Arundhati Roy and "The God of Small Things"

Some time ago, during the lesson, we read a fragment of Arudhati Roy’s book, “The God of Small Things”. I liked it a lot and decided to search more information about Roy, who I had not know earlier, and her book.

First of all, the book is about two brothers’(twins) childhood. Behind that children’s story, Roy shows the discrimination of women in India and familial tragedies. The socio-political context is an important aspect of the book as well.

The title may sound a bit mysterious. According to Wikipedia, “The book is a description of how the small things in life affect people's behaviour and their lives.”

The interesting fact is that the book, published in 1997, is the first and the only one novel by Roy. it won Booker Prize and became a bestseller.

However, it was only a part of her career. Earlier, she had wrote the screenplays for her husband’s (who is a director) films. And  after “The God of Small Things”, she started to write essays on politics so that now she is known mainly  as a political activist involved in human rights and environmental issues.

Nancy Huston

Last Monday, I participated in „the day of Canada”, organised by our university. It was a great occasion to get to know something interesting about this unusual country, famous for its bilingualism.

One of the lectures concerned Nancy Huston, the author of many fiction and non-fiction novels, plays and books for children. She was born in 1953 in Calgary and grew up in Canada and United States. She spent also some time in Germany when she was a little child and later, at the age of twenty, she came to Paris for the purpose of studying. She earned a master’s degree there under the supervision of Roland Barthes. She stayed in Paris and it was there that she learned French, her language of literary expression.

Nancy Huston is one of the authors who translate their works themselves, which is very intriguing about her because not so many authors do that. Even more so because French is not her first language, but she had said that this foreignness paradoxically helped her to find her literary voice. She had got to use to be a foreigner because of numerous removals in the past and finally, she had accepted the role of a foreigner as her own choice and the way of being. What’s more, she considers her self-translation as a fact of re-writing (réécriture), so she privileges the uniqueness of a language and she perceives a translation as a new, different text.

Is Yasmina Khadra Charlie?

Few days ago I found a very interesting and informative commentary concerning the murderous attack in Paris which shocked the public opinion.

It all happened in January and now, two months later, we all already know the most important facts about the incident: the place, the time, the reasons, the organisation the terrorists identify with and the identity of the victims. We all know the official statements about the incident as well. They are summarised by the most popular phrase in media: “Je suis Charlie”: a sign of intolerance towards the violation of the freedom of speech and the solidarity with victims.

Of course, we are right to “be Charlie”, but it is essential to learn something more and to understand how it was possible that such a tragedy happened. That is why I was glad to stumble upon  an interview with Yasmina Khadra. He is a well known French-speaking  author from Algeria and he is a Muslim.

In the beginning, he said that even if he had witnessed many Algerian tragedies, he was still shocked, because “nobody can get used to that atrocity”. Then he was asked about his opinion on the Algerian origins of the terrorists and the fact that the Muslim community was accused of responsibility for the attack. He replied that the origins and nationality were not important and that a murderer might have been identified only by their act. That is why he does not feel any link with them. To him, it is only an act that counts, and not whole background (the contrary of what the media often says). What is more, the Algerian origins could not significantly influence this act because those who are guilty, were born and brought up in France.

He also insisted on the fact that the Muslim community had nothing to do with the attack because these were only Islamists who are responsible. He claimed that “this reaction of condemning Muslims is a huge mistake”. By saying that, he wanted people to stick to the definitions and not to confuse groups that are not related to each other.

To him, the problem is that different groups have different values that are “sacred” and  try to impose them one to another. If there is no dialogue, it will always be impossible to put an end to the conflict of which the attack was just an extreme symptom.

That  are just some of the opinions of Khadra. The whole interview below (with English subtitles):