News

The Berlin International Literature Festival is calling for a worldwide reading of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry on October 5.  If your school or cultural institution is interested, please see details here.

I’m delighted to hear, via the blog of the NBCC, that the National Book Foundation will honor Maxine Hong Kingston with its 2008 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. One of the books that has marked me most is Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (I first came across it as an undergraduate student at Mohammed-V). I still have my old copy, most of it underlined or filled with comments. And nowadays I even teach portions of it in my creative nonfiction classes. It’s so nice to see her work recognized.

Well, that was fast. The shortlist for the 2008 Booker Prizes has already been announced:

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

Since The Enchantress didn’t make the list, people will probably remind John Sutherland of his promise.

The longlist for the Booker Prize for 2008 has been announced.  It includes:

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
From A to X by John Berger
The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

The only one I’ve read so far is Rushdie’s Enchantress. I also have Netherland, and hope to get to it in the next week or two.

Last Wednesday, the Moroccan blogger Mohamed Erraji penned a column for the website Hespress, in which he criticized King Mohammed for what he called “policies of charity” that are “destroying the country.” On Thursday, Erraji was reportedly questioned over the column. On Friday, he was arrested in Agadir for “lack of respect due to the king.” And, on Monday, he was brought to court for trial, fined 5,000 dirhams, and sentenced to two years in prison.

The column itself is available in Arabic here, in English here, and in French here. It starts with an anecdote about the king giving a policeman a transportation license (such licenses guarantee some income for life), then questions whether such practices encourage the creation of an independent society.

The arrest marks the first time anyone has been arrested for a blog post in Morocco, and, given the Moroccan government’s touchiness, I can guarantee it is not the last time. But I would like to make one small point: Erraji’s criticism is quite mild compared with what one can read in such French-language Moroccan magazines as Tel Quel or Le Journal. But these publications enjoy the support of many international groups (such as Reporters Without Borders) and so the government often has to think twice before arresting one of their journalists or editors. But because Erraji writes in Arabic, and because he writes for Hespress, a website whose quality is quite questionable (it’s very populist and sometimes inaccurate), and because he is not part of the connected elite, his right to freedom of expression has simply been denied and his case has been even more bungled than usual.

A website has been set up to defend Erraji: Help Erraji. I wish there was also a website to help Morocco get a clue on press freedom.