Ohio trip

Last time I went back home to Ohio I had two kids.

After Liji was born, we went for Christmas and we went for Passover (or maybe it was Passover, then Christmas...it was a long ago). I guess I sort of expected to carry on that way, but then Leif had such intense medical complications as a baby and toddler and then the doctor said no to most travel during the pregnancy with Laila and then I had cancer and then I was recovering from treatment and pretty soon I hadn't been back home to Ohio in almost eight years, which is as long as I lived there.

But not all years are equal. I think somewhere, in the back of your mind, the place where you came of age and the friends you made there will always stay with you because they get locked into your identity a different way, being there like handprints in concrete that's just been poured.

I didn't come back to Ohio this time to reconnect. I came back to help my parents with the old house after some flooding in the basement. But spending time in that Ohio green and eating Tommy's pizza and most of all sneaking in two long talks with two old friends has left me just aching for the place I grew up.   

"I kinda want to move back," I told Nicole this morning.

"I know," she said, though we've never talked about it before. "I can see it in you."

I don't think I actually will, at least not soon. We've got a life here. And I know that actually living there that pull of memory would wear thinner, this rush of feeling would fade away into the everyday.

But I hope it doesn't take eight more years until the next visit. Because it was good to be back home a few days. So good to be home.

Is the United States a "developed country"?

Whenever the United States performs poorly on an index measuring human well-being, people tend to pull up charts comparing us to various European countries to show how sad our stats are.

If this is useful, that's fine. But I'm not sure it's an entirely fair comparison. 

Is the United States a "developed country" the way many European nations are? 

I wonder this because places like France and Britain (and Belgium and the Netherlands and Germany and Portugal and Spain and I'm running out of breath) used to have colonies all around the world that they looted and exploited--and then eventually left under the face of mounting local pressure. 

The United States did its own share of overseas colonial adventuring, but also dehumanized and enslaved and oppressed and exploited millions of people right here in our own borders. And I'm not convinced that we've addressed that legacy thoroughly enough to become a "developed country." 

I suspect that if you lumped together statistics from France or Britain or Belgium and their former colonies, the United States would look more average. 

Maybe at the end of the day, we need to stop thinking about how we're doing as a "developed country" and start asking when we're gonna live in a better developed world. 

Thoughts? 

Is Mia Love right?

Yesterday, President Trump used charged, abusive language to argue about Haitians and a few other groups of immigrants. The underlying argument, I think, was that those populations should not be part of a comprehensive immigration deal because he doesn't respect their nations of origin.

A number of conservative as well as liberal figures have expressed outrage at his comments. Among them was Mia Love, a conservative Republican representative from the congressional district next to mine, whose parents are immigrants from Haiti. "The president’s comments are unkind, divisive, elitist and fly in the face of our nation’s values," she said. "This behavior is unacceptable from the leader of our nation."

I think it's hard to argue with any of that. I might quibble: I think there's a difference worth noting between words that are simply "unkind" and active expressions of contempt, for example. The President wasn't just sort of rude to anyone from Haiti--he used language designed to strip away value from them. Ugly language for an ugly purpose. With, I might add, a long and ugly history. But overall? Unkind, divisive, elitist, and unacceptable is a great list.

What stood out to me far more than Love's initial criticism of the remarks, though, was a claim she made in the tenth paragraph of the Deseret News report of her response.

"I doubt that a comment like that would have been made," Love said, "if somebody like me was sitting across the table from him."

Is Mia Love right about that?

My first reaction was to think that Love is too optimistic. President Trump doesn't seem to have much of a filter in general: would it really change the way he spoke or thought if one Haitian-origin representative from a faraway state were in the meeting?

But then I remembered President Trump's visit to China. After raging against the country on the campaign trail and in Washington, Trump seemed downright complimentary of the country and its leadership when he visited. He even complimented them on their past economic dealings with the United States, going out of his way to say that it was only natural that they would watch out for their own people's interests and blaming any past problems in trade agreements on former U.S. presidents.

It's not the only time something like that has happened. Donald Trump may not have been as complimentary, but he certainly clammed up during his campaign visit to Mexico. It's hard to think, actually, of instances where he's insulted groups or individuals directly to their faces.

The man can mouth off in all caps to millions on Twitter. He can rage at rallies while addressing his base. But face to face interaction does seem to affect his behavior.

And it seems like the face itself matters. There were plenty of people in the room with President Trump yesterday who were upset by the sentiment he expressed and the language he expressed it in. But he would have had to think ahead to realize that they might be upset, and perhaps to wonder whether the offense would be only political or also personally.

Would things have been different with a black face in the room? Especially if he vaguely remembered to connect that face with the very country under discussion?

Maybe Mia Love is right. Maybe some words would have been harder to say, some thoughts just a little harder even to form, if she'd been sitting there.

And if she's right, it's an insight with use far beyond the Trump White House. If she's right that we respond to the subconscious cues around us, that we respond to the visual and the visceral even when we can't quite grasp the implications of our ideas at a fully realized rational level, then Mia Love made a really important observation about human nature, and an important argument for diversity in counsel in a broad range of political, corporate, religious, and social settings.

The El Paso Problem

My grandma's grandfather, Helaman Pratt, first went from Utah to Mexico in 1875 and his descendants have been wandering back and forth over the border ever since. My grandma herself spent her growing-up years as far south as Mexico City and as far north as southern Idaho--with many of those years spent in the area around El Paso, Texas. 

Now, the borders around El Paso were defined in the mid-1800s by the Rio Grande. But as my grandmother told me when I was a child, the river never did know or care that it was a border. So from time to time, it's up and changed course.

Which creates an interesting dispute: where does the border go when the river shifts?

You could look up past disputes and find several different answers from several different negotiations. But if you were the judge, what would be your initial impulse?

Does the border remain at the place where the river was when the border was first negotiated? Or is it better to just say the border moves when the river does?

There are more complicated options, of course, for those of you who prefer detailed jurisprudence. Are there other factors which need to be taken into account to determine whether the old course or the new course of the river should be followed? Should the new border somehow split the difference between the river's old and new courses? Etc.

I think this is a fascinating problem. I would love to hear your responses: where should the border go when the river shifts and (perhaps more importantly) why?

April Fools' Day in an Information Society

Holidays tend to either express or invert the values of their culture. A simple example of this is Mardi Gras/Carnival and Lent in Catholic cultures--one holiday to acknowledge the excess the culture works against; another to showcase the values of restraint and repentance the culture strives for. In the Jewish holiday calendar, built in an agricultural society, the pairs are similar but with the values almost reversed: feast days celebrate the abundance the culture strives for; fasts give a picture of that joy overturned.

This April 1st, half of what I saw on Facebook was a barefaced lie. It was glorious. As usual, Google itself contributed a generous budget to developing elaborate April Fools' Day jokes. For one day, the Internet's aspiration of granting instant access to reliable information was tossed upside down. Carnival for an information age.

I think April Fools' Day will only get bigger and more important as the internet continues to shape our culture. It's a holiday well-suited for our age.

Witches, Jews, and Acceptable Verbal Abuse

I have been writing today about witches.

Using American communists or communist sympathizers in the McCarthy era as my starting point, I made four observations about characteristics of the witches in a given society, :

1) A witch stands against the basic assumptions of the virtuous group's social vision.
2) A witch evokes very real memories of persecution and fear.
3) Even a drop of Satan's blood is enough to make someone a witch.
4) It is seen as an act of virtue to expose and isolate a witch.

As I wrote, it occurred to me that these four principles may help explain the Christian persecution of Jews during the Medieval and Renaissance eras. Since most European societies were built on Catholic political thought, Jews called into question the dominant society's basic assumptions as surely as people who blatantly resist scientific or democratic principles in America today.

Jews were popularly associated both with memories of early persecution of then-minority emerging Christians by the more established community of mainstream Jews and with false accusations of responsibility in all sorts of missing child cases and other tragedies. In addition to believing Jews committed more crimes, Christians were probably also more likely to remember any crimes Jews were alleged to commit, giving an extremely skewed popular image of the threat of violence and ill-will represented by the Jewish community.

Even Jews who converted to Christianity were often faced with prolonged skepticism about the completeness of their conversion (and persecuted when it was suspected that they had retained any vestiges of Judaism whatsoever). And there certainly wasn't room in most European societies in the Medieval and Renaissance eras for Jews to offset their religious identity with other merits as a way to enter mainstream society,

And because Jews were seen as far from the dominant social and legal order, Christians probably felt virtuous for abusing them in much the same way that we are socially rewarded for verbally degrading people whose political views are farthest from our own today. It would be interesting to compare the things hard-core conservatives sometimes say about liberals and hard-core liberals say about conservatives today with the things pre-Enlightenment European Christians sometimes said about Jews.

We have changed since those days. We are certainly more tolerant about religion, and we have protections in place against physical abuse and segregation. But are there still shadows of the old European treatment of Jews in the ways people from different ideological camps interact with each other? 

I wonder how the Merchant of Venice would play out today if it were set in a college theater department with the merchant as a straight-laced, traditional-marriage Republican in a sea of progressive Democrats. Would we be offended if part of his plea deal (after being outwitted by a man dressed in drag to disguise himself as the female Department Chair) was a pledge to vote for equality and register as a Democrat? 

Cultural Differences Between American and Indian Dogs

So...for all the cultural differences between people in India and America, one of the most striking differences I noticed was between dogs.

American dogs I've met are almost always curious about new people, either for social or territorial reasons. If you get close to them, they want to sniff you or bark at you or just stand close to you for long enough to make some internal canine judgments.

But the stray dogs I walked past on the streets in Delhi and Dhudike were nothing like that. They seemed perfectly willing to adapt themselves to traffic patterns without worrying about who owned what space and didn't show direct much direct interest in human beings at all. I don't remember a single one sniffing me or barking at me, though I must have walked past a few dozen.

The dogs in Delhi did get loud sometimes at night. They'd howl or bark (probably at each other), though the sounds were different than I'm used to from backyard dogs in my neighborhood.

I don't remember the dogs in Dhudike making much noise at any time. I wonder why that is.

Memories of Mahipalpur, New Delhi

On December 26th, I arrived in India for the first time in my life on my way to my cousin's wedding in our village in Punjab. Before I met up with other relatives to head to back to the old family house, though, I had one day in New Delhi on my own.

Instead of going to any major site, I decided to spend that day simply by walking out of my hotel and away from the main road to take a look at what life was like in that part of Delhi.

The first thing that struck me was the sheer abundance of social life on the progressively narrow streets. There were people everywhere talking, laughing, working, playing cards, eating, drinking juice or tea, walking, waiting, greeting each other, selling wares from doorways or from carts, driving by on bicycles and motorbikes and sometimes cars while honking regularly, looking down from balconies or rooftops--the streets were completely alive. I remember thinking: this must have been what it was like when Jesus was alive. Streets like these are where Christianity comes from.

There was also seldom a hard line of separation between the streets and the buildings. Construction guys worked from piles of gravel poured right on the side of the street and took bowels-full at a time to reinforce the lower stories of buildings that were completely open for me to see the process. Lots of finished buildings seemed open still: I looked in on a sewing factory with fifteen machines and a handful of people at work that was just open to the street; I saw into warehouses, clear to the back of shops, into the windows of houses three doors back from the alley.

It was actually difficult sometimes to keep track of what counted as a street and what was more like an internal hallway in a housing complex. The streets themselves were sort of like I imagine capilarries: getting narrower and quieter as they divide until they're just little walkways---it's a very different feel from the hard distinction in an American suburb between a street, a driveway, and a sidewalk. There were plenty of dead ends, so that it was quite difficult to keep track of where I was after the first hour or so, and plenty of construction, so that it never quite felt like your location was permanent anyway.

I was still out and about when a nearby boys' school got out and boys in red sweaters poured through the streets in happy streams for a while. A few minutes later, a girls' school got out, too, and girls in blue and white came streaming through the area from a different direction.

I remember stray dogs wandering through the traffic, pretty much minding their own business and keeping their heads low.

I remember a shoe repair man sitting down on one of the big, paved streets on the edges of the area I was exploring, holding a customer's sandal between his feet while he stitched it back up with his hands.

On one edge of the neighborhood, I saw a giant trash dump which I used as a landmark. Like everything else, it was open--big and small paths led in and out, people came looking for useful things and left when they'd found what they wanted. There was a big cow grazing there.

A few people absently watched or nodded their heads when I came by, but nobody seemed to think it was unusual to have me wandering through their neighborhood and looking around. Maybe I looked just Indian enough to seem fairly normal. Maybe enough other people wander out of the hotels and back into the streets for a while that local people are used to foreigners in their streets, though I sort of doubt that. Maybe things are just open enough that no one's used to worrying about who's looking around or expecting them to have any reason for it.

In any case, it was a beautiful day. I know New Delhi has all sorts of problems, but it was really wonderful to get a sense of the energy, openness, and sense of community in one corner of Mahipalpur, a few blocks back from the airport hotels and travel agencies on the paved road out front.

I think my ideal neighborhood would be a cleaner version of that place.

Hostess and the House of Saud

Yesterday in the car, my wife and I got talking about the recent demise of Hostess Brands, Inc. (longtime maker of Twinkies, Wonderbread, and other mainstays of American pop culture) after their bakers' union turned down a pay and benefits cut. We'd heard some people blame those union members for bargaining themselves out of 18,500 jobs. We'd also heard, though, that union workers had agreed to pay cuts to save the company after a previous bankruptcy just a few years before. And so we wondered: when would you accept a pay cut to save your company? When would you vote for your own employer to go under? 

With limited information on the Hostess case, we decided we'd probably have voted against the pay cut. After all, what's the point of sacrificing just to extend the decline of a dying concern? If changes American eating patterns have made pay cuts the only way for Hostess to survive, why not just let it go and try to find work with a company better in touch with the industry's future?

Now--if I felt like company leaders understood why Hostess was struggling, I said, and if they had a clear plan to turn the company around and get wages up again, then it would be much easier for me to make a short-term sacrifice to keep the company alive.

In short, I said, I would make a sacrifice to back a leader with a plan for success but would have very little loyalty to a leader who allowed his or her own company to decline and then expected me to fix it. And with a union potentially multiplying workers' anxiety as well as influence, it might be quite difficult for a leader of a failing company to really convince anyone he was worth a second chance. 

Which is when our conversation turned to the House of Saud.

I once read that before the late 1700s, the interior of the Arabian peninsula was typically ruled locally, with various families and tribes competing for dominance. Periodically, one family's leader would defeat another, and still other families would align themselves with him in exchange for promises of security. Gradually, the leader of that family might come to rule much of the peninsula as people rallied around him after military victories--but a leader's rule ever lasted long, because the first defeat not only limited his expansion, it also shook the loyalty of all his subjects. A losing leader was less likely to have his former allies show up for the next battle, and therefore more likely to lose again--starting off a chain reaction that resulted in rapid decline. In the end, many once-great leaders died as little more than village patriarchs, or even as exiles and wanderers, no longer supported even on their families' native lands.


And so it was with Hostess: a weak leader can't hold a coalition together on a "sacrifice because we're weak" slogan. They should have known they were doomed: people are naturally inclined to support the ascendant.

And yet--if we support on the ascendant, aren't we also doomed (like Arabs in the 1700s) to the insecurity of rapid cycles of change? It's human nature to want to side with winners, but people who change sides too quickly risk their own stability and security, which are also powerful motivators for supporting a given ruler or boss. So how can a leader keep a coalition together through ups and downs long enough to establish stability?

One possible answer comes from the House of Saud. In the mid-1700s, a local chieftain named Muhammad ibn Saud joined forces with a preacher named al Wahhab: ibn Saud swore to govern in a way that would promote al Wahhab's vision of a purified, fundamentalist Islamic order. Ibn Saud won battles, to be sure, but it wasn't just his military ascendance supporters were drawn to. They also bought into his ideological vision. Even when ibn Saud suffered defeats and setbacks, allies who valued that vision were willing to stand with him. Within just 70 years of their adoption of Wahhabism, the heirs of ibn Saud ruled an area just larger than they do today.

A possible corporate parallel can be found in Apple under Steve Jobs. At various times, Apple has been ascendant and weak. But its core supporters have remained committed because of their faith in the company vision even at times when its fortunes seemed to be running low.

Thinking about House of Saud, I theorized that ascendance, security, and vision are the three main glues all types of different governments and companies use to keep their organizations together.When a country or company loses these three things, it's likely to lose the support of its people soon afterward. The stronger it can keep each of the three, the more claims to people's faith and support it has to fall back on.

Hostess probably had an inspiring vision once upon a time. Maybe back in the Depression its workers took pride in their ability to provide people with affordable, technologically-sophisticated bread. Maybe in the 1950s and 1960s, they took pride in their ability to give hostesses a startlingly convenient way to share obviously complicated desserts with their guests. Along with that vision, workers in those eras probably enjoyed a sense of ascendance as they saw their company uniting with other regional bakeries into an industry powerhouse. They probably also developed a strong sense of security as company leaders promised them reliable benefits packages and wages above the industry average.

The advantages Hostess has probably didn't disappear all at once. But the culture around them shifted. As inexpensive turned to cheap, the company's talent for lowering the bottom line by extending the shelf life of goods probably lost much of its lustre. As people began to value the wonders of the natural over the wonders of technology, the company likely lost more meaning.

And with the vision slipping, ascendance probably settled into plateau and then market share erosion. When a product becomes uninspiring to make, odds are it will soon struggle to sell.

Finally, probably after years and years of subtle warnings, Hostess found itself unable to meet its old promises of security. They asked their workers to accept a pay cut in 2009 and got it. But they lost the last leg of their legitimacy in the process. When they had to come ask for concessions again without a vision or a hope of ascendance to support them, it was over.

And maybe we'll live to see the same happen to the House of Saud. The personal behaviors of some members of the ruling family have undermined their credibility as heirs to Wahhab's vision--which may also itself lose cultural power as hardline Muslim governments around the world fail to thrive. Their credibility for providing security was compromised during the first Gulf War, when they had to ask the United States for assistance and accept American bases on their lands. And their ascendance is certainly in jeopardy if the world transitions from oil--or if their oil runs out. 

Identity as Social Technology

I've been thinking lately about the idea of identity. And it's occurred to me that most of what we talk about as part of identity is less about "who you are" than about what aspects of yourself you choose to emphasize to connect with others.

Here's an example: anybody can mix whole wheat flour and water, roll it out and add oil, then cook it, eat it, and enjoy it. They could even share the word roti for describing it. But that's just something you eat. It's part of what you do, but not part of your identity.

For me, it's also part of identity because eating roti is a piece of social technology I use to connect myself with other people. It reminds me of my grandfather and of other members of the Gill family. In some sense, it connects me to non-Gill Punjabi who also, presumably, feel a certain emotional and family as well as dietary connection to rotis. 

Another example: let's say you listen to a song. You may like it or dislike it, but it's only part of your identity if you see your attitude toward the song as being a part of my belonging in a larger group. You may be subconsciously using your dislike for country music, for example, as a way to connect to other urban, sophisticated people and to distance yourself from rural populations in the South and West. Or you may be emphasizing your connection to a certain ideological group by emphasizing your appreciation for related music.

In any case, it seems like whether we're talking about stories, food, values, or practices,the point of most of what we associate with identity is to connect with others.

Which is why I'm a bit puzzled at how much people today seem to want to find a totally unique identity. I mean, every person is already unique--it seems to me that the point of most elements of identity is to counterbalance your natural isolation by building stronger bonds with others.

The Simple Version

Tonight, I had several friends over who I know only through a new group blog. At one point, they wanted to get straight my family background, and it occurred to me it might be time to post a basic diagram for people who are finding out about me through the internet.

Here is a simple chart of my ancestry:

At the bottom, I have listed my original name. After various bureaucratic misunderstanding, I decided to simply and go with three names like most Americans, but still happily answer to Westwood when I'm with people who knew me when I still tried to go by all four names.

Above me are my parents. To my children, my Dad is "Grandpa Zorro" (well..."Zoyyo" still for my two-year-old, but close enough). I have included this name on my chart because I think his chosen patriarchal title is a good expression of who he is. My mom is Vilo 3 of 4 because she shares a first name with her daughter, her mother, and her grandmother, which was also the nickname of her great-grandmother's close friend.

My father's father was Jewish--both his parents were immigrants to the United States from Romania. My father's mother was from the Westwood/Holladay clan in California, which is a strange and wonderful tribe of Mormons with a ferocious wit and a taste for massive Fourth of July parties.

My mother's father was born in rural India while the British still ruled there. Six of his brothers followed him to the United States, and so our extended family is mostly Punjabi-American, but with some Punjabi-Canadians and even a few Punjabi-Punjabis! My mother's mother was born to a family of Mormon colonistas in northern Mexico, though when many people from the colonies went north, her family went south, so part of her childhood was in Hidalgo state near Mexico City.

The diagram leaves out the relatives who married in from other countries (including but not limited to Belgium, Japan, Fiji, the Navajo nation, England, and Ohio). And it leaves out any mention of the sort of awesomely overwhelming number of extended cousins I have. But it's maybe helpful in giving a basic overview of the family context that inspired the creation of this blog.

The Valiant Chattee-Maker

So...once upon a time, I wrote this children's play based on an old Indian folktale. It's about an ordinary pot-maker who goes out into a storm to look for his lost donkey, launching a series of improbable events that make him a national hero within the next thirty-five minutes of stage time.

Last night, I got to watch a performance of this fall's touring production of the play. And it was awesome. I laughed. Elementary school kids laughed and laughed. When the warhorse came on, even my two year old son started to laugh.

And I think there's something really wonderful about that. About little kids getting early experiences of other cultures through humor they can enjoy and feel like a part of.

It's a small thing, yes. But sometimes I feel like it's the small things more than the big dramatic things that make our world work. The little points of connection and sympathy that will ultimately make a difference.

An hour in Greensboro

 I am currently in Greensboro, North Carolina, participating in Orson Scott Card's "Literary Boot Camp"--an intense, week-long writing class and workshop with a writer I admire. Last night, he sent us out onto the town with instructions to find story ideas: two from observation, one from an interview, and two from research.

It was awesome.

I wandered up Highpoint Road first, and stepped into a small side gate of a large cemetery--full of Guralniks and Stadiems and Isaacsons and Goldbergs. Completely Jewish with headstones dating back to the late 1800s.  Evidence of a long history of Jewish Greensboro.

Behind the cemetery were some woods. I walked next to them down the road, wondering if there would be a synagogue on the other side--but there was a little Christian church instead (I think it was called Sunrise Ministries or something). Past the church was a little path down into the woods, so of course I followed it. North Carolina woods are pretty spectacular--tall pines taking out the sky, but leaving enough room for thick green growth on the ground and long vines winding up around their narrow trucks. I walked, and I watched the fireflies rise up out of the grasses and along the stream bed. And I thought about the people who used to run and hide in woods like these. Wondered how, once they got far enough for dogs not to track them, anybody ever managed to hunt them down.

I came out of the woods again and watched people sitting on porches or gathering on lawn chairs around tables under trees. Watched a lot of people talking on cell phone in the cars, windows rolled down in the driveway. I worried for a minute I might not find the noise and landmarks of Highpoint again...just be lost in this nice southern neighborhood.

But it wasn't long before I found Highpoint again, stepped into one little corner grocery with no produce and barely any grain (unless you count Doritos or Potato chips) and then out again to see if I could find a place that could at least sell me a tomato.

I noticed another hole-in-the-wall grocery back in the direction of my motel, close to where I'd seen the cemetery. Though I knew it was a long shot, I decided to give it a chance.

There was not a single piece of produce in sight, but there was a nice guy with a thick local accent who was willing to give me directions to another grocery store. It was farther than I wanted to walk at the time, but he was a nice guy, so I asked him if he knew anything about the cemetery.

"Oh, for that you've got to talk to the boss," he said. "He's the man to talk to about anything in Greensboro." So he took me into the store and introduced me.

His boss was a 70-year-old Palestinian Christian emigrant named Nabeel, and he wrote down the address of the nearest Jewish school for me in case I wanted to go there at the same time as he explained to me how Judaism and Zionism are two very different things, and that he doesn't mind the one even though he hates the other. Then he told me all kinds of things about his village outside Tel Aviv, overlooking the Mediterranean, where everybody knew you and if you got sick people just popped in with soup or bread--ready to help without even being asked. He talked about the old family business making soap out of pure olive oil. "With that soap, you never get dandruff," he said. "Hundreds of years before Tide, my family was making that soap!" He talked about missing the village, about high school and East Jerusalem, about how attacks interrupted life and how that still didn't mean he could count someone he saw as a freedom fighter as a terrorist. I asked him if he wanted to go back "there" and he told me he was glad I didn't use the word Israel (even though it was more accident than choice).

When he asked what my name was and I said James, he told me that was crap. He asked what it really was, my Hebrew name, and I said it would be Yaakov. He said, "oh yes! Yacub. I had an uncle with that name."" And he insisted on referring to me as Yacub for the rest of our conversation.

It was a pretty amazing interview. Good to have a writing exercise to help justify talking to strangers.

Is gurdwara an English word yet?

My short story "The Maulana Azad Memorial Lamppost of Panipatnam" was recently accepted for publication and I recently got the copy edited manuscript to look over.

In my original manuscript, I had italicized India-related terms only when the characters of the story were self-consciously explaining them to non-Indian characters while leaving India-related terms unitalicized when two Indian characters talked with each other, or when Indian characters talked quickly without bothering to explain themselves.

But the publisher's style guide, understandably, doesn't have such an elaborate set of rules for when to italicize words. Their rule is that if a word is foreign, it should be italicized the first time it appears. Which is, admittedly, a much simpler standard to watch for.

But it sort of makes me curious: how do we know when a word counts as foreign and when it becomes English? Obviously we don't feel the need to point out that pork has French origins every time the term appears in print. And when characters are clumsy, no one calls them klutzes in case you don't know any Yiddish.

But when did a mosque become a mosque? And when will gurdwara become just plain old gurdwara?

How does an imported word get naturalized into English? 

Gender, Seating Arrangements, and Social Development

In Punjabi Sikh culture, men and women sit on separate sides of the center aisle at a wedding or other religious service.  I don't think it's a rule or anything, just tradition (though weddings tend to bring out the tradition in people to the point where it might as well be a rule). Punjabis also do a lot of socializing in same-gender groups.

In LDS churches, most of us spend one hour with our with an age group, one hour with a gender group, and one hour seated by family with the whole group. We also have formal gender-based organizations and spend time with them occasionally in service or social activities.

I recently read Sylvester Lamin's The Coconut Bond, a novel that gives a fascinating look into recent Sierra Leonese history and culture. It makes passing, casual reference to characters' initiations into the poro secret society for men and bondo secret society for women. There's a Hugh Masekela song called "African Secret Society"--the title sounds like it's an imaginary thing, but he's probably referring to similar institutions in South African cultures.

Yesterday I started wondering when and how often mainstream Americans spend time in formal or informal single-gender groups. Many teens and a few people in their early twenties participate in single-gender sports teams. A few participate in Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, though I believe enrollment numbers are down for both organizations. In popular culture, watching sports is often presented as a male bonding activity, and book clubs as female--though in practice, both are probably mixed-gender activities more than single gender.

I understand, of course, that gender roles can lead to damaging gender inequalities. So there's a good case that we should just get rid of single-gender groups and socialization patterns and aim for a society where there are no real gender distinctions between the two biological sexes.

Then again, there may be a reason why so many cultures have developed structures for some socialization in single-gender groups. If we're gaining something in America by largely neglecting such groups and patterns, are we also losing something?

Discuss...

Why America is Ready for a Black President--but not a Mormon President

Don't get me wrong--there's a good chance America will soon have a Mormon President. Try as they might, it seems improbable at this point that the Republican Party's right wing will be able to stop a Romney nomination. And if gas prices are too high in the fall or things turn particularly ugly in Afghanistan or something else happens that's mostly out of Barack Obama's control but for which he'll still be blamed, then people are likely to vote for against him and--voila--put Mitt Romney in the White House.

But even if Americans elect a Mormon President, I don't think they're really ready for one--because among both liberals and conservatives, the capacity to stereotype Mormons is still too high.

See, when Barack Obama passes something controversial, people blame him, not all black people. Nobody thinks "man, those black people need to leave the Catholic Church alone" or "I hate how black people are cozying up to the Europeans all the time" or even "black people are so indecisive sometimes." And when a black person does something negative in someone's life, no one seems to think it's evidence to oppose the President. No one says, "I had a black boss once who I didn't like, so I can't support Barack Obama."

But I don't think America is ready to make the same differentiations yet between a Mormon President and Mormons. I've read plenty of online comments in which people did attack Romney because they had a bad Mormon boss or because they heard all Mormons are against women or racist or trying to take over the world. And if Mitt Romney does become President, I think we'll see the stereotypes go the other way. Imagine for a moment:
"%&#$@ Mormons took away my health insurance!"
"Why'd you Mormons have to push us to the brink of war with Iran?"
"Of course he nominated another man to the Supreme Court. %(#@$# Mormon!"

Hmmm....

So, I'm pretty sure I'm right that many people expect Romney to be accountable for all of Mormonism, and I'm pretty sure that many people would expect individual Mormons to be accountable for things Romney would do as President.

But I'm wondering now whether the same doesn't seem to be true for Barack Obama because he's actually biracial, raised in a white family, and more difficult to associate with black Americans as a group. If we had a President who was closer to people's image of what a black man in America is like, would there be more crossover between the President's acts and the cultural stereotypes?

Maybe another useful example is Nikki Haley in South Carolina. I don't think anyone is going to judge all South Asians based on her, or expect her to explain why bad things happen in India--but they probably would do those things to an Indian-origin candidate who was closer to their stereotypes.

And would Americans still be talk about a Presidential candidate's Mormon-ness the same way if the candidate were, say, a Mormon Latina?

Query Letter, Take Two

I wrote my first query letter thinking of Paul Cirone, the agent who handled Leif Enger's Peace Like A River. When I started writing it, Cirone's profile said he was still accepting literary fiction, but most interested in nonfiction with some kind of current affairs connection (or something like that). So I tried to pitch my Jesus book in a way that would catch the attention of someone interested in contemporary politics.

In a strange and somewhat moving twist of fate, however, Paul Cirone officially announced he was leaving publishing to become a special education elementary school teacher at about the same time as I finished my book draft. Coming from a long line of teachers, it's hard for me not to admire someone's decision to give up a great career to serve children--but it did mean my query was designed for someone I couldn't send it to anymore.

I'd worked enough on that letter I sent it to several agents anyway. So far, I have several form rejection letters in return. I know that form rejection letters are completely normal, but decided to rewrite the query anyway to get rid of the contemporary connection and emphasize the strength of the imagery in my book instead.

Here's my first stab at the new query angle. Do you want to read the book described here more than the one I described in my last letter?

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Dear [Agent name here]:

There’s a place in the desert where the Jordan is as brown with dust as a tear running down a drought-stricken farmer’s face. When Jesus was baptized, he must’ve looked buried under those muddy waters for a moment before rising up, just as a bird swooped down to skim insects off the river’s surface. Who could’ve known then how soon he’d be buried in a tomb? Who would have imagined how many people he’d share bread with before the Passover flatbread became his last?

My 75,000 word literary novel In Search of Vanished Blood tells Jesus’ story from the perspectives of those around him: from close followers and relatives to people he met only once. Andrew, more fisher than preacher, ties knots by day for each new teaching and goes over them by night as carefully as if he were mending his net. Judas’s heart beats faster whenever Jesus hints at the coming end of the world: he can’t wait for the day when legions of angels descend to usher in a new age. After helping Jesus’ men find lodgings in her town, Mary from Magdala insists on following them wherever they go—though she has to pass herself off as some apostle’s sister whenever anyone asks what she’s doing on the road with so many men.

No matter where Jesus and his followers go, danger is never far. Because foreign occupations make local divisions run deeper, it’s hard to know who to trust; because speech can be deadly, Jesus uses parables to at once conceal and reveal unorthodox ideas. Religious audiences will feel closer to familiar Biblical figures who navigate unexpected tensions in my book. Literary audiences will be drawn to the prose style, which mixes the meditative folklore tone of Elie Wiesel’s Souls on Fire with the charged imagery of classical Urdu poetry. Academic audiences will explore the subtle, intricate shaping of the narrative around Old Testament structures.

My telling of Jesus’ story is unique partly because of my background: not many part-Sikh, part-Jewish writers also hold MFAs from Brigham Young University. I’ve won awards for my plays and essays, had work on Jewish topics published in Shofar and Drash, and had work translated into Punjabi. I’m querying you because [insert evidence I’ve actually read up on them here.]

Sincerely,

James Goldberg

Help me sell my novel...

Update 7/19/2011: I decided I didn't love this query and have tried again. Please take a look at my updated query instead of this one.

As many of you know, I recently finished a strong draft of a 263-page book, meaning that I'm ready to start trying to sell it to someone.

The first step in selling a novel is to find an agent who might like your work. The most common advice I've seen for finding an agent is to find books that are like--but not TOO much like--yours and then send a short letter describing your book to the agents that sold those books.

Problem: I'm struggling to think of books that are good matches.

After reading the query letter below, are you interested in reading my book? If so, would you mind telling me in the comments what other books you like?

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Query Letter, last modified 6/6 at 10:15 pm:

Dear [insert agent name here],

You’ve heard the story before. At the edge of an empire, an occupied people seeks answers in their faith. Some search for purity in strict ritual observance, others by separating themselves from the symbols of a brutally civilized world. Some emphasize peace and love to transcend (and undermine) bitter political realities, while others insist that God will bring miraculous victory only if they first fight violence with violence.

You’ve heard of this world before: but does it produce Osama Bin Laden or Jesus?

My 75,000 word novel In Search of Vanished Blood tells the story of Jesus from the perspectives of those around him at a time when unsettling cultural imperialism has produced religious turmoil. The pressures of the time shape the way the story is told: because speech can be deadly, Jesus uses parables to at once conceal and reveal unorthodox ideas; his followers repurpose sacred stories into veiled outcries. Religious audiences will feel closer to familiar Biblical figures who navigate unexpected tensions in my book. Literary audiences will be drawn to the prose style, which mixes the meditative folklore tone of Elie Wiesel’s Souls on Fire with the charged imagery of classical Urdu poetry. Academic audiences will explore the subtle, intricate shaping of the narrative around Old Testament structures.

My telling of Jesus’ story is unique partly because of my background: not many part-Sikh, part-Jewish writers also hold MFAs from Brigham Young University. I understand contexts of repression: I’m related to the murdered activist poet Avtar Singh Pash and studied South Asian political writing with Indian screenwriter Abhijat Joshi. I honor my Jewish roots and have had work published in Shofar and Drash. I know about how religions emerge and spread: I spent two years as a missionary and later worked for the scholarly Joseph Smith Papers Project.

And how many writers’ looks have made passing strangers call them both “Osama” and “Jesus”?

Sincerely,

James Goldberg

Family Tweets

I still haven't learned the art of telling this blog's sort of stories in 140 characters or fewer. So far, I think two tweets, both from 19 Feb, might fit.


The first is about my grandfather's incredible efforts in preserving genealogical information from old Punjabi land records:

My daughter calls cemeteries "dictionaries." My grandfather agrees: he finds meaning by looking up the names of the dead. #familyhistory


The other tweet was meant as a joke, but I think it also gets a bit at the paradox of how the sheer amount of time parents and children spend together can make it feel repetitive and banal even though it's also the most important, and often destiny-shaping, part of our lives:

Sometimes being a parent feels like being the movie Groundhog Day, only with fewer opportunities for redemption.

Book Ate My Blogs

I've been working on a book which seems to have pretty much squeezed out the blog spaces in my day. Since there are still blog spaces in my brain, though, I've decided to start using Twitter once a day or so to capture an idea or memory in a short-short form.

I'll try to post relevant tweets on this blog periodically.