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.
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 by Laila Lalami
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.
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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.
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 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.)
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.
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.
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