We were talking Sunday over coffee about the Demzette publishing a conversational yet solid-punching essay by UA’s Mohja Kahf as the lede piece in the Perspective (editorial) section. Under her name is printed The Washington Post, where the piece first ran a week ago.
We were proud. Mohja is one of us. Not just a “Fate-ville” gal, as she might put it, but we are friends with many of the same people. Doesn’t mean she recognizes me. There’s a handful of people who over the years mutual friends introduce me to, over and over again. I remember, they don’t. Doesn’t matter. If Mohja gives a reading I will try to attend, whether poetry or fiction, The words are precise, the delivery just theatrical enough. You can hear her voice in this weekend piece, it’s that good.
My conversation partner said, “Isn’t that just like the Little Rock paper, not recognizing Mohja until someone big like the Post runs something by her then they take it for their own.”
I recognize this attitude, it’s uniquely Arkansas, proud and persecuted all at once. It’s what made the old Gazette unbearable at times. Not just it but individual Arkies, the better-dressed and well-educated ones, embarrassed by their tribe until they believe it’s being attacked. (Maybe I mean Jewish.) But the speaker at the table is not a native but a Midwesterner; guess she’s been here enough years for the shod-Arkansas attitude to infect her.
I don’t know why the Demzette ran the piece but I have a strong guess, which I offered, and my coffee companion accepted as, well, a possibility: If Prof. Kahf offered a guest column to the Demzette, its editors would have jumped on it. But as pleasant as she is, Mohja is too big for that. Her novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf is published by a major house. Her poetry has run in The Paris Review. If a great writer wants to tell the world about how Christianity and Judaism can and must find commonality with Islam, she goes to the big leagues. And the majors take her.
It’s not our loss. It’s everyone’s gain. -30-
