Having barely emerged from my sickbed over the last few days I decided to check in on the world, only to discover the sickening, horrific news that today the Israeli settler state launched a series of murderous attacks on the Palestinian nation, bombing over 100 sites in Gaza. The initial death toll, mostly civilian, is 200, with 600 wounded. The massacre has of course generated immediate outrage--and rage--worldwide, and an upswelling of sympathy and solidarity for the suffering people of Palestine, who had already been enduring a brutal blockade in Gaza. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine has called for protest actions; I'm sure these will break out quickly. I'm sorry I'm too sick to attend the demonstration that will no doubt be called in New York, because I feel a special obligation as Jew to always disassociate myself from the criminal Zionist state and reiterate my loyalty to the oppressed people struggling for self-determination. Long live Palestine!
Update: Subsequent posts about Gaza and Palestine can be found here and here and here.
Christini on Winterson and Ngugi
In response to an item I posted last week about Jeanette Winterson, Tony Christini of A Practical Policy emailed me the following note, which I post with his permission:
Per usual, I've been continuing to keep up with your thoughtful weblog. Just wanted to note that while the Winterson quote is wonderful, litblog co-op has equally pithy quotes by Ngugi wa Thiong'o that go much further, in my view.Tony points us to his lengthy piece "Fiction Gutted: The Establishment and the Novel" for more of his thoughts on this.
I really appreciated Winterson's novel The Passion, far and away her best fiction, to me, though I haven't read her recent fiction.
Ngugi's accurately self-described global epic novel from Africa, Wizard of the Crow (2006), is easily among the very best, most vital, most important works of contemporary fiction, rare, seems to me. As one Amazon reviewer noted, accurately I think, we would be lucky to have such a work from the U.S. I've written just a little about it thus far (some of which I may be reincorporating soon on my weblog). Such a work from the U.S. (or one that goes farther sociopolitically) would have to be fought for, I think, in a variety of ways.
Ngugi on the responsibility of literature
That Litblog Co-op item Tony referenced above includes a series of fascinating quotations from Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Here are two that really speak to me:
Fiction cannot be the agent of change. The people are the agent of change. All writers can do is really try to point out where things went wrong. They can do no more than that. But fiction should be firmly on the side of the oppressed. Fiction should firmly embody the aspirations and hopes of the majority--of the peasants and workers.
and
Literature is indeed a powerful weapon. I believe that we in Africa or anywhere else for that matter have to use literature deliberately and consciously as a weapon of struggle in two ways: 1) first, by trying as much as possible to correctly reflect the world of struggle in all its stark reality, and b) secondly, by weighting our sympathies on the side of those forces struggling against national and class oppression and exploitation, say, against the entire system of imperialism in the world today. I believe that the more conscious a writer is about the social forces at work in his society and in the world, the more effective he or she is likely to be as a writer. We writers must reject the bourgeois image of a writer as a mindless genius.
