[lit-ideas] NYTimes.com Article: The Empty Chador

From: carolkir@xxxxxxxx
To: Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2004 18:53:00 -0400 (EDT)

The article below from NYTimes.com
has been sent to you by carolkir@xxxxxxxxx

FYI-On Australia's tradition of literary frauds. But would a novel have sold
nearly as well, or at all?
ck

carolkir@xxxxxxxx

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The Empty Chador

August 4, 2004
By IAIN McCALMAN

Canberra, Australia

Over the last couple of years Norma Khouri and I have found
ourselves among the same assortment of beginners performing
at Australian literary festivals. During book-signing
sessions, I would look wistfully at the long serpentine
queues waiting for an endorsement from the hand that wrote
"Forbidden Love.''

Described as a true story, the book (published in the
United States, to much less notice, under the title "Honor
Lost'') tells of Dalia, Ms. Khouri's closest friend in
Jordan, who was stabbed to death by her bigoted Muslim
father after she fell in love with a Christian soldier.
Even among the mounds of paperbacks at festival bookshops,
it was impossible to miss the haunting cover photograph of
an Arab beauty peeping mysteriously from behind a chador,
an image that also seemed to encapsulate the author herself
- a brave, soulful Arab woman campaigning with all her
heart against the atavism of Muslim honor killings.

Having sold more than 200,000 copies here, "Forbidden
Love'' has by Australian standards been a runaway best
seller, and Ms. Khouri has become a star. It's not hard to
see why. She is a compelling public performer, and her book
had all the ingredients of a romance novel in chador, but
with the extra cachet of truth. Nowadays the allure of "the
reality effect'' is a worldwide phenomenon, a reaction,
perhaps, to the excesses of postmodern relativism, which
made us squint at mirages. Whether in television, cinema or
literature, people today are opting for the reassurance of
solid facts and documented stories.

"Forbidden Love'' was also well timed: it caught the
powerful eddies of anxiety and xenophobia churned up in
Australia - as much as in the United States - by the
tragedies of 9/11 and the Bali nightclub bombing. We were
primed to believe any enormity of Muslim males, and Norma
Khouri, as an insider, confirmed our prejudices.

In Australia, too, there was the added glamour of Ms.
Khouri's pronounced American accent, something she
attributed to having attended a special school in Jordan.
Residual cultural insecurities ensure that Australians are
desperately eager to welcome any English-speaking artists
prepared to turn their backs on the metropolitan centers of
the Northern Hemisphere. We were secretly proud that Norma
Khouri had chosen to live with us on the periphery of the
world.

Now "Forbidden Love'' has been withdrawn from sale. Norma
Khouri's elaborate dual fabrication started to unravel when
a Jordanian women's rights advocate, Amal al-Sabbagh,
became suspicious of the book's topographical
inconsistencies, cultural gaffes and whiffs of ideology.
She and her colleagues uncovered scores of errors,
including, they said, the nonexistence of Dalia and her
punitive father. Back in Australia, a journalist fluent in
Arabic was also puzzled by Ms. Khouri's rudimentary grasp
of her native tongue.

Ms. Khouri's passionate rejoinders to these doubts allayed
her publisher's concerns until Malcolm Knox, a Sydney
journalist, began an inquiry that led him to the neat brick
duplexes of Chicago's Southwest Side. There he found Ms.
Khouri's mother, Asma Bagain, and learned that Ms. Khouri
herself had moved from Jordan to the United States at age
3. Further digging uncovered a sad trail of inventions,
duplicities, domestic squabbles and evaporated dreams.
Married to a John Toliopoulos, who, reports say, is being
sought by the F.B.I. after being accused in a real-estate
fraud, Ms. Khouri decamped in 1999 without leaving a
forwarding address.

In Australia, these revelations have provoked some deep
soul-searching, particularly among the literati who were so
emphatically duped. Of all the peoples in the world, why
did she choose to make us the special recipients of her
literary fantasies, and why did we, known for wry and
earthy cynicism, prove so susceptible to her fictions? Did
she realize that this country has long been a Mecca for
literary frauds?

So established is this tradition that, even before Ms.
Khouri's exposure, the editors of a prominent Australian
literary journal were advertising a forthcoming special
issue on "Imposture, Hoaxes and Identity Conflicts in
Australian Literature.'' One of our most cherished modern
poets, Ern Malley, was actually a brilliant spoof devised
by two conservatives who wanted to ridicule the fatuities
of 1940's literary trends. Their gleeful bricolage
inadvertently produced poetry admired by T. S. Eliot and by
critics ever since.

In recent times, though, Australian literary hoaxes have
been motivated not by satire, but its opposite - the desire
to manufacture stories and identities that conform to
marketable fashions. In 1995, Helen Darville won a swag of
literary awards for a quasi-historical novel about the
Holocaust in the Ukraine that gained extra force from her
assumed identity as Helen Demidenko. A real-life Serbian
immigrant, Streten Bozic, found it easier, however, to get
published as an Aboriginal named B. Wongar, as did a Sydney
taxi driver, Leon Carmen, who produced a heartfelt memoir
called "My Own Sweet Time" written in the guise of an
Aboriginal woman called Wanda Koolmatrie.

It is understandable why Norma Khouri might imagine
Australia to be a congenial place to remake herself.
Sometimes our distance from the Northern Hemisphere can
appear a blessing rather than a tyranny. Psychologically at
least, Australia is often still felt to lie beyond the
margins of the known world. Like Frederick Jackson Turner's
America, our melting pot of migrants and frontier expansion
has offered plentiful opportunities for those who want to
shuck off old identities. This, after all, was the humus
that spawned one of the most celebrated impostures of the
nineteenth century, when an obese butcher from Wagga Wagga
pretended to be Roger Tichborne, the missing heir to a
English baronetcy and fortune.

But times have changed. Australia, like the United States,
is no longer a remote frontier society: it is one of the
most electronically wired and bureaucratically managed
countries in the world. Our small population is
concentrated heavily in a few cities; we trawl the Internet
indefatigably; and we have cultivated a tradition of
trenchant investigative journalism with a taste for
unearthing dodgy pasts. So how do we explain the tardiness
of Norma Khouri's exposure?

The answer is that everyone was disarmed by her palpable
sincerity. Observers couldn't help being moved by her
visceral anguish and her ardor to rectify the wrongs of
Jordanian women. Many now believe that Ms. Khouri's public
tears were merely the reflexes of a brilliant actor, but
others feel that her conviction went deeper. Sometimes, it
seems, a new identity can be taken up with the force of a
conversion. For people trapped in shabby pasts, a new
persona can offer liberating as much as predatory
opportunity.

Ms. Khouri's imposture doesn't mean that she lacks literary
ability. Had "Forbidden Love" been a novel, there would
have been little fuss, for it is a good read. Successful
charlatanism is, after all, a type of artistry, a virtuoso
performance of the self that demands great psychological
insight and empathy - qualities that don't go amiss in a
writer. The test will surely come when Norma Khouri decides
to write her own real-life memoir, not as a Jordanian
exotic but as a girl from the Southwest Side of Chicago.

Iain McCalman, director of the Humanities Research Center
at the Australian National University, is the author of
"The Last Alchemist: Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in
the Age of Reason.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/opinion/04mccalman.html?ex=1092659980&ei=1&en=dbed21ba42413abc

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[lit-ideas] NYTimes.com Article: The Empty Chador

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