Laila Lalami

Well, it turned out that quite a few people are proud to call themselves ‘liberals,’ as you can see from yesterday’s reading with Thom Hartmann at Powell’s:

The appeals court in Rabat upheld a judgment against independent newsmagazine Le Journal Hebdo in the libel lawsuit brought against it by the Belgian think tank ESISC:

[The think tank's] study said the United Nations should drop efforts to hold an independence referendum for Western Sahara, a mineral-rich former Spanish territory seized by Morocco in 1974. The rebel Polisario Front waged a long desert war seeking to end the annexation and gain independence.

The magazine said in December that the findings were so similar to official Morocco’s views that it raised questions about whether the study was “guided by” and possibly paid for by the Moroccan government.

The punitive damages against the weekly’s publisher, Aboubakr Jamai, and writer Fahd Iraqi were the biggest ever given journalists in Morocco, leading rights groups to question whether the courts were trying to curb media from taking independent stances on important matters.

“With this disproportionate sentence … the judges are clearly trying to silence the journal,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.

The group said the magazine wasn’t allowed to mount a proper defense. During the trial, the judge barred Le Journal Hebdomadaire from introducing an expert witness, prompting the magazine to withdraw from the proceedings in protest.

Read it all here And weep.

Novelist Rashim Esenov from Turkmenistan became the first writer to accept PEN’s Freedom To Write Award in person, at a gala event. (Because of the nature of the award, the recipients are usually in prison, or not able to travel to New York.) Apparently, Esenov’s ‘offence’ was:

According to PEN, he was arrested two years ago when he returned to Turkmenistan from a trip to Moscow with 800 copies of his banned trilogy, “Ventsenosny Skitalets” (“The Crowned Wanderer”), about a 16th-century Turkmen poet and general, Bayram Khan, who is said to have saved the Mogul empire from breaking apart.

Mr. Esenov was accused of smuggling the books and with inciting national and religious hatred. Although he was released from prison a few weeks after his arrest, he was forbidden to leave Turkmenistan, even to seek medical treatment in Moscow. Many of his books were burned.

After leaving New York, Esenov is due to go to Moscow for medical treatment, and then he “expects to return to his homeland after that. It is unclear what his status will be then.”

Michael Lowenthal writes in about an interesting Pen event, Writing and Expression in Wartime. Writers Rebecca Faery, James Caroll, Nathaniel Fick, and Uzodinma Iweala discuss questions posed for writers in wartime.

This all takes place tonight, Thursday, April 20th at 7:00 pm at the First Parish Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Tonight I’ll be reading with Thom Hartmann, to promote the anthology Proud to be Liberal . Here are the details:

7:30 PM
Powell’s City of Books
1005 W Burnside
Portland, Oregon

See you there!

Princes Amongst Men: Journeys with Gypsy Musicians
By Garth Cartwright
Serpent’s Tail
309 pp.

Garth Cartwright was already familiar with Gypsy music when he decided to travel across the Balkans in search of the truth behind Gypsy myths. He set out to not only interview well-known Gypsy singers and musicians but also to explore how the Roma people were surviving in the former Yugoslavia and other Eastern European countries. (The term “Roma” refers to people of an established ethnic group and is slowly coming back into use. “Gypsy” was a title conferred by Europeans on the first Roma to arrive in Europe a thousand years ago as they mistakenly believed them to have arrived from Egypt. It is now used somewhat negatively to refer to anyone who leads a nomadic life, regardless of ethnicity, but is still the accepted term for Roma music.) While it may sometimes be difficult for some readers to keep track of the many unfamiliar names and destinations that Cartwright rattles off with ease, his intense desire to know just what life is like on the ground for a people struggling not only to hold on to their traditions but also to keep a roof over their heads makes his book, Princes Amongst Men: Journeys with Gypsy Musicians fascinating reading.

In traveling through Serbia, Macedonia, Romania and Bulgaria, Cartwright found most Romas living in “mahalas” or Roma settlements. The poverty is staggering, with the musicians often proving to be the only community members who are able to afford indoor plumbing or electricity. This is the story that, as Cartwright explains, is all too often ignored by journalists investigating post-war Yugoslavia or the collapse of communism. As he writes in the book, “their role in history is reduced to a silent supporting cast. And the Roma know this – nobody’s listening – so [it's] feeding a sense of exclusion.” This feeling is supported by the fact that few historians acknowledge the Roma genocide in WWII, where they were one of the few groups specifically targeted by Hitler for extermination and lost approximately 500,000 people in concentration camps. Cartwright makes a serious effort toward combating this lack of information by discussing Roma history in each of the countries he visits, explaining how they initially came to live there and their political and social struggles to gain equality. His research reveals that it has not been an easy road for them, and each step of the way their struggle has been gone largely unrecognized.

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Jilali Ferhati’s Mémoire en Detention (‘Memory In Detention’) has won first prize in the African Film Festival in Rome.

The Monitor has a profile of Doreen Baingana, who was in Kampala for the launch of her collection of short stories in Uganda. If you haven’t read her book, Tropical Fish: Stories Out of Entebbe, you should.

The Guardian reports that a Moroccan mosque in Ceuta was burned down, one of apparently several incidents of this nature on Spanish territory:

El País newspaper yesterday listed a number of mosques and other Muslim targets that have been ransacked, burned or had copies of the Qur’an set alight by intruders.

Police said that extreme rightwingers and skinhead groups were responsible for almost all the attacks.

“They want Spain to have the same sort of violent reaction that the Netherlands had after the murder of film director Theo van Gogh,” one police expert told El País. “Little by little they are creating an atmosphere for this to grow.”

Spain’s 800,000 Muslims, many of them immigrants from neighbouring Morocco, have some 600 mosques around the country.

If you think that violence against Moroccans or their institutions are isolated occurrences in Europe, then you probably should make yourself watch this, courtesy of the Italian carabinieri.

Well, color me surprised: The BBC reports that when George Clooney’s Syriana was screened in the UAE, two minutes of film were removed by government censors: They dealt with mistreatment of Asian workers in an unnamed Gulf country.