For every 100,000 babies born, 6,500 mothers die in the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan due to unavailable or inadequate medical care. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, violent conflicts over control of its rich mineral deposits have killed more people than the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Darfur combined.
\” . . . Isn\’t it time that every Jewish child take at least one course in Herzl? If he isn\’t the modern father of the Jewish People, who is? For without Herzl\’s many contributions, the Holocaust would have excluded any chance of a Jewish state in Israel . . .\”\n\n
Salman Rushdie is at Disney Hall, addressing a near-capacity audience as part of the Music Center\’s 2006 Speaker Series. He has come this March 1 evening to talk about politics and art, truth and tyranny, free and forbidden speech. He has come, also, to promote his newest book.
I\’m 11-years-old, my world a patchwork of mixed identities and conflicting beliefs, my eyes searching for a horizon I cannot yet see but that I follow almost by instinct. It\’s August in New York — a long and gray stretch of humidity and noise, people speaking to me in an accent I cannot understand, streets choked with traffic, shops overflowing with merchandise, buildings that block out the sun and cast permanent shadows upon the city. It\’s the first of many visits I\’ll make with my family to America, a small and tentative step along a journey that has begun long ago in my parents\’ hearts.
It is summer, a long time ago, and I am lying on a terrace overlooking an ancient garden full of rosebushes and fruit trees. The days have been so hot, the asphalt on the sidewalk melts under my feet if I dare step out of the house. At night, the temperature drops. My sisters and I take the hose to the yard and stand there as the day\’s heat rises out of the brick floor in a cloud of white steam. My mother spreads our bed on the terrace, and we crawl into it, hours before we can actually fall asleep. We thrash about in the cool sheets that smell of dust, summer and lavender bleach; listen to the music that drifts up from our grandmother\’s radio downstairs; eat fresh mulberries we have picked from the tree in our own yard.
So there\’s a fairy-tale wedding: a thousand guests in a flower-filled ballroom, a dozen violins playing Mozart, a grainy-voiced singer belting out an old Persian love song. The bride is 20 years old and ravishing, of course, but she\’s also blessed with charm and charisma, the kind of exuberance that turns heads and drags stares behind her. She\’s been breaking hearts since she was 14 years old and walked into a cousin\’s wedding in a frilly white dress and a wide lace headband. Now she dances on stage, next to the singer with the forlorn music, and the crystal beads on her wedding gown glow like fireflies in the dark.
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