For Jan/Feb: Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

On February 19th we discussed Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book.

Background reading:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali at the Aspen Ideas Festival, talking about terrorism

The BBC has an interesting profile on Hirsi Ali, briefly describing her arrival in the Netherlands where she was given asylum and then citizenship, her participation in the creation of the film 'Submission' with Theo Van Gogh (van Gogh was murdered in 2004) and her public life in the Netherlands until 2006. In 2006, her citizenship was threatened and she moved to the United States, to work with the conservative think tank, American Enterprise Institute.

You can also watch this interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, which includes a few scenes from the film 'Submission', and listen to Hirsi Ali's claim that there is no Islamophopia. For more detail on her criticism of Islam, listen to this interview from the BBC.

Thanks to Gerda, for sending this link to a book review in the New York Times written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

We had a very lively discussion. The first half of the book describes Hirsi Ali's early years, growing up an living in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Kenya. The second half describes a dramatic escape from civil war in Somalia, a dramatic break from an arranged marriage to a Canadian Somali man, and Hirsi Ali's struggle to find a place for herself in the Netherlands, where she got refugee status, attended university, and tried to come to terms with her upbringing. 

Several participants in our discussion found the clan structure very striking, and remarked how interesting is was to read about the authors amazement at how people in the West seemed to help each other even if they were not of the same 'clan'. 

One major theme in the discussion was the politics of Hirsi Ali's argument about Islam. Some think she was an opportunist; others found that she was simply looking for a space in which to develop her opinions; some people feel that the issues are important, but that Hirsi Ali is too blunt, and ends up playing into the hands of conservatives and fundamentalists.

We also had a good time talking about what made Hirsi Ali strong, and how diverse and complicated Islam is (even in Infidel). Wherever social rules are very strict, there is a lot of 'undercover' or 'quiet' rebellion. Hirsi Ali saw her grandmother, mother, and father challenge certain social rules. We thought that she learned from these family members, but that she also had her own sort of independent spirit. Infidel seemed to be primarily a story of becoming, of self-discovery. While most of us agreed that it has not been the religion itself, but fundamentalist interpretations of Islam that have been most problematic for women, this distinction was not always clear in Hirsi Ali's book. It did facilitate great discussion, however!

For December 6th: Anil's Ghost

To celebrate Sri Lankan human rights activist Sunila Abeysekera's work in Sri Lanka, and her 2007 award of human rights defender from Human Rights Watch, we will be reading Michael Ondaatje's novel, "Anil's Ghost" set in Sri Lanka. This is the same author who wrote "The English Patient".

Here is an audio excerpt of the novel.

We had a very interesting discussion about Anil's Ghost. This book was for most readers in our group a very interesting read. In some ways the book was very much a personal story about the main characters. It could have been a story set anywhere in the world where ongoing violence and civil war has shaped people's lives and deaths.

We noticed how the novel uncovered beauty in the landscape, in people, and in life in spite of the violence and ugliness of civil war. The way the novel is written evokes a chaotic, otherworldly, unsettled, insecure and shuttered/closed-off atmosphere created by the ongoing civil war. At the same time, this chaos is echoed in the character Anil's own personal state of mind. This chaotic, insecure and emotional element of Anil's life is also in stark contrast to her job as a forensic scientist who is looking for truth and fact.

We found that the book was an absorbing and personal look into the complexities of doing work in conflict zones, something particularly interesting because of Human Rights Watch's role in sending researchers out into conflict zones to do research on human rights abuses.

For more information on Sri Lanka, and to read the reports produced by HRW researchers, click here.

November: Half a Yellow Sun

The author of Purple Hibiscus, Chiamamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote a novel about the Biafran War as her second novel. If you are interested in reading some reviews of the book, check out the official website for the book. 

About the book:

" Half of a Yellow Sun recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria, and the chilling violence that followed.

With astonishing empathy and the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie weaves together the lives of three characters swept up in the turbulence of the decade. Thirteen-year-old Ugwu is employed as a houseboy for a university professor full of revolutionary zeal. Olanna is the professor's beautiful mistress, who has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charisma of her new lover. And Richard is a shy young Englishman in thrall to Olanna's twin sister, an enigmatic figure who refuses to belong to anyone. As Nigerian troops advance and they must run for their lives, their ideals are severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another.

Epic, ambitious, and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race—and the ways in which love can complicate them all.

About the Author:

Adichie grew up in Nigeria, went to college in the United States, and is pursuing graduate work at Yale. To read more about her, check out the website above. 

About our discussion

One of the things that really struck our group about this book was the way that Adichie really brings the reader into a world that seems very real: the way the characters speak, what they eat, the sights, sounds, smells of their world surrounded us as we read. 

The book also brought us to ask why and how group differences in a society can turn into motives for violence and hatred, and what the role of outsiders should or can be in such a conflict. We were reading about a conflict that resulted in great suffering for civilians, a conflict that was inside a country's borders, a conflict in which natural resources played a significant role, in which the use of child soldiers was evident, a conflict that clearly illustrated how easy it is for human rights to be abused in an environment of political upheaval, violence, and internal displacement. 

The remarkable thing is that this conflict happened in 1967-70, yet it has a lot of parallels to current conflicts! There is a lot we can learn from history, and this piece of fiction really drew us into that world, and made us care about the people who lived in it.