A passionate, candid, and convincing narrative of unmasking and revelation.
Exploding the profound hypocrisy of sexual life in Morocco.
As Slimani amply shows, Morocco is a country obsessed with sex, but premarital sex, adultery, abortion, prostitution, and homosexuality are all illegal—and, at the same time, rampant. The author of the well-received thriller The Perfect Nanny (2018), Slimani began the project that culminated in this book while on tour in Morocco for her first novel, Adèle, the protagonist of which is a woman with a double life: a secret sex addict who struggles to experience pleasure. Slimani’s feeling that this tale was a metaphor for the collective experience of young Moroccan women proved true when, one after another, women approached her to share their own stories of hypocrisy, oppression, and shame. In explicit opposition to what she calls “Morocco’s motto”—“Do what you wish, but never talk about it”—the author collects the stories of these women and others, one more troubling and outrageous than the next, threading in her own experiences and commentary. We learn that since “virginity is an obsession in Morocco and throughout the Arab world,” girls who have had sex, even via rape, pretend to be virgins and have hymen restoration surgery when marriage is on the table. We hear from a therapist who suffered through two violent marriages: “My second husband…used to rape me regularly. He would bring prostitutes into our home and tell me: ‘You’re lucky…I haven’t humiliated you by taking another wife. You ought to thank me.’ ” One of Slimani’s interviewees, a theology researcher and public intellectual, asserts that though “the Koran is notably silent on questions of sex,” in broadcasts “on the Arabic satellite networks, the ulama (experts on Islamic law) never stop talking about sex.” A particularly ludicrous recent fatwa prohibited women from touching bananas and cucumbers. You can imagine why.
A passionate, candid, and convincing narrative of unmasking and revelation.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-14-313376-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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