This first novel by a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Washington Post investigative reporter is superb.
How a blond-haired American woman, educated at Princeton University, can somehow transmute herself into a desperately poor, semi-terror-stricken Algerian illegal immigrant, so much so that it is as if you yourself were experiencing what it is like to be Abdelaziz Arkoun, is nothing short of a miracle.
I remember once reading that the definition of a great work of art is that it is impossible to understand how it was created.
So.
Anyone who believes that terrorism will be controlled or eliminated by pouring ever more money into surveillance and information-gathering should read this book.
What happens in this story is, on the surface, rather simple: a series of young Algerian men, desperate to escape the nightmare of their own benighted small country's internecine warface, which to date has killed over 100,000 people and continues unabated, make their way to America as stowaways on giant tankers.
They spend months locked below deck in the hold, freezing, starving, at risk of being discovered by the ship's crew and summarily executed and thrown overboard.
On arriving at Boston harbor they leap from the ships, then swim the icy waters to shore and make their way to an enclave of their countrymen in the poorer part of Boston.
There they find safety and shelter and food, living sometimes ten to a small apartment, sleeping in hallways and bathrooms, haltingly learning to speak English while pursuing a succession of dead-end jobs under constant threat of being discovered, jailed, and deported to what for most will be certain death on returning home.
Because not to join a jihadist group in Algeria is to be the enemy.
But to join is to become an enemy of the state.
So it is that they seek harbor in the United States.
Article comments
1 - Eric Berlin
Selected for Advance.
2 - Doston Latta
Such hype. You make us weary. I lived in the Middle East as an American and later had an affair with the North American wife of an Algerian away serving time in the Algerian army.
Adams does put out the real stuff. And if you see past her cheap tricks, you will realize that she has not even begun to master the art and craft of fiction.
3 - rabah
The story is quite a human story. Ms. Adams has attempted to describe the minds of Algerians who flee their country in search of something: Love, Money, or Fame.
She could digged deeper into the Algerian minds and present their emotions as to being suspected to be terrorists.
Fortunately, a new book "Still Moments: A Story about Faded Dreams and Forbidden Pictures" by Zighen Aym does just that. It is a true story, written by a North African man who is a free-lance photographer that gets interrogated by the FBI after having taken pictures of railroad tracks in Central Illinois.
4 - Brian H. Appleton
I am not sure which is worse, turning human misery into chic pseudo-intellectual fiction for profit or an imperialistic government that thinks that terrorism is a disease which can be wiped out. What is really the root cause of terrorism is the completely inequitable distribution of wealth in the world and the Middle East in particular. Why is it that any country that insists on its own sovereignty is made into a boogeyman by Uncle Sam and any country with a US puppet has a population living in poverty.
The US economy is based on oil as its main source of energy. The US population represents only 4.5% of the global population yet consumes 25% of the world energy. What is going to happen when all the aspiring nations of the third world reach that level of consumption? Look at the "Ka Ching" Dynasty in China! Meanwhile our govenrment wages oil wars and the population gives its tacit consent so that its consumer way of life can continue uniterrupted. We have discovered the enemy and it is us. We are a nation of vast consumerism abandoning our traditions and families and cultures, without real spirituality and without a sustainable way of life. Our corporations own and run this nation, and apsire to control the world's resources, we are the global eco terrorists, it is us.]
Our children maintain comfortable bourgeois fictions about loving the environment when the real cause of species extinction is loss of habitat. There are just too many people for the poor old earth to sustain with any quality of life at the present time, isn't it? The automobile has become almost non functional. Next time you are stuck in traffic for two hours on a 20 mile journey ask yourself if I am exaggerating!
The media is all owned by major corporations. Who started the myth that the press is liberal and that we have free press?
The propoganda is so effective that the truth lies burried under so many layers as to be unreachable. 80% of Iranian women under the IRI are in the work force while only 45% were working under the Shah. Health care in Iran is now universal and the best in the Middle East and in fact Harvard University has made a study of it. But what do we know of Iran? Any woman who has worn a head scarf there can write a book here bashing Iran and get it published because it's what we want to hear. We want affirmation of our wrong way of life. We want Gunga Din's and people who repudiate their own culture to adopt ours. And what is American culture? "Buying things..." as far as I can ascertain.
Under Saddam, Iraq had one of the highest standards of living in the Middle East, with no illiteracy and offering employment to poor Egyptians, Palestinians and Jordanians, now it has one of the lowest standards of living not to mention 665,000 estimated dead from this war.
Bush during his debates with Kerry kept repeating that the world was a better place without Saddam, never mind he flaunted the rule of law and became a vigilante to take out Saddam who was a CIA appointee. It was the US which sold the biologic weapons to Saddam and encouraged him to attack Iran. A million people on each side died in that 10 year "silent war" and all Bush could talk about was how Saddam gassed his own people. Well he was trying to gas the Iranians but the wind shifted. You see how gullible the public can be?
Why is it that the rich will only give to charity if they can come out for a debutant's ball, are we all Marie Antoinette? Can we only take an interest in the Middle East if it is dressed up in some sugar coated fiction which avoids the hand that our government and foreign policies and the military industrial complex have had in creating terrorism and the millions, yes millions of deaths they have caused there? When you comprise the list of all the American beneficiaries of 911, it becomes evident that the status quo has a vested interest in maintaining terrorism not ending it.
The best way to fight terrorism is to actually do something with the vast financial and intellectual resources of this nation to help the poor here and abroad. If the war were on poverty instead of political dissidents then the terrorists would lose most of their constituents. The only people who strap bombs to themselves are the ones who have nothing left to lose. Meanwhile we can maintain intriguing and dark mysterious fictions about Islamic fundamentalism which was another creation of the CIA to fight the spread of communism during the Cold War, while ignoring our own right wing religious fundamentalists. It is so convenient to never subject oneself to self examination when a handy boogeyman can be created. Demonize someone else and you transfer all your venom away from yourself and then follow it with high altitude bombing and hold your head high and delude yourself into believeing that you are doing God's work...afterall "they" behead people where as we only bomb them from high altitude if we don't like their politics, which is much less barbaric because we don't get their blood spilled on us...
cheers,
Brian H. Appleton