These days, the topics of war and immigration generate a great deal of conversation about cultural differences and how to tolerate, absorb, and welcome that diversity into our lives in the interest of general human enrichment and, perhaps, peace. Since spring and summer are seasons we associate with warmth, new beginnings, and long days plumped out like juicy peaches, I thought it might also be a good time to consider a wider range of books, art, food, film, and travel options.

Some studies have shown that when we encounter something new or different, our brains attempt to “recognize” it by relating it to memories of similar events. How often, when exposed to foods, writings, and artistic creation from other cultures, do feelings and expectations derived or absorbed from our past prevent us from a direct, fresh experience? Can we learn to set aside those inclinations, to form new, positive memories, and approach cultural differences with curiosity and an expectation of pleasant discovery?

In the spirit of giving it a try, in this issue you’ll find a selection of novels by writers of diverse ethnic and national backgrounds. Each flavors the soup of English-language literature with a touch of saffron here, a bit of bitterroot, a pinch of salt, a touch of irony, a stir of laughter. There are also suggestions for films and art that explore an assortment of cultures. By stepping out of our usual Anglocentric choices, we honor the diversity of our country, we open the door to fresh views of universal topics, and we enrich our lives and stimulate our imaginations with previously unrevealed images. I hope you’ll pick one or two and open your heart to change.

-- Rosemary Carstens

NOTE: We've expanded this issue and have some new separate sections for food and art!

COMMENTS

FICTION THAT BLEW MY HAIR BACK:

The Saffron Kitchen, Yasmin Crowther. Viking 2006. I so often find that debut novels burst forth like a piñata, filled with color and delight. This one is no exception. One of my favorites so far this year, Saffron Kitchen is set in England and is the story of a mixed marriage between an Englishman and an Iranian woman, and their daughter Sara. The story moves back and forth between past and present, London and a small remote village in Iran. The writing is beautiful and elegant, filled with captivating description so real that all your sense are ignited—underlying all is a discussion of what it is to be in exile from a place or person you love. To be rootless and unable to return, then, when finally you DO return, is the past waiting to exhale? Or has it moved on so that what you remember can no longer be visited? This is a story without a villain, only human beings whose actions have been so rash that the direction and tenor of their lives have been altered forever. It is about love, forgiveness, anger—and a lifetime of haunting memory.

A Far Country, Daniel Mason. Knopf 2007. This story is not a happy one, but the author’s ability to observe and report the telling detail places us front and center in the life of an exile in a developing country. A young girl must leave her remote village for “the city” so that her family, starving due to drought and lack of income, can survive. Her older brother went before her but it’s been months since they’ve heard from him. Mason, author of the magical Piano Tuner, does not tell us what far country this is—but the setting could be Tijuana, Bombay, Addis Abbaba—or any other poor, underdeveloped country where people are swarming to the cities in hopes of building a sustainable life for themselves and their families. It’s the real deal.

I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, Susan Straight. Knopf 1992. Marietta Cook is from the Gullah-speaking village of Pine Gardens, South Carolina—this is the story of how she grows up, what happens when she goes to the big city, how she raises her sons to deal with the constant discrimination and fear visited upon them by white folks. This is a fine book. The Gullah dialect was handled so well, I was practically speaking it when I finished!

If You Lived Here, Dana Sachs. HarperCollins 2007. Author of the memoir The House on Dream Street, Sachs hits the ball out of the park with her new novel. Combining her first-hand knowledge of Vietnam and the US South, she tells us the story of Shelley Marino, in her forties and desperately wanting a child. Over the 20 years of their marriage, she and her husband have tried and been unsuccessful. Now adoption seems the only option. Her husband is not particularly enthusiastic and, when a Vietnamese baby becomes available, Shelley finds she must choose between the child and her husband. Running counterpoint to Shelley’s story is that of Xuan Mai, who emigrated to America twenty years earlier after the Vietnam War. Xuan Mai has her own difficult choices to make: to go back to Vietnam and ask forgiveness for the terrible tragedy that drove her to leave, or continue to live the half life of an exile from family and friends. Like a lovely piece of tapestry, Sachs weaves these two extraordinary stories and lives skillfully together. This is a story you’ll long remember. It will speak to your heart! http://www.danasachs.com/

The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai. Grove 2006. Winner of the Man Booker Prize for 2006, Desai skillfully describes not only the physical landscape of each setting in telling detail, but also the inner landscape of her characters. From Harlem to the Himalayas, the author does not shrink from revealing the everyday consequences of life after colonialism, of what it is to be in exile as an illegal immigrant in New York—or an exile within your own country of India. It’s about the effects of globalism, life, joy, and despair among those not born in a developing country and their wrenching efforts to escape poverty. Bittersweet fruit birthed in tragedy and family love, it is also a story of obligation and uncertainty in an elite-rigged system.

Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee. Grove 1999. A beautifully written story of a Hindu illegal immigrant from India: her flight to Florida, New York, and Iowa, and her journey to becoming a US citizen. This book is especially revealing of the barrier between Americans and illegals—the border that cannot be crossed. This author is known for her lyrical poetry—and her prose echoes that strength.

The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri. Houghton Mifflin 2003. Pulitzer prize-winning Lahiri writes about the immigrant experience for Indians, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and the tangled ties between generations. At the center of this novel is a family from Calcutta—a young couple immigrates to the United States and has a family. Each generation’s connections to India are complicated and defining as they struggle through the years. The central character is their first child, a son, who is named Gogol through various misunderstandings and acts of fate. The name serves to set him apart throughout his life. The author provides wonderful insight into her themes, as always. This is the first of her work I have read and feel enriched by the greater understanding of a culture than I had before. This book was made into an equally fine movie in 2006, directed by Mira Nair.

The Pearl Diver, Jeff Talarigo. Doubleday 2004. A young pearl diver in Japan at the close of WWII is diagnosed with leprosy and isolated on an island, erased from her family’s history, and struggles to find a life in a world of bigotry and ignorance. This is a story of shame, courage, indomitability—and insight into how the disease of leprosy was demonized not so long ago. http://www.jefftalarigo.com/

Returning to Earth, Jim Harrison. Grove Press 2007. Donald is a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. In his days of fading verbal ability, he struggles to pass along his family history before he goes. As his family and friends wrestle with their upcoming loss and how to deal with his wish to die on his own terms and be laid to rest in accordance with his own deeply held beliefs that are in conflict with contemporary laws, Donald dictates stories of three generations of his ancestors and his relationship with his personal spiritual heritage. Harrison frames the question of how we return “to earth” upon our passing, how we retain dignity and choice, through chapters by each of the characters. Through their personal journeys as they deal with their loss, a finely written discussion of life, death, and redemption is revealed.

JUST THE CAPTIVATING FACTS - RECOMMENDED NONFICTION:

Dreams of Trespass, Tales of a Harem Girlhood, Fatima Mernissi. Perseus Books 1994. A young girl confronts the mysteries of time and place, gender and sex in 1940s Fez, Morocco. From its attention-grabbing opening, “I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco. . .” right through to its ending the author takes you inside a seldom-seen Muslim world. She weaves personal memories with dreams—her own and those of the women around her. This is narrative nonfiction and memoir at its best, not sensationalized or romanticized. Mernissi’s prose reads like poetry in places and I found myself marking passage after passage. I have often gone back to this book to reread especially lovely sections. I’ve included just a few short samples here:

Words, I will cherish.
I will cultivate them to illuminate the nights,
Demolish walls
And dwarf gates...

I will become a magician.
I will chisel words to share the dream and render the frontiers useless. (p. 114)

When speaking of a woman who lived a sort of double life: in the European city she was “modern” and paraded around unveiled, and in the Medina she dressed and behaved traditionally:

We children found the thought of switching codes and languages to be as spellbinding as the sliding open of magic doors. The women loved it, but the men did not. They thought it was dangerous, and Father especially did not like Mrs. Bennis, because he said that she made trespassing seem natural. She stepped too easily out of one culture and into another, without any regard for the hudad, the sacred boundary. (p. 180)

Fatima’s Aunt Habiba warns that some wonderful things cannot be taught:

You just keep alert, so as to capture the sizzling silk of the winged dream.

There are two prerequisites to growing wings: “the first is to feel encircled and the second is to believe that you can break the circle.”

Fatima came to understand that “magic, like ice cream, came in many flavors. The weaving of fine threads between myself and the stars was one kind; focusing on strong invisible dreams and spreading out wings from within, was another more elusive one.”

Aunt Habiba was a wonderful woman, a guardian angel in a sense. She says, “The main thing for the powerless is to have a dream. . . True, a dream alone, without the bargaining power to go with it, does not transform the world or make the walls vanish, but it does help you keep hold of dignity.” (p. 214)

For additional information on this intriguing scholar and Moroccan activist who strives for more involved and engaged Arab women, see http://www.mernissi.net/.
For a revealing article on Fatima Mernissi and her work, see “A Contemporary Scheherazade's Tales of a Borderless World” by Maggie Huff-Rousselle http://www.mernissi.net/civil_society/portraits/fatimamernissi.html.

FOUR STUNNING POSTCARDS were designed by artist Oida to summarize Fatima Mernissi’s Erasmus Prize speech on November 4, 2004, “Adab or Allying with the Stranger as the Strategy to Win the Globalized Planet.” The images and the strategy underlying each is available at: http://www.mernissi.net/gallery/sindbad.html OR SEE OUR SPECIAL ART SECTION IN THIS ISSUE.

Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, Jeremy Scahill. Nation Books 2007.

“On March 31, 2004, four Americans were ambushed and burned near their jeeps by an angry mob in the Sunni stronghold of Fallujah. Their charred corpses were hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River. The ensuing slaughter by US troops would fuel the fierce Iraqi resistance that haunts occupation forces to this day. But these men were neither American military nor civilians. They were highly trained private soldiers sent to Iraq by a secretive mercenary company based in the wilderness of North Carolina.”

Sounds like the plot of an action-packed Hollywood movie, doesn’t it? Far from it—it’s the reality of private contracting of non-military soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere—and even on US soil—trained men who perform duties that the US government/military don’t want to own. Turning multiple millions in profits, Blackwater USA is the brain child of Erik Prince, right-wing multimillionaire Christian conservative and its forces are capable of overthrowing governments—yet most people have never heard of them. Scahill carefully documents this detailed investigative work and it will raise the hair on the back of your neck to see how Blackwater USA has joined hands with officials at our highest levels, including the oval office. The company’s website is at http://www.blackwaterusa.com/

A Whale For The Killing, Farley Mowat. Stackpole Books 2005 (originally published in 1972). Non-fictional account of a Fin whale trapped in a pond off the coast of Newfoundland and how the local population torments it. The whale is shot at, harrassed, starved. Mowat tells of his superhuman efforts at trying to save it. It is incredible to read of human beings failing to recognize a living creature among us who is so magnificent, has such an affinity for humans, is a gentle and wonderful being. The figures for decimation of the whale nation that Mowat gives in 1972 are staggeringly depressing—I shudder with horror to think of what must have occurred in the 24 years since he wrote that book! Steve Burgess wrote a nice article about Mowat for Salon, titled “Northern Exposure.” It can be found online at http://www.salon.com/people/bc/1999/05/11/mowat/index.html

COMING UP AND NOT TO BE MISSED:

No Place Safe, Kim Reid. Forthcoming October 2007 by Kensington Books. A skilled writer of fiction, Kim Reid has written a real life, true crime story about how her life changed when, at the age of thirteen, her single mother, a cop in early 1980s Atlanta, joined the Missing and Murdered Children investigation, a serial murder case that captured the nation’s attention and resulted in the 1982 conviction of Wayne Williams. Want to know more? Check out http://kimreid.com/

TO ACCESS OUR SEPARATE ART PAGE FOR THIS ISSUE, JUST CLICK ON THE IMAGE ABOVE -

Don’t Tempt Me (2001). Starring Victoria Abril and Penelope Cruz. From Spain comes a bizarre film that is surprisingly fun to watch. A concussive brain injury forces a boxer named Manny to retire from the ring with the warning that should he ever box again he would suffer a fatal brain hemorrhage. News of the pending availability of Manny’s soul brings an angel from heaven and a waitress from hell to struggle over who “gets” him. Cruz plays the role of a former male gangster sentenced to the 21st circle of hell as a woman. As she says, “there is no lower rank in life or death.” Her motivation for winning Manny’s soul is to get to be a man again in the 10th circle. The devil plays a role as does God’s right-hand woman as a bankrupt heaven and a hell ruled by money and power vie for survival.

The Wedding Banquet (1993). The second in director Ang Lee’s food trilogy. Successful New Yorker Wai Tung and his partner Simon are a happy gay couple. But Wai Tung’s conservative Taiwanese parents are bugging him to marry and give them a grandchild. He and Simon cook up a plan for Wai Tung to marry a sexy go-getter in need of a green card. They plan a simple city hall wedding, but when Wai Tung’s family flies in with big plans for a tradition Chinese wedding things soon spiral out of control. Humor, diversity, family issues. Ang Lee (director, co-writer) and James Schamus (Producer, co-writer).

I Am David (2004). A heartwarming film based on Anne Holm’s novel North to Freedom, it chronicles the struggles of a 12-year-old boy (Ben Tibber) who manages to flee a communist concentration camp through sheer will and determination. All he has in his possession is a loaf of bread, a letter to deliver to someone in Denmark, a compass to help guide him there, and a bar of soap. Co-stars James Caviezel and Joan Plowright. Poignant and revealing of the human capacity for survival.

TO ACCESS OUR SEPARATE FOOD PAGE FOR THIS ISSUE, CLICK ON THE IMAGE ABOVE -

SOMETHING DIFFERENT? Sometimes when we travel to a familiar destination, for business or pleasure, it can turn into something entirely new and interesting simply by changing our routine, by considering some different activities. Visiting NEW YORK CITY, for example, often involves the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, a play or two, a favorite restaurant you’ve enjoyed on previous trips. Here are some suggestions for jazzing up your next visit:

Ammos Estiatorio, 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, between 44th and 45th Streets. 212-922-9999. Try this for lunch. They specialize in grilled seafood priced by the pound and seasoned with the classic Greek combo of olive oil, oregano, sea salt, and lemon juice. I’m told a number of literary agents like to take their clients there for good food and a unique New York experience—who knows who you might see hammering out a six-figure deal! It’s a bit pricey for dinner—what isn’t in NYC? A bit touristy, but fun, every Saturday night they clear the tables from the floor so the MYLOS All-Star band can perform Greek folk music on bouzouki, keyboards, guitar, and percussion; then a bit of Middle Eastern on dumbek, daoul, and darbuka, followed by a high-octane program of classic Greek dance tunes. Guys: Break out your foustanela skirt and your tsarouhia shoes!

American Folk Art Museum, 45 West 53rd Street. 212-265-1040. Closed on Mondays, free on Friday nights with live music from 5:30–7:30pm. Folk art captures the heart of American culture: It reflects the diversity of our heritage and honors individual creativity and community values. The museum’s collection of more than 4,000 artworks span three centuries and feature such mediums as portraits, quilts, and handcrafted weathervanes, and remarkable works by contemporary self-taught artists. From June 5 – September 9, the museum will be featuring THE GREAT COVER UP: American Rugs on Beds, Tables, and Floors. This will be the first presentation devoted to a wide range of American rug traditions since 1974. www.folkartmuseum.org

Repertorio Español, 138 East 27th Street (between Lexington and Third Avenue). 212-889-2850. Repertorio Español was founded in 1968 to introduce the best of Latin American, Spanish and Hispanic American theater to a broad audience in the city. It maintains its own dramatic ensemble, attracting many talented veterans and emerging Hispanic actors, singers, and dancers. In 1984, the company began to present and commission new plays by Hispanic American playwrights and, in 1991, inaugurated an infrared simultaneous translation system that provides an opportunity for non-Spanish-speaking audiences to enjoy the company’s award-winning selections. This summer, there are an exciting group of performances to choose from, including: OK ¿Love or money? Two women must decide between money and love for a single young man. A funny and daring play with Zully Montero and Isabel Moreno. Part of the Jewish Latin-American Theatre Festival. For more information go to www.repertorio.org

MACYs Herald Square – NOT JUST FOR SHOPPING! 151 West 34th Street. That’s right, don’t forget that Macey’s department store sponsors some fabulous events throughout the year, including their spring flower show when windows and floors are decked out for a stroll through the woods, their incredible 4th of July fireworks, Thanksgiving Day parade, beloved Puppet Theater, and their entire floor of Santaland in December. In every season, just visiting their windows pre-shopping is a treat. There’s always something special happening, so before your next visit, check out their website: Macysforfun

Yale University Art Gallery. 1111 Chapel Hill, New Haven, CT. 203-432-0600. Going to be in New York for a few days? Want to do something different? Take the train from Grand Central to New Haven and visit the Yale University Art Gallery. Designed by famed American architect Louis Kahn in 1953, a special exhibition runs through July 8th titled “Responding to Kahn: A Sculptural Conversation.” It highlights the restored building and the relationship between modern art and architecture, with particular emphasis on postwar sculpture. I was blown away by the quality of the pieces in the exhibit, plus the range of their permanent collection! New Haven has both elegant and funky little restaurants where you can grab a bite of lunch before or after you visit the museum. See http://artgallery.yale.edu/ for full details.