Ready for your Friday World Tour? We touch down in Iran just in time for the New Year celebrations—for which thousands of books are exchanged! Then off to the States, where writers of all backgrounds are reacting to the political tumult of the times. Finally in Morocco, we’ll catch the National Conference on the Arabic Language. Let’s get going!
Poupeh Missaghi, Editor-at-Large for Iran, updates on the New Year celebrations:
The Persian year of 1395 (SH for solar Hijri calendar) will come to an end and give way to the year 1396 on Monday March 21st, the day of the spring equinox, at exactly 13:58:40 Iran’s local time. The arrival of the New Year and spring is celebrated with various Nowruz (literally meaning “new day”) traditions such as haft sin, the special table spreading that consists of seven different items all starting with the Persian letter س [sin or the “s” letter], each symbolizing one thing or another. The International Nowruz Day was inscribed on the list of UN’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009.
To welcome the New Year, the Iranian literary community, like the previous year, has set up a campaign entitled Eydane ye Ketab [Nowruz gifts of book]. It began on March 5th and will run for a month, aiming to promote buying books as eydi (gifts for the Persian New Year) for friends and family instead of offering money or other gifts, or even as replacements for the calendars that companies widely give out as promotional year-end gifts. More than four thousand publishers around the country are part of this campaign and offer more than one million titles with special prices. In the first seven days of the campaign, more than 190,000 books were sold.
Some of the translation titles on the bestsellers list of the Eydane, have included: The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi by Elif Şafak; Me Before You by Jojo Moyes; A Fraction of a Whole by Steve Totlz; After You by Jojo Moyes; Asshole No More, The Original Self-Help Guide for Recovering Assholes and Their Victims by Xavier Crement; The 52-Story Treehouse by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton; One Plus One by Jojo Moyes; and The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
Along with the campaign, journalists, literary figures, and individual readers, have also begun tweeting their suggestions of book titles; either as “Here is my year-long list of books I have enjoyed reading” or “Best book I read in 1395” or “Books for eydi suggestions.” Popular hashtags used include: #کتاب۹۵ and #عیدی + #کتاب .
On another front, many daily newspapers and journals (monthly, weekly, etc.) publish and distribute special issues for the upcoming New Year during the final weeks of the current year. Newspapers call these Saalnamehs [year-end journals] and the magazines simply call theirs Nowruz Special Issue. These annual year-end journals look back at the events of the year in different areas such as politics (domestic and international), social issues, arts and literature, sports, the environment, etc., offering in-depth analyses and interviews. They often put together the material with the theme of the arrival of spring or the New Year and its traditions. With so many different choices and some journals having page counts running into the hundreds (for example Mehrnameh at 520 pages, Tajrobeh at 264 pages), they offer their readers more than enough reading material for the week-long national holiday; for schools and some of the private sector, the holiday runs as long as thirteen days—until Sizda Bedar, or Nature’s Day, brings an end to the Nowruz festivities.
Nozomi Saito, Senior Executive Assistant, has the scoop on literary dissidence happening in the U.S.:
In US news, the juncture of transnationalism and literature is a hotbed of political activity. In the past two weeks, Arkansas legislature proposed a bill to ban any books by Howard Zinn, the author best known for A People’s History of the United States, which gives an account of US history from the perspective of the disenfranchised and exploited. The current administration’s restriction of certain freedoms, such as freedom of the press, while abusing the power of language with the use of “alternative facts,” has motivated librarians at the American Library Association to develop new systems for fact-checking.
The topic of migration continues to be a concern with Trump’s second immigration ban, meanwhile—how timely—the critically acclaimed Exit West by Mohsin Hamid just hit the shelves this past week. Reviewed by The Seattle Times as “eerily prescient,” Exit West depicts the loss, hope, and endurance of a young couple as they flee a war-torn country to seek refuge in an unnamed Western promised land. Pulitzer Prize-winner Viet Thanh Nguyen remarks that this is a story “not only of the present but of the future, where migration will be the norm.”
The theme of immigration is part of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, which just came out this week. The Washington Post calls it a “funny, first novel about freshman love at Harvard,” but it is also more than that, as Batuman yokes the conventional bildungsroman form with a protagonist whose parents are Turkish immigrants. The Idiot is ultimately about coming of age in the global era, where it is a given that one’s education and the literary worlds that shape us are so often part of a series of transnational exchanges.
Finally, Bandi’s The Accusation also came out this past week from Grove Press. The story behind the acquisition and eventual publication of the book itself reads like a tale of literary espionage and resistance, for Bandi, a current resident of North Korea, had only one manuscript, which had to be smuggled out of the country to be published.
And Editor-at-Large Jessie Stoolman reports from Morocco:
This past week at the National Library in Rabat, the National Coalition for Arabic Language organized its fourth National Conference on the Arabic Language. Like in previous years, scholars, political figures, and writers gathered to discuss the state of the Arabic language in Morocco—a complicated and nuanced topic for a country that has at least two official languages, Arabic and Amazigh (as recognized by its 2011 constitution), and many more, depending on whom you ask.
For a more literary approach to discussion of language and identity, check out Mohamed Hmoudane’s presentation and signing of his most recent book, État d’urgence (Virgule, 2016). This illustrated, book-length poem was penned in response to the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels. Although his tour in Morocco ends today, you can still catch him between March 24th and 27th at the Livre Paris in Paris, France. Hmoudane, Moroccan poet and novelist, has been living in France since 1989 and has written various collections of poetry (Parole prise, parole donnée; Blanche Mécanique; Incandescence; and Attentat), as well as two novels (French Dream and La Ciel, Hassan II et Maman France). His work, some of which has been translated into English, is known for being genre-bending, blurring the lines between novel writing and poetry.
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