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Although the alienated, impoverished immigrant communities outside Paris are increasingly prone to anti-Semitism, the profiles of French jihadists don’t track closely with class. Many of them have come from bourgeois families. Photograph by Arnau Bach for The New Yorker.

Fouad Ben Ahmed never paid much attention to Charlie Hebdo. He found the satirical magazine to be vulgar and not funny, and to him it seemed fixated on Islam, but he didn’t think that its contributors did real harm. One of its cartoonists, Stéphane Charbonnier, also drew for Le Petit Quotidien, a children’s paper to which Ben Ahmed subscribed for his two kids. On January 7th, upon hearing that two French brothers with Algerian names, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, had executed twelve people at the Charlie Hebdo offices—including Charbonnier—in revenge for covers caricaturing Muhammad, Ben Ahmed wrote on Facebook, “My French heart bleeds, my Muslim soul weeps. Nothing, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, can justify these barbaric acts. Don’t talk to me about media or politicians who would play such-and-such a game, because there’s no excuse for barbarism. #JeSuisCharlie.”

That night, Ben Ahmed left his house, in the suburbs outside Paris, and went into the city to join tens of thousands of people at a vigil. He is of Algerian and Tunisian descent, with dark skin, and a few white extremists spat threats at him, but Ben Ahmed ignored them—France was his country, too. On January 11th, he joined the one and a half million citizens who marched in unity from the Place de la République.

Ben Ahmed’s Facebook page became a forum for others, mostly French Muslims, to discuss the attacks. Many expressed simple grief and outrage; a few aired conspiracy theories, suggesting a plot to stigmatize Muslims. “Let the investigators shed light on this massacre,” Ben Ahmed advised. One woman wrote, “I fear for the Muslims of France. The narrow-minded or frightened are going to dig in their heels and make an amalgame”—conflate terrorists with all Muslims. Ben Ahmed agreed: “Our country is going to be more divided.” He defended his use of #JeSuisCharlie, arguing that critiques of Charlie’s content, however legitimate before the attack, had no place afterward. “If we have a debate on the editorial line, it’s like saying, ‘Yes—but,’ ” he later told me. “In these conditions, that is unthinkable.”

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Beginning our monthly series of Q&As with Filipino writers

Great Philippine Jungle Energy Cafe, first published in 1988, has been reissued by Anvil. Available at National Bookstores, Php375.

Alfred A. Yuson a.k.a. Krip has authored 26 books thus far, including novels, poetry collections, short fiction, essays, children’s stories, biographies and coffee table books, apart from having edited literary anthologies. He has gained numerous distinctions, including the 2009 Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas from UMPIL the Writer’s Union of the Philppines, the Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan award from the City of Manila, a Rockefeller Foundation grant for residency at Bellagio in Italy, and the South East Asian Writers Award from Thai royalty for lifetime achievement. He has also been elevated to the Hall of Fame of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. He co-founded the Philippine Literary Arts Council, Creative Writing Foundation, Inc., and Manila Critics Circle.

Krip Yuson can also be counted on to find paying jobs for underemployed writers, and is the social director of the Philippine literary scene.

Random excerpt

The natives called the mountain Talinis for its sharp peaks. The Spanish came and saw the twin peaks as home. They named the mountain Cuernos de Negros, Horns of the Devil, thinking it funnily appropriate that the island the mountain belonged to had itself earlier been named Negros for its dark-skinned aborigines.

If you look at the island on a map, fair chances are you’d recall sometime in your boyish past you bent from the waist and peered between your legs at your Aunt Rita, she of the jutjaw and the well-coiffed chignon and string of pearls almost as large as your marbles, an a scent that drew attention even while you nursed your year’s prized cold.

The outline of Negros Island much resembled an inverted silhouette of a lady with a powerful neck and a high bun on her head. Where the lady’s eye would be, the taller peak of Cuernos de Negros rose to a craggy cloud-capped height.

When Pedro Saavedra, Spanish surveyor and heir to a brewery fortune in Galicia, stood on this peak in 1765 and thus came to the crowning culmination of seven months of geodetic cum geologic work on the island, he took one long sweeping look at the curving coastline to the south, where the island’s head widened to the sea’s hairdressing hands, and breathed deeply the way Galicians of high birth do before their swig of malt at sundown.

Q&A with Krip Yuson

Jessica Zafra (JZ): A publisher has described The Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café as the first magical realist novel of the Philippines. Did you consciously set out to write a magical realist novel?

Alfred A. Yuson (AAY): Uhh, I don’t think so. I’ve never really been into labels identifying literary genres, often eschewing academic terms and trends. It just happened to be the kind of genre that appealed to me, that I was enjoying reading, then and maybe even now. It wasn’t until much later I think when the term magical realist, or metafiction or post-modern for that matter, became familiar. I was reading and enjoying Borges, Cortazar, eventually Marquez (whose work popularized the label for some Latin American fiction), but I was not aware that Nick Joaquin had already tried his hand in it with a few of his stories, written in the early 1950s. So much so that when I began attending literary fests/conferences abroad by the 1990s, and some smart-ass Aussie would question why Philippine fiction in English seemed to be enamored with magic realism, my reply would be to issue a challenge for him to come to Manila, live for a week in Quiapo, and look out the window, so he could witness the Black Nazarene procession as well as some street vendor hawking a tabloid with the headline: “Woman gives birth to fish!”
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James Bond movies have always opened with thrilling set pieces, and that’s even before the credit sequence/music video for the theme song. When we first see Daniel Craig (who should probably enjoy doing what he is extremely good at, that has made him a global star, instead of wanting to get out of it) as 007 in Spectre, he is wearing a death’s head mask and a suit with a skeleton design. It is the Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico, and to go out without a costume is to call attention to one’s self. Even without seeing that rather ugly but scorchingly hot mug we know it is Daniel Craig because his posture radiates arrogance and mastery. And then there is the matter of the tailoring. We know that Q provides the cars and gadgetry, but is the tailoring also MI6-issue? Is there a portable 3D printer in the glove compartment that can produce a perfect suit in minutes? And how much lycra is in the trousers, given that they are almost tight but never rip despite his exertions?

Throughout the movie we found ourselves asking when he had time to pack. We do not believe that he dresses off the rack. We’ll assume that he knew he’d be in the Day of the Dead procession so he had his tailor make the costume, but what about his other outfits? Between fleeing goons led by Dave Bautista (How strange to see a movie in which the biggest guy is Filipino. But yay!) in the snows of Altausee and catching the train to Morocco, he manages to produce a dinner jacket, and his lovely charge with the Proustian name of Dr. Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux; to extend the metaphor she should be a neuroscientist specialising in memory) walks down the dining car in a fabulous gown.

But going back to the opening scene, Bond kisses a woman, ditches the costume, goes out the window, and walks along the roof carrying a large gun with a microphone. The point of the longish walk is to highlight his casual disregard for danger and show the celebrations below, and surely to advertise a series of videos called “Daniel Craig Walks Somewhere”, which we will pre-order. Then he takes down a building and has a fight in a helicopter, and we’ll shut up with the spoilers except to note that our friend finished an entire tumbler of popcorn during this thrilling sequence. Then there was the credit sequence/music video featuring the song by Sam Smith, which is less of a downer than the Adele song for Skyfall, but face it, there’s nothing like a big, brassy number by Shirley Bassey. The tentacle porn is kind of funny.

When we were a child back in the Cretaceous, our parents used to sneak us into revivals of the Sean Connery Bond flicks while disdaining the Roger Moore editions that were showing at the time. Spectre reminds us of the Connery movies, minus the fashionable lechery of the time, which is alluded to when a white cat jumps onto Craig’s knees and he says, “Pussy”. Moviegoers expecting the nonstop kinetics of the Bourne-Mission Impossible school will be disappointed—director Sam Mendes likes the movie to breathe between the action scenes, though at nearly two and a half hours that’s too much breathing time. Also, Mendes is so respectful of human life that whenever Bond kills a bad guy we’re not allowed to cheer. We’re supposed to feel guilty. Ayyy political correctness.

Written by Penny Dreadful showrunner John Logan and others, Spectre is about the impending obsolescence of the Double-00 intelligence program in favour of surveillance technology. The new head of MI6 is played by Andrew Scott a.k.a. Moriarty on BBC’s Sherlock, so the mere casting is a spoiler. Ralph Fiennes returns as M (the new Judi), Naomie Harris as Ms Moneypenny (Give her a spinoff), Ben Whishaw as Q, and Rory Kinnear (Frankenstein’s Monster in Penny Dreadful) as another guy whose name we didn’t catch. Fiennes, Whishaw and Kinnear are three of the finest Shakespearean actors of the day (See Whishaw and Kinnear in The Hollow Crown as Richard II and the future Henry IV), so maybe Daniel Craig should consider that as Bond he gets to be supported by these wonderful actors who are probably happy to have the parts. Also, what is the point of casting Monica Bellucci if she gets just five minutes of screen time? The snows of Altausee get more screen time (We’ve actually been to Altausee, obviously not skiing, en route to the picturesque town of Gmunden to see the toilet museum).

Christoph Waltz, also with a very good tailor, is the arch-villain who turns out to be another classic Bond villain. With a white cat, so you know who the arch-villain’s boss is.

Rating: Highly recommended

She’s a harsh critic.

Illustration by Diego Patiño

Or a funny story made of the scary parts of scary movies.

The Scariest Story Ever Told
by Colin Nissan

At the end of a quiet road, behind a veil of twisted black oak trees, there was a house. A woman lived there. On bitter nights like this one, she sat by the fire and read until she grew tired enough for sleep. But on this night, as her lids grew heavy, she was startled by a sound. A sound she wasn’t accustomed to hearing these days. Who could be calling, she wondered? And this late? She rose from her chair and picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

“I’m going to kill you,” a man with a deep voice said.

“Who is this?” she asked.

No answer.

“Who is this?” she repeated, her hand trembling.

There was a click. Silence. She quickly dialled the police and explained what had happened. The officer told her to wait while he traced the call. After a few moments he said, “The call is coming from . . . inside your house.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “How could someone be inside my house?”

“He probably broke in,” he said.

“Oh yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

“And that’s not everything,” he said. “I’m not a police officer.”

“You aren’t?”

“No, I’m the killer guy from before. I never actually hung up.”

Read it.

Kapatiran by Pepe Diokno

We were always 30 seconds away from getting up and walking out of Kapatiran, but the seemingly random scenes of life in Metro Manila were so familiar, we stayed just in case we turned up on the screen. It’s a kind of ethnographic study with attention-deficit disorder: a week in the life of this blasted city that we bitch about but can’t seem to leave.

Sleepless by Prime Cruz

Apart from describing the protagonist, the title is also tempting fate. Sleepless moves at such an even, placid clip that I may have nodded off for a few minutes. But that is still in keeping with the material: people deprived of sleep do blank out at odd moments.

Glaiza de Castro plays Gem, a call center agent with insomnia. The opening scenes showing Gem lying awake on her bed or staring at things in a picturesque manner suggest Lost In Translation in translation. Then Gem is assigned to help a new coworker, Barry (Dominic Roco), whom she introduces to the pleasures of sitting on the roof to stare at things in a picturesque manner.

Read our reviews at InterAksyon.