Laila Lalami

We’re expecting some snow in Portland, and nothing says, “I’m your novel! Revise me!!” like a coat of snow, so I’m going to spend the day doing just that. Have a great weekend!

This NPR interview by Renee Montagne with Michael Malice, the author of Overheard in New York, got me thinking about one of the most bizarre conversations I overheard in L.A. I was sitting at a cafe on Pacific Coast Highway in Manhattan Beach when a couple of women in business suits passed by me, and one of them said to the other: “Look, if she’s bludgeoned to death, I want to make sure we see some blood.”

Oh, my God, I thought, what are these two plotting?

They sat down with their coffees and they started to mumble, and I couldn’t hear the rest. I pushed my chair away from my table, as if I needed the extra space for my book.

“Right,” one of the women said, “so one of the problems we’re having is that when the blood comes out, it gets pixellated. Do you have experience dealing with that?”

“I do, indeed,” the other woman replied, and she pointed to her resume.

They were having a job interview for a video game designer position.

Morocco has the sad distinction of being involved in one of Africa’s oldest conflicts, the thirty-year dispute with the Polisario Front over Western Sahara. Toby Shelley’s Endgame in the Western Sahara, a history of the conflict, has just come out, and Jeremy Harding reviews it for the LRB. The book even covers the latest development, which, frankly, bring me to the edge of despair:

The novel dimension to the geography of this dispute is offshore oil. Shelley, once the energy desk editor for Dow Jones Newswires, has the story at his fingertips. In 2000 Morocco was the second largest oil importer in Africa (‘the Ottomans stopped at Algiers,’ Moroccans like to say, ‘and so did the oil’). Over the years, various surveys on and offshore have come to nothing, but the discovery of viable deposits off the coast of Mauritania in 2001 suggested a promising future in Western Saharan territorial waters – more promising than anything further north in Morocco proper. Towards the end of the year, Rabat ‘parcelled out the entirety of the Western Sahara’s waters’ to the French multinational TotalFinalElf and the Texan Kerr-McGee.

With the scent of smoke still lingering in the air from the Ogoni affair, Polisario and Sahrawi support committees in the US and Europe responded aggressively. Since Shelley published his book, Total has pulled out, claiming to have ‘found no oil or other hydrocarbons that can be exploited’, but the company may also have been concerned about the legal status of the venture. Kerr-McGee, a Republican Party donor and a favourite of UK fund managers (notably Legal and General), has not been dissuaded from ‘reconnaissance’ – a new, Moroccan approach to awarding licences which allows companies to explore on a semi-speculative basis with a much reduced outlay, though new agreements must be drawn up for drilling to begin. (…) In the meantime, a smaller oil company, Fusion, has decided to throw in its lot with Polisario and accept a promissory licence issued by the Front, with exploration starting once the SADR has come into existence. Last December Polisario awarded a further batch of licences to six British oil companies that would sooner gamble on the likelihood of independence than paddle around in semi-legality, on or off Saharan shores.

A long review, but a very worthwhile read. In related news, the BBC reports that homes of Saharan refugees in Tindouf, in Algeria, have been destroyed or damaged by three days of heavy rains; they will need several million dollars over the next six months for support.

The Lit Saloon has an interesting link this morning to Al-Bayane, where some depressing statistics are given on Moroccan publishing: Fewer than 3,000 books have been published between 2002 and 2004 in Morocco; most of these books have a small print run of under 2,000 copies; and the author is often called on to bear the cost (hence the expression “a compte d’auteur,” which is sort of midway between self-publishing and vanity publishing.) Read the numbers, and weep.

As distressing as these numbers are, they don’t, of course, offer a complete picture of readership in Morocco, because the vast majority of the books that you’re likely to see in a bookstore at any given time are not printed locally, but, rather, imported, usually from France. Paperbacks from Folio and Poche, in particular, are fairly inexpensive and still affordable for Moroccan readers. (So, next time someone tells you that the Arab world needs to learn “our” values through “our” culture, just tell them Morocco is awash in “our” culture, and really needs more of its own.)

The most distressing of all the statistics in Al Bayane is that only .53% of books published in Morocco appear in the Amazigh language, which is spoken by fully 30% of population. Granted, that 30% is probably fully bilingual (with Arabic) or even trilingual (with French), but there is really no excuse for why such a large part of Moroccan heritage is not sustained through book culture. According to Le Matin, one of the booths at the Salon was devoted to the Royal Institute for Amazigh Culture, but, even there, many of the offerings about Amazigh culture were available in other languages.

American speed skater Joey Cheek has donated his Olympics gold medal award ($25,000) to Darfur refugees.

New photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu-Ghraib have been unveiled, and yet the lead story on CNN‘s website as of 5 pm yesterday remained Vice-President Dick Cheney’s ridiculous hunting accident. Last week, a video of British soldiers abusing Iraqis (or, as the euphemism goes, “letting off some steam”) was also released. It’s unclear how the “isolated cases” defense is going to hold up in the face of new evidence.

Muslim graves have been desecrated in the city of Esbjerg, west of Copenhagen. No word yet from self-declared experts on what “ails” the “Danish street.” Meanwhile, the Italian minister for Reform, Roberto Calderolli, has announced he will start wearing T-shirts with one of the infamous cartoons. In Morocco, Aboubakr Jamai, publisher of the Casablanca-based Le Journal Hebdomadaire, is facing harassment for printing a photo of the newspaper France-Soir, which carried the cartoons of the Prophet. Lastly, three people have died in Pakistan, shot by police as they were protesting said caricatures, bringing the total death toll to nineteen. Just when you think everyone’s lost their minds, Egyptian editor Hany Shukrallah provides one of the best and most lucid assessments on this overblown controversy.

Related:
Defend Freedom of Speech…Everywhere
Caricatures: Clash of Civilizations, Clash of Ignorance
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Fire: Meet Dry Gunpowder
Cartoon Shmartoon

I’ve never read Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, and last year’s mention of the epic in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow made me want to read it even more. Well, Shahnameh is now out in a new translation, billed as the most complete yet. Here’s a review.

Three weeks ago, we presented Part 1 of The Lit Mag Roundup, a new, quarterly feature at Moorishgirl.com, in which North Carolina-based fiction writer Katrina Denza shares her literary discoveries of the season. Below is Part II of her fall 2005 review.

For every commercial movie I go to see, I watch about ten independents. I want to be moved; I want an experience unencumbered by packaging for the masses; I want to learn something: about another culture, another time, about humanity. Literary journals offer all of these things as well.

In the Fall/Winter 2005 issue of The Paris Review, readers can expect to be taken to faraway places. The issue begins with Karl Taro Greenfeld’s dispatch, “Wild Flavor,” a riveting account of how one young man, hoping for a better life, moves to Shenzhen and contracts SARS. Andy Friedman and Nicholas Dawidoff take us to the hidden world of Brooklyn’s fish market, soon to be forever changed, in “At the Fish Market.” There are two insightful interviews: one with poet Jack Gilbert and one with novelist Orhan Pamuk. Both offer wisdom on the writing process. There are poems by Jack Gilbert, John Burnside, and Mary Jo Bang. My favorites of each (“Ode to History,” “Winter in the Night Fields,” “Nothing”) all have a reverence and a visceral magic to them. Suyeon Yun’s “Two Koreas, Ten Portraits,” shows us hidden North Korean escapees in Seoul. Dmitri Nabokov has translated one of his father’s poems, “Revolution.” In Ma Jian’s essay, “Tibetan Excursion,” he writes of his disappointment in the reality of Tibet and of his persecution by the Chinese government for his collection, “Stick Out Your Tongue.” His story, “Woman and the Blue Sky,” offered in this issue, is part of that collection. And in Benjamin Percy’s “Refresh, Refresh,” a young man’s life is greatly affected when the men of his Oregon town, including his father, are deployed to Iraq.

(more…)

I wholeheartedly recommend Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, also known as The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, published in 1722 and widely considered to be one of the first English-language novels (Defoe himself, some say, being the father of the novel form). When I first came to the book, I was halfway through drafting my own first novel, Mary After All – the story of a Jersey City woman who comes of age during the turbulent 1970s and discovers her own route to independence along the way – and it certainly made quite an impression on me: both as a reader and as a writer. So many things seemed more possible – not the least of which was the idea that you could, as a man, convincingly tell a story from a woman’s perspective, and in that woman’s voice. (Worth noting is the fact that Defoe wrote Moll Flanders under a pseudonym so that his readers would believe it was the actual journal of a bawdy, adventurous woman in the eighteenth century.) There was also, in those pages, validation of the concept that by creating a full-blown, closely-examined character who is chock full of flaws and fully revealing of them… who is driven by decisions, sometimes awful but always explained, that make sense at the time – in Moll’s case she is, by turns, a good wife, a hooker, a pickpocket, a convict and a “reformed” bad mother of sorts – you could make the reader like your heroine even more. I surely did! I also shared in her joys and sorrows and successes more completely, I think, because none of her many “warts” were hidden. My own narrator, Mary, leads a rather quotidian existence compared to Moll – although she does have a stint as a bookie and kicks the woman who slept with her husband down the stairs. But in Moll Flanders there was the refreshing concept, clear in its early pages, that fairly ordinary details – personal finances, daily routines and decisions – could be fascinating – not just interesting — if the conveyance was intimate and accurate enough. And in that intimacy grew drama. Drama that could build and be felt by the reader with each move and plot twist, no matter how large or small, because you were there *with* her. And nearly four hundred years after the initial publication of Moll Flanders… you still are.

Bill Gordon‘s work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Mississippi Review, New York Press, Christopher Street, and Downtown. He received an MFA from Columbia University. He grew up in Jersey City and now lives in New York. Mary After All is his first novel.

If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.