Month: July 2005

I received a copy of Start Making Sense a couple of weeks ago in the mail, and figured it would make for a nice giveaway. It’s an anthology of essays about how liberals can “turn the lessons of election 2004 into winning progressive politics.” Contributors include Howard Dean, Arianna Huffington, George Lakoff, Amy Goodman, Barbara Ehrenreich, Barack Obama, and Markos Moulitsakis Zuniga (a.k.a. Daily Kos).

You know the rules. First person to email me at llalami at yahoo dot com with the subject line “start making sense” will get a copy in the mail.

Update: The winner is Stephen S. from Los Angeles.

The summer 2005 issue of Mizna is now available, with contributions by D.H. Melhem, Patricia Sarrafian Ward, and the always hilarious Dean Obeidallah. And the cover art is, once again, outstanding.

Those of you in the Bay area might like to check out Night Train Magazine‘s fifth issue launch at Zebulon’s Lounge in Petaluma on August 2nd. Readers include Bruce Bauman, Jordan Rosenfeld and Susan Henderson. Details here.

The appetite of Western readers for books about Muslim women shows no sign of declining. Take, for example, The Almond, a novel written by the pseudonymous Nedjma, billed as “the first erotic novel to be written by a Muslim woman.” It became an instant hit in France when it was published last year, selling nearly 50,000 copies. It received enthusiastic reviews from Alexie Toca in Lire and Marianne Payot in L’Express, and was recommended in Elle and Le Point. Foreign rights were quickly sold in the UK, Germany, Italy, Holland, Japan, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Finland, and elsewhere garnering a total of 500,000 Euros for the author.

When it was published in the United States last month, The Almond received a starred review from Publishers’ Weekly and considerable coverage in the New York Times (a Sunday review and an author profile.) At a time when only 3% of fiction published in the US today originally appeared in another language and when otherwise internationally renowned authors are having trouble finding American publishers, the attention heaped on The Almond is quite rare. But it is not surprising. It’s an excellent time to be writing about the “plight of Muslim women,” about “life behind the veil,” about “taboos in Islam” and so on. What is troubling, however, is that, in their rush to hear about the sex lives of Muslim women, few reviewers have bothered to engage the novel critically. And, even more telling, none of these reviewers appear to be Muslim, Arab, or North African, much less Moroccan.

The story told in The Almond is one many readers of erotica will recognize: A village girl (Badra) escapes from her loveless and sexually barren marriage to the big city (Tangier) where she lives with a liberal relative (Aunt Selma) and meets a handsome, experienced man (Driss). He introduces her to the pleasures of the flesh, and the two of them carry on a torrid affair, ultimately ruined by one of the lovers’ insatiable desire for novelty. The book is written in a straightforward style that occasionally manages to rise above the mundane, particularly in Nedjma’s sexy description of Badra’s first night with Driss, which is written with boldness and obvious pleasure.

Most of the novel, however, is consumed with descriptions of Badra’s village life, which contrasts sharply with the more liberal one she has in Tangier. To the careful reader, there are many details that make these accounts of life in Morocco rather unconvincing. For instance, Badra claims to love the comedian “Bzou” a curious amalgam of the famous comedic duo Bziz ou Baz, who ruled the stand-up scene in Morocco in the 1980s and who were intermittently banned in the 1990s. Elsewhere, a saint’s mausoleum is erroneously referred to as Sidi Brahmin, a rather Indianized version of the real saint, Brahim. A man who falls in love with Badra, bursts out that he has come for the “bent el hassab u nnassab,” an Egyptian expression that seems rather out of place in the medina of Tangier. The woman who comes to dress Badra for her wedding is named Neggafa, without a hint of irony. (Neggafas are a cross between hairdressers and wedding planners, and their role is to prepare the bride for her big day. Imagine if a novel featured a character named “Hairdresser” while everyone else is blessed with simple names like John and Jane.) There are references to village brides wandering as “far as the sand dunes,” a rather difficult geographical undertaking since they are in the North of Morocco, hundreds of miles away from the Sahara. In the hammam, young Badra describes women who carefully wrap themselves in big cloths and hide behind bathroom doors before undressing. Clearly, Nedjma has never stepped into a Moroccan hammam.

But does any of this matter?

Probably not. After all, The Almond is a work of fiction, not a treatise on village life in Morocco. However, if the novel’s problems were simply restricted to authenticity, they could easily be shrugged off and attributed to poor research. The greater problem here is not factual truth; it is emotional truth. The characters in this book never fully rise above the caricature, never convince us that their struggles are real, never make us feel any emotions for them beside sorrow or titillation. Badra’s mother, sister, cousins, friends and neighbors all make brief appearances in order to deliver their lines of dialogues like so many grenades. They service the plot, and then they disappear. Unsurprisingly, the roles that they have been given are to demonstrate, bit by bit, their sexual repression. Here’s the long-suffering mother who advises Badra that she “must accept her fate like the rest of us.” Here’s the mother-in-law who ties Badra down to her bed to enable the husband to deflower her more easily. Here’s the sister who leans over and whispers, “Close your eyes, bite your lips, and think of something else.” Here’s the sister-in-law, who is treated like a leper because she had the misfortune of getting pregnant out of wedlock. None of these characters are memorable, none stick around long enough to have a distinct identity. They are only ideas, not people made of flesh and blood, with desires and dislikes, aspirations and contradictions. If all writing is a war against cliche, then Nedjma must be an avowed pacifist.

In the prologue to The Almond, Nedjma declares, “My ambition is to give back to the women of my blood the power of speech confiscated by their fathers, brothers, and husbands.” Despite this lofty claim, there can be little doubt that this book was not written for an Arab audience, but, rather, for Western readers, for those among them who will be suitably shocked at the catalog of horrors perpetrated on women, those who will be flattered when they are told that having “European skin” is desirable, those who will nod with approbation at Driss’s literary recommendations (Simone de Beauvoir, Boris Vian, Louis Aragon). This book is not literature; it is comfort. And I prefer to get my comfort by other means.

When she appeared on Thierry Ardisson’s television show “Tout Le Monde En Parle” in France, Nedjma hid behind a hat and glasses, and her voice was altered. The camouflage was necessary, she said, because she feared reprisals from Islamists for the erotic material in her novel. And yet, for years, Moroccan women have been writing about their lives, including their sex lives, without the need for such simulacrum. Who bothered Fatema Mernissi when she wrote Dreams of Trespass and Beyond The Veil? Who bothered Soumaya Naamane-Guessous when she published her wide-ranging study of sexual practices among men and women, Au Dela De Toute Pudeur? Who bothered Ghita El Khayat when she published The Affair? That Nedjma, who’s written a novel that is so unremarkable, could claim that she fears for her life is not only ludicrous, it is an insult to the women who dare to speak about their condition, face unveiled, and live with the consequences.

In an article published in the Spanish paper La Vanguardia (full text here), IMPAC-award winning author Tahar Ben Jelloun recounts an airport anecdote that I thought worth quoting:

El pasado mes de marzo fui invitado a Estados Unidos por la prestigiosa Universidad de Princeton para dar una serie de conferencias. Subo al avion, si que la compania tiene que comunicar la lista de los pasajeros que se disponen a entrar en suelo estadounidense. Como todos, relleno los impresos que nos distribuyen y que hay que entregar a la policia de fronteras. Tengo un pasaporte frances. Lo presento. En cuanto el policia estadounidense ve un nombre arabe, se pone a teclear en el ordenador durante cinco minutos, entrega mis documentos a otro agente y luego me pide que lo siga a un despacho situado al final del aeropuerto. Me instalan en una sala donde observo la presencia de otros arabes. Angustiado, no digo nada. Espero. Lo si, soy sospechoso. ” De que? ” Que he hecho? Empiezo a preguntarme que puedo haber hecho. Me digo que quize he cometido un delito y que mi memoria lo ha borrado. Espero. Pienso en K., el personaje de El proceso de Kafka. A veces basta con una naderea para caer en el absurdo. No es posible leer nada en el rostro del agente encargado de mis papeles. Lo miro y bajo los ojos. Empiezo a tener miedo. Me digo: ” y si me confunde con otra persona que se llama igual que yo, con alguien buscado? Para cuando se demostrara el error ya estaraa en Guantanamo. Crece la tension. Espero, no me atrevo a preguntar que pasa. Me han dicho que nunca hay que protestar en estos casos.

Al cabo de cuarenta minutos, el agente me llama y me hace una serie de preguntas. Mi ingles es deficiente. Respondo en frances y luego en ingles aproximado. Me hace preguntas trampa: ” quien es Amin? Es mi hijo. ” Cual es su fecha de nacimiento? De pronto sufro un lapsus de memoria. Doy la de otro de mis hijos. Le muestro la invitacion de Princeton. No queda muy intimidado. Sigue escribiendo en el teclado del ordenador. Entonces me acuerdo de un articulo que escribo sobre la guerra de Iraq donde pedia que Bush fuera llevado ante el Tribunal Penal Internacional por haber matado a inocentes en Iraq. Me digo que la policia me retiene por eso. Tras un momento de silencio en que habla con otro agente, me devuelve el pasaporte. Salgo, veo mi maleta sola en la cinta. Los otros pasajeros, europeos, no han sido sometidos a interrogatorio alguno.

Essentially, Ben Jelloun says that he was invited to give a series of talks at Princeton last March. Upon arriving at the airport, he presented his French passport. The officer looked at his Arab name, spent a few minutes typing on his keyboard, then took him to a waiting area at the other end of the airport with other Arabs. After a 40-minute wait, he was asked a few questions, like “Who is Amin?” “My son.” “What is his date of birth?”

Ben Jelloun showed the officer his invitation from Princeton, but, he said, the man “didn’t seem impressed.” Then, Ben Jelloun remembered an article he’d written the year before, in which he suggested that President Bush be tried by the International Tribunal for the killing of innocent Iraqis*. After some delay, he was given his passport back and allowed to collect his luggage.

Ben Jelloun uses the anecdote to illustrate the clash between Occident and Orient, one a powerful, easily-recognizable mass, the other a mosaic of countries sometimes situated in Asia, the Middle-East, or North Africa. He argues that while the clash of civilizations is a simplistic way of looking at how cultures interact, the clash of ignorances is a reality, and until we begin to know each other, we have no hope of understanding and respecting one another.

Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun is the Goncourt- and IMPAC-award winning author of more than ten novels, four collections of poetry, several memoirs, plays, and anthologies. He resides in Paris.

Link via Label ASH.

*Thanks to David R. for the clarification

“With all that is going on in Iraq and the world, all the Harry Potter and chick Lit discussions need to take a hiatus,” Desousa says. “Not that I do not read strictly for entertainment. But we are running out of time and in this frame of mind I went out and bought The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer. It’s a story of a white South African woman’s journey to the village of her Muslim lover. I think there is no way to understand a religion without experiencing the culture that nurtures it and this book takes its time (another virtue one needs to develop when reading serious lit). It’s a slim novel and it’s amazing how I am not feeling rushed to finish it, but instead am savoring it, one awkward compromise at a time. Ever since I read The House Gun, I have liked Gordimer’s writing. Her treatment of gay men in the novel was so subtly woven into the broader conflict of race.”

Born in Kenya, raised in Goa, corrupted and educated in Bombay, Neale Desousa now lives in Los Angeles. His work has been published in Chiron Review, Slipstream, and is forthcoming in Swink.