A Palestinian Novel Unearths Dirty Secrets in the Arab World /
by JOUMANA HADDAD / July 3, 2017
We are a people of dirty secrets hiding beneath a veil of fake morality.
That’s the first thought that came to mind when I read about the banning of the novel Crime in Ramallah by the Palestinian author Abbad Yahya, and about the death threats he has been receiving.
Published this year and the fourth book by Mr. Yahya, the novel narrates the everyday lives of three young men (Raouf, Nour and Wissam) in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The Palestinian Authority’s attorney general banned it in February because it contained indecent texts and terms that endangered morality and public decency. Some Palestinians have even threatened to burn bookstores selling the novel.
When I heard the news, I immediately went out and bought a copy. Because I live in Beirut, the freedom haven of the Arab Middle East, this proved easy.
That evening, I started reading Crime in Ramallah and did not stop until I finished it. It was refreshingly genuine. It did not shy away from exposing the ugliness, the desperateness, the corruption, the loss of purpose, the unavoidable wrong turns and the uncomfortable truths of life in Ramallah after the second intifada. The sexual fragments are quite graphic, which was surprising and exhilarating. An Arab author writing about a homosexual character (Nour) enjoying oral sex, to cite but one example, is not something we encounter often. But, as the response to the book has shown, there can be no homosexuals in a reality-obliterating Arab world, where real manhood is defined by a chauvinist heterosexuality. Continued here
from The New York Times, July 3, 2017.
