Laila Lalami

Today’s Washington Post includes an op-ed by Eric Fair, a former civilian interrogator in Iraq in early 2004. Fair’s duties were to deprive the detainee of sleep, force him to stand in a corner, and strip him of his clothes. “Three years later,” Fair writes, “the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.” Please read it all here.

My friend Cliff has been raving about Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul. “It’s one of the best books I’ve read in years,” he told me. And then in a separate note to a reading group we belong to he called it “an excellent book.” The novel, already a major bestseller in Turkey, just came out in the United States this month. Shafak was due to travel to several cities in the U.S. in support of the novel, but in the wake of Hrant Dink’s murder, she cut her tour down to just one appearance in New York, during which she was also interviewed by Terri Gross for NPR. Of the secular nationalists who attacked her and others, Shafak says:

This group is one of many voices in Turkey. They do not represent the majority of the voices in society, and frankly my opinion is they are targeting intellectuals and writers precisely because they want to stop the E.U. process. They have made it very clear that they are against Turkey’s E.U. membership, and they would like to see the country as a more insular place, a more xenophobic nation-state, a closed society. That’s what they would like to see happening.

You can listen to the interview here.

The Los Angeles Times has an opinion piece by Michel Shehadeh, who has been in legal limbo, along with other Palestinian immigrants, as part of the group known as the “L.A. 8.” A federal judge last week dismissed the justice department’s attempt to deport Shehadeh and the rest of the L.A. 8, saying, “the attenuation of these proceedings is a festering wound on the body of these respondents and an embarrassment to the rule of law.” Read the piece here.

A discussion is taking place this week over at the Lit Blog Co-Op about Ngugi’s latest novel, his first in many years: Wizard of the Crow. I’ve mentioned this book before, and I am thrilled to see it make the LBC’s Winter Read This! selection. Check it out.

A brief opinion piece I wrote about freedom of speech in Morocco appeared in Saturday’s New York Times. Its starting point is the lawsuit that was brought against the magazine Nichane (which I’ve mentioned previously on this blog) and the denouement of the case involving Aboubakr Jamai and his magazine Le Journal Hebdo (also mentioned briefly here). Here is an excerpt:

In the United States, Morocco is often seen as a liberal country and a bulwark against Islamic extremism. Certainly, the reforms that have taken place over the last few years, particularly in terms of women’s rights, are steps in the right direction.

But while the court cases against independent news magazines like Nichane, Le Journal Hebdomadaire and several others are within the bounds of Moroccan law, they appear to single out the independent press, to the exclusion of more partisan publications. These cases highlight a particularly troubling pattern, in which the regime represses the progressive voices it claims to champion

You can read the full text of the op-ed at the NYT site.

I had bought a copy of Hisham Matar’s In The Country of Men when I was in London last summer, and finally got around to reading it…last week. I enjoyed it quite a bit–it builds slowly in intensity, and deals with a terrible subject with a lot of grace and restraint. It looks like it just came out in the States: Ron Charles reviews it for The Washington Post.

Apologies for the lack of posts this past week. I’ve been struggling with a sore throat and an injured back. The latter is not such a bad thing; I tend to work with my laptop on my knees, and if I hurt my back it means I’m probably getting at least some work done. See? The glass is half full.