Neil MacFarquhar's Textured View of the Middle East

In his engrossing new book, “The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East”(Public Affairs, $27), former New York Times Cairo bureau chief Neil MacFarquhar takes a sledgehammer to monolithic views and stereotypes of the Middle East by profiling dissidents, rebels and bloggers who are battling repressive regimes from Egypt to Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

Raised in Libya in the 1960s and fluent in Arabic, MacFarquhar spent two decades as a journalist in the Middle East. In his book, he sets out to show a widely diverse region where wit and black humor are used to combat dictators and the omnipresent secret police. MacFarquhar interviews the host of a Lebanese game show glorifying suicide bombers, but then spends time with a Kuwaiti sex therapist who is a satellite TV icon in the Arab-speaking world. He finds that the Jordanian secret police has their own website, and wonders if one of the FAQs should be, “How do I find what dungeon my relative is in?” MacFarquhar’s book is a combination of history, memoir and travelogue, taking the reader through a vibrant, modern Middle East that is on the cusp of dramatic social and political change.

MacFarquhar, 49, worked for the Associated Press and the New York Times in the Middle East, and presently covers the United Nations for the Times. He met with freelance writer Dylan Foley in a cafe in Manhattan.

Q. What motivated you to write this book?

A. The book was something I always wanted to do, having spent so much time in the region. I got the end of my stint in Cairo, and I wasn’t sure if I had a book because I covered so much violence. The overwhelming amount of time I spent in the region was running off to bombings and all sorts of mayhem. I took all my notebooks, packed them in a trunk and went to the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. They gave me a cabin and for six weeks I read through my old notebooks. I downloaded my stories that I had written in a five-year period. There were 460. I took out all the stories that dealt with violence or explosions. There were 60 stories left.

Q. You write about the outside image of the Middle East, versus the internal reality of sophisticated people often living under brutal dictatorships. How would you describe the varied people of the Middle East?

A. The people who live in these countries are great. The Egyptians and Lebanese have wicked senses of humor, which makes surviving in difficult situations possible. The food is wonderful. The people are incredibly hospitable, despite the hostility towards Americans because of American policies towards the region.

Q. Jordan is viewed by some its own dissidents as the “best of the worst” dictatorships in the region. Could you tell me the story of Emad Hajjaj, the Jordanian cartoonist?

A. Hajjaj wrote a cartoon showing the secret police as just a hand hovering over society. He was called in by the secret police and they said, “Never mention us in a cartoon again, ever.” I asked, “Did you obey?” He looked at me and said, “Are you kidding? We barely feel comfortable talking about the secret police when we are alone with our wives in bed.”

Q. You profile Professor Bakr, a woman Saudi rebel who fights the brutal regime against impossible odds. What are Saudi women like?

A. The Saudi women are amazing. They are so strong. You don’t know if it is because they have been repressed for so long or they have always been that way. The women are outspoken and educated. It is a source of frustration that the system doesn’t let them exercise their ambitions. Saudi Arabia has a horribly repressive system. When you spend any time there, you appreciate our separation of church and state.

Q. Opponents to the Syrian dictatorship have no newspapers and are almost completely blocked from the Internet. How do see the situation in Syria?

A. It is sad because it is a country where so much potential has been squashed. A lot of people with talent and brains don’t leave the country because they don’t want to spend their lives fighting the system. I knew this [human-rights] lawyer named Bunni who wound up in jail. He was a giddy optimist, but you have to be one to take the system on.

Colum McCann's Epic Novel of 1970s New York City

The Irish writer Colum McCann’s bold new novel “Let the Great World Spin” takes place in New York City on and around August 7, 1974, when the Frenchman Phillipe Petit carried out his death-defying tightrope walk between the towers of the World Trade Center. In a glorious panoramic view of the city, the book goes high and low, from Petit’s walk to Claire, a Park Avenue matron grieving over the death of her son in Vietnam, to the lives of Corrigan, an Irish priest in the Bronx, and Tillie and Jazzlyn, the mother-daughter prostitutes he befriends. McCann’s complex cast of characters creates a gritty and vibrant chronicle of an almost-bankrupt metropolis.

McCann spoke with the writer Dylan Foley at his New York City apartment.

Dylan Foley: Why did you start this novel at the World Trade Center?
Colum McCann: In one sense, it has to begin with 9-11. My father-in-law was in Tower Two, the first building hit and the second to come down. We were living on East 71st Street. It was 9 a.m. My sister called all hysterical from London. I turned on the television and saw the burning. My wife Alison was putting a shirt on our son Johnny Michael. She was kneeling on the floor, buttoning him up. What do I do, what do I say? My father-in-law was on the 59th floor. We didn’t know if he’s going to get out. It was 2 p.m. when he finally walked up to us, covered in ash. My three-year-old Isabel ran to him, “Poppy, Poppy,” all happy, then she ran away and hid. I found her and asked what’s wrong, and she said, “Poppy’s burning, he’s burning from the inside.”

Foley: You don’t even mention the collapse of the towers in the novel. Why?
McCann: For me, there were two towers in the novel, and that was Corrigan and Jazzlyn. They are dead in the first chapter. I didn’t realize this at first, but I spent the rest of the novel building them up. A lot of this is unconscious, but I feel the book is an anti-narrative of the 9-11 experience. The novel doesn’t want to cling to all the grief, all the sadness. I am interested in grace and recovery, and making sense of the small lives at the bottom, like Tillie and Jazzlyn.

Foley: How did Phillipe Petit’s famous walk become part of the novel?
McCann: I looked to 1974, first of all, and there was Phillipe Petit and his tightrope walk. I wanted the image of the wire between the towers. I was originally going to do the book about Petit and have him fall in the middle. I wanted to rewrite history. I hope people will forget Petit when they read the novel. He dissolves throughout the book. At the end, you should only remember the two little girls, daughters of a dead prostitute, being ripped from their home in the housing projects, and it looks like they are being taken away to lives of absolute misery. We have forgotten the tightrope and are down at street level.
Foley: How did you wind up moving from Petit to hookers working under an expressway?
McCann: Part of it was luck and accident. I knew I wanted to write about Corrigan, who was initially based on the activist priest Daniel Berrigan. I knew I had to have Corrigan live in the projects. The Irishman led me to those women.
Foley: Tillie turns her 17-year-old daughter into a hooker, and is indirectly responsible for her death. How did you create Tillie’s voice for her 32-page suicide monologue?
McCann: It took me a long time to get the voice of Tillie. It was four or five months. I went out with the writer and Bronx police detective Ed Conlon. I read the memoir of the pimp Iceberg Slim. I spoke to some women on the stroll, but there are no hookers left from the 1970s. I told Alison that I can’t do it, that Tillie is too far away. One night, I had a simple line, something like “The skinniest dog I ever saw was on the side of the Greyhound Buses.” I wrote all night and wound up with six pages. Tillie started whispering all this stuff to me--“I’m Rosa Parks. I’m black and on the pavement. I’m a chewing gum spot.” I wanted to get at Tillie, I wanted to get at a Walt Whitmanesque view of the city, to list all these people. That is what I do well, accessing “the other.” I had some cops read the section. They said, “This is perfect. This is a woman we know.” Part of it was knowing that Tillie was telling her story from her prison cell, planning to commit suicide. That helped. I have to be careful, but I do think that this is my best piece of writing, the Tillie section.

Foley: How did you come up with the ending, which moves forward to 2006?
McCann: I didn’t know how the novel was going to end. I was going to have Phillipe Petit walk across the Grand Canyon. Then Jaslyn, Jazzlyn’s daughter, came along. She suggested to me that she was alive and wanted to finish the book. I liked her and worked hard on getting her voice right. I didn’t want her to be too cute or too highly sexualized. Her whole story broke open.

Foley: Did you set out to write an epic novel about a New York City on the verge of bankruptcy and an America scarred by Vietnam and Watergate?
McCann: Yes. Yes, I kind of did set out to write an epic. Part of me thought that I failed with “Zoli,” my novel on the Gypsies and Romany culture in Europe. I wanted to bounce back fast. First of all, every novel is a failure. I really believe that. You can never achieve what you truly want to achieve. That thing you dreamt on the riverbank is never the thing you achieve when you are back at the writing table, or when the paper is coming out of the printer. With this book, I felt I got what I wanted to get across.

Foley: And what did you want to get across?
McCann: If I had a gun to my head, and somebody asked me what this book was about, I would say it’s about achieving grace in the face of trauma and not making a grief-fest out of 9-11. We shouldn’t use 9-11 as an excuse to bomb Iraq or Afghanistan, not in our name. We have to look at ourselves instead.

Foley: Your title “Let the Great World Spin” comes from an Alfred Tennyson poem. What does it mean to you?
McCann: The world goes on and we have to go on with it. We have to achieve some modicum of beauty. The idea that Jazzlyn’s two girls would be sent to some horrible state school, I just couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t have thought that I had achieved any kind of grace for my own children or the people around me. We can look at the crap and the grime and the torments in the world around us, and still find something beautiful in the end. That’s my responsibility to what I know in my heart and what I feel about the world. I do think it is a bit harder to be optimistic than to be cynical.

Q&A: Ian Rankin on Detective Inspector Rebus' Last Case

In 1987, a Scottish graduate student named Ian Rankin created the grouchy Edinburgh police detective John Rebus. The chain-smoking, hard-drinking Rebus exposed the underbelly of Edinburgh society, a world of addicts, gangsters and conmen, with the detective often following corruption up to the highest government levels. From his novels “Knots and Crosses” to “The Naming of the Dead,” Rankin helped elevate the Rebus series into the pantheon of the literary detective mysteries.

In Rankin’s 17th Rebus novel “Exit Music”(Little, Brown, $25) the tough and bitter detective inspector is 10 days away from his mandatory retirement at 60. Rebus must solve the grisly murder of a a prominent Russian dissident poet while a delegation of Russian oligarchs are in Edinburgh. At the same time, his nemesis, the brutal ganglord Cafferty, is given a savage beating. Rebus tangles with his own police brass in an attempt to solve a gritty, convoluted murder where everything is not that it seems.

Rankin, 48, spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from his home in Edinburgh.

Q. How did you wind up retiring Rebus in his 17th mystery?

A. A few years ago, an Edinburgh detective I know said to me, “Hey, this guy Rebus was 40 in 1987, right?8 0 I said yeah. “In 2007,” he said, “he’s going to be 60. If he’s a cop in Scotland, he’s going to have to retire.”

When I wrote the first book, I never planned to write a series. Rebus was actually supposed to die in the first novel. I was trying to write an updated version of “Jekyll and Hyde” with a cop instead of a doctor. Quite early in the series, I decided the books would take place over a real space of time and would reflect the changes in the world around me.

The reason I wrote the first book was in part because there was an Edinburgh that no one was thinking about. People thought that Edinburgh was a very quiet, genteel city where nothing happened. Away from the tourist spots, there were areas of great deprivation and the problems of drugs, drug violence and prostitution. I wanted to write about contemporary society and its problems.

Q. You’ve said that Rebus came out of your head fully formed in 1987. How has he changed in the last 20 years?

A. Rebus has changed dramatically over time. Slowly over the course of the series, I’ve given him my taste in music. In 1987, he liked classical music and jazz, but I realized it was easier for me to write about rock and roll. Rebus has been changed by every case has undertaken. He evolved with each book, becoming more cynical, and his health and personal life continued to deteriorate. The only thing that saves him is hi s job. That has been his whole life and that makes me worry about him now that he is retired.

Q. Rebus’ cat-and-mouse game with the master criminal Cafferty went on for more than two decades. How did Cafferty develop as a character?

A. In my third book, Cafferty appeared for only six lines as a criminal Rebus was giving evidence against. It was a couple of books later that I realized that Cafferty was a very good way of capturing all of society’s bad stuff in one character. He became Rebus’ Moriarty. Like Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty, Rebus and Cafferty are very similar. They have the same background, they are the same age and they both feel like dinosaurs, the last of a dying breed. You can never tell if they are going to become bosom buddies or if they are going to destroy each other. For both men, the lives they have chosen for themselves are lives without family and friends. Rebus rejects the nice women I’ve given him to play with. He’s just not very good at relationships.

Q. Detective Inspector Rebus pulled you out of graduate school and turned you into a bestselling author. Is it a shock that the crotchety old Rebus has retired?

A. I haven’t thought much about it until people ask me. I have a lot of other projects going on. If I want to bring Rebus back, there are realistic ways to do it. Retired cops often come back to handle cases on the Cold Case Review Team. Detective Sergeant Siobahn Clarke, his sidekick, could take over the series, with Rebus being there to help or to hinder the future cases.

Q&A with Ed Park on his debut novel "Personal Days"

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger on June 22, 2008)

“The Ninth Circle of Cubicle Hell”

In Ed Park’s hilarious debut novel “Personal Days”(Random House, $13), a crew of office drones wait at a unnamed New York City corporate hell for the downsizing ax to fall. In a witty satire of office culture, Park harnesses the Orwellian doublespeak of corporate bloodletting, where workers are stripped of tasks and fired by speakerphone, while the survivors wait for the ominous “Californians” to fly in and brutally fire the rest. An eerie calm settles in as the workers realize that someone is out to destroy the company.

“Personal Days” was inspired in part by the corporate gutting of the once-venerable Village Voice, where Park was fired as an editor in 2006. In his dead-on character studies, Park introduces the reader to Pru, the ex-graduate-student-turned-cubicle inmate, and Jack II, who gives unwanted “jackrubs.” There is Sprout, the Canadian boss who may be evil, and the bizarre Grime, a British worker who has a murky past and an impenetrable accent. There is the highly neurotic Lars, and Jill, who compiles the “Jilliad,” a collection of ludicrous business writings that becomes an almost holy text for the remaining workers. The literary coup at the end of the novel is a 52-page sentence, written by a worker trapped in an elevator with a dying laptop, answering all mysteries and making a strangled plea for love.

Park, 37, was raised in Buffalo and educated at Yale and Columbia universities. He was the editor of the Village Voice Literary Supplement and is a founding editor of “The Believer.” Park spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley at a cafe not far from his Manhattan apartment.

Q. You started writing fragments of “Personal Days” during the mass firings and layoffs at the Village Voice. What was the process?

A. At some point in 2005, I started writing and didn’t really know what I was working on. “Personal Days” is definitely not a roman a clef about the Voice, but as things at the Voice started going downhill more and more, there was more material. I had never written about the office before and all of a sudden, I was sitting on this great material--all these interesting hierarchies, the interactions between people in the office and the language they use. As the downsizing accelerated, this chaos and confusion magnified everything. The stories were screaming to be used.

For most people at work, there is the mystery, who rules over me? During the Voice downsizing, you had executives flying in from out of town. They have this embarrassingly dumb swagger and they pretend they know everything, which they clearly don’t. I was treated shabbily, but there were people treated worse. I eventually was fired over speakerphone.

Q. The novel is written in three distinct sections--a breezy, first-person narrative, an ominous report written in outline form and a 52-page single sentence. Why?

A. If you are going to write a novel about restructuring a company, you should have a structure that is changing, that is being restructured. That’s why there are three distinct narratives in the novel. The first section is “bad things are happening,” but it is entertaining and written in bite-sized sections. The second section is more anonymous. You have this report but who wrote it? The third section needed to be radically different. It is a love letter and a solution to various mysteries.

Q. The boss Sprout seems to be evil, but with a human face. How did he evolve in the novel?

A. I thought it was funny to have a character like Sprout who was described as “a proud native of Canada.” I started trying to make Sprout be seen as a bad guy through the eyes of his employees. By the end, I wanted him to be a more sympathetic character. You have to figure out the position that he was put in with the firings and who put him there.

Q. In one hysterical section, a fired worker named Jill leaves behind a notebook called “The Jilliad,” a compilation of absurd business sayings. How did you write this?

A. The Jilliad is the one part I didn’t write on my laptop. I wrote it using an old-fashioned typewriter. The typewriter gave the section a neat tone. Jill is this milquetoast character who won’t go into therapy because she is too shy. On the other hand, she is this incredible project going on, that speaks to incredible depths of character. I made all the business homilies up. It was me doing a workout on the typewriter.

Paul Theroux on Blindness in "Blinding Light"

(Originally published in the Denver Post, July 2005)

By Dylan Foley

In his 24th novel, “Blinding Light,” Paul Theroux writes about Slade Steadman, a travel writer who published one great book about sneaking across borders 20 years ago, but has not written any books since. The book “Trespassing” made Steadman fabulously wealthy through a clothing line, but has done nothing for his brutal writer’s block. He travels down to Ecuador to find a cure, takes a psychotropic and becomes a visionary, but also goes blind.

Theroux is written an incredibly witty, sensual novel about blindness, hubris, trespassing over borders and transgressions against the people. Theroux also writes a major cameo for Chappaqua’s most famous resident: Bill Clinton, who Theroux considers to be one of the great modern tragic figures.

The inspiration for Theroux’s latest novel came when he almost lost his own sight. “I had a double cataract operation in 1999,” said Theroux, at a New York hotel during the start of his book tour. “It was traumatic because I wasn’t that old. It made me really think about blindness. I wondered if there was a drug that could make you blind.”

At 64, Theroux is tan and robust, fresh from a recent trip to India. He says that the book took him six years to write. Along the way, Theroux explored the inability to write. “The book is also about writer’s block, for even writers like myself with 40 books can have writer’s block,” he says. But it is also the American condition of being a one-hit wonder. In other countries, we don’t have that problem. You can write on book and become celebrated. Here it becomes a serious problem.”

Theroux reels off a list of the great one-hit wonders: “Ralph Ellison and ‘The Invisible Man.’ Harper Lee and “To Kill a Mockingbird.’ And J.D. Salinger, who really only had the one great novel, ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’”

Theroux went down to Ecuador in 2000 on a psychotropic drug tour to try ayahuasca, a hallucenogen used by native South Americans. “I got sick and threw up,” he says, “and I had auditory sensations of insight, lights shining and visions of snakes and animals.” Theroux was also offered datura, a stronger drug that has harsh side effects. “I didn’t try datura because I didn’t want to go blind.”

Theroux has Steadman try datura and he becomes addicted to it. Steadman goes temporarily blind. He sees into people’s souls and even rescues a child who is drowning. Using his doctor girlfriend Ava as an assistant, he writes what he believes will be the greatest American novel ever. They begin to carry out complicated sexual fantasies, acting out the carnal experiences of Steadman’s youth.

“Steadman doesn’t have omnipotence, so much as prescience and second sight,” says Theroux. “He becomes a seer, for a lot of seers are blind.”

Theroux himself has been one of the most famous travel writers of the past 30 years, with his classic books “Riding the Iron Rooster” and “The Great Railway Bazaar.” At the beginning of the new novel, Theroux indulges in a satire of the yuppie travel world.

While in Ecuador, Steadman encounters a tour of four wealthy tourists. They spend huge sums of money to go to the most remote places in the world--Tibet, Rwanda and now a South American jungle drug tour. The group is blind to their own arrogance, greed and infidelity. Steadman, with his drug-enhanced senses, gives them their comeuppance.

Theroux, like other professional travelers before him, laments the overtouristed parts of the world. “When I was traveling Africa in the 1960s, there were still wonderful places to see,” he says. “Now even the remote places have been trashed.”

Instead of going to far-flung places where everybody else goes, Theroux urges intrepid travelers to go deep. “Travel isn’t about going to remote places anymore,” he says. “It is about going deep. There is always a place that has been misunderstood, but can be penetrated or understood by traveling there in a different way. A travel editor boasted to me that he’d been to Tibet. I said, ‘I would have been more impressed if you had gone to a remote part of Jackson, Mississippi, to an inner city ghetto.’ There is all kind of activity there, good, bad and ugly.”

Bill Clinton’s several extended cameos in the novel are hysterical. Theroux’s portrait of the brilliant and needy ex-president are dead on. The time is 1997, right on the cusp of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Steadman and Clinton meet at a big fundraiser on Martha’s Vineyard. Clinton embraces the blind Steadman as a new friend and talisman. Steadman winds up visiting the White House and senses the corruption of the people at a state dinner and the moral rot in the walls of the building itself.

It was Theroux’s leisure reading of a particular government document that brought Clinton into the novel. “What interested me a lot was the Starr Report,” says Theroux, of the massive report prying into Clinton’s personal indiscretions. “A lot of people haven’t read it. I can tell you it is pretty interesting. It is a total invasion of privacy on the level of going into someone’s house who you barely knew, opening all the drawers and looked at letters, money, devices and secrets. Not big secrets, but appalling secrets. Steadman meets Clinton and thinks that he’s got a secret, that there’s something rumbling in the background.”

For Theroux, Clinton is not only a tragic character in the Greek sense, where a man’s flaws bring about his downfall, but he’s almost a fictional figure. “People have written about Clinton, but it is the Clinton metaphor that interests me,” says Theroux. “It is almost like Clinton is a fictional character. The tragedy with Clinton was that everyone saw into the most intimate aspects of his life. No one wants that. Where does it happen? Only in novels, where the omniscient narrator peers into the crevices of a man’s life. That’s why Clinton is a fictional character to me.”

With 40 books under his belt, including novels, travel books and memoirs, Theroux said that one of the challenges is not to repeat himself, to do something new. “I wanted this book to be an erotic novel, which is one of the things I really haven’t written before,” he says. “It is a great area, to plumb a character’s personal, sexual fantasies. Writing about sex is very difficult to do and very easy to mock. People are very conflicted in reading about sex. There is very little in prose fiction nowadays. Once there was a lot of it.”

Steadman’s visionary blindness eventually makes him insufferable, until he finds that he is permanently blind. “The magic potion has cast a spell on him,” says Theroux. “Steadman is arrogant and hubristic, but he’s in for a mighty fall. He thinks he can control his blindness like Dr. Jekyll thinks he can control Mr. Hyde. The arrogance is punished when he loses control over going blind.”

The subtext of “Blinding Light” may be the general idea of the writing life. Living with Steadman for the past six years, Theroux says he has insights into his character and maybe that of all writers. “A writer who spends all his time at home is pretty unbalanced,” he says. “Steadman wouldn’t be a writer in the first place unless he was unbalanced.

“One of the things about writing about a writer is you are writing about an eccentric person,” says Theroux. “Where do you find a warm and fuzzy writer? They almost don’t exist.”

Dylan Foley is a writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Caroline Moorehead on the Masses of Refugees Worldwide in “Human Cargo”

(Originally published in the Denver Post, June 2005)

By Dylan Foley

There are an estimated 20 million refugees scattered around the world, forced out of their home countries by ethnic strife, civil wars and religious persecution. Some are survivors from wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone that chased them over the border into Guinea, others are Palestinians pushed out of Israel in 1948 and there are victims of political violence from the former Soviet Union, desperately seeking asylum in London.

The acclaimed British biographer and journalist Caroline Moorehead investigates the plight of these and other world refugees in her new book “Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees” (Holt, $26). Moorehead’s refugee project started when she went to Cairo four years ago to meet with Liberian asylum seekers hoping to resettle in the West.

“When I got there, it was clear that the asylum situation was chaotic,” said Moorehead, from her publisher’s office in New York. “We put together a system of taking refugee testimonies. Their stories became their passports. I went back to England and helped raise money for a legal office in Cairo.”

Moorehead’s Cairo trip started her own odyssey, with journeys to Guinea to look at the refugee camps and to Australia where Iranian Christians are kept in a desert gulag, helplessly watching their children go insane.

She went to Sicily to see how Liberian refugees fare after incredibly dangerous boat journeys, to San Diego to see how the U.S. border is crossed and to London and smaller English cities to meet with refugees warehoused in hostels, waiting in depression and anxiety for asylum.

Moorehead is no stranger to human right journalism. “In 1980, I was a feature writer at the Times of London,” she said. “My editors asked me if I’d like to do a column on this new sort of thought, these ‘prisoners of conscience,’ the Amnesty International idea. I wrote pieces about human rights and became involved in the human rights movement.”

The interview is interrupted by Moorehead’s cell phone. After a quick, animated conversation, Moorehead said sheepishly, “I feel like I am a human rights groupie.” She came to New York to meet with one of the Liberian men she mentored in Cairo, who has gained asylum in the U.S. and now drives a cab.

The 60 year-old Moorehead’s cultured manner doesn’t hide her steely determination. After her New York visit, she planned to jet up to Montreal, to find a human rights lawyer to help obtain a Canadian humanitarian visa for another Liberian refugee who is working as a virtual slave in a cement factory in Israel.

The personal involvement in the book came as a surprise. “When I first started, I never realized to what extent that I would become involved,” she said. “I think of a lot of these young men as friends, because I have a proper relationship with them. For many of these asylum seekers, they’d never really told their story to anyone. When they began talking, the conversation became important in itself.”

To write the book, Moorehead took nine journeys of her own in 18 months, including a trip to a harsh refugee camp in Guinea, where refugees from strife in Liberia and Sierra Leone wind up. Moorehead shows the dignity of a mother trying to care for her children in destitute
conditions.

“It was the first time that I had ever seen a big refugee camp,” she said. “What I felt was the utter poverty. None of us in the West literally have the experience of having nothing. There are very few words to describe nothing. In the West, we go into a restaurant and eat what we want. These refugees, year after year, eat bulgur and a few greens. There is no milk, no meat, no dairy products, no coffee, no sugar, no tea. It is extraordinary what nothing means. And the hardships the children experienced, I found that very hard to take.”

Throughout the book, Moorhead puts a human face on dozens of refugees. There is one young Liberian man who dreams of a philosophy degree while he washes dishes, and there is Mary from the Sudan, who watched family members murdered and is now in the strange safety of Finland. In a humane, touching chronicle, Moorehead reveals the great determination of the refugees to survive and explores their few shreds of hope.

Turning her gaze homeward to her native England, Moorehead found the condition of asylum seekers to be quite bleak. “There was much desperation,” said Moorehead. “One of the insane rules in Britain is they can’t work, so they’ve got not money or self worth. Because they are treated as non people, all the horrors they’ve fled are magnified. They arrive in the West and they are treated as spongers. They are anxious and terrified, and all they have are their memories.”

Moorehead noted that a better foreign policy might prevent the creation of new refugees. “We are making refugees by selling arms and by unfair trade practices,” she said. “Western countries could stop countries from producing refugees if we put more money into improving conditions (in the refugees’ home countries), so they stayed home and did not become refugees in the first place. The notion of an ethical foreign policy is very attractive, but who is practicing it?”

In Cairo, Moorehead found the 57 Liberian men and women she mentored hungry for education, despite their uncertain futures. They rented a flat and held classes. “It was so terribly touching when we asked them at the beginning what they wanted to learn,” she said. “They wrote down nuclear physics, philosophy, biology and dentistry, as if they were possibilities.”

The Egyptian police had other ideas. “Egypt is a police state,” she said. “Eventually, the authorities started picking up and questioning our students on what we were teaching them and it became too dangerous. We closed down the school, but moved the classes to American University in Cairo.”

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Khaled Hosseini Returns to Afghanistan in “A Thousand Splendid Suns”

(Originally published in the Denver Post, July 2007)

By Dylan Foley

In 2003, the Afghan-American writer Khaled Hosseini exploded on the
literary scene with his novel “The Kite Runner,” about a friendship
between two boy in war-torn Afghanistan. The book sold more than four
million copies. His engrossing, new novel, “A Thousand Splendid Suns”(Riverhead, $26), has also shot to the top of the national bestseller lists. In the new book, Hosseini covers 35 years in Afghanistan’s turbulent, tragic history through the eyes of Mariam and Laila, the two abused wives of a Kabul shoemaker.

Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man. After her
mother’s suicide in the mid-1970s, the 15-year-old girl is married to
Rasheed, a man 30 years older who starts beating her after they find
she cannot bear children. For 19 years, she lives alone with Rasheed, forced to wear the burkha, the head-to-toe covering, and suffers his abuse as Afghanistan undergoes Soviet occupation and genocidal civil war.

In 1992, Rasheed marries the war orphan Laila, also 15 years-old. The
two women are at first adversaries, but then find a bond against their
hateful husband. As the country descends into the hell of endless war
and the Taliban, the women’s affection for each other grows, as they raise two children. Out of the grim environment of war and domestic abuse, they are able to pull out a common joy in each other’s company.

For Husseini, the story of two women trapped in an abusive marriage to
the same man came from his 2003 visit to Afghanistan.

"When I went to Kabul, the things I heard were really
astonishing," said the 42-year-old Hosseini in an interview at a New
York City hotel. "Women had seen their children starve to death. A
woman’s sister had been raped and killed herself. There were women
living in abject poverty who were beggars."

Then there was the grim execution video. "It is a rather famous video
out of Afghanistan," he said. “It is a grainy shot of a woman wearing a
burkha being led to a spot in a soccer stadium. The Taliban guy behind
her shoots her in the head rather casually. She collapses. It disturbed
me, but the writer in me thought, ‘What was her crime? Who was she?
What kind of dreams did she have? What was she like as a child?’”

Mariam and Laila come from vastly different experiences. "The key word with Mariam is that she is isolated in every sense of
the word,” said Hosseini. “She is a woman who is detached from the day-to-day norms of human existence. Really, she just wants connection with another human being. Until Laila comes along, you hasn’t found these things. Laila had much higher aspirations. She had a much more fulfilling relationship with her father, her girlfriends and her childhood friend
Tariq. She expected to finish school and is looking for personal
fulfillment. These are two very different, representative kinds of
women."



Throwing the women together in his novel, Hosseini expected some
friction, but his women found kinship in adversity, despite beatings and emotional cruelty from Rasheed. "Mariam had been there for 19 years, and she would feel her territory infringed upon," said Hosseini, whose family emigrated to the United States in 1980. "What the women found out is they shared a common hardship, namely an abusive, psychologically imposing man. Mariam finally finds a person to connect with, and because she is childless, Laila becomes her
daughter for all practical purposes. Laila finds a friend and a doting alternative mother."

In Hosseini's deft hands, the abusive husband Rasheed is a multilayered
person. "Rasheed's the embodiment of the patriarchal, tribal
character. In writing him, I didn’t want to write him as an
irredeemable villain. He is a reprehensible person, but there are
moments of humanity, such as his love for his son."

To keep centered with Rasheed, Hosseini kept remembering an experience
he had in Afghanistan four years ago. "I had dinner with a man who had a very sweet, subservient wife. He said to me slyly, 'She doesn’t know this
yet, but I have another one coming.' He meant he was getting a second
wife. I would go back to that to put more meat on Rasheed’s bones."

During the four decades that the novel covers, Afghanistan and the
condition of its women become more horrible with each passing year. Despite slaughtering a million people in the countryside, the Soviets had a liberal policy towards Afghani women. Mariam and Leila observe this horrible collapse.

"Once the Soviets left and the international community lost interest in
Afghanistan, Afghanistan fell into the hands of the mujahideen
factions," said Hosseini. "These folks had identical ideas about women
as the Taliban had, but were too busy killing each other to implement
them. When the Taliban came in, they severely restricted women’s access
to jobs and healthcare. Women became invisible to society."

Even with the abusive conditions at home and the cruelty of endless war
and the Taliban, Mariam and Leila find contentment with each other.
"The women find joy in their day-to-day lives, from the children, to
doing chores together and the cup of tea they have at the end of a hard
day," said Hosseini. “People find meaning and redemption in the most
unusual human connections.

Like Sidney Carton in Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities,' Mariam
chooses death to save Leila and her two children, but goes to her
execution with dignity. "Mariam really matured by the end of this novel," said Hosseini "She had found what
she wanted in life, a companion. She had found love and acceptance, and
a home. It was with peace that she could walk to her death. She did
what every mother does, which is to put the well-being of her child
first."

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer from Brooklyn, N.Y.