Laila Lalami

The Arabist has posted pictures from one of the many demonstrations in Cairo in favor of an independent judiciary. Mubarak’s police is shown at work, beating up peaceful demonstrators.

There is a very cool interview with Moroccan photographer Yto Barrada at openDemocracy. Over the last five years, Barrada’s work has centered around the question of borders and migration, particularly from Morocco to Spain. You can also listen to the interview here. Highly recommended.

Yto Barrada’s “The Strait Project: A Life Full of Holes” is currently on display at the Kitchen in New York (only until May 20, so hurry and see it while you can!)

(Photo: Yto Barrada.)

Over at the Chronicle, Lennard Davis asks: Should one keep on teaching Heart of Darkness, despite its obvious racism? Davis first read the book in high school, where it was interpreted as “a kind of existential journey.” In Edward Said’s class at Columbia, Davis came to see the book as “a stinging indictment of the callous and genocidal treatment of the Africans.” Under a feminist teacher, Davis’s eyes were opened to the “male world that kept women in the dark” about inhuman practices in the colonies. Later, with Chinua Achebe’s famous denouncement, he saw the novella as “hopelessly Eurocentric.” But his black students’ reluctance to read the work leads Davis to wonder:

But my latest learning experience has taught me that this text, which has been mined for so much meaning and inspiration, perhaps needs to be discarded. I can’t underline that point, because the lesson isn’t on the page but in the brain and heart.

As a culture, we have granted certain books immortality and permit them to teach us new lessons across the ages. We’ve given that privilege to the works of Homer, Shakespeare, Shelley (Mary), Defoe, Swift, Austen, Dickens, Flaubert, and more recently Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Silko, and others. But we can rescind that immortality and consign certain books to the back shelves of our consciousness.

This argument keeps cropping up every once in a while: that Heart of Darkness is obsolete because its views on race are retrograde. In my opinion, reading the text with a historical eye is a very useful exercise in how imperialism needs ethnocentrism in order to succeed. Conrad rejected the former, but not the latter–a stance that one can see today as well. I think that the book is as relevant today as it was in 1899. Our culture has a different focus now (the Middle East instead of the Congo) and uses different language (“sand-nigger” instead of “nigger”), but the mission civilisatrice is still there, and there are plenty of Marlowes and Kurtzes around. This is a book, I, for one, would continue to teach.

Thanks to Maud Newton for the link.

Do any of you MG readers have access to a DVD or review copy of Laila Marrakchi’s Marock? I have been going crazy for the last few weeks trying to locate one, without luck. If you are able to help, please email me at llalami AT yahoo DOT com.

My friend Roy Kesey is publishing his first book, a novella called Nothing in the World, which has been praised by George Saunders, Anthony Doerr, Tom Bissell, David Vann, and, uh, me. I loved it. Nothing in the World tells the story of Josko Banovic, a young, lonely Croatian man who soon finds himself dragged into a war he doesn’t quite comprehend, but in which he contributes his share of courage and cowardliness, occasional kindness and utmost cruelty. In a review for TEV, Ron Currie, Jr. writes:

Through Josko, Kesey illustrates the grotesque incongruities of war, how it produces impossible duality, souls in which seemingly contradictory elements can coexist. Josko, like the boy he is, yearns painfully for his sister in one scene; a few pages later, he shoots a man twice in the back and cuts the head off his corpse. He politely insists on paying for rolls from a bakery, then murders a man by slamming his face into the fan of a jeep engine. Like a heartbroken child he follows the voice of the girl he’s imagined is his love, then wanders into a cafe and, as a joke, puts on display the severed head of the man he killed earlier and orders a drink for it. Horrible acts, perpetrated with a coolness that borders on sociopathic, but Kesey merely reports them in his clear, subtly lyrical style, refusing to pass judgment of any kind.

You can find more coverage of Nothing in the World here. So here’s how it works: The first person to send me an email with the subject line “Kesey” gets the free copy. Please include your mailing address. Previous winners excluded.

Update: The winner is Matthew T. from Buxton, Maine.

At Cannes this week, all eyes are on the film adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, but I’m really intrigued by the new film from Rachid Bouchareb, called Indigènes, which will also premiere at the festival. It’s set in 1944, and it’s about four young soldiers from France’s colonies in Algeria and Morocco, who are sent to the mainland to fight the Nazis. It stars Jamel Debbouze, Samy Naceri, Roschdy Zem, and Sami Bouajila. You can view a trailer here. The official site also has photos and information about this forgotten moment of history. Notice, by the way, that there was no hand-wringing about “integration” and “assimilation” of North Africans when they were being sent to the front lines to fight for the freedom of their oppressor.

NPR’s Rene Montagne interviews Wole Soyinka about his new memoir, You Must Set Forth At Dawn. Among other things, Soyinka talks about Ogun (I hope I spelled that right!), a Yoruba deity that has had a huge impact on his work.

I remember seeing a profile in Le Monde of Aziz Ridouan, the French-Moroccan high school student and founder of Audionautes, an NGO that provides legal assistance to those accused of illegally downloading music. Nice to see the NYT catching up. My favorite lines in the profile:

Mr. Ridouan, who intends to study political science in college, said his Audionautes-financed lobbying did not hurt his studies. He has missed some school but has a note from the French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, excusing him from class when he meets with government officials.

“There’s no need for me to fake notes to skip class ever since I got Sarkozy’s written permission,” said Mr. Ridouan. “I don’t even have the note anymore because my teacher wanted to keep it as a souvenir.”

More here.

Over at Salon, Laura Miller praises Tony D’Souza debut novel, Whiteman. “If you read a lot of debut novels, you know there’s a category of these books written by earnest young men who have done stints with the Peace Corps or other NGOs working in developing nations,” she writes. ” (…) As you can tell, I’m pretty jaded about this particular species of first novel, and it must be admitted that Tony D’Souza’s “Whiteman” would seem to fit the formula uncomfortably well. Yet somehow, this novel beats the odds: It manages to be quirky, seductive and funny, but most of all it has captured a shard of the host country in a way that NGO novels rarely do. ” Read it all here.

The United States is restoring full diplomatic relations with Libya, and removing that country from the list of state sponsors of terror. In other news, Egypt continues to terrorize its people and prevent the establishment of an independent judiciary, but it gets a bit pat on the back.