DUELLING WITH AMERICA

Tariq Ali is an Oxford-educated East Asian expatriate who has nevertheless maintained deep ties with his nation of origin. Famed for his silver-tongued oratorical skills, he kept a packed, multi-ethnic audience captivated with his account of American interventions in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, and brought out ripples of laughter and applause with caustic assessments of the Bhuttos, the Bush legacy, Barack Obama, and Michael Ignatieff.

In his most recent book, The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, Ali describes how Americans called the shots in Pakistan, pouring billions of dollars into the military while the country’s poverty deepened, always finding the kind of general they wanted–profoundly fundamentalist or profoundly secular – to satisfy short-term, disastrously short-sighted policy aims. If they had wanted a hermaphrodite general, he joked, they would have found one. He didn’t mince words about the Bhuttos.

Although Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came in with an idealistic platform of land reform, etc. a la India, he didn’t put it into effect because fundamentally, according to Tariq Ali, he didn’t consider it necessary, coming from the landed gentry himself. The problem with his daughter Benazir was that she had married “a rogue” – one of the most corrupt landlords and administrators in Pakistan. She and Tariq Ali had been quite close. He helped Benazir write her inauguration speech and advised that if elected, she leave a positive legacy, including state schools for girls and a health centre in at least every two villages, so the poor wouldn’t have to go to the big cities for medical attention.

Like her father, she doubted she could enact such reforms without support of the power elites – an impossible condition to hope for from the start. Ali was as upset as any when she was assassinated – but found it absurd that the Western press should paint her as a sort of “goddess of democracy,” when in her political will she had left the leadership of her party to her husband.

Ali had written The Duel during the Bush years. Obama, Ali remarked, is almost certainly the most intelligent President in recent memory, one who can not only read books, but actually write them. “Unfortunately, if you wear Caesar’s robes and put on Caesar’s crown, you have to act like Caesar. The previous one was like Caligula. This one is more like Claudius.” He mused as to whether Michele would make a more decisive President.

Asked whether his own political convictions had changed over the years, Ali replied that of course times and he himself had changed dramatically, but that fundamentally, he had always remained on the left, in support of human rights and a better lot for the poor – “unlike certain liberals who have gone on to advocate the Iraq war and apologize for torture, like your future Prime Minister.”

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CBC host Paul Kennedy wrote his interview notes on a coffee coaster. Jian Ghomeshi, the interviewer of Jonathan Goldstein a few hours later, wrote his on a couple of barf bags from two different airlines, which brought him to compare the merits of the two airlines, as well as other uses for those bags should the interview go like the notorious one that had recently taken place on Q. What’s with these CBC hosts? I thought. Well, both were very smooth and professional, which made these little foibles all the more endearing.

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Jonathan Goldstein said he felt like a truck backing up. A.S. Byatt said she could hear ghostly fairy pipes in a forest. The source of their metaphorical inspiration? Feedback from hearing aids and cell phones in response to the elevated speakers by the stage – a new technological interaction designed to vex hosts and bring on flights of whimsy from featured guests.

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This is my second (and last) entry on the The Rover's Blue Met Blog. It was fun wearing a Journaliste tag for a few days (at last -- a clear identity) and honing a somewhat different type of writing skill. Besides, I got free passes to a many interesting panels to which I would probably not have otherwise gone! Because I sold several copies if Passenger Flight to friends and acquaintances I bumped into on the crowded floor (feeling, mind you, a bit like a street hawker with stolen watches inside his trench coat), I almost broke even on my own book purchases and The Delta's usurious bar tab...

Carol Zardetto, Sergio Ramirez at the Blue Met

My first entry on the Rover's Blue Met blog:

Politics and the Writing Life

Imagine you come home, turn on the TV, make popcorn, settle into the couch and really try to get into a show. Meanwhile, your house is burning down. That’s how Carol Zardetto, a Guatemalan writer who spoke on Friday’s Politics and the Pen panel, described a Gen-X of younger, apolitical writers in her country. While turning away from politics is entirely understandable in the context of Guatemala’s unending political foment, in the end, she said, private life cannot be separated from public life, particularly in a country like Guatemala.

Both Zardetto and Sergio Ramirez, the other writer on the panel, have been seriously involved in politics. Ramirez served as Nicaragua’s Vice President from 1995-2000; Zardetto, a lawyer, served as a Deputy Minister of Education for a year in 1996 before being posted as Consul General in Vancouver. Both spoke of the difficulty of balancing the writing life and the political life, and of the inherent incompatibility of holding to an official line while trying to maintain the independence required of a writer.

Ramirez said he didn’t write a line for ten years when his Sandinista commitments most monopolized his time; at a certain point a panic set in and he literally “stole time” from his Vice Presidential duties, getting up at five in the morning to put in three hours of writing before starting his working day. While both writers have withdrawn from active involvement in politics, both concurred that it was important to maintain a sense of political commitment, and expressed appreciation for how their own political lives ultimately enriched their writing lives.

In the relatively benign political climate of Canada, of course, it is quite possible to live out an entirely “private” life – to tune out the disturbing news, to narrow-cast, to ego-cast. All one has to do, though, is look at a typical kitchen and all the products in it that come from foreign lands, to sense the pervasive influence of realpolitik on our lives.

As Carol Zardetto put it, no matter how much one may push politics to the margins of one’s life, it will always remain a lurking presence there – so one may as well try to understand and deal with it, to make oneself into a subject of history rather than its unwitting object, pushed around by forces one can neither control nor comprehend.

Haven't been back, because my computer has been in the repair shop.

The launch party was, I'd say, the most joyous I've ever had for one of my products. The cafe was almost full, and 20 books were sold. Almost all sales and signings took place before the reading; as a number of my friends were second language speakers, I invited them to read along, indicating the page number of each poem before I read it; a fair number of native speakers also took advantage of the opportunity.

So rare that people get to do that at a reading! Seems to me an option people should have more often. Photocopies handed out of a few of the poems to be read -- is that too complicated? In this age of e-mail and cheap photocopies, that should be easier to orchestrate than ever.

Starting tomorrow, I'll be blogging for The Rover at this year's Blue Met. I suppose I'll be cross-posting here. Among the events I'll be attending: Politics and the Pen with Carol Zardetto and Sergio Ramirez; John Ralston Saul being interviewed about his new book, A Fair Country; Interviews of AS Byatt and Tariq Ali; some international poetry evenings.