Month: March 2007

I was relieved when I had to travel to Rabat for the Fulbright Symposium because it meant I would get away from the news coverage of the foiled terrorist attack in Casablanca. Last week, As Sabah published a color picture of the torn body of Abdelfettah Raydi, the 24-year-old man who blew himself up inside a cyber cafe in Sidi Moumen on March 11. Al Massae showed the second terrorist, 17-year-old Youssef Khoudri, while he was transported to Ibn Rochd Hospital. An Nass, meanwhile, printed a photo of him being stitched up. Not to be outdone, La Vie Economique did a dossier on the events, and included a photo of the severed head of Raydi.

Despite the sensationalism, the articles accompanying the photos were, for the most part, well researched and interesting. They included interviews with the man who had alerted police, with witnesses and survivors, and with the terrorists’ family and neighbors. Many journalists asked why nothing had been done about the shantytowns in Sidi Moumen since the attacks of May 2003, and cautioned that more attacks remain possible so long as there is fertile ground for them. But a columnist for Aujourd’hui le Maroc fumed that “barbarians should not be pitied.” (You’d think you were reading Max Boot.)

The details that have emerged certainly give pause: the seizure of 200 kg of explosives in Sidi Moumen; the fact that Raydi had already served two years of prison for suspected Salafi activities before being released in an amnesty in 2005; the claim that it took only two weeks to convince Youssef Khoudri–an illiterate mint seller and sometime drug user who lived in a one-room house with his five siblings and parents–to take part in the attack; the suggestion that the targets included the police headquarters on Zerktouni; and so on.

All this took me back to my work. Large parts of my novel are set in Sidi Moumen and it is difficult to write about something knowing not only that it could happen, but that it does happen. It’s not easy to use one’s imagination while at the same time grappling with a similar reality. In the end, I had to shut off the real in order to focus on the fictional; I had to stop reading the papers–at least until coverage subsides–so I can finish my novel. The symposium came at the right time.

Posting will be light to non-existent for the next three days while I travel to Rabat for the annual Fulbright Symposium. Come again soon.

“Diane Schoemperlen’s In the Language of Love: A Novel in 100 Chapters is structured around the 100 stimulus words from the Standard Word Association Test. Each of these words– words like “soft”, “mutton”, “priest”, “red”, “needle”, “thirsty”–becomes a jumping off place for Schoemperlen to explore the different forms of love (as child, as mother, as wife, as lover) in her character Joanna’s life. While such a structure could feel like a gimmick in the wrong hands, Schoemperlen uses it to frame a strange and beautiful meditation on the wayward ways of the heart.”

Gayle Brandeis is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write and The Book of Dead Birds: A Novel, which won Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change. Her second novel, Self Storage, was recently published by Ballantine.

A suicide bomber blew himself up and injured three other people at an internet cafe in the neighborhood of Sidi Moumen, here in Casablanca. According to the BBC:

The blast happened after the man began a dispute with the cafe’s owner, who refused him access to jihadist sites. Another man, with the bomber at the time of the blast, fled after the explosion but has now been arrested by police, reports say.

“The man used to come to view jihadist websites and the dispute was prompted by the internet cafe owner’s decision to prevent him this time from viewing such propaganda material,” one official told Reuters. Police say it is unclear if the device was detonated by design or went off by accident during the argument between the two men.

The attack took place on the anniversary of the Madrid bombings. Several news sites have put forth the theory that the bomber was at the internet cafe in order to get instructions about his target as it seems inconceivable that he would aim at a place in the slum. The investigation is still ongoing. Last week, Moroccan police arrested a suspected terrorist by the name of Saad Houssaini, who is alleged to be the “chemist” of GCIM.