curve on a few tests already," he said.

Her report cards have been filled with A's, and an assistant principal said she should be considered for the school's gifted program.

But as she and her younger sister blossom at school, her family is struggling at home.

Farah had hoped to enroll in community college and eventually pursue a medical degree. But her family has no car and no money to pay for tuition. So she spends long days at home, listening to music and quizzing herself from a geometry textbook.

A father's frustrations

Her father spends his days worrying about money and watching the news from Afghanistan. "It's nearly one year now that I am jobless," he said.

He described a frustrating job search, filled with unreturned calls and e-mails and promises of help from former employers in Afghanistan that did not materialize.

His relatives here have found jobs in banks or driving taxicabs. But he does not want work that is unrelated to his expertise about Afghanistan, knowledge that he thinks is critical to this country's security. His job worries have been compounded by health problems that he and his wife could not afford to have treated here. Finally, this winter, he decided that the family should go back.

The plan is to move to Kabul, and to move soon, so Farah, after a two-year hiatus, can enroll again in college before the next term begins in March.

The father is deeply disappointed to be starting over again, but he hopes that his daughters will find new academic opportunities and that he will be able to support his family. Kabul is home to the country's flagship public university, which is undergoing extensive rebuilding.

There is also the recently opened American University, a private school that offers scholarships and computer science degrees.

The decision has pitted him against all the women in his family, who want somehow to stay. But they are slowly preparing to go.

Hussna has begun telling her teachers that soon she will be gone. "I know that we can't stay here," she said.

Born in Japan, but ordered out

Image by Robert Sanzalone via Flickr

By Blaine Harden
Sunday, January 17, 2010; A20

TOKYO -- Fida Khan, a gangly 14-year-old, told the court that immigration authorities should not deport him and his family merely because his foreign-born parents lacked proper visas when they came to Japan more than 20 years ago.

During the past two decades, his Pakistani father and Filipino mother have held steady jobs, raised children, paid taxes and have never been in trouble with the law.

"I have the right to do my best to become a person who can contribute to this society," Fida told a Tokyo district court in Japanese, the only language he speaks.

But the court ruled last year that Fida has no right to stay in the country where he was born. Unless a higher court or the Minister of Justice intervenes, a deportation order will soon split the Khan family, sending the father, Waqar Hassan Khan, back to Pakistan, while dispatching Fida and his sister Fatima, 7, to the Philippines with their mother, Jennette.

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Aggressive enforcement of Japanese immigration laws has increased in recent years as the country's economy has floundered and the need for cheap foreign labor has fallen.

Nationality in Japan is based on blood and parentage, not place of birth. This island nation was closed to the outside world until the 1850s, when U.S. warships forced it to open up to trade. Wariness of foreigners remains a potent political force, one that politicians dare not ignore, especially when the economy is weak.

As a result, the number of illegal immigrants has been slashed, often by deportation, from 300,000 in 1995 to just 130,000, a minuscule number in comparison to other rich countries. The United States, whose population is 2 1/2 times that of Japan's, has about 90 times as many illegal immigrants (11.6 million).

Image by notariety via Flickr

Among highly developed countries, Japan also ranks near the bottom in the percentage of legal foreign residents. Just 1.7 percent are foreign or foreign-born, compared with about 12 percent in the United States. Japan held a pivotal election last year and voters tossed out a party that had ruled for nearly 50 years. But the winner, the Democratic Party of Japan, has so far done nothing to alter immigration policy.

That policy, in a country running low on working-age people, is helping to push Japan off a demographic cliff. It already has fewer children and more elderly as a percentage of its population than any country in recorded history. If trends continue, the population of 127 million will shrink by a third in 50 years and by two-thirds in a century. By 2060, Japan will have two retirees for every three workers -- a ratio that will weaken and perhaps wreck pension and health-care systems.

These dismal numbers upset Masaki Tsuchiya, who manages a Tokyo welding company that for seven years has employed Waqar Khan.

"If Khan is deported, it will not be possible to find anyone like him, as many Japanese workers have lost their hungriness," said Tsuchiya, who has urged Japanese immigration officials to rescind the deportation order for the Khan family. "When the Japanese population is declining, I believe our society has to think more seriously about immigration."

At the Ministry of Justice, immigration officials say they are simply carrying out rules politicians make. The rules, though, are not particularly precise. They grant wide leeway to bureaucrats to use their own discretion in deciding who stays and who gets deported. Last year, immigration officials granted "special permits" to 8,500 undocumented foreigners, with about 65 percent of them going to those who had married a Japanese citizen.

Exercising their discretion under the law, immigration authorities last year offered Noriko Calderon, 13, the wrenching choice of living with her parents or living in her homeland. The girl, who was born and educated in the Tokyo suburbs, could stay in Japan, the government ruled. But she had to say goodbye to her Filipino mother and father, who were deported after living illegally in Japan for 16 years. Following tearful goodbyes at a Tokyo airport, Noriko remained in Japan with an aunt.

Japan's growing need for working-age immigrants has not gone unnoticed by senior leaders in government and business. Slightly relaxed rules have admitted skilled professionals and guest workers. The number of legal foreign residents reached an all-time high of 2.2 million at the end of 2008, with Chinese accounting for the largest group, followed by Koreans, Brazilians (mostly of Japanese descent) and Filipinos.

Still, experts say these numbers are far too low to head off significant economic contraction. A group of 80 politicians said last year that the country needs 10 million immigrants by 2050. Japan's largest business federation called for 15 million, saying: "We cannot wait any longer to aggressively welcome necessary personnel."

Yet the treatment of foreign workers already in Japan is unpredictable. The government opened service centers last year to help foreign workers who lost their jobs to recession. For the first time, it offered them free language training, along with classes on social integration. As that program got underway, however, the government began giving money -- about $12,000 for a family of four -- to foreign workers, if they agreed to go home immediately and never come back to work.

The Khan family's troubles began two years, when a policeman nabbed Waqar Khan on his way home from work. He was detained for nine months. Police in Japan often stop foreign-looking people on the street and ask for residency documents.

The letter of the law was clearly against Khan and his wife. He had overstayed a 15-day tourist visa by 20 years. She came into the country on a forged passport.

But they have refused to sign deportation documents, arguing that although their papers are bad, their behavior as foreigners has been exemplary. Under Japanese law, foreigners are eligible to become naturalized citizens if they have lived in the country for more than five years, have good behavior and are self-sufficient.

The Khans also argue that their children, who regard themselves as Japanese, are assets for Japan. "It is a bit weird that the country needs children, but it is saying to us, go away," Khan said.

The family's lawyer, Gen'ichi Yamaguchi, has tried -- and so far failed -- to convince immigration officials and judges that the Khans are just the sort of hardworking, Japanese-speaking immigrants that the country should embrace for the sake of its own future.

"During the bubble years, the number of illegal workers increased a lot and the police looked the other way," Yamaguchi said. "Japan has always looked at immigrants as cheap but disposable labor."

An appeals court is scheduled to rule on the Khan case in the first week of February.

Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.

As Holbrooke bolsters Karzai, parliament again rejects many of his cabinet picks

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 17, 2010; A18

KABUL -- Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said Saturday that it is time to "move on" from last year's fraud-marred presidential election and any lingering questions about the legitimacy of President Hamid Karzai's government.

But just minutes before Holbrooke met with reporters at the heavily fortified U.S. Embassy compound here, the newly assertive Afghan parliament delivered Karzai another political setback by voting to reject more than half of his second slate of cabinet nominees.

The parliament had earlier rejected 70 percent of the president's cabinet choices, deeming many of them either too closely aligned with Afghanistan's former guerrilla commanders, or warlords, or not sufficiently qualified to lead the ministries for which they were nominated.

In the latest vote, the parliament rejected 10 of Karzai's picks while approving seven, thus leaving about a third of the 24 cabinet jobs unfilled. Among those rejected were two of three female nominees.

Holbrooke, arriving from Pakistan on his sixth visit to the region as special representative, dismissed the development as "an internal matter" and called the nominees who were confirmed "excellent." He was in time for the vote approving Zalmay Rassoul for the post of foreign minister and was among the first to shake his hand.

"This is a government we can work with, and look forward to working with," Holbrooke said.

He also disputed the suggestion that last year's election, in which Karzai's closest challenger withdrew from a planned runoff amid widespread charges of voting irregularities, had left a cloud over the president's legitimacy.

"The government is legitimate," Holbrooke said, calling Karzai "the legitimately chosen, legitimate leader of this country."

"I honestly believe it's time to move on, and get on with why we're here," he added, noting that much of 2009 had been consumed by the election and by the deteriorating security situation, which prompted President Obama to launch a wide-ranging review of the United States' Afghanistan policy. The review culminated in a December announcement that 30,000 additional U.S. troops and more civilian aid workers would be sent to the country.

"The troops have begun to arrive," Holbrooke said. "It's a very important symbol of our commitment." He also said the civilian surge was an equally important, if often underreported, part of the new policy.

But the continuing instability in Afghanistan was underscored by fresh reports of violence in the south, particularly in the volatile Helmand province, where the U.S. troop surge is concentrated. Two British soldiers were reported killed by an explosion in Helmand on Friday while on foot patrol. On Saturday, NATO and Afghan troops came under fire from Taliban insurgents attacking from two positions; the foreign troops called for air support and said a missile was fired at a Taliban position.

Also in Helmand, NATO reported that an overnight raid Friday in Nad Ali district killed 11 insurgents and led to the discovery of a weapons cache, a trove of black tar opium and equipment used to make roadside bombs.

Insurgents, meanwhile, fired a rocket into Kabul on Friday night. It landed near the German Embassy, injuring a security guard.

On Saturday, NATO said a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan earlier in the day killed one of its soldiers, but the alliance gave no details.

Holbrooke said one of the United States' key goals is to aggressively support Karzai's initiative to open talks with moderate Taliban elements in hopes of drawing them away from the insurgency.

"There is no vehicle for them to come in from the cold right now," Holbrooke said, adding: "This has got to be an Afghan-led program, but we're ready to support it."

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Poor schooling slows anti-terrorism effort in Pakistan

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By Griff Witte
Sunday, January 17, 2010; A18

ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN -- With a curriculum that glorifies violence in the name of Islam and ignores basic history, science and math, Pakistan's public education system has become a major barrier to U.S. efforts to defeat extremist groups here, U.S. and Pakistani officials say.

Western officials tend to blame Islamic schools, known as madrassas, for their role as feeders to militant groups, but Pakistani education experts say the root of the problem is the public schools in a nation in which half of adults cannot sign their own name. The United States is hoping an infusion of cash -- part of a $7.5 billion civilian aid package -- will begin to change that, and in the process alter the widespread perception that Washington's only interest in Pakistan is in bolstering its military.

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But according to education reform advocates here, any effort to improve the system faces the reality of intense institutional pressure to keep the schools exactly the way they are. They say that for different reasons, the most powerful forces in Pakistan, including the army, the religious establishment and the feudal landlords who dominate civilian politics, have worked against improving an education system that for decades has been in marked decline.

"If the people get education, the elite would be threatened," said Khadim Hussain, coordinator of the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy and a professor at Islamabad's Bahria University. "If they make education available, the security establishment's ideology may be at risk."

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That ideology, Hussain said, involves the belief that non-Muslim nations are out to destroy Pakistan and that the army is the only protection Pakistanis have from certain annihilation. Those notions are emphasized at every level in the schools, with students focused on memorizing the names of Pakistan's military heroes and the sayings of the prophet Muhammad, but not learning the basics of algebra or biology, he said.

The nature of the education system is reflected in popular attitudes toward the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremist groups that in recent months have carried out dozens of suicide bombings in Pakistan, many of them targeting civilians.

Although the groups in many cases have publicly asserted responsibility for the attacks, a large percentage of the population here refuses to believe that Muslims could be responsible for such horrific crimes, choosing to believe that India, Israel or the United States is behind the violence. When Hussain challenges graduate-level students for proof, they accuse him of being part of the plot, he said.

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"Telling students they need to use evidence and logic means that you are definitely an agent of India, Israel and the CIA," he said. "They don't understand what evidence is."

The madrassas have multiplied in Pakistan as public education has deteriorated. But madrassas still educate only about 1.5 million students a year, compared with more than 20 million in public schools. If Pakistan is to improve its dismal literacy rate and provide marketable skills to more of the estimated 90 million Pakistanis under the age of 18, it will have to start in the public schools.

The United States plans to spend $200 million here this year on education, the U.S. Agency for International Development's largest education program worldwide. The money comes from the Kerry-Lugar aid bill, which was passed in late 2009 and promises Pakistan $7.5 billion in civilian assistance over the next five years.

The funds are intended to signal a substantial shift from earlier years, when U.S. assistance to Pakistan was overwhelmingly focused on helping the military, which is battling the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the nation's northwest.

U.S. officials say the money will be spent on a combination of programs, including infrastructure improvements, teacher training and updates to the curriculum. Unlike in past years, the money will not be filtered through non-governmental organizations and contractors but will be given directly to Pakistan's government, officials say.

The idea is to improve the capacity of the nation's fledgling civilian-led administration, and to promote trust between the two nations.

But there is also the risk that without adequate monitoring, much of the money will go to waste.

Pakistan's current spending on education -- less than 3 percent of its budget -- is anemic, and far lower on a relative basis than in India or even Bangladesh. Much of it never reaches students.

Pakistan's public education system includes thousands of "ghost schools," which exist on paper and receive state funding. But in reality, the schools do not function: A local landlord gets the money, and either pockets it or dispenses it to individuals who are on the books as teachers, but in fact are associates or relatives who do nothing to earn their salaries. School buildings are often used for housing farmworkers or livestock, not for education.

Those buildings that do operate lack basic facilities -- a 2006 government study found that more than half do not have electricity and 40 percent have no bathrooms. About a third of students drop out by the fifth grade. Teachers, meanwhile, earn as little as $50 a month, less in many cases than that of a domestic servant. The low pay mirrors teachers' perceived value in Pakistani society.

"The social status of teachers is low, compared with other professions," said Rehana Masrur, dean of the education department at Allama Iqbal Open University in Islamabad. "If someone is doing nothing and has no future, people say, 'Why doesn't he become a teacher?' "

Top government officials have little incentive to change that, experts here say. Although the vast majority of Pakistanis must choose between the public schools or madrassas for their children, Pakistan's well-to-do can send their kids to private schools, many of which are considered world-class.

Javed Ashraf Qazi, a former Pakistani education minister, said the United States has not helped by frittering away much of its assistance budget on poorly defined programs, such as conflict-resolution training, which he said leave no enduring impact. What Pakistan really needs, he said, is a network of vocational training institutes that can prepare students for the workplace.

"What would help is something that is lasting," he said. "The U.S. is spending more money, but spending it in a way that it does not leave any impact."

But Pervez Hoodbhoy, a noted nuclear physicist at Islamabad's Quaid-i-Azam University and a longtime proponent of education reform, said Pakistan needs something more fundamental.

"I don't think it's a matter of money. The more you throw at the system, the faster it leaks out," he said. "There has to be a desire to improve. The U.S. can't create that desire. When Pakistanis feel they need a different kind of education system, that's when it will improve."

In Miami's Little Haiti, frustration and fear mount among kin of quake victims

Image via Wikipedia

By Peter Whoriskey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 17, 2010; A16

MIAMI -- In this city's Little Haiti, anxious text messages relay the news.

From under the earthquake's rubble, a relative punches into a cellphone: "I'm trapped." Survivors running out of water plead for someone to help. Often the messages are just inquiries: Has anyone heard from this friend, that family member?

The earthquake in Haiti has dismayed television viewers across the United States. But many people here are unnerved not just by their closeness to the site of the disaster but also by the difficulty of responding before it's too late. Bottlenecks have kept many supplies and rescuers from getting to Haiti and, more personally, prevented Haitian Americans from answering requests from stricken relatives.

In a demonstration of concern, Vice President Biden made two stops in Little Haiti on Saturday, promising government and church leaders that help was on the way for the residents of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital.

"On behalf of the administration, our hearts ache for you," Biden told about 30 officials gathered Saturday morning at the Little Haiti Cultural Center.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Marie Etienne, a nursing professor at Miami Dade College, attended one meeting. She has been frustrated because a group of hundreds of Haitian American nurses that she organized has been unable to reach the island.

"It's heartbreaking," she said. "We see things on TV, and we feel powerless."

The sense of danger that comes with each passing hour is acute. Over the past few days, this is what Rasha Cameau, 40, the manager of a Haitian cultural center here, has learned via text messages from her sister:

Her elderly parents, their house flattened, have no food.

Her cousin, who had sent the text message alerting people that he was buried in the rubble, died before he could be rescued.

Her uncle is dead, too.

Image by Southworth Sailor via Flickr

"I keep telling my parents that help is coming so they won't lose hope," she said, tearing up.

Her husband has volunteered to join rescue efforts, and she is helping through the city of Miami, her employer.

But, she said, "My dad keeps saying: 'We are going to die here.' "

The urge to assist, nonetheless, has spurred numerous efforts.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Miami is pressing for clearance to bring Haitian children orphaned by the earthquake into the United States in an operation similar to one that brought thousands of Cuban children to this country after the 1959 revolution. The Cuban operation was known as Pedro Pan; the prospective Haitian one has been dubbed Pierre Pan. On Saturday, church officials asked Biden to help clear the way for the flights.

With some predicting another migratory exodus from Haiti, Miami-Dade County is reviewing what it calls a mass migration plan. So far, there have been no signs of organized attempts to flee Haiti.

Grass-roots donations have surged. Every Miami-Dade library, fire station and police district station is being organized to handle the outpouring. Employees at the Walgreens in Little Haiti, where six of 30 workers have yet to hear from relatives in Haiti, have set up a $5 carwash operation to raise money. Corporate donations have funded a call center where Haitian Americans can call home. Community activists are planning to hold a public wake in Little Haiti Sunday night.

Local Haitian radio personality Piman Bouk (Haitian Creole for "hot pepper") said the need to help is felt intensely. Bouk, a Christian, has been on the radio advising people to "forget about the voodoo."

"So many people are in the ground, in the rubble," he said in front of his restaurant in Little Haiti. "They don't eat. They don't drink. They are suffering. If they are still alive, we must say, 'Thanks be to God.' "

"The entire community is emotionally attached to Haiti, and it's been rough," said Rep. Kendrick B. Meek (D-Fla.), who has convened meetings in the area to coordinate relief efforts. "People really want to do something."

Haitian American employees form the base of a number of big companies in the region, Meek said, many of them at hotels, prompting firms to offer help.

In a blog post last week, Marriott International Chairman Bill Marriott, writing from the Harbor Beach Marriott in Fort Lauderdale, said that more than a third of the "associates" at the hotel are Haitian and have been affected by the disaster.

"They are struggling with trying to find out what has happened to their families and loved ones," Marriott wrote. "They have a group get-together for prayer and song every morning and our hearts go out to them all."

Community leaders and others say they hope that the attention to the poverty-stricken nation will last. On his visit Saturday, Biden promised that it would.

He said the Obama administration views earthquake relief as a possibly years-long effort.

"We are there to rescue," Biden told the community leaders. "We are there to secure. We are there to rebuild.

"This president does not view this as a humanitarian mission that is going to have a life cycle of a month. This will be on our radar screen -- dead-center -- long after it is off of the CNN crawl at the bottom of the screen."

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• Haitian orphans could be airlifted to Miami for resettlement (guardian.co.uk)

Prospective parents grow more worried about Haiti's orphans

Image by stevendepolo via Flickr

By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 17, 2010; A14

Adoption agencies and prospective parents across the United States are growing increasingly alarmed about the long-term fate of an estimated 50,000 children who were living in Haitian orphanages when the earthquake hit.

Between 800 and 900 of the children were in the process of being adopted by families in the United States. An additional 1,500 had been matched with European families, mostly in France and the Netherlands.

The remaining children include many who might not technically be orphans but whose families could not afford to care for them, said Tom DiFilipo, president of the Joint Council on International Children's Services, a Washington-based child welfare organization that has taken the lead on negotiating their status with U.S. authorities.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

So far, there have been no reports of deaths at orphanages, DiFilipo said. But many of Haiti's orphanages, which include 177 official government-approved facilities and 200 or so ad hoc groups providing care, remain unaccounted for. Those that have sent news often describe dire conditions.

"We're getting e-mails and texts from orphanage directors saying, 'We're out of water, our roads are blocked. We made it to the market, and there was nothing there because there was so much looting,' " DiFilipo said. "I can't put into words how worried I am. 'Extremely' doesn't cut it. It's at a crisis stage."

Although all Haitians in the earthquake zone require assistance, DiFilipo added, children in orphanages are among those with the toughest odds of survival.

"They don't have a next-door neighbor to lend them a hand. They don't have an aunt to bring them into their home or a grandmother to hold their hand and comfort them," he said. "They have a few people in an orphanage, and that's it."

Like many U.S.-based liaisons to Haitian orphanages, Diana Boni has been frantically alerting every humanitarian aid group she can think of to the plight of the orphanage she works with, BRESMA in Port-au-Prince. The nonprofit group cares for 150 children ranging from babies and toddlers to 13-year-olds.

One of the BRESMA's three concrete-block houses completely collapsed. A second was so badly damaged that the children are sleeping on the lawn outside. The third building emerged intact but is now crammed with the children from the first house.

Directing aid workers to the site is a challenge in a neighborhood that was hard to navigate even before the quake.

"I'm giving directions like, 'Go up the hill on Delmas where the Caribbean market used to be and turn left," said Boni, 39, who lives in South Dakota and is Haiti program coordinator for Kentucky Adoption Services, a nonprofit group.

By Friday afternoon, Boni's voice was hoarse from worry and lack of sleep. One of the houses was provided for, but if help doesn't reach the other soon, she said in a tearful whisper, "I'm out of water tonight."

Then her computer chirped with an e-mail arrival. "It looks like a CNN crew has arrived there!" she exclaimed. "I hope they've brought water."

For prospective parents in the United States, the wait for news has been equally excruciating.

Andrea Vanderhoff of Pella, Iowa, was thrilled to hear from an ABC news crew that a boy and his sister she has been waiting to adopt through the Central Texas Orphan Mission Alliance were safe. But "once that ABC crew leaves, there's going to be no one there," she said fretfully. "These are orphans. They have no one."

During the two years that Vanderhoff and her husband have been waiting for the adoption paperwork to go through, they have visited the children multiple times. "They are already calling us Mama and Papa," she said. "If we need to fly there to get them, I would do it today, but right now it doesn't sound like they would let us in."

In an effort to better coordinate relief efforts, the Joint Council on International Children's Services has started a database of orphanages and known orphans on its Web site, http://www.jcics.org.

The group hopes the list will eventually help it expedite moving the orphans to the United States and Europe. The easier cases are ones in which adoptions were already approved by Haitian authorities and the children were awaiting a U.S. or European visa. More complicated is the situation of children who were matched with a family but whose adoption had not been certified.

In an e-mail, Department of Homeland Security spokesman Matthew Chandler said, "We understand the deep concern these prospective adoptive parents feel about the welfare of these children, and we are actively working to identify available options in light of the recent tragedy."

Staff writer Tara Bahrampour contributed to this report.