Laila Lalami

Jennifer Needleman and Joshua Asen’s documentary film I Love Hip Hop in Morocco, which screened this past weekend at the Arab Film Festival in Los Angeles, and at the Casablanca Film Festival in Morocco, is a rare treat: A film that shows the country in all its complexity. The picture follows several hip hop bands (H-Kayne, Fnaire, DJ Key, Bigg, Brown Fingazz, and Fati Show) as they attempt to set up a hip hop festival in three big cities: Meknes, Marrakesh, and Casablanca. They try to get funding and sponsorship, they rent space, they get permits, they print flyers, they rehearse, and as we follow them through this journey we get a rich portrait of these artists. We visit with DJ Key at home and hear about how he abandoned his work in an architecture firm to focus on hip hop. We hear about the choices they make in their lyrics. For example, the members of Fnaire refuse to use the word ‘fuck’ (“We don’t talk like that”) while solo rapper Brown Fingazz defends his use of the epithet ‘nigga’ to refer to himself and his friends in the medina. They share their struggles, particularly with freedom of speech and with logistical support. They talk about their private lives. The only woman rapper in the film is a young high school girl in Fez, whose parents are extremely supportive, but who has to win the crowd when she goes on stage during the festival. If you have a chance to see this film at the festival near you, don’t miss it.

Clip: “Issawa Style” by H-Kayne.

Cartoonist Khalil Bendib has published a new collection of cartoons, which he presented in Los Angeles a few days ago. Here are a couple of photos from the event at the Beverly Hills Public Library:

The cartoon above shows a colony of Dick Cheney lookalikes, carrying bags labeled “Fraud,” “No Bid Contracts,” “Food Services Overcharges,” and “Gasoline Overcharges.” The caption says: “Hallibaba and the Forty Thieves.”

This one shows two Al-Saud family members fast asleep while their answering machine responds to an incoming call: “Hello. You have reached the House of Saud. We’re busy at the moment. If this is an emergency and thousands of pilgrims are dying due to our incompetence, at the sound of the beep please leave us alone. Thank you.”

Bendib’s new collection is called Mission Accomplished: Wicked Cartoons by America’s Most Wanted Political Cartoonist. You can view many of Bendib’s cartoons on his website. Enjoy.

Amos Oz delivers an impassioned plea for literature in this L.A. Times op-ed:

If you are a mere tourist, you might stand on a street and look up at an old house, in the old part of town, and see a woman staring out of her window. Then you will walk on.

But if you are a reader, you can see that woman staring out of her window, but you are there with her, inside her room, inside her head.

As you read a foreign novel, you are actually invited into other people’s living rooms, into their nurseries and studies, into their bedrooms. You are invited into their secret sorrows, into their family joys, into their dreams.

Which is why I believe in literature as a bridge between peoples. I believe curiosity can be a moral quality. I believe imagining the other can be an antidote to fanaticism. Imagining the other will make you not only a better businessperson or a better lover but even a better person.

Part of the tragedy between Jew and Arab is the inability of so many of us, Jews and Arabs, to imagine each other. Really imagine each other: the loves, the terrible fears, the anger, the passion. There is too much hostility between us, too little curiosity.

By the by, Gil Hochberg’s book, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination deals with the problem that Oz lays out in this piece. Hochberg contends that, in literature at least, Jews and Arabs have always met, always mixed, always found the self within the other. At a reading sponsored by the Levantine Center last week, Hochberg cited numerous examples, though the one that stuck in my mind and aroused my curiosity most was the work of (Moroccan) Israeli novelist Albert Suissa.