Dibs

This year is Happy Birthday #75 for Babar the Elephant, “the fictional pachyderm decried by some as a symbol of oppression and imperialism,” reports North Korea Times: “Babar, who lives in a world reminiscent of colonial-era French settlements in Africa, is being celebrated in France with postage stamps, a marketing deal with the Environment Ministry and a new book, Babar’s World Tour.” A new edition of Babar’s Yoga for Elephants, drawn by original author Jean de Brunhoff’s son Laurent de Bruhoff, is due out this fall featuring sketches of the fictional pachyderm doing one-leg stands and other yoga poses. Babar, the Times tells us, “has been called a symbol of racism and imperialism by his detractors. Sociologist Herbert Kohl wrote a famous essay, ‘Should We Burn Babar?’ arguing the elephant’s kingdom is one of racism and sexism. Laurent de Brunhoff acknowledged some of the early works could be construed as racist and said he declined to reissue an early book, Picnic at Babar’s, for that reason. ‘It was the past. African-American parents do not seem to hold it against me. I often see them with their children at signing sessions,’ he said.”

To update you on that Zimbabwean International Book Fair that Dibs! covered yesterday … well, as if things weren’t bad enough already, its gay and lesbian section was trashed by vandals! According to South African site IOL, “The gay and lesbian stand at Zimbabwe’s International Book Fair in Harare has been destroyed. Organisers granted the Gays and Lesbians Association of Zimbabwe (GALZ) a stand at the book fair… The fair’s executive director, Greenfield Chilongo, confirmed the trashing of the GALZ stand.” Dictator Robert Mugabe’s “anti-gay stance resonates with many Zimbabweans,” reports IOL: “Mugabe has accused ‘gay gangsters’ of being among the saboteurs conspiring for regime change” in the impoverished and downtrodden African nation. Efforts by various groups have all “failed to get Zimbabweans to accept homosexuality” — thus, gays and lesbians there enjoy no constitutional rights. Greeaaaaat! All citizens of countries that are not Zimbabwe, you are forbidden from this moment onward to take anything for granted.

You can tell by its book fair that Zimbabwe is majorly screwed-up. “Once Africa’s proudest annual literary celebration,” Zimbabwe’s Inernational Book Fair “now has only one tale to tell — the decline of a country brought to its knees by political and economic woes,” reports Qatar’s Gulf Times. Until 2002, the fair “was one of the continent’s biggest shows, attracting African, European, American and Asian publishers to exhibit their work, and Africa’s top writers.” But the fair held in Harare this week “remains ‘international’ in name only, shunned by foreign publishers and writers who see little mileage from travelling to a country the US has branded an ‘outpost of tyranny.’” (That’s because it is an outpost of tyranny.) The Gulf Times goes on: “During Zimbabwe’s sunnier days, when [dictator Robert] Mugabe was still hailed as the man who ended white rule in the former Rhodesia in 1980, the Harare book fair drew Africa’s literary giants.” Past headliners included Nigeria’s legendary Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart. “‘It was Afro-centric … people came for brainstorming sessions on African literature…. It was extremely fun…,’ said Veronique Tadjo, an author from Ivory Coast. But now the big writers and publishers are staying away and the fair resembles a small village show, its largely empty book stalls standing under thatch shades in a vacant, windswept park. Although Zimbabwe has a 90% literacy rate – one of the highest in Africa – its economic woes have left it almost unable to sustain a publishing industry as consumers struggle with inflation now well over 1,000%.” The article goes on to say that the country can’t afford to pay top musicians to perform there, and that citizens can’t afford to rent DVDs or go to movie theaters, evincing an almost complete collapse in culture. That’s the trouble with dictators. During China’s cultural revolution, most books were outlawed, as were all love songs.

It’s book-fair time again in Damascus! As the sounds of artillery draw ever closer, “under the patronage of President Bashar al-Assad, Minister of Culture Riad Na’asan Agha opened Tuesday the 22nd session of the International Book Exhibition at al-Assad Library,” reports the Syrian Arab News Agency. Lasting from August 1 through 11, the fair is “a cultural activity including a number of seminars, evenings and lectures… 19 Arab and foreign countries in addition to 42 organizations and commissions are taking part in the exhibition which displays about 40 thousands titles and programs,” reports SANA. Which volumes will be on display for the curious book-loving crowds? Because the Syrian government is always coming up with something new! Just last year, a new Syrian edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a popular offering at the Cairo International Book Fair, where it was “exhibited with other Syrian-published anti-Semitic books,” reports Israel’s Intelligence & Terrorism Information Center, whose site includes pictures and translations of the text. Dedicated to suicide bombers (direct translation: “To the shaheeds of the blessed Al-Aqsa [mosque] and all those who died the deaths of martyrs for the sake of Allah…. May Allah grant me the privilege of dying the death of a martyr for the sake of Allah”), the book “combines Christian European and traditional Islamic anti-Semitic myths with political propaganda encouraging Palestinian terrorism and predicting the disappearance of the State of Israel. The Syrian publishing house Dar Al-Awael notes in its foreword that publication was authorized by the Syrian Ministry of Information, providing additional proof that the current Syrian régime is infected with a vicious strain of anti-Semitism also marketed to the Arab-Muslim world.” Publishing house Dar Al-Awael is a member of the Syrian Publishers’ Association and the Arab Publishers’ Association. Its Web site features an animated graphic of a quill-pen emerging from a vessel and writing in what looks like blood. But maybe it’s cherry juice, since the site is in Arabic, which Dibs! can’t read. Dar Al-Awael’s other books include one whose cover features a menorah in flames, and another whose cover shows a stereotypical Jew clutching the world globe in his hands. At the Syrian fair two years ago, “the President was represented by the member of al Baath Arab Socialist Party’s Regional leadership Ahmad Dergham,” according to Syrialive.com. Waaait, is that “Baath” as in Saddam Hussein’s “Baath”? D’you think the fair has a selection from that San Francisco-area publisher that specializes in books about sadomasochism and enema pleasure? No?

On trial now are the four Nairobi thugs who attacked Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o in 2004 and raped his wife. Ngugi’s writings lambasting colonialism and Christianity and the Kenyan government got him jailed in 1977 — he wrote his book A Devil on the Cross on prison toilet paper. A Marxist who wrote Swahili and his native Gikuyu after denouncing the English language, in which he had written previously, the author of A Grain of Wheat; Detained; The Black Hermit; Decolonizing the Mind and other works became a professor at NYU after his release from prison. Later he began teaching at the University of California at Irvine. But he ended his self-imposed exile with a visit to Africa in 2004, which ended in disaster when four assailants beat him, robbed him, and brutally raped his wife. The assailants are now on trial and claiming police brutality and coercion, as reported by the Kenyan Broadcasting Corporation: “The third suspect … told the court that he was tortured and lured with goodies to implicate principal suspect in the trial. Elias Sikuku Wanjala told trial magistrate Julie Oseko that he is not sure whether he can father a child as police damaged his private parts using pliers. Wanjala … said the police promised him a job and cash money to implicate engineer John Kiragu Chege, accused of engineering the attack on Ngugi and his wife Njeeri on the night of 1th and 12th of August 2004.” What kind of goodies?

Even if books are absent from fifty percent of American homes, kids still read books in school … right? Wrong, now that California is instituting a new bookless mode of teaching history and social studies, “in what could be the first large-scale step to eliminate books from classrooms,” according to a terrifying story in Reuters: “Pearson, the world’s biggest publisher of educational materials, disclosed on Monday … that about half the state’s elementary school students will learn about the American Revolutionary War and Thomas Jefferson using an interactive computer program. The company also said its success in California, where about 1.5 million students aged 5-11 will use the program in classrooms this year, has led it to plan the same approach in additional states and with more subjects. ‘Digital development costs us less and takes less time,’ Pearson Chief Executive Marjorie Scardino said. ‘We’re speeding up how we’re rolling out those kinds of programs.’ Greeeeat! Keep those illiteracy-promoting programs rolling! (Or is it “roling”? “Roaling”?) UK-based Pearson estimates that the bookless curriculum costs about half as much to develop as a textbook with supplemental materials. “It’s a major breakthrough,” said Chief Financial Officer Robin Freestone. “We managed to launch something for schools that didn’t need a book.” The company’s strategy is “to cull existing materials into a digital offering that included online homework assignments. It sent state officials a laptop computer instead of a pile of books in April 2005, and won state approval in November. ‘Most schools have a big fat textbook on the table that doesn’t really entice students any more,’ Scardino said.” The bookless “multimedia product … enables teachers to tailor lessons to individual students, includes video clips and is able to read aloud all of the lessons in English and Spanish.”

Americans neither know nor care much about the game of cricket, but maybe we should, coz apparently it turns you into a sex magnet, as revealed in a new book about Australian player Shane Keith Warne, who “had sex with at least 1000 women and was caught just five times,” according to Cricketzone.com. Caught? Is having sex a crime? Paul Barry’s book Spun Out “portrays the Aussies as a bunch of womanisers with Warne miles ahead of his Baggy Green comrades,” Cricketzone comments.

It’s now being called “the Battle of Brick Lane” — the mostly Bangladeshi residents of London’s Brick Lane district have used what some would call protests and others, including Dibs!, would call threats to keep a film version of Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane from being shot in their neighborhood. The Guardian reports that veteran feminist author Germaine Greer supports the “Brick Lane activists” and that fellow author Salman Rushdie, who spent years in hiding after being saddled with a fatwa, has lashed out against Greer. Rushdie wrote a letter, published in the Guardian today, which calls Greer’s stance “philistine, sanctimonious, and disgraceful, but it is not unexpected. As I well remember, she has done this before. At the height of the assault against my novel The Satanic Verses, Germaine Greer stated, ‘I refuse to sign petitions for that book of his, which was about his own troubles.’ She went on to describe me as ‘a megalomaniac, an Englishman with dark skin.’ Now it’s Monica Ali’s turn to be deracinated by Germaine.” Ouch! And ouch back atcha, as back to the Dark Ages we go. The Guardian continues: “Last night community activists in Brick Lane confirmed a rally would go ahead tomorrow and, in an echo of the burnings of The Satanic Verses nearly 20 years ago, they would burn Ali’s book.” Ahhhh, nothing sez “civilization” like book-burnings. “More than 100 activists are expected to attend the rally, with small delegations travelling from Cardiff, Manchester and Birmingham…. Enthusiasm for tomorrow’s protest has been stoked by rumour. In one scare-story gaining unfounded credence in Brick Lane’s restaurants and clothes factories, the movie is said to feature a scene in which a leech falls from the hair of a Bangladeshi woman into a pot of curry. The film company strongly denies any such scene exists.” Rumors sparking mass movements with a potential for violence, eh? Can you say “Hugh of Lincoln”? Thought you could.

The Marvel Comics character Blade the Vampire Slayer was a role model inspiring a young Brooklyn man to kill the violent drunkard who had, moments before, shot the youth’s mother to death. As reported in the Downtown Star, Emmanuel Allen returned last week to the Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment that he had once shared with his girlfriend Vilma Rosario: According to his brother, Allen was only picking up some belongings. But he had beaten Rosario and once attacked the woman’s teenage daughter while they were together. When he arrived on the fateful night, he shot Rosario, the teenage girl fled screaming, and Rosario’s 23- and 16-year-old sons confronted the killer: “By some twist of fate, someone in the house was a fan of the movie Blade” — starring Wesley Snipes and based on the comic book — “in which a hero uses a sword, among other things, to slay vampires. The household possessed a replica of the sword” that is wielded in the film, “and the brothers used it to slay their own monster…. One of the brothers grabbed the sword and sliced open Allen’s chest. In pain, the murderer dropped the .45-caliber gun he [had] used to murder Rosario. While Raymond Garcia sliced at the killer, his brother Juju grabbed the firearm and shot Allen once in the head. The brothers had a stoic reaction to their actions. Raymond has publicly stated he does not regret their actions, claiming the police who interviewed him told him he did the right thing.”

Young British historian Richard Hargreaves has spent £40,000 (around $80,000 US) and fifteen years researching and writing a book about the momentous WWII landings and battles at Normandy … from the Nazis’ point of view. Planned for a September release, The Germans in Normandy sprang from an idea that Hargreaves had as a 19-year-old media studies student at Nottingham University, according to the Lancashire Evening Telegraph. “I set out to write something completely different about the Germans in the Second World War but I realised seven or eight years into the research that … no publisher would touch it,” he told the Telegraph. To collect data, he traveled all over Europe and the US and taught himself German. The Normandy invasion, aka Operation Overlord, was the largest seaborne invasion in history, involving almost three million Allied troops crossing the English Channel to German-occupied France: “Films and books have taken various Allied accounts of the invasion but little has been documented from the German point of view,” the Telegraph notes, quoting Hargreaves: “One of the things that always frustrates me is that most books on Normandy feature the British, American and Canadian sides…. The book puts a human face on the people who were fighting across there. In the films they are almost always portrayed as faceless Nazis plodding around. Most of the Germans who fought at Normandy weren’t Nazis. Of course there were some but most were just doing their bit for their country.” Well, yeah, but….