Laila Lalami

Tahar Ben Jelloun’s new novel, Partir, is about young Moroccan men who want to leave everything behind to immigrate. Sound familiar? I think there’s really a Zeitgeist in Moroccan art at the moment around the issue of immigration. Photographer Yto Barrada, filmmaker Yasmine Kassari, and rai musicians have all dealt with the issue in recent work.

Yahoo! news has a brief article (in French) about Partir. No word on an English translation yet. Ben Jelloun’s latest novel to appear here in the U.S. is The Last Friend, which comes out in February.

As has been widely reported, Patrick O’Keeffe took home the $20,000 Story Prize on Wednesday night, for The Hill Road. The other finalists were Jim Harrison for The Summer He Didn’t Die and Maureen F. McHugh for Mothers & Other Monsters. More at the Guardian.

Driss Benzekri, the man who spent 17 years as a political prisoner under the reign of King Hassan, and who is now the head of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission, visited Washington this week. The commission had been charged with documenting abuses of the “years of lead” and with making recommendations. Its report was released to the Moroccan public earlier this year.

“In the course of our work, we were able to shed light on the fate of 742 persons who disappeared for different reasons. We called for compensation for them, as well as 10,000 other victims. Then we proposed a series of reforms to the constitution to ensure the separation of powers; and we recommended that the independence of the judiciary be inscribed in the constitution, and an end to legal immunity for security officials who commit human rights abuses. The main objective of our recommendations was to promote and protect all forms of civil liberties. Then we gave the report to His Majesty and it was made public.”

The young king, who took over from his father in 1999, immediately embraced the report and its calls for compensation. Many former political prisoners appeared in public town hall meetings and on television, telling their stories in a unique form of catharsis. This is unprecedented in the Arab world.

This, of course, is real, tangible progress, and I think it’s a huge step forward for Morocco (combined with the family law reform of last year, this really puts the country in the right track). There’s also clearly a political will, on all sides of this issue, to finally address the dossier.

But, and there is a but, the report leaves open two questions. Firstly, I’ve seen press reports that suggest that there are cases that have not been investigated, and the worry now is that they probably won’t be. Secondly, although many of those responsible have now passed on, others are alive and kicking, leading a life of relative ease, while their victims have to live with the horrors of the past.

“Tomorrow is Too Far,” a new short story by Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie, appears in the current issue of Prospect. Here is the opening paragrah:

It was the last summer you spent in Nigeria, the summer before your parents’ divorce, before your mother swore you would never again set foot in Nigeria to see your father’s family, especially not Grandmama. You remember the heat of that summer clearly, even now, thirteen years later, the way Grandmama’s yard felt like a steamy bathroom, a yard with so many trees that the telephone wire was tangled in leaves and different branches touched one another and sometimes mangoes appeared on cashew trees and guavas on mango trees. The thick mat of decaying leaves was soggy under your bare feet. Yellow-bellied bees buzzed around you, your brother Nonso and your cousin Dozie’s heads. Grandmama let only your brother Nonso climb the trees to shake a loaded branch, although you were a better climber than he was. Fruits would rain down, avocados and cashews and guavas, and you and your cousin Dozie would fill old buckets with fruit.

Read the rest here.

If you’re the kind of person who gets warm fuzzies whenever you think of Google, consider this: The company has decided to abide by China’s censorship laws–blocking out certain search results, as well as disallowing the use of blogs and emails on its systems.

Which, of course, raises the question: Was Google’s decision to resist the U.S. government’s request for information on its users motivated by concern for free speech, or rather by the desire to look good to its young, educated clients here in the U.S.?

This week I’m giving away a copy of James Meek’s The People’s Act of Love. Set in 1919 Siberia, the novel follows a gulag escapee who unwittingly wanders into a village where followers of a mystical Christian sect cohabit with Czech soldiers desparate to get home from the war.

The fifth (yes, fifth) person to correctly answer this question gets the book: What is the name of the Siberian town in which the story is set? Please use the subject line “Meek” in your email, and please also include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded.

Update: Pete A. from Joliet, Illinois has won the book.

I’ve received word that RAWI, the Arab American Writers’ association, is organizing a literary contest for 2006. Short stories, essays, memoir, drama, vignettes, and prose poetry will be considered. The deadline is March 20, 2006, and the competition will be judged by Joseph Geha and Sahar Kayyal. Send your (new, unpublished) entry to Alice Nashashibi, 95 Mercedes Way, San Francisco, CA 94217. Good luck to all.

Residents of Kandahar have reported another unwarranted arrest, this time of a local poet.

Dozens of US soldiers stormed the mosque on January 10, during the Eid Muslim holiday, and showed every worshiper to several masked men who were accompanying them, two witnesses said on Monday.

They then rounded up five men, including poet and high school student Sayed Ahmad Qaneh and four of his relatives, the witnesses said. One of the group, an old man, was released the following day.

The U.S. authorities in Kabul have said they have no information about the detention of the poet, who also runs a small bookshop in Kandahar.

Gabriel García Márquez says he has stopped writing. In an interview with Barcelona-based La Vanguardia, he revealed he hasn’t written a single line in 2005, and doesn’t know if he will again.

After revelations that crucial portions of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces were either fabricated or largely exaggerated, and after reports that the writer J.T. Leroy was a middle-aged mom, and not, as she had claimed, a transsexual teenage ex-prostitute, a third writer has found himself in hot waters, so to speak. The L.A. Weekly reports that the writer who goes by the name of Nasdijj, and whose account of a life spent on Navajo reservations, dealing with alcoholism, childhood sexual abuse, and other horrors, may not be Native American at all. Suspicions about him started as far back as 1999:

[A]s his successes and literary credentials grew in number so did his skeptics – particularly from within the Native American community. Sherman Alexie first heard of Nasdijj in 1999 after his former editor sent him a galley proof of The Blood for comment. At the time, Alexie, who is Spokane and Coeur d’Alene, was one of the hottest authors in America and was widely considered the most prominent voice in Native American literature. His novel Indian Killer was a New York Times notable book, and his cinematic feature Smoke Signals was the previous year’s Sundance darling, nominated for the Grand Jury Prize and winner of the Audience Award. Alexie’s seal of approval would have provided The Blood with a virtual rubber stamp of native authenticity. But it took Alexie only a few pages before he realized he couldn’t vouch for the work. It wasn’t just that similar writing style and cadence that bothered Alexie.

“The whole time I was reading I was thinking, this doesn’t just sound like me, this is me,” he says.

Alexie was born hydrocephalic, a life-threatening condition characterized by water on the brain. At the age of 6 months he underwent brain surgery that saved his life but left him, much like Tommy Nothing Fancy, prone to chronic seizures throughout his childhood. Instead of identifying with Nasdijj’s story, however, Alexie became suspicious.

“At first I was flattered but as I kept reading I noticed he was borrowing from other Native writers too. I thought, this can’t be real.”

The L.A. Weekly article suggests that Nasdijj is in fact a white man from Lansing, Michigan named Tim Barrus. It’s easy enough to imagine that Barrus turned in a novel that he called a memoir, and since publishers do not fact-check memoirs, no one saw anything suspicious. But how could the public have been fooled for so long? Alexie provides a possible answer:

On many issues, preachy whites simply lack the political and cultural cachet of someone perceived to be Native American.

“My stepfather once told me, if you want anyone in the world to like you, just tell them that you’re Indian,” says Sherman Alexie. “For some reason we are elevated simply because of our race. I’m so popular I could start a cult. I could have 45 German women living with me tomorrow.”

Read the rest of the article here.