Laila Lalami

Last week, the annual Salon du Livre opened at the Foire Internationale in Casablanca. The theme was “Maghreb: Fifty Years Later.” As many as 560 vendors from 53 countries are present, with, of course, readings, talks, and workshops on the schedule for the week. The fair began with the announcement of the Prix du Maroc, which this year went to Mohamed Sebbagh for Enfance Sexagenaire. In non-fiction, the winners were Mohamed Moatassim (La vision apocalyptique dans le roman arabe à la fin du 20e siecle), Zakya Daoud (Marocains de l’autre rive), and Abdelilah Belmlih (L’esclavage au Maghreb et en Andalousie). More details as they become available.

Portland-based author Justin Tussing’s debut novel, The Best People in the World, has just been published, and it’s reviewed in the NY Times by Dan Chiasson.

One of the pleasures of reading the novel is experiencing its sheer variety of actual things. At times you expect him, like Thoreau, to up and list the cost and quantity of materials it took for his characters to live their outlaw life. Gutters and downspouts of an old farmhouse become clogged by a family of mice, making the rain cascade off its roof. Old, wide oak floorboards will be pillaged in the 80′s for “dining tables and lustrous bars for ostentatious restaurants.”

Tussing will be reading from his novel on Thursday, at Powell’s Books on Hawthorne.

The NY Times has a piece by Dinitia Smith on Arab American playwrights, which cites the work of many artists in the field, including Betty Shamieh, Nathalie Handal, Yussef El-Guindi, and others. The only thing I don’t understand is why one of the interviewees had to go and say something like this:

Mr. Khoury of Silk Road said that conservatism within Muslim culture may be one reason for the scarcity of Arab-American playwrights. Representations of the human form are frowned on, he said: women dancing, or performing in front of men is considered reprehensible.

That’s funny, because “Muslim culture” (whatever the hell that means) has also managed to produce playwrights like Tayeb Saddiki, Tawfiq Al-Hakim, Assia Djebbar, Slimane Benaissa, Ahmed Ghazali, Kateb Yacine, Tahar Ben Jelloun, among many others, so that can hardly be the reason why there aren’t that many Arab playwrights here in America. And as for the representation of the human form, you’d have to strike down the entire Egyptian film industry and the bazillion movies it puts out every year for Khoury’s contention to make any sense, so that’s not the reason either. Couldn’t the reason be, oh I don’t know, a little less complicated? Maybe that first- or second-generation Arab-Americans, like many other minorities here, value the professions (doctor, lawyer, etc.) over art?

This is the democracy the U.S. wants to export:

The United States is helping Morocco to build a new interrogation and detention facility for Al-Qaeda suspects near its capital, Rabat, according to western intelligence sources.

The sources confirmed last week that building was under way at Ain Aouda, above a wooded gorge south of Rabat’s diplomatic district. Locals said they had often seen American vehicles with diplomatic plates in the area.

The construction of the new compound, run by the Direction de la Securité du Territoire (DST), the Moroccan secret police, adds to a substantial body of evidence that Morocco is one of America’s principal partners in the secret “rendition” programme in which the CIA flies prisoners to third countries for interrogation.

I’m speechless.

Allan Massie reviews Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Last Friend, over at the Scotsman:

Nostalgia permeates the novel, for it is not only the story of a friendship that is brought to breaking-point but a melancholy meditation on loss, on the bitter taste of experience, on the closing of the avenues of possibility that seemed to exist – did perhaps exist – in youth.

Tahar Ben Jelloun is a remarkable novelist, and this novel which is at the same time fresh as a spring morning, and sad as an autumn twilight, offers us a wonderful evocation of daily life, of the conflicting claims of friendship and marriage, of the deadening weight of experience that presses on Ali and Mamed in maturity. The writing is simple and direct. Every sentence is telling. It makes you think and feel at the same time. Read it. There is nothing tricksy about it, nothing pretentious. It is that most satisfying of things: a true fiction.

I’ve actually just finished writing my own review of this engrossing and significant novel. More on this soon. In the meantime, those of you who read French can already check out Ben Jelloun’s latest novel, Partir, which is quickly climbing the bestseller lists in France.

Reuters reports that Israel and some U.S. Jewish groups have lobbied organizers of the Academy Awards to change the name of the nominating country for Hany Abu-Asad’s Paradise Now. They want it to change from ‘Palestine’ to ‘Palestinian Authority.’

Many Israelis were irked when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in publishing the nomination, said “Paradise Now” came from “Palestine.”

While the tag remains on the academy’s Web site, an Israeli diplomat said he expected the film to be described as coming from the “Palestinian Authority” during the awards ceremony.

What the hell?

I have said it before, and I will, unfortunately, have to say it again: Leave the cartoonists alone! Okay, so maybe it’s not cartoonists this time, but it’s all the same. All together now: Leave the editors alone!

Jihad Al-Momani, the editor of the Jordanian daily Al-Shihane has been fired for reprinting one of the infamous Jyllands-Posten cartoons in the February 2nd issue of his newspaper, along with an editorial in which he asked: “What brings more prejudice against Islam, these caricatures or pictures of a hostage-taker slashing the throat of his victim in front of the cameras or a suicide bomber who blows himself up during a wedding ceremony in Amman?” Al-Momani was arrested on February 4th, while King Abdullah was on an official visit to the United States. He was released without bail, the following day. He is now awaiting trial.

Also in Jordan, editor Hashim Al-Khalida reprinted and denounced the cartoons in Al-Mihwar. He has now run into trouble. What’s interesting is that Al-Khalida reprinted the cartoons back in November, and only now has he been charged with “harming religious feelings.” Like Al-Momani, Al-Khalida is now awaiting trial.

Meanwhile, in Morocco, Annahar Al-Maghribiya reprinted the most offensive of the twelve cartoons, the one in which the Prophet is portrayed with a bomb in his turban, along with a caption attributing the drawing to Jyllands-Posten. The editor, Abdelhakim Badie, was asked to come to the police station to answer questions. He, too, expressed surprise, considering he had published two of the cartoons, without hitch, on October 20. It’s unclear yet whether Badie will be charged with a crime.

The latest arrests come from Algeria and Yemen. Kahel Bousaad of Errisala and Berkane Bouderbala of Iqraa are facing charges today in Algiers for reprinting the cartoons, even though the drawings were deliberately “fogged,” and were accompanied by articles denouncing them. Mohammad al-Asaadi, the editor of the English-language Yemen Observer, and Akram Sabra and Yehiya al-Abed of al-Hurriya weekly newspaper have all been arrested; a warrant has been issued against a fourth editor, Kamal al-Aalafi of al-Rai al-Aam.

Ironies abound, of course. President Bush, who was so keen on offering Denmark support over freedom of speech, didn’t bring up the case of Al-Momani or Al-Khalidi during King Abdullah’s visit. Freedom of speech, in this case, is secondary to Jordanian-American relations in the so-called war on terror. And France-Soir, La Stampa, Die Welt, and all those other European newspapers who were so keen on putting the cartoons on the front page in the name of freedom of speech might do well to offer front-page support to the Arab editors who face charges for the same decision. Similarly, let’s not forget that, despite the offense that Arab readers must surely have felt at seeing the cartoons in the local press, the fraction of them that ended up protesting on the street did so only at the behest of the Islamist parties, which were eager to pose themselves as the defenders of Islamic honor and identity against an imperial West. Finally, it’s also quite clear that the Moroccan and Jordanian governments had no problem with freedom of expression until the right-wing religious parties fell on the cartoons like flies on, um, a Danish.

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

The Guardian‘s Stephanie Merritt reveals that novelist AL Kennedy has taken up stand-up comedy.

The novelist’s chief advantage is that she rarely has to face her audience; aside from reviews and the odd book-fair appearance, there is no way of knowing whether a funny line bombed or made the reader laugh out loud, but in the absence of empirical evidence, she can sit at home fondly imagining the latter. So why would a novelist exchange that safe distance for the immediacy of a late-night comedy club, particularly a novelist as seemingly sensitive to criticism as Kennedy, whose website dissects reviews of all her books with occasionally chippy retorts to the reviewer?

The act is made of darkly comic stories rather than jokes. When is she bringing it to the U.S.? That’s what I’d like to know.

This week, the Lit Blog Co-Op will be discussing Rupert Thomson’s excellent Divided Kingdom. The author himself will be available to answer questions today between 3:30 PM and 5:00 PM EST. (Note to my neighbor: If you’re done reading Divided Kingdom, can I have it back? My sister wants to read it.)

Seven years after Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, Kiran Desai has finally returned with a new novel, The Inheritance of Loss. Pankaj Mishra reviews it on the front page of the NYT Book Review and finds it “extraordinary” and “the best kind of post-9/11 novel.”

“The Inheritance of Loss” opens with a teenage Indian girl, an orphan called Sai, living with her Cambridge-educated Anglophile grandfather, a retired judge, in the town of Kalimpong on the Indian side of the Himalayas. Sai is romantically involved with her math tutor, Gyan, the descendant of a Nepali Gurkha mercenary, but he eventually recoils from her obvious privilege and falls in with a group of ethnic Nepalese insurgents. In a parallel narrative, we are shown the life of Biju, the son of Sai’s grandfather’s cook, who belongs to the “shadow class” of illegal immigrants in New York and spends much of his time dodging the authorities, moving from one ill-paid job to another.

What binds these seemingly disparate characters is a shared historical legacy and a common experience of impotence and humiliation. “Certain moves made long ago had produced all of them,” Desai writes, referring to centuries of subjection by the economic and cultural power of the West. But the beginnings of an apparently leveled field in a late-20th-century global economy serve merely to scratch those wounds rather than heal them.

Marjorie Kehe also praises the novel in the Christian Science Monitor, giving it high marks in particular for its ending, which “treats the heart to one last moment of wild, comic joy – even as it satisfies the head by refusing to relinquish the dark reality that is the life of its characters.” It sounds like this new book will have been worth the long wait.