Back from the Dead?
As I look to rejoin the Blogoma, I have taken a few minor steps to streamline the old site. First, the old (and out of date) blogroll is gone. Instead, I am experimenting with developing a [MAP] of the Moroccan web to show connections among blogs and other web sites related to Morocco. I have only just started to chart my little map, so that I hope that the may people I have omitted will kindly call this to my attention with no rancor at the oversight, and I will happily include them. Long distance love affairs are fraught with difficulties at best, but I am hoping to rekindle this one.
Moroccan Portal
Every once in a while Twitter vindicates itself, in this case leading me to the fascinating Moroccan portal: Atlantic Connection. So far I have only just signed up and skimmed the site, but it looks quite rich.
Wolfram|Alpha on Outat El Haj
The highly touted new search engine and online reference Wolfram|Alpha, which aspires to revolutionize the web by providing complex calculations for processing data online, even has a little demographic data on my old Peace Corps site: Outat El Haj.
Canadians Discover Jewish Heritage in Morocco
Although perhaps only 5,000 Jews remain in Morocco, the country's rich Jewish heritage and well-preserved "heritage sites" continue to draw Jewish tourists, many of them looking to discover their roots.[Ottawa Citizen]
Secret Son
My review
rating: 5 of 5 stars
In this superb short novel, Laila Lalami deftly limns the rise and fall of Youssef El Mekki, unacknowledged bastard son of prominent businessman, disillusioned activist, and bon vivant Nabil El Amrani. Seemingly sprung from the trap of the Casablanca slums when he learns that his father, far from being dead, is in fact a Moroccan tycoon, Youssef is soon caught in a complex web of familial and political intrigue. A mark of this novel's quality is its ability to portray what for many Americans is the mildly exotic culture of Morocco while also convincingly revealing the ways in which both Americans and Moroccans are enmeshed in their own cultural contexts (a point illustrated in another fashion by Malcolm Gladwell's recent Outliers). While each character acts as though autonomously, behind the apparently simple interactions between the characters lies a complex web of human relationships, cultural relationships, and sometimes sinister motivations, which Lalami gradually unveils. Lalami's lean style, unsparing eye, and tight construction mean not a word is wasted in this elegant depiction of the book's all too human characters and its damning indictment of the cruel forces that manipulate them.
Crackdown?
The D.C. Examiner warns that the monarchy may be planning sterner measures against Shiites (are there any in Morocco?) and gays. Repression makes strange bedfellows, as it were.
Abdelhati Belkhayat
One of the areas in which my acquaintance with Morocco is definitely underdeveloped is Moroccan music, so I recently asked some friends to suggest some of the music and musicians of which no lover of things Moroccan should be ignorant. Since I view my blog as primarily a means of guiding and shaping my own instruction, with the hope that it may be useful to others along the way, here is Abdelhati Belkhayat. Enjoy!
The Cure
The View from Fez point to the cure for what ails you at Morocco Therapy.
(It does look as though the therapist needs to cure one or two bugs.)
Arabesques
Although I have cleverly managed to miss most of a celebration of Arab and Moroccan culture that will likely not be repeated in the nation's capital for another century, I did make it down to the Kennedy Center for a panel at which Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami read and discussed a passage from her new novel, Secret Son, due to be released officially in April. (I was ecstatic to obtain a pre-release copy, which is now at the top of my reading list.) Lalami's reading was characteristically incisive, at once exposing hypocrisy without forgoing compassion for human frailty. (A man worried about the behaviour of his daughter in America is introduced for the first time to the illegitimate son he did know he had fathered.) The consensus of the panel generally (although there were some marked differences) seemed to be that the primary concern of art was art, but the infusion of an Arab sensibility into the mainstream of American consciousness could not fail to enrich the perspective of both Americans and Arabs to the benefit of both.
Debut of Laila Lalami's First Novel - Secret Son
Kif in the Rif
I do not encourage either the production or the consumption of marijuana, but my only real policy concern related to either of them is the undesirable social effects of interdiction.
When I read a a self-congratulatory proclamation that marijuana cultivation has been significantly reduced in areas such as the Rif Mountains of Morocco, estimated to account for half the world's hashish production, it raises a question in my mind which almost always goes unaddressed.
If cultivation of marijuana in the Rif has been significantly suppressed, what exactly are the farmers and the families in this notoriously poor region of Morocco doing to support themselves? Have the governments that are suppressing cultivation (we are not told how), provided roads, schools, and jobs so that people in the Rif can make a living by other means? Curious minds would like to know.
Morocco on Facebook
Facebook has a Friends of Morocco group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16329050138
BBC: Single Mothers Face Harsh Consequences
Abdelilha Boukili pointed me to an excellent piece by the BBC on the difficulties faced by single mothers in Morocco as a result of social ostracism. While this piece focused particularly on the suffering of the mothers, the suffering of their children is often even more compelling. A double standard for male and female sexuality is by no means unique to Morocco, but its consequences for Morocco are starkly demonstrated here.
Romance of Morocco
One of Morocco's most charming and elegant bloggers, Maryam Montague of My Marrakesh, has a write-up in Time.com, in which she extols the beauties of Chefchaouen, Fez, and, yes, Marrakesh.
Detainee Allegedly Tortured in Morocco to be Released
The Washington Post reports that Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohammed will be released to the custody of Great Britain. Morocco and the United States deny allegations that Mohammed was tortured in Morocco at the behest of the United States, but U.S. insistence that Great Britain seal all records related to torture and its admission that allegations of a dirty bomb plot were based on "false confessions" suggest otherwise.
When Eric Holder recently caused a stir by proclaiming us a "nation of cowards" for refusing to speak candidly about race, he was only half right. The real reason we are a nation of cowards is that we have let a fear-mongering administration herd us like sheep into abandoning our most basic Constitutional and humanitarian principles.
State Visit to Morocco?
The television showed signs at the inaugural saying that Barack Obama was going to speak in Morocco. Anybody know anything about that?
UPDATE: From Liosliath Manner: See http://www.obamatospeakinmorocco.com/
FURTHER UPDATE: Also from LM: http://abcnews.go.com/International/AroundTheWorld/story?id=6686616&page=1
More from Marrakesh
The latest New York Times write-up on Marrakesh is pretty much the standard treatment, except that anything that involves Paula Wolfert has got to be good.
My Thoughts on the Facebook Cause "Free Palestine"
I have hesitated for a long time before joining this cause. As a member of a Jewish family, a firm friend of Israel, and an uncompromising opponent of political violence, I have been concerned about the nuances, implications, and appearance of joining Free Palestine. I do not endorse destruction of the state of Israel, either directly or indirectly. That said, I also believe unequivocally in the right of Palestinians to self-determination and self-government, and a true withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza is long overdue. I am supportive of the idea of a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, and there should be free access to the holy sites. I oppose a right of return to land that is inside Israel's borders recognized by the United Nations, but I think compensation of people who fled the advancing armies in 1948, 1967, and 1973 would be appropriate. I am sure that in trying to please everybody I will please nobody, but i have tried to find a position that is fair and moral. God help us all.
Torrent of Death
Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry: Algerian Stories by Assia Djebar
My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
Love, death, and memory are perhaps the three central themes of Djebar's wrenching collection of stories The Blood’s Tongue Does Not Run Dry, which was recently translated into English by Tegan Raleigh. When death appears in the text, it always violent, relentlessly stalking the characters as they each try to impose some sense on their surroundings. The Algeria chronicled in this book (that is to say, a country at the height of a fratricidal civil war) seems to resemble Europe during the Black Death. Life appears to go on normally, but in the midst of it all people just suddenly die.
Ah, one might say, but the violence in Algeria was targeted at specific people, and did not affect people randomly, the way a disease might. I did not get this sense from Djebar's stories, however. The French murder the Algerians, the Algerians murder the French, the Algerians murder each other. Murder in these stories is not politicized, although there is a strong implication that, to speak out, for whatever reason, is to court summary execution—trade unionists, teachers, and journalists being among the most prominent victims.
The young teacher Atyka assigns her class a story from The Thousand and One Nights, in which Harun Al Rachid must assign responsibility for the mysterious death of a beautiful young woman found chopped into pieces in a chest. As the number of contributors to her death multiplies, it becomes ever harder to isolate a culprit. Likewise, Djebar's stories have very little to say about culprits, but a great deal to say about the victims of violence.
Felicie Marie Germaine, French expatriate, is one the few people who dies of natural causes in this book. Comatose in her French hospital bed, she is the subject of her Algerian children's long reveries about life with their father, Mohammed "Moh" Miloudi, “a nobleman when he spoke his mother tongue and a worker from the lowest class when he went over into French.” It turns out that, as a woman of French origins, her throat was nearly cut by an Islamist insurgent whose hand was arrested at the last minute by the tiny gold Koran on a chain that Moh had given her. After three days of detention, she was returned to her traumatized family. After Moh’s death, she departs for Paris with her family. The fact that she survives the war only to die in her Parisian hospital bed is as fortuitous as the abrupt and bloody deaths of other characters in the novel. She returns to Algeria one last time, in a coffin tagged with the name “Yasmina Miloudi,” in order to persuade the authorities to allow a French Catholic to lie by her Algerian husband in a local cemetery. In death, at last, the characters are united in all the ways that life did not allow.
(With thanks to LL).