Apr 03 2009
April Fools Prank, Literary Hoax and Orientalism
What makes a good April Fool’s day joke?
I think a good one is one that gets people to ask themselves, “This can’t be true, can it? OMG!” Then you hit the jackpot. In other words, besides being outrageous, a good Fool’s day prank has to seduce its audience to believe in their worst instinct about this world.
While driving home, I was listening to the story of Norma Khouri, who wrote a book of a fictional case of honor killing in Jordan, pretending to be a personal friend of the victim. She grew up in Chicago, went to Catholic school, married and have two kids but presented herself throughout as a 35-year old virgin from Jordan whose life was in danger because of the book.
How did her perfect American accent not give her away? How could she show up in one TV shows after another, signed hundreds of books at trade shows, but no one in the hundreds of thousands of the audience ever suspected her authenticity?
Because she wrote the book in 2003, not long after 9.11 but before the Iraq debacle fell apart. Is Khouri a master of deception or many among us are perennial fools?