Laila Lalami

The AP reports that 22 Emirati men have been arrested at a “mass homosexual wedding” in the UAE. The men face jail time as well as government-mandated “hormone treatments.”

As I’m sure has been reported elsewhere, someone’s trying to patent a fictional storyline on zombies. Watch out, Hollywood.

Thanks to reader Edward E. for the link.

Zadie Smith was in town yesterday to read from On Beauty. There were about 300 people at the event, which was held at the First Unitarian Church in downtown Portland. Smith chose a scene from early on in the novel, when Jerome drags the entire Belsey family to a Mozart concert, and they run into two of Howard’s colleagues: Jack French, the Dean of Humanities, and Erskine Jegede, the chair of the Black Studies Department.

The Q&A proceeded in a rather textbook fashion (“How do you write?” “What are you reading at the moment?” “Which writers have influenced you?” etc.) Then a gentleman sitting in the balcony asked her how she felt about “normalizing black people.”

(I am not making this up.)

Though Smith appeared to be bewildered by the question, she remained gracious, and calmly responded that she doesn’t see what would be wrong with that, because she herself feels very normal [a round of applause].

An exhibit of Botero’s paintings, inspired by the torture of Iraqi prisoner by U.S. troops at the Abu-Ghraib prison, opened in Rome last month. Another show of the artist’s works opened in Barranquilla, this time displaying pieces inspired by car bombings and kidnappings in Colombia. The L.A. Times has a review of the shows, and of what drew Botero to the events.

These aren’t the sorts of scenes most people associate with Fernando Botero. For decades, the 73-year-old Colombian painter and sculptor has been best known for his seemingly innocuous images of plump priests, chunky children and still lifes of gargantuan fruits and flowers.

But this perception of Botero’s work was always overly simplistic and incomplete. Encoded, or perhaps hidden in plain sight, in many of his paintings are multilayered cultural symbols, covert allusions to current events and winking art-historical references to works by Velazquez, Vermeer and other Old Masters. Some of his most enigmatic images birds perched in lollipop trees, faces anxiously peering out of windows, a pile of dead bishops resting peacefully hint at darker forces roiling beneath the colorful, pleasing surfaces.

Read more here.

Norman Mailer’s racist, misogynistic rant against NY Times critic Michiko Kakutani has been getting quite a bit of press, but it’s distressing to note how much of it is being related without even a dash of condemnation. Nor have those who’ve claimed Mailer’s ire to be “understandable” bothered to look at Kakutani’s record. (Michael Cader, of Publishers’ Marketplace, looked at 150 reviews by Kakutani and found books by white men to be “as well represented as any.”)

A controversial biography of the Prophet, written by one George Bush (distant, distant relation, says the White House), in the last century, has been authorized for distribution by the powerful and often belligerent Al-Azhar in Egypt. Al-Azhar is a religious university that has the power to censor particular books in the republic, so I was a little surprised that they gave the book a pass. (The book describes the Prophet as an “imposter” and Muslims as “locusts.”) Are the ulamas of Al-Azhar becoming more respectful of freedom of speech? Sure would be good news for novelists like Haydar Haydar. (But I remain skeptical.)

WH link from Lit Saloon.

Add this to the list of “must-do” things for a hot, young author: Marry another hot, young author. Then the media can file useless pieces about your relationship, other famous literary pairings, and what it all means for literature. Ugh.

Just when Morocco is liberalizing its press and making democratic reforms there comes a bit of sobering news that makes you wonder whether the clock isn’t turning back. Ali Lamrabet, the editor of Demain Magazine, who’s had previous entanglements with the law in Morocco has now been banned from working as a journalist for 10 years. Although the lawsuit was brought by an association of civilians, it’s pretty clear that his real crime was voicing an opinion about territorial disputes in the Sahara that ran contrary to the standard. The Reuters dispatch has a couple of worthwhile quotes.

“This is a major blunder by our judiciary system. The judge did not even let us plead our client’s case,” said Abderrahim Jamai, Lmrabet’s lawyer and a prominent human rights activist.

A Communication Ministry spokeswoman said she could not comment because the justice system was independent. But Morocco’s national union of journalists criticised the use of the criminal law in this particular case.

“It is the first time in the history of the Moroccan press that a journalist has been given such a heavy sentence in a defamation case,” Reporters Without Borders said in a statement. “This ruling…is a serious blot on freedom of opinion and the press in Morocco.”

An absolute outrage. I suspect that another pardon may be in the works, especially if the pressure continues to mount, but it pisses me off when the courts don’t do their job.

When Salman Rushdie visits Bozeman, Montana, this is how the local rag, the Billings Gazette reports about it: India Native Says Great Literature Changes World. Because, in case you missed it, the author’s claim to fame is that he was born in India. Wow. Did you know that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Colombia? Wild, I know.

I honestly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read this:

A Muslim woman breaks the taboos of her culture: using a pseudonym, she publishes an erotic tale divulging the secret sexual lives and cravings of Muslim women. The book was a phenomenon in France, but conservative Muslims have attacked it as trash. If her identity were revealed, she fears she would be stoned in her native Morocco.

Stoning? In Morocco?? For crying out loud, if you’re going to trade in cliches, it might be a good idea to stick to the ones most appropriate for the country where your story is set.

The book this Spiegel article is raving about is the much-hyped autobiographical novel The Almond, written by a pseudonymous author named Nedjma. It has been described as a Muslim Vagina Monologues and touted as the first erotic novel by an Arab woman. It recounts the life of a Moroccan farm girl named Badira, who is sexually assaulted by her husband on her wedding night, and who puts up with the violence for three years before moving to Tangiers, where she takes a lover and rediscovers her sexuality.

But the details that we have about the author suggest that she’s not even Moroccan. For instance, her name is spelled in the Algerian vernacular (in Moroccan Arabic, it’s a different ‘j’ sound.) And Nedjma also happens to be the title of the famous novel by the Algerian Kateb Yacine. Indeed, the Telegraph identified this Nedjma as Algerian, while Spiegel Online says she’d be stoned “in her native Morocco,” so which the fuck is it, people?

I guess the reason I’m annoyed with this whole hoopla is that it completely trades on the sales bonanza enjoyed by Salman Rushdie in 1989. But it’s one thing for a novelist like Salman Rushdie (whom I respect and admire) to have the courage to put his name on a work of fiction, and to put up with a fatwa by a bunch of lunatic goons, and it’s quite another to write a pseudonymous novel and hide behind the idea that there are risks of “stoning,” when, as far as we know, no threats have been made.

And the idea that Nedjma is the “first Arab woman” to deal with erotica is completely absurd. How about Al Khansaa who wrote in the 7th century? Or, more recently, Alifa Rifaat? Or Ahdaf Soueif? Or Assia Djebbar?

But of course, it’s this “I’m an oppressed Arab woman who tells the West about her plight” that sells books, and I guess her U.S. publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, will soon cash in as well. And the NY Times profile (with the author hiding behind a hat and dark sunglasses) can’t be far behind.

A few months ago, I wrote a 1,000-word piece about these types of books and how they work, and I never got around to sending it out. Maybe I should.

Update: Fellow writer Randa Jarrar sends this note with even more names of women writers who’ve written erotica.

Latifa El-Zayyat wrote about sex; Nawal Al-Saadawi has erotic scenes in most of her novellas; sexual content was one of the reasons Assia Djebbar changed her name; Ahlam Mostaghanmi, the author of Memory of the Body, wrote many sex scenes. Speaking of Mostaghanmi: when her book first came out, her publisher claimed she was the first Algerian woman to have written a novel in Arabic. This turned out to be false. A schoolteacher had written a novel in Arabic 20 years earlier.

I’d be willing to bet that this Nedjma does not even exist.