Laila Lalami

The latest issue of The Nation includes a critical essay by Bashir Abu-Manneh about the Palestinian struggle for a national homeland. He takes two recent books as his starting point: Rashid Khalidi’s The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood and Ali Abunimah’s One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. It’s a powerful, well-argued piece by Abu-Manneh, who is, quite rightly, uncompromising on the issue of self-determination.

For those of you in France: The French edition of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits will be released by Editions Anne-Carrière in January, under the title De L’espoir et d’autres quêtes dangereuses. I will be doing some events in Paris for this, so stay tuned.

This week I am reading C. R. Pennell’s Morocco Since 1830. The text could have used a more thorough editing (pronoun references are a bit sloppy, for instance) but I am finding the book very instructive. It’s also depressing, quite frankly, to read about the period during which the country fell slowly and surely under foreign control. I hope to finish it this week, and move on to something a bit more literary.

Last weekend’s New York Times Magazine includes a thoughtful piece by Bidoun editor Negar Azimi on the (lack of) gay rights in Egypt. I find myself in agreement with her when she points out that the recent persecution of gays in Egypt and elsewhere is a result of a policy of appropriation of ‘morals’, in the sense that homosexuality is presented as a Western invention, despite all evidence of thriving gay subcultures in many parts of the Arab world. Therefore, any attempt at handling gay issues from a purely civil rights perspective is perceived as coming from traitors. To complicate matters, foreign human rights organizations can–willfully or witlessly–play a role in escalating the situation:

When the raid on the Queen Boat occurred, much of the human rights community declined to take the case on, Al Boraei included. (Some activists even attacked those who met with the defendants.) Hossam Bahgat, a young Alexandrian working at the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, told me he was quietly dismissed after he wrote an article calling upon the human rights community to overcome its fears about working on the case. In the West, however, the Queen Boat became something of a cause célèbre. Amnesty International supported protests in front of the Egyptian Embassy in London. A Web site called GayEgypt.com called on Egypt’s homosexuals to wear red on the two-year anniversary of the Queen Boat raid (an invitation to be arrested, it seems), while 35 members of the U.S. Congress wrote to Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, asking for a stop to the anti-homosexual crusade. It was no wonder that amid this, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram al-Arabi proclaimed, “Be a pervert and Uncle Sam will approve.”

“This was framed locally as an attack from the West,” says Bahgat, who eventually collaborated with Human Rights Watch on the case and later opened his own organization, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. “It was important to show that working for the rights of the detained was not a gay agenda, or a Western agenda, that this was linked to Egypt’s overall human rights record. Raising the gay banner when most sexual and other human rights are systematically violated every day is never going to get you far in this country.”

In the end, Human Rights Watch avoided laying itself open to easy attack as the bearer of an outsider’s agenda, packaging Queen Boat advocacy in the larger context of torture. Many of the arrested men were tortured, and torture is something that, at least in theory, most people agree is a bad thing.

You can read the rest of the article here. A fine piece.

(link via The Arabist)

At the prospect of living in Morocco again after fourteen years abroad, I felt a whole range of emotions–happiness, excitement, worry –but I couldn’t really sort through these feelings because I was exhausted all the time. I did a lot of traveling in the fall, for readings and lectures and conferences, and whenever I was not on the road, I was packing a bag, or moving a box, or disconnecting a service, or canceling a subscription. It wasn’t until the plane landed at Mohammed V Airport in Casablanca that the move here began to seem real.

Several of my friends expected me to have reverse culture shock, but I haven’t found that to be true at all. My sense of disorientation, if you can even call it that, is more subtle. I was born and raised in Rabat, and living in Casablanca has already brought a few surprises–dialectal, to begin with. I asked our doorman for directions, and it took me three tries to figure out the name of a street based on his pronunciation. And then the driving here is so much worse than in Rabat–if that is even possible. If you’ve ever been curious as to how one can accomplish a left-hand turn from a right-hand lane, this is the city for you.

The other thing that strikes me every time I come back to Morocco is the light. It’s different here, and I’m not sure I can explain how. It seems to hit trees and plants and buildings and even people at a different angle, bringing out more contrast in colors. Our apartment has large windows, so I spend a lot of time holding things up to the light to see how new they look.

There’s a certain kindness in the way that people speak to each other here–the many polite rejoinders, the jokes, the helpfulness. I missed all of this so much, and it’s of course wonderful to witness it again. And yet at the same time there is also a hardness that comes from living in a large, overcrowded, dense, polluted city. I was on my way to Ittissalaat Al-Maghrib (Maroc Telecom) to get a phone line set up, and the cab driver who took me grumbled about a change in the law that made him ultimately responsible, in case of accident, for any pedestrian injuries. “Were it not for this law, I would just have hit that guy,” he said, pointing to a kid who was crossing without looking, “and teach him a good lesson. Once he’s in a wheelchair, he’ll learn to look before crossing.” Given the driver’s anger, I thought it best not to point out that he was speeding–and that he was on the wrong lane. I was just happy to arrive at the phone company in one piece. When my turn finally came up at the counter, the clerk spent more than half an hour with me, walking me through the process, and waiting very patiently for me to make up my mind about all the services. And then he sent me home with good wishes for my health. (I only wish it meant our DSL worked properly. It doesn’t. But more on this long, tortuous odyssey in a later post.)

The picture above shows the King Hassan mosque in all its artistic glory, at sunset. (Credit: Henk Meijer.) The photo below shows what the mosque looks like from my bedroom window, during the daytime, with the smog above, the apartment buildings below, and the sea of satellite dishes around.