Always More Than a Place Parssinen, Keija
World literature today,
07/2021, Letnik:
95, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Yet I realized that many of my favorite recent books-Aminatta Fornas The Memory of Love and The Hired Man, Leila Aboulelas Lyrics Alley and Bird Summons, and Rabih Alameddines An Unnecessary Woman, ...to name a few-have come from one press: Parssinen: The novel opens at the end of the Ottoman Empire; European colonial powers vie for control of the region, sparking a nascent Palestinian independence movement. ...I was very conscious of the absence of popularly received Palestinian narratives of the events prior to the Nakba, often a result of active silencing of Palestinian voices in mainstream Western contexts, and that was a large part of my motivation for writing the book in the first place. Hammad: I find it exoticizing when writers italicize nonEnglish words in English-language books in descriptions, so that the words seem to be there purely for "local color" or "local texture" I find that a bit touristic and depressing.
Happiness, Aminatta Forna's fourth novel, is a complex love letter to
London that examines with great delicacy how the city both shelters and
challenges the people—and animals—who call it home (see ...WLT,
Nov. 2018, 70). Born in Scotland and raised in Sierra Leone and the
UK, Forna is a cosmopolitan writer who probingly explores how places shape
their inhabitants, native and nonnative alike. Starting with her excellent
memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water, which documents
Sierra Leone's descent into civil war through the tribulations of her
dissident father, Mohammed, Forna's work pays special attention to how
people are changed, for better or worse, in the crucible of history. She sat
down to speak with Keija Parssinen about writing, Sierra Leone's civil war
and its aftermath, and narrative identity. The following is an excerpt from
their exchange.
Writing as Spiritual Offering Parssinen, Keija
World literature today,
01/2020, Letnik:
94, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
...post-9/11 and amid our current national climate of fear and division, stoked by a jingoistic and racist president, our country and culture cry out for books like hers-works that painstakingly ...examine the East-West divide, illuminating the richness and complexity of intercultural relationships through the lives of characters who refuse to be pigeonholed; who remind us that humans are singular creatures who remain united by common needs: for a sense of home, for family, for love. In my fiction, I am looking for a place of compassion, a place in which the traveler can share the baggage they carried with them, a place to hum the yearning for home as well as push forward and claim a position in this new world, which might not be welcoming at first, but, hopefully, there are spots that can give way to the pressure of a stranger rather than resist. Because the immigrant experience is also often one of blunder and misunderstandings, I am also looking for a forgiving place where people can be given a second chance. Islam plays a vital role in the lives of so many of your characters, but you also present readers with Muslim characters for whom faith is inherited, where Islam is more of a cultural backdrop than an ever-present influence in their lives. Every genre from crime to science fiction is heavy with Christian symbolism, while secular literary fiction, even if it is in opposition to Christianity, is also still engaged with its ethos.
The View from Elsewhere Parssinen, Keija
World literature today,
07/2019, Letnik:
93, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Starting with her excellent memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water, which documents Sierra Leone's descent into civil war through the tribulations of her dissident father, Mohammed, Fornas work ...pays special attention to how people are changed, for better or worse, in the crucible of history. ...the particular position I occupy in the world, which is one of great privilege because I have an extraordinary range in my vantage point, allows me to see some things perhaps more sharply than others might. ...I feel that something I can do and am interested in doing is describing what it might look like from elsewhere, the view from elsewhere. The Memory of Love was prompted by the character of Elias Cole, and he was very much inspired by talking to older Sierra Leoneans who'd been around in the 1960s and '70s when the country had first taken the wrong turn on the path, finding them not many years after the end of the war, reconceiving their past in a way that would be more palatable and exculpating them from any kind of guilt or role in the things that had happened. ...it was being carried out in the newspapers, it was being carried out on university campuses, and I was giving talks and my talks were just packed, people were hanging out of window frames, there was this real hunger to answer the question of How did we get here?
