Comments on: Honour lost, indeed

Honour lost, indeed

orange swan — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 07:08:56 -0800

Forbidden Love: The Romance That Masqueraded as a Bio In early 2003, a Jordanian woman named Norma Khouri published a book entitled Forbidden Love (or Honor Lost in North America). This book was a memoir about how Norma Khouri's best friend, Dalia, was killed by her own father after she fell in love with a Christian military officer, and Norma's subsequent escape from Jordan. Forbidden Love was a bio that read like a sensational romance, and it sold 250,000 copies around the world and made Norma Khouri a celebrity in her adoptive country of Australia. However, it turns out that the book really was just a romance. Dalia never existed. Norma Khouri left Jordan at the age of 3 and grew to adulthood living in Chicago. So, one very disturbed woman has exploited Western prejudices about Arab cultures, fooled the general public, plunged her publisher into an enormous legal and financial embarrassment, and impugned the very real and serious problem of honour killings. And she got away with it for a full year and a half.

By: orange swan

orange swan — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 07:10:08 -0800

Please note that you don't have to actually register to view the second and third articles - there's a "register later and continue to article" link.

By: agregoli

agregoli — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 07:18:49 -0800

What's the crime here? That she didn't call it fiction? I can understand the real life woman being upset though.

By: PinkStainlessTail

PinkStainlessTail — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 07:23:43 -0800

What's the crime here? That she didn't call it fiction? Yup: fraud and misrepresentation for personal gain. That's a crime isn't it?

By: rushmc

rushmc — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 07:42:02 -0800

Isn't this the same issue we debated a couple weeks ago in a different context, that labels on books (fiction/non-fiction) are more guide than absolute these days and that one has to read things critically and skeptically? This seems like much ado about nothing to me, really. Did the story change from 2003 to today? Is the context really that essential the story?

By: magullo

magullo — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 08:05:45 -0800

"I am truly offended by your request to label Forbidden Love as fiction" "Forbidden Love is not fiction. Is it not enough that her father received nothing more than a slap on the wrist for her murder ... now you wish me to say that she never existed in the first place ... and for what ... the 'image of Jordan'. I am angered to see that you are more concerned for the 'image of Jordan' than for the many innocent victims of honour killings each year in your country It was totally crazy. She accused us of only defending Jordan's reputation, when we had to defend the reputation of Jordanian women against what she wrote. She ruined the reputation of Jordanian women, saying they were imprisoned in their homes and so on. Jordanian women have excellent education levels that are gradually being translated into participation in the workforce. Her tone is that all Jordanian women live under these traditional practices, which is wrong. /Feeling kind today, I'll file it under nutjob. Make it "opportunistic" nutjob.

By: johnnyboy

johnnyboy — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 08:48:28 -0800

Yup: fraud and misrepresentation for personal gain. That's a crime isn't it? - how ironic as we sit in the maelstrom of a presidential election. On the topic of honour killings, I seem to recall several police investigations into murders that have occured within the muslim community being re-opened, due to suspicions that some may have been honour killings.

By: of strange foe

of strange foe — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 11:31:32 -0800

Our PBS station did an interview with her last year.

By: i_am_joe's_spleen

i_am_joe's_spleen — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 14:40:12 -0800

Australia seems prone to this for some reason. There was Helen Demidenko who claimed to be the child of a Ukrainian taxi driver and wrote a memoir of his life in the Ukraine that was totally fabricated. There was Ern Malley, the poet who never was. And then there's the Holocaust "memoirs" of Binjamin Wilkomirski, who turned out to be the Swiss Bruno Grosjean. rushmc, I think there's a whole other issue here: why people fake traumatic pasts they didn't have. Is it the sympathy? The money? The attention? I'm not interested in truth in this case so much as motivation.

By: rushmc

rushmc — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 15:13:04 -0800

I think "money and attention" cover most people's actions these days, i_am.

By: thomas j wise

thomas j wise — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 15:44:13 -0800

why people fake traumatic pasts they didn't have. This sort of fake confessional autobiography has been around since...well, probably since autobiography has been around. The most famous nineteenth-century examples, most of them anti-Catholic, include "Maria Monk"'s Awful Disclosures..., Rebecca Reed's Six Months in a Convent, and Charles Chiniquy's Fifty Years in the Church of Rome. These books combine personal claims for authority, sensationalism and faux "documentation" with a very shrewd grasp of the target audience's willingness to believe anything nasty about Roman Catholics. (Both Maria Monk and Chiniquy are still kicking around. So is the Jewish convert narrative Leila Ada, even though we know from his Royal Literary Fund file that Osborn W. Trenery Heighway had invented an "authentic" memoir before.) It's a market-driven genre.

By: i_am_joe's_spleen

i_am_joe's_spleen — Thu, 05 Aug 2004 17:09:19 -0800

If you read the articles I linked to, rush, you'll see that Khouri, Demidenko and Grosjean all share certain traits: unstable upbringing, long previous history of difficulties in life, etc. Helen Darville/Demidenko, it turns out, is a antisemite with a history of passing herself off as variously Czech, Hungarian, Ukranian long before she wrote her novel. Grosjean was "the child of a troubled, illegitimate affair, the young boy spent years bouncing from orphanages to cruel and neglectful foster homes before landing with adoptive parents". So there is more to it than sheer mercenary instinct.

By: Kwantsar

Kwantsar — Fri, 06 Aug 2004 02:32:09 -0800

Maybe Martha Stewart will invite her over to hang out during her house arrest.

By: orange swan

orange swan — Fri, 06 Aug 2004 09:21:44 -0800

A lurker named John Horner has emailed me with another piece of information: "Her book has been submitted as *evidence* in hearings of the Australian Immigration department; the honour killing situation described in it submitted as proof that women from certain countries are in danger of their lives, and therefore, entitled to refugee status."

By: dejah420

dejah420 — Fri, 06 Aug 2004 10:43:30 -0800

Well, to be fair Orange Swan, honor killing is a problem in a lot of the Arabic world. And I say this as someone who is fairly familiar with the culture. Jordan, from what I understand, is significantly better than many countries. Iraq, Iran, Saudi, and a couple of the 'stans all have problems with honor killings. Some countries like Lebanon and Syria have virtually no honor killings. I think a lot depends on how secular the country is. My point is that while this book is fiction, the situations described in it, are not. Many women do need refugee status. This book being fiction cannot be used as tool to prevent women being hunted from getting away from their hunters.