Laila Lalami

The October 16 issue of the New Yorker has a profile by Jane Kramer of Aboubakr Jamaï, founder, publisher, and editor of the Casablanca-based weekly magazine Le Journal Hebdo. The article is unfortunately not available online, so I can’t link to it. You should check it out, though. It’s generally well researched and quite readable, and gives a good background on Jamaï (or Boubker, as he is known.) Boubker’s magazine has created waves in Morocco for its daring reporting on the three taboos of the press (the king’s private life, Western Sahara, and separation of church and state). His work has cost him several trips to the courthouse, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. The quote in the title of this post is from an unnamed source in Kramer’s article who says, “I tell Boubker, ‘Your editorials about the King are like Mercurochrome on a wooden leg.’”

Although I enjoyed the article, I had a couple of problems with it. For starters, the title is “The Crusader.” (I mean, seriously, what was the editor thinking?) And then Kramer adds occasional orientalist comments like: “The King at forty-three is not a statesman, despite a French education.” (Excuse me? So in order to be a statesman one needs a French education?) And when she mentions the women’s rights reform that took place in 2004, she states that Islamists staged a huge demonstration against it in Casablanca, but neglects to add that there was a demonstration in Rabat in favor of the reform. The effect is that one gets the impression that the only political actors on the scene are the king and the Islamists, which is not quite the case.

Scott Anderson’s Vanity Fair article on Egypt is an absolute must-read.

Until a few years ago, no one had heard of the Red Sea Riviera. Perhaps that’s because most of the shiny beach-resort hotels that fall under the marketing label aren’t on the Red Sea at all, but rather on the Gulf of ‘Aqaba, that narrow strip of water which separates the eastern coast of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula from Saudi Arabia and Jordan. No matter, because it really could be anywhere. From Taba, at the very north end, flush on the border with Israel, all the way down the 125 miles of rugged Sinai coastline to the main tourist resort of Sharm al-Sheikh, the visitor exists in a cocoon of pleasure scrubbed clean of exoticism, the largest gated playground on the planet. Within those gates are five-star hotels and restaurants and world-class scuba-diving, a Hard Rock Cafe, and McDonald’s. Outside those gates is everyone and everything else, a purity maintained by police checkpoints on all roads leading into the enclave. The only Egyptians allowed to enter are those wealthy enough to vacation in the zone, or those who can prove they have jobs there; the others are turned back.

Starting out at the resort, Anderson follows two trails, that of a young man who had been accused of taking part in one of the recent bombings, and that of another young man who briefly worked at the resort, but whose life has been nothing but constant humiliation. Please read the article to the end, here.

Link via The Arabist.

Tonight I’ll be reading from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits at Powell’s City of Books in Portland. Here are the details:

Friday, October 13
7:30 PM
Reading and Signing
Powell’s City of Books
1005 W Burnside
Portland, Oregon

If your book club is reading Hope, you may find it relevant that Harcourt has a reading guide online.

This is delightful news: Bangladeshi economics professor Muhammad Yunus has won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, to be shared with Grameen Bank, which he founded. Yunus is credited with inventing micro-credit. I remember watching a documentary about him on PBS a while back–a very soft-spoken man, and a committed activist. But what a difference he has made for Bangladeshi women, and men.

Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, who directed The Battle of Algiers, has passed on, aged 86. The photo below is from the scene in which Colonel Mathieu enters the city with his troops, in order to quell the rebellion. (In real life, the actor Jean Martin staunchly opposed French occupation of Algeria. )

Below is another photo from the film, from a scene where four independence militants are trapped in the casbah. All the actors in the film, with the exception of Martin, were non-professionals. To the right is Brahim Hadjiadj, who plays the role of Ali la Pointe.

When it was released in 1965, the film was banned in France, and several theatres that showed it in Europe were bombed. But the film survived, of course, and has become a classic. Last year, the Criteron Collection released a boxed set of the film, which includes many extras and commentary, by the likes of Mira Nair, Spike Lee, and Julian Schnabel. Pontecorvo will be sorely missed, and I can only hope that the rumors of a Hollywood remake are false.

This week is Fall Fiction Week over at Slate. There’s a great exchange between Gary Shteyngart and Walter Kirn on the future of American fiction, reviews of new books by Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford, Edna O’Brien, Richard Powers, Lynne Tillman, and Charles Frazier, and a survey of overlooked fiction by bloggers and booksellers. Find out which book I recommended.

This November, in addition to the gubernatorial election, Oregonians have to decide whether to renew the library levy. More than half of the funding for Oregon libraries comes from this levy. The people campaigning against this levy and against funding include Friends for Safer Libraries, whose website describes a library as “a playground of books [that] becomes a minefield of harmful visions.” So now going to the library is like going to Iraq? Anyway, please vote yes on the levy, so that libraries can keep their funding.

Department of I told you so: The 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Orhan Pamuk, “who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.” It’s clear the judges have been sensitive to all the recent controversies that have been framed as exemplars of an age-old “clash of civilizations,” but they also understand that it’s not an inevitable state, since they’ve at least added the word “interlacing.” And Pamuk himself is not one for essentialist views, as you can see from this lovely essay he wrote for the New York Review of Books in November 2001: “The Anger of the Damned.”

In any case, this is a wonderful and richly deserved distinction, and I couldn’t be more pleased. You can find all of Pamuk’s recent books online or at your favorite bookshop: My Name Is Red, Snow, The White Castle, The Black Book, and his most recent, a memoir, Istanbul: Memories of the City.

Some Pamuk-related links:
Orhan Pamuk goes on trial
Pamuk update
Pamuk in trouble?
The MG review of Snow
Orhan Pamuk on Istanbul

Photo: M. Euler/Scanpix

From Joan Didion’s article in the October 5 issue of the New York Review of Books about Vice President Dick Cheney:

It was in some ways predictable that the central player in the system of willed errors and reversals that is the Bush administration would turn out to be its vice-president, Richard B. Cheney. Here was a man with considerable practice in the reversal of his own errors. He was never a star. No one ever called him a natural. He reached public life with every reason to believe that he would continue to both court failure and overcome it, take the lemons he seemed determined to pick for himself and make the lemonade, then spill it, let someone else clean up. The son of two New Deal Democrats, his father a federal civil servant with the Soil Conservation Service in Casper, Wyoming, he more or less happened into a full scholarship to Yale: his high school girlfriend and later wife, Lynne Vincent, introduced him to her part-time employer, a Yale donor named Thomas Stroock who, he later told Nicholas Lemann, “called Yale and told ‘em to take this guy.” The beneficiary of the future Lynne Cheney’s networking lasted three semesters, took a year off before risking a fourth, and was asked to leave.

And then there’s this:

Signing statements are not new, but at the time Bill Clinton left office, the device had been used, by the first forty-two presidents combined, fewer than six hundred times. George W. Bush, by contrast, issued more than eight hundred such takebacks during the first six years of his administration. Those who object to this or any other assumption of absolute executive power are reflexively said by those who speak for the Vice President to be “tying the president’s hands,” or “eroding his ability to do his job,” or, more ominously, “aiding those who don’t want him to do his job.”

More here.

There are days when I feel completely battered by the news, and have no energy to work, much less to post anything here. And then there are days when even a word like “battered” seems obscene. A new report, released by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, estimates that 650,000 Iraqis have died since 2003. The survey numbers are based on interviews with 1,849 Iraqi households between May and July 2006.

I do not doubt that this figure will be disputed. But it should also be pointed out that the United States itself has not kept track of civilian casualties since the early days of the war and has no counter-number to offer; and that the director of the Baghdad mosque has been quoted, time and again, as saying that the numbers he sees in the press (i.e. about 100 dead per day) do not match the numbers he has in his books.

I’m afraid that once the numbers are dismissed as “politics” (and they already have!), the media will move on. But if these numbers are correct, then the Bush administration may have killed more civilians than Saddam. Shouldn’t this make statisticians run to their calculators and tell us whether the study’s result are accurate? Welcome to the new, liberated Iraq. No one asks questions.