Laila Lalami

Regular readers of this blog will likely remember the name of Fouad Mourtada, the young engineer who was arrested and allegedly tortured by the Moroccan government because he created a fake profile of the crown prince. The charges are not under question; what is under question, however, is the legal process by which this young man was arrested, tried, and sentenced for a youthful prank. If you live in D.C., here is a chance to make your voice heard. A protest will be taking place in front of the Embassy of Morocco this coming Saturday, March 1st:

Location: Embassy of the Kingdom of Morocco
Time: Saturday, March 1st. 2:00pm – 5:00pm
Address : 1601 21st Street, NW, Washington DC 20009
Directions: Yahoo Maps

There is also a Facebook link. (I bet the irony will go unnoticed by Mourtada’s jailers.)

As has been widely reported, one of the best independent bookstores in Los Angeles is closing. Dutton’s had been at its Brentwood location for 23 years. I remember going there to hear Monica Ali, Michael Chabon, Jhumpa Lahiri, and many, many others. I was thrilled to read there when my own book came out in hardcover–a bit of a dream come true. But now, another Los Angeles bookstore is in danger: Beyond Baroque. An email currently making the rounds states that “[the] lease is now in question, and ends Saturday, March 1st. It has not been extended.” The bookstore will be renting the space month to month from now on.

The reasons for both these developments are essentially the same: expensive retail space, competition from chains and online booksellers. I find it depressing that, with such a disproportionate number of wealthy people here, no one is coming forward to help independent literary culture survive. Quite the contrary, the millionaire who owns the building in which Dutton’s is located has said that he would be willing to pay the bookstore’s debts, and forgive the rent, so long as the bookstore closes at the end of April.

The latest issue of the London Review of Books has a Diary piece (don’t you love those? I do.) by Israeli journalist Yonathan Mendel, in which he describes his work covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A particularly interesting tidbit:

In most of the articles on the conflict two sides battle it out: the Israel Defence Forces, on the one hand, and the Palestinians, on the other. When a violent incident is reported, the IDF confirms or the army says but the Palestinians claim: ‘The Palestinians claimed that a baby was severely injured in IDF shootings.’ Is this a fib? ‘The Palestinians claim that Israeli settlers threatened them’: but who are the Palestinians? Did the entire Palestinian people, citizens of Israel, inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, people living in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab states and those living in the diaspora make the claim? Why is it that a serious article is reporting a claim made by the Palestinians? Why is there so rarely a name, a desk, an organisation or a source of this information? Could it be because that would make it seem more reliable?

All italics are Mendel’s. He also looks at verbs like ‘initiate,’ or ‘launch’ versus ‘respond.’ Interesting stuff, particularly for those of us who are obsessed with language or politics (or both.)

Recently, I had my students read a couple of essays from Salman Rushdie’s collection Imaginary Homelands. I particularly like these lines from “Is Nothing Sacred?”:

What is more, the writer is there, in his work, in the reader’s hands, utterly exposed, utterly defenseless, entirely without the benefit of an alter ego to hide behind. What is forged, in the secret act of reading, is a different kind of identity, as the reader and writer merge, through the medium of the text, to become a collective being that both writes as it reads and reads as it writes, and creates, jointly, that unique work, ‘their’ novel. This ‘secret identity’ of writer and reader is the novel form’s greatest and most subversive gift.

This was originally published in Granta in 1990. If you’re looking for something more recent by Rushdie, try “The Shelter of the World,” which appeared in the New Yorker last week (or was it two weeks ago?), and is an excerpt from his forthcoming novel.

(Photo credit: Eamonn McCabe)

As a reminder: Tomorrow, I will be hosting Moroccan journalist Boubker Jamaï at the University of California, Riverside (HMNSS 1500, 11:00 am) for a talk on democratization. The talk is free and open to the public, so if you’re in the Southern California area, please come.

I have an opinion piece up at The Nation website about the imprisonment of Fouad Mourtada in Casablanca two weeks ago. Here is how it begins:

On the morning of February 5, plainclothes officers in Morocco picked up Fouad Mourtada in Casablanca, blindfolded him, and took him to the police station, where they reportedly tortured him until he lost consciousness. His crime: He had created a Facebook profile of Crown Prince Moulay Rachid, the King’s brother.

Mourtada is 26. He did what millions of other people his age do every day–create profiles, real or fake, on social networking websites. There are fake profiles on Facebook for everyone from Brad Pitt to Mother Teresa, from King Abdullah to Osama bin Laden. There are 500 profiles for George W. Bush. Mourtada did not appear to think he was committing any crime. Indeed, despite being a computer engineer, with a degree from the prestigious École Mohammedia des Ingénieurs, he did not use a proxy server to protect his identity. Nor did he derive any profit, monetary or otherwise, from the Facebook profile. It may have been a youthful prank or a twenty-first-century homage, but either way it landed him in jail.

You can read the entire piece over at The Nation. The court is due to reconvene today, and I can only hope that cooler heads will prevail.

Updated to say that Fouad Mourtada has been sentenced to three years in prison.

The L.A. Times Book Review includes a thoughtful piece by Josh Kun on two recent books about the U.S.-Mexico border: Hyper-Border by Fernando Romero and 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border by Juan Felipe Herrera.

The U.S.-Mexico border is a 2,000-mile geopolitical line that runs from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, slicing through 10 states, two deserts, at least four different regional accents and at least three different philosophies on how to cook meat, all while changing shape from rivers to rocks to ranch fences to wooden posts to menacing metal walls rigged with electronic sensors.

Yet the border has never been just a line on a map. CNN’s Lou Dobbs knows this as well as a Tijuana local who wakes up to the smell of U.S. Border Patrol tear gas. It is a machine and a metaphor, a tool and a scapegoat, an entire cosmology and, especially these days, a political quagmire as laden with quicksand as the mention of a Palestinian state at a Passover table. There’s no way to talk about it without getting lost in circuitous, maddening debate.

Romero’s book redefines the idea of a clear border by providing a complex image of the region, with its interdependencies, while Herrera’s book is a collection of his poetry, essays and reflections over 30 years of activism on behalf of border peoples, border generations, border languages.

Next Tuesday, I will be hosting Moroccan journalist Boubker Jamaï at the University of California, Riverside, for a talk on democratization. Here are the details:

The talk is free and open to the public, so if you’re in the Southern California area, please join us for a lively discussion. Those of you who are unfamiliar with Jamai can read this (poorly titled) article by Jane Kramer in the New Yorker.

Two weeks ago, a computer engineer by the name of Fouad Mourtada was arrested by Moroccan police in Casablanca for creating a fake Facebook profile of Prince Moulay Rachid, the king’s brother. Mourtada’s family found out about his arrest through the news, and had to wait a week to be allowed to see him. Mourtada says he was tortured when he was taken into custody. There are thousands of fake profiles for politicians, royals, and celebrities, but Mourtada has been charged with identity theft and risks up to five years in prison. Several Moroccan bloggers, including this one, are maintaining radio silence today. You can visit the Mourtada family website here.

The Winter 2008 issue of the magazine Bidoun includes a lovely article by Issandr El Amrani on Anfas (Souffles), the legendary Moroccan literary and cultural magazine. Here is a brief snippet

In 1966, a small group of Moroccan poets, artists, and intellectuals launched Souffles, a quarterly review that would over time become at once a vehicle for cultural renewal and an instigator of efforts to promote social justice in the Maghreb. From its very first issue, Souffles was a unique experiment, a Moroccan and Maghrebi effort to liberate the country’s intellectual framework from fetid provincialism and lingering colonial complexes. It was a cri de coeur, a rebellion against the artistic status quo, a manifesto for a new aesthetics, even a new worldview. Its trademark cover, emblazoned with an intense black sun, radiated rebellion.

The full article is available online here, so please take a look.