December 27, 2006

'The Town By The Sea'

Just a few days after the Asian tsunami, Amitav Ghosh went to the Andaman and Nicobar islands. In a New Yorker essay titled "The Town By The Sea," he wrote of the environmental devastation, the physical destruction, and the unendurable tragedy that were visited on the people of the islands. Ghosh describes a middle-aged scientist, a man referred to merely as "the Director," who was traveling to the town of Malacca to look for his wife and daughter among the few survivors that had been found. This was not the first time the Director had undertaken this trip, and sadly there was no trace of his family.

As he walked among the ruins, however, the Director came across a set of slides from his epidemiological research, and he picked them up, carefully selecting which ones he would keep. A little later, he spotted a yellow paint box that his daughter had owned. He chose to leave it where it lay. Ghosh writes:

I had expected he would stoop to pick up the box, but instead he turned away and walked on, gripping his bag of slides. "Wait!" I cried. "Don't you want to take the box?"

"No," he said vehemently, shaking his head. "What good will it do? What will it give back?" He stopped to look at me over the rim of his glasses. "Do you know what happened the last time I was here? Someone had found my daughter's schoolbag and saved it for me. It was handed to me, like a card. It was the worst thing I could have seen. It was unbearable."

He started to walk off again. Unable to restrain myself, I called out after him: "Are you sure you don't want it - the paintbox?"

Without looking around he said: "Yes, I am sure."

I stood amazed as he walked off towards the blazing fire, with his slides still folded in his grip: how was it possible that the only memento he had chosen to retrieve were those magnified images? As a husband, a father, a human being, it was impossible not to wonder: what would I have done? what would I have felt? what would I have chosen to keep of the past? The truth is nobody can know, except in the extremity of that moment, and then the choice is not a choice at all, but an expression of the innermost sovereignty of the self, which decides because nothing now remains to cloud its vision. In the manner of his choosing there was not a particle of hesitation, not the faintest glimmer of a doubt. Was it perhaps, that in this moment of utter desolation there was some comfort in the knowledge of an impersonal effort? Could it be that he was seeking refuge in the one aspect of his existence that could not be erased by an act of nature? Or was there some consolation in the very lack of immediacy - did the value of those slides lie precisely in their exclusion from the unendurable pain of his loss? Whatever the reason, it was plain his mind had fixed upon a set of objects that derived their meaning from the part of his life that was lived in thought and contemplation.

There are times when words seem futile, and to no one more so than a writer. At these moments it seems that nothing is of value other than to act and to intervene in the course of events: to think, to reflect, to write seem trivial and wasteful. But the life of the mind takes many forms, and some time after the day had passed I understood that in the manner of his choosing, the Director had mounted the most singular, the most powerful defence of it that I would ever witness.

You can read the essay in full here.

December 25, 2006

On Iran

During his tour of the Middle East last week, Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that the main obstacle to peace in the region was Iran. He sounded like a hapless traveler who'd started a huge fire in a forest and couldn't control it; and instead of trying to put it out, he wanted to go out into the next forest and start an even bigger fire. Then he could claim that all these fires were making the forests safer.

Writing in the Guardian, Nasrin Alavi debunks many of Blair's claims by pointing out the terrible role that the government of Saudi Arabia (i.e. Blair's ally) has played and continues to play in escalating the war. She also points to Iran's experiences with democracy and liberalism, and how today's Iranian youths are fighting the regime.

(Alavi is the author of We Are Iran, a portrait of contemporary Iran through its blog culture. Last year, she contributed a column to this blog.)

December 21, 2006

Nichane: Banned

The Arabic-language weekly magazine Nichane was banned yesterday by the Moroccan authorities, by order of the Prime Minister's office. Nichane's issue #91, dated December 9th to the 15th, had a cover story on "Jokes: How Moroccans Make Fun of Religion, Sex, and Politics." It included a long article, written by Sanaa Al Aji, describing the cathartic role of jokes, and sharing a few juicy ones with readers. The jokes that were deemed particularly offensive were the ones dealing with religion. There were seven in total, ranging from the subversively funny to the unfunny or downright offensive, but these are jokes that readers could just as easily have heard at work, at school, at home or at the café, and therefore they're nothing new.

But their publication in Nichane was enough to prompt the Guardians of Morality ™, specifically members of the religious right, the Party of Justice and Development and others of similar sensibilities, to start a campaign against the magazine, and against the journalists, who have already been accused of being "apostates." What makes this campaign against the free press particularly troubling is that its fomentors include journalists, people who should at the very least know something about freedom of the press and show some solidarity for their fellow writers, editors, and reporters.

For instance, conservative journalist Mohammed Lachyab posted a long tirade on his blog, not just against the article, but against the magazine, and against its sister publication, the Francophone Tel Quel, accusing them of persistently insulting the "religious and national" feelings of Moroccans through their "editorial line." Lachyab also attacked Nichane's use of Moroccan Arabic, saying that "the secret goal" behind such a move is "the destruction of the Arabic language, after the failure of the Francophone magazine in that role." (Journalist and conspiracy theorist, all in one!) Lachyab followed this post with a long list of contacts and asked his readers to make their opinions heard. The list included not only the email address of the magazine's director, Driss Ksikes, but also those of the Prime Minister's office, the Minister of Waqf and Islamic Affairs, and even the theology school.

This veritable witch hunt resulted in the ban of Nichane. A lawsuit has been filed against Driss Ksikes, the magazine's director, and Sanaa Al Aji, the writer, for "insult to the Islamic religion" and "publication and distribution of writings that are contrary to the morals and mores" of the country. The trial is set for 8 January 2007, and they risk prison terms of 3 to 5 years. It should also be pointed out that, while the ban looks like (and will be interpreted) as a win for the PJD and its ilk, the magazine has not endeared itself to the government with its articles on corruption, the economy, party financing, etc.

As of this morning, the Nichane website appears to be down, so you cannot access the article in question. Ironically, the only place I can find the "incendiary" material is ....on the website of the very people who claim to be offended. They have scanned the jokes and you can see them there.

Related:
Reporters Sans Frontières condemns the ban. Popular blogger Larbi offers his support to the magazine, as does Mohammed Said Hjiouij.

December 20, 2006

Pamuk's Nobel Lecture

A couple of weeks ago, Orhan Pamuk delivered his Nobel lecture at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. Titled "Babamin bavulu," which translates as "My Father's Suitcase," it's about Pamuk's relationship with his father, a man who loved to read, had hoped to be a writer, but in the end preferred to enjoy life rather than devote himself fully to the craft. Pamuk, of course, chose a different path, and his meditation on his and his father's choices, their fates, and their relationship to one another moved me to tears. The lecture also includes many lovely comments about the art of literature, and its place in the world. Here's just one taste:

I would like to see myself as belonging to the tradition of writers who--wherever they are in the world, East or West--cut themselves off from society and shut themselves up in their rooms with their books; this is the starting point of true literature.

But once we have shut ourselves away we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other people’s stories, other people’s books--the thing we call tradition. I believe literature to be the most valuable tool that humanity has found in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors--and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signs that dark and improvident times are upon us. But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature’s eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people’s stories, and to tell other people’s stories as if they were his own, for that is what literature is.

You can find Orhan Pamuk's lecture in the original Turkish, and in various other translations, at the Nobel site. The English-language version is also reprinted in this week's New Yorker magazine.)

December 19, 2006

A Muslim Santa

One of the more unfortunate legacies of colonialism in Morocco is a certain obsession with, and mimicry of, all things French. If you walk into a fine store in the Racine neighborhood (I mean, look at the neighborhood's name, for God's sake) the clerk is likely to address you in French, even though you are not French, and neither is she. "Bonjour madame, est-ce que je peux vous aider?" she'll ask. In the beginning, I would answer, somewhat irritatedly, in Moroccan Arabic (Darija) just to make a point. But then a strangely condescending look would appear on the salesperson's face, intimating that perhaps I couldn't afford to shop at the store, and the service would mysteriously drop to lower standards. So now I don't even bother anymore, I just go with the flow.

There is still, fifty years after independence, a persistent association of anything French with "better." People are driving themselves into the poorhouse trying to send their kids to French lycées. A few department stores and private schools here in Casa also throw Christmas celebrations, complete with trees, trimmings, and multicolored lights. It's bizarre.

This morning, while I was reading the paper (a French-language one, I know, I know), I stumbled on this advertisement for LG Electronics. It shows an old man with a white beard, wearing a jellaba and a tarbouche, merrily riding a sheep-drawn carriage full of refrigerators, microwaves, and other assorted kitchen appliances. The message above says, "Aïd Moubarak Saïd."

I suppose someone at the ad agency thought that the mix of the Eid El-Kebir, the Muslim commemoration of Abraham's sacrifice, with Santa Claus, a folkoric addition to the Christian holidays, might somehow be conducive to shopping sprees. Maybe it just means that consumerism is finally winning the battle of Muslim holidays--via Christian ones. Let's shop, fellow Moroccans, just like the French do!

December 18, 2006

'How Language Works'

This is a delightful surprise: A book on linguistics is reviewed in the daily New York Times. Sure, it's David Crystal's How Language Works, which makes it hard to ignore, but it's still nice to see something on linguistics in the book section.

Café, Anyone?

You can't really have a bad cup of coffee in Casablanca. We've been to several different places since we arrived, and the espresso was amazing everywhere. Traditionally, the coffee house was the ultimate male space, where men got together to smoke, play chess, read the paper, catch up with each other and, I imagine, complain about their womenfolk. In contrast, the ultimate female space was the home, where women threw elaborate parties, listened to music, danced, traded gossip, and enjoyed a good glass of tea. But of course all of this has changed over the last ten to twenty years, and the coffee houses are being firmly and steadily desegregated. The picture above is from a Maarif cafe, which is so popular that it has been turned into a chain. At least it's a homegrown chain. There are no Starbucks here. Yet.

December 14, 2006

WWW

The talk of the town is Faouzi Bensaïdi's new film, WWW: What A Wonderful World, which just opened this week at the Megarama. It's about the intersecting lives of a contract killer (played by Bensaidi himself), a policewoman, a hacker, and a prostitute, and it's all set in Casablanca. WWW premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and was also shown a couple of weeks ago at the Marrakech Film Festival. I hope to catch it this weekend...

Fallout

So now it's official. The government of Saudi Arabia told Dick Cheney that it will arm Sunni militias if the U.S. leaves Iraq. Last July, you'll remember, Saudi Arabia blamed Israel's invasion of Lebanon entirely on Hizbollah, while Olmert referred--with no detectable irony--to the Kingdom as a "moderate Arab state." Which means we're seeing a very clear alignment: Saudi Arabia, the U.S., Israel, Fatah, and Saniora's government on one side, and Iran, Hamas, Hizbollah, and maybe Syria on the other side. I just want to hide under a blanket and go to sleep.

I Hate Yahoo!

I've failed to receive several messages that were sent to my Yahoo! email account, and my attempts to get these problems straightened out have led nowhere. So if you have sent me something and have not heard back from me, it probably means I didn't get it. Please feel free to resend.

Muslim Minorities in Europe

I enjoyed Aziz Huq's review in the American Prospect of Ian Buruma's Murder in Amsterdam and Zachary Shore's Breeding Bin Ladens. Huq has produced a very level-headed piece on a topic that far too often degenerates into polemics.

December 13, 2006

Wood on Harris

Those of you who subscribe to the New Republic: Could you email me James Wood's review of Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation? Done. Thanks.

December 12, 2006

What Do You Miss?

Last week, a friend of mine emailed me to ask whether I missed anything about America. I wanted to write back and say that America is everywhere. There are cafés called "Madison Square," neighborhoods called "Californie," rappers called "Bigg," a few reality TV shows, and several McDonald's and Pizza Huts. But I'll tell you what I miss: Our house's fireplaces and central heating. It's been windy and cold in Casablanca the last few days, and our apartment, like most dwellings here, doesn't have central heating. In order to get any work done, I have to wrap myself up in fleece blankets, put on the kind of thick socks I usually wear for hiking, and hug my laptop. Time to go buy a heater.

Robert Marshall Recommends

"Lynne Tillman's Motion Sickness helped change my conception of what a novel could be," Marshall writes. "Published in 1992, it's an account of an unnamed female narrator's post modern "grand tour" of Europe. She bounces - or ricochets - between Paris, Istanbul, Amsterdam and other destinations. Her background, as well as the specific motivation for her travels, remain mysterious, although some sort of loss seems implied. In each city she knows or meets people. As the novel progresses, an increasingly dense web of interrelationships emerges. All the while she reads, she thinks, has doubts, and writes postcards (which she may or may not send).

Formally, the novel Motion Sickness most resembles is, to my mind, Sebald's Rings of Saturn, first published in 1995. In both, a somewhat arbitrary physical tour provides the occasion for a mental journey. But while Sebald's work has begun to travel into the canon, Motion Sickness has gone out of print. Why? Several possible explanations occur. Certainly, although Tillman's vision can at moments be grim, her darkness never approaches the Sebaldian. She is too often too riotously funny. I've sometimes wondered whether it is precisely this sense of humor, along with her rigorous refusal of any hint of pretentiousness, that has kept her work from being regarded with the same seriousness as that of her German contemporary. Or is it simply (and depressingly) because women writers still aren't supposed to write major novels of ideas? Or did Motion Sickness just appear before its time?

Unanswerable questions. The world - and Tillman's work - abounds in them (in this sense, although I suspect she would beg to differ, I think Tillman is a great realist). But thanks to the wonders of the internet, although Motion Sickness may be out of print, it isn't unavailable. Buy it. Read it. Help it on its journey. Pass it along."

Robert Marshall's debut novel, A Separate Reality, is newly published by Carroll & Graf.

December 11, 2006

Hope in the NYT Book Review

Ihsan Taylor reviews Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits for the New York Times Book Review's Paperback Row.

Satrapi Blog

If, like me, you're a fan of Marjane Satrapi's work, then you might like to know that she has a blog, in which she discusses her work on the film adaptation of Persepolis.

December 07, 2006

How To (Not) Set Up Your DSL Connection

Day 1
Because I depend on the Internet for much of my work (contact with my editor, my agent, etc.), one of my primary concerns when I arrived in Casablanca was to get a DSL connection, and get it fast. So I went to a Maroc Telecom office on my first day in town, exhausted and jetlagged. I was helped by M., a prematurely balding, slightly overweight man, who was a little grumpy at first, but loosened up after I made a couple of jokes. I asked about getting a phone line set up and a DSL connection working, and was told it would take 48 hours for the former and up to 15 days for the latter. But, M. assured me, in most cases, customers are connected within a day or two.
"Fine,” I said. “I'd like to sign up today."
M. picked up several forms, a couple of which were in triplicate, and lined them up neatly on the desk between us. "First, we need to prepare your contract."
"Contract? What contract?"
"For receiving your service. It's for two years."
"A-sidi, I'm only here for nine months, to do research. Can't you just bill me month to month?"
"No, that’s not possible. But you can sign up for one year if you like."
Of course, it was significantly more expensive to sign up for the one-year contract than the two-year contract, not to mention buying a telephone and a modem. But even the one-year contract posed problems for me. "What do I do after my stay is over? I’m going to be vacating my apartment and can’t bloody well leave the phone and Internet behind for the next person.”
"I’ll tell you what you can do. You can file a change of address form and put down the address of a family member, and then they can have the Internet. When the remaining 3 months are completed, the contract is over."
"And how do I transfer service to another address?"
M. proceeded to give me an explanation that made my head spin: I could already see that I would have to fill out more forms, in triplicate, and wait in line for hours, at God knew what other agency in town. I looked at the numbers again. I must have looked quite stricken at the choices before me, because M. began to chuckle lightly. "I have a feeling that I am swindling you,” he said.
Ah, finally, something on which we could both agree. "I have the feeling that I am being swindled."
He laughed again. I did not. I was so desperate that I decided not to worry about what would happen at the end of my nine months here. I just wanted to deal with the problem at hand, so I gave him the money. Instead of giving me my 10 dirhams in change, he suddenly turned to me and asked, “Do you know about the annual campaign for solidarity? We're selling these yellow badges for them. It’s a very good cause--the fight against poverty."
I couldn't say no to that. "How much is it?"
"Only 10 dirhams."
"Fine," I said. I took the badge from him. And then I noticed that he did not set 10 dirhams aside for the charitable donation I had just been forced to make. My contribution may well have gone to his personal fund. After we finished all the paperwork, M. finally went to the stock room to get me my DSL modem. I noticed that the box didn't say whether the modem had an ethernet port, so I asked him if it had one. "Don't worry," he said, "it has everything you need to connect." I thanked him and left.

Day 2
A technician from Maroc Telecom called my cell phone while I was out, to see if he could come and install the phone line. I called him back at his number several times that afternoon. No one answered.

Day 3
The technician called again, and this time I picked up. He arrived at our apartment after lunch time, looking sweaty and tired. I offered him some tea, but he turned me down, he was in too much of a hurry. He got started with the phone jack, opened it up, connected the wires, and did the same with the other outlet in our bedroom. Then he installed a DSL filter. I was so thrilled at the thought that we could connect to the Internet soon, that I gave him a nice tip, which he accepted.

Alex and I opened our DSL modem box, and, predictably enough, there was no ethernet port. So we went back to the Maroc Telecom office, together. As luck would have it, I was again sent to M.'s desk. I told him the modem he sold me wouldn't work because it didn't have an ethernet port, which I needed in order to hook up multiple computers (mine and Alex's). He seemed a bit lost, but then he regained his composure, disappeared into the stock room, and came back with another, bigger box. "This modem," he explained, "is what you need. We sell it to people who open cyber-cafes."
"But I'm not opening a cafe with 20 computers. I just want something for 2 computers."
"..."
"Okay, look, here's the list of modem equipment you're selling, and I can see that a couple of them have ethernet ports. Can you tell me which line on this list corresponds to the box you want to sell me?"
"I think it's this one," he said, pointing, a little hesitantly, to one of the lines.
"And how much is it?"
"1,900 dirhams."
"Look, I can't spend that kind of money and then find out it's not the right modem."
"Let me check."
He turned to his colleague, a helpful young woman named S. She said she thought it was a completely different line on the form. So now I had two opinions from the Maroc Telecom agents, and no idea which modem they were trying to sell me, or whether it did indeed have an ethernet port. Alex joined the conversation at this point, and we had a four-way, three-language discussion for a few minutes, and still no solution. Finally, S. called someone she knew, a young man who owned a cyber-cafe. "Having lived in the States for many years," she explained, "he will know what you two need." Great. We thanked her, and went outside to wait for the man, who arrived in his car about two minutes later. We climbed in, and he drove us to his office, where we explained what we needed. He found us the right wi-fi DSL router, and said he'd even come and install it.

Day 4
S. arrived mid-afternoon and installed our new router. We tested the connection, and it appeared to work. Disappointingly, however, it seemed quite slow. Later that night, it went down.

Day 5
We still couldn't connect, so I called the help line. The man at the other end was hurried, but very polite. "Madame, I see that you connected this morning at 8:46 am, so from my perspective it seems like everything is fine." I checked my computer. Yes, it looked like we had been connected between the time I picked up the phone and the time I was helped.
"When did you install your DSL connection?" he asked.
"Day before yesterday."
"They might not have finished setting you up, hence the complications. I would wait a day or two."
We stayed connected for about 30 minutes, and then the connection went down. I called the help line again. This time, I got a very angry young man, who barked at me that everything was fine.
"It's not," I said. "Our connection is unstable. It's up for half an hour at a time, and even when it's up, it's not fast." The angry young man told me to check my connection speed by clicking on the appropriate icon of my Menara software, and then hung up. Big help that was.

Day 6
Problems continued. We could not connect, or when we did, it was at a speed of 32k. I called the help line, and the young woman at the other end wanted me to click on some icon on my desktop that I did not appear to have. "If you installed your software right, you should have 4 icons."
"I have 2."
"Then you need to reinstall."
It didn't occur to her to ask me whether I was on a PC or a Mac. On my Mac, I only had the two icons. But I didn't back down. "Look I don't think it's an installation problem. Can you please just send someone?"
"All right, Madame. Someone will be there within 72 hours."

Days 7 and 8
We attempted repeatedly to connect. Whenever we did, it was at the ridiculous speed of 32k.

Day 9
The technicians showed up just after lunch time, looking very grumpy and impatient. I tried to explain our problems, but they barely listened. They seemed to be following their own script for how to deal with customers. "You need a filter," they announced within seconds.
"The one I have there," I pointed out, "is the one that your colleague at Maroc Telecom installed."
"He's not our colleague. You need a filter."
They rummaged through my modem box and found a different filter, which they plugged in. We tried to connect, but failed. Return to Start. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. They asked if we had any PCs at home. "No," I said. They heaved a sigh, and pulled out their laptop PC from their bag and tried to connect. They managed to get on the Internet, but at the speed of 32k. Then one of them picked up our phone and made a long-distance call to the Rabat office to complain about the connection speed. While he was on the line with them, the connection went up to 1meg. He hung up. "It's fixed," he announced, and then they left hurriedly. The connection stayed up for about 3 hours after that, then went down.

Day 10
By Day 10, I had resigned myself not to have a fast, reliable internet connection. I took my coffee into the living room and started to read the newspapers, having decided that I'd rather slit my wrists open than deal with a 32k connection. But Alex kept testing and trying to figure out what the problem was. After about an hour, Eureka!, he found that whenever the phone is off the hook, we can get a stable, 1 meg connection. Whenever we hang up, we are back down to 32k, or we get disconnected. This was why it was so hard to replicate the problem for all the agents and techies. Armed with this knowledge, we went back to the Maroc Telecom office one last time, and told them that we could only get connected if our phone is off the hook. They said they would send a tech. That was a week ago. So I am not holding my breath, I'm just keeping the phone off the hook. Don't call me, people, I'm on the Internet.

December 06, 2006

To Do On Thursday

Driss C. Jaydane will present his debut novel, Le Jour venu, at the Carrefour des Livres here in Casablanca. Set in the 1980s, Le Jour venu is described as the coming of age story of a young bourgeois from Casablanca. Having the reading in a Maarif bookstore is quite à propos, then.

Write-ups in the local press have been quite favorable. See, for instance, the article by Driss Ksikes in Tel Quel or the review by Kenza Sefrioui in Le Journal. Details:

Driss C. Jaydane
Le Jour venu
Thursday, December 7
7 pm
Carrefour des Livres
Angle des Landes et rue Vignemale
Casablanca
022 23 46 65

Be there!

SSC Takes Guardian Award

This pleases me enormously: Yiyun Li's short story collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers has won the Guardian First Book Award. This is a general award, not strictly reserved for short stories, or even for fiction, so it's particularly sweet to see Yiyun's book taking the top spot.

Marrakech Festival

The Marrakech International Film Festival takes place this week, and needless to say there is much coverage of the events by star-struck journalists on radio, television, and in print, here in Casablanca. The jury this year is composed of the irrepressible Jamel Debbouze, actors Sandrine Bonnaire and Paz Vega, and directors Yousry Nasrallah and Pan Nalin, among others. The president is Roman Polanski. The festival opened with a tribute to national treasure Mohammed Majd (The Messenger, Ali Zaoua, Syriana, Le Grand Voyage, etc.). He received a standing ovation, and appeared emotional as he gave the customary acceptance speech. Majd is, with Amina Rachid and Amidou, one of only three Moroccans to have been so honored since the festival started in 2001. (The other honorees include Omar Sharif, Claude Lelouch, John Boorman, David Lynch, Francis Ford Coppola, Claudia Cardinale, Sean Connery, Youssef Chahine, Abbas Kiarostami, and a whole bunch of others.) In any case, the interesting bit is that Mohammed Majd was quoted in the 22 November issue of the newspaper Assahifa as saying, "It would be a mess if the organizers of the Marrakech film festival were Moroccans." The quote was reprinted by a couple of magazines, but without anyone really disagreeing or taking offense. Although the festival staff is largely Moroccan, the director and several of the top organizers are French--part of the continuing attitude in this country to leave the direction of larger projects to foreigners. Pretty sad.

December 05, 2006

'A Dream Deferred'

The latest issue of The Nation includes a critical essay by Bashir Abu-Manneh about the Palestinian struggle for a national homeland. He takes two recent books as his starting point: Rashid Khalidi's The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood and Ali Abunimah's One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. It's a powerful, well-argued piece by Abu-Manneh, who is, quite rightly, uncompromising on the issue of self-determination.

HODP En Français

For those of you in France: The French edition of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits will be released by Editions Anne-Carrière in January, under the title De L'espoir et d'autres quêtes dangereuses. I will be doing some events in Paris for this, so stay tuned.

On My Nightstand

This week I am reading C. R. Pennell's Morocco Since 1830. The text could have used a more thorough editing (pronoun references are a bit sloppy, for instance) but I am finding the book very instructive. It's also depressing, quite frankly, to read about the period during which the country fell slowly and surely under foreign control. I hope to finish it this week, and move on to something a bit more literary.

December 04, 2006

Inconvenient Rights

Last weekend's New York Times Magazine includes a thoughtful piece by Bidoun editor Negar Azimi on the (lack of) gay rights in Egypt. I find myself in agreement with her when she points out that the recent persecution of gays in Egypt and elsewhere is a result of a policy of appropriation of 'morals', in the sense that homosexuality is presented as a Western invention, despite all evidence of thriving gay subcultures in many parts of the Arab world. Therefore, any attempt at handling gay issues from a purely civil rights perspective is perceived as coming from traitors. To complicate matters, foreign human rights organizations can--willfully or witlessly--play a role in escalating the situation:

When the raid on the Queen Boat occurred, much of the human rights community declined to take the case on, Al Boraei included. (Some activists even attacked those who met with the defendants.) Hossam Bahgat, a young Alexandrian working at the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, told me he was quietly dismissed after he wrote an article calling upon the human rights community to overcome its fears about working on the case. In the West, however, the Queen Boat became something of a cause célèbre. Amnesty International supported protests in front of the Egyptian Embassy in London. A Web site called GayEgypt.com called on Egypt’s homosexuals to wear red on the two-year anniversary of the Queen Boat raid (an invitation to be arrested, it seems), while 35 members of the U.S. Congress wrote to Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, asking for a stop to the anti-homosexual crusade. It was no wonder that amid this, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram al-Arabi proclaimed, “Be a pervert and Uncle Sam will approve.”

“This was framed locally as an attack from the West,” says Bahgat, who eventually collaborated with Human Rights Watch on the case and later opened his own organization, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. “It was important to show that working for the rights of the detained was not a gay agenda, or a Western agenda, that this was linked to Egypt’s overall human rights record. Raising the gay banner when most sexual and other human rights are systematically violated every day is never going to get you far in this country.”

In the end, Human Rights Watch avoided laying itself open to easy attack as the bearer of an outsider’s agenda, packaging Queen Boat advocacy in the larger context of torture. Many of the arrested men were tortured, and torture is something that, at least in theory, most people agree is a bad thing.

You can read the rest of the article here. A fine piece.

(link via The Arabist)

The View From Casablanca

At the prospect of living in Morocco again after fourteen years abroad, I felt a whole range of emotions--happiness, excitement, worry --but I couldn't really sort through these feelings because I was exhausted all the time. I did a lot of traveling in the fall, for readings and lectures and conferences, and whenever I was not on the road, I was packing a bag, or moving a box, or disconnecting a service, or canceling a subscription. It wasn't until the plane landed at Mohammed V Airport in Casablanca that the move here began to seem real.

Several of my friends expected me to have reverse culture shock, but I haven't found that to be true at all. My sense of disorientation, if you can even call it that, is more subtle. I was born and raised in Rabat, and living in Casablanca has already brought a few surprises--dialectal, to begin with. I asked our doorman for directions, and it took me three tries to figure out the name of a street based on his pronunciation. And then the driving here is so much worse than in Rabat--if that is even possible. If you've ever been curious as to how one can accomplish a left-hand turn from a right-hand lane, this is the city for you.

The other thing that strikes me every time I come back to Morocco is the light. It's different here, and I'm not sure I can explain how. It seems to hit trees and plants and buildings and even people at a different angle, bringing out more contrast in colors. Our apartment has large windows, so I spend a lot of time holding things up to the light to see how new they look.

There's a certain kindness in the way that people speak to each other here--the many polite rejoinders, the jokes, the helpfulness. I missed all of this so much, and it's of course wonderful to witness it again. And yet at the same time there is also a hardness that comes from living in a large, overcrowded, dense, polluted city. I was on my way to Ittissalaat Al-Maghrib (Maroc Telecom) to get a phone line set up, and the cab driver who took me grumbled about a change in the law that made him ultimately responsible, in case of accident, for any pedestrian injuries. "Were it not for this law, I would just have hit that guy," he said, pointing to a kid who was crossing without looking, "and teach him a good lesson. Once he's in a wheelchair, he'll learn to look before crossing." Given the driver's anger, I thought it best not to point out that he was speeding--and that he was on the wrong lane. I was just happy to arrive at the phone company in one piece. When my turn finally came up at the counter, the clerk spent more than half an hour with me, walking me through the process, and waiting very patiently for me to make up my mind about all the services. And then he sent me home with good wishes for my health. (I only wish it meant our DSL worked properly. It doesn't. But more on this long, tortuous odyssey in a later post.)

The picture above shows the King Hassan mosque in all its artistic glory, at sunset. (Credit: Henk Meijer.) The photo below shows what the mosque looks like from my bedroom window, during the daytime, with the smog above, the apartment buildings below, and the sea of satellite dishes around.

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04.26: LA Times Festival of Books
04.30: Claremont, California
09.23-10.04: International Literature Festival Berlin

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De l’espoir et autres quêtes dangereuses

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