Archives for December, 2006

For all its whitespace, this blog is degenerating into a very dark and gloomy, a very academic and near-sighted place. And really, I’m not always dark and gloomy, not always academic. Though definitely always near-sighted.

Which is why I’m taking up the 3 Beautiful Things challenge.
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I spent much of my childhood in various cities in Saudi Arabia, a country which Arjun Appadurai describes as “notoriously closed to immigration” but with large “populations of guestworkers¹.” He calls the result “labour diasporas,” which is a term I find perfectly gets at the issues of isolation and class that characterize the existence of guestworkers in Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi Arabia I remember is one defined clearly across lines of race and class – and these are lines that intersect more obviously in Saudi Arabia than they do here in Canada. Continue reading this entry »

With age and sickness, my father’s sense of his own mortality has become an overriding concern in my family. It is no longer a vague concept to be considered philosophically, but an inevitability to be prepared for. That makes us fortunate, in the clichéd sense, in that we are on some level prepared for something we’ve seen happen to others. Prepared, anyway, for It to happen to my father, if not ourselves. A bleak fallacy, but it suffices.
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I’m currently reading Naomi Alderman’s Disobedience. I heard about this book around the same time I heard about Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.

I started reading it on the subway on the way back from handing in my third and last essay. I read feverishly, the way I’d read Mistry maybe or exhilarating theory, quickly for fear of losing it. And also because I was tired, desperate to throw myself into my winter break.
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