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| Beware what you read |
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| NinthMuharram |
| 07/28/04 at 02:00:42 |
| [slm] I have not read the whole book but glanced through it at a bookstore. A lesson learned not to fully believe a non-fiction/autobiography kind of books. They may not be based on truth at all. Since there are so many version of truths, I am not even sure I can believe this article either! However, my heart goes out to those women that were sacrificed in the name of honour. Whether the story behind this fabrication of the book is truth or not, we cannot deny the fact that honour killings continue to prey on our sisters. Bestseller's lies exposed July 24, 2004 Literary Editor Malcolm Knox uncovers Australia's latest hoax author. Her tragic story stole readers' hearts and triggered an international outcry. She became a best-selling author in the same league as J.K.Rowling and Michael Moore. She petitioned the United Nations personally, was published in 15 countries, and Australians voted her memoir into their favourite 100 books of all time. But Norma Khouri is a fake, and so is Forbidden Love. With Australian sales approaching 200,000, the book told of her lifelong friendship with a girl named Dalia in Amman, Jordan. In their 20s, Khouri wrote, she and Dalia started a hairdressing salon together. Dalia met and fell in love with Michael, a Christian army officer. When their chaste affair was discovered, Dalia was murdered - stabbed 12 times - by her father. Norma fled Jordan to Athens, where she said she wrote her book in internet cafes, and ultimately to Australia, where her publisher Random House sponsored her for a temporary residence visa. Khouri, now 34, spent much of 2003 retelling this story, reducing listeners to tears and anger, in interviews, book festivals, bookshops and other events. She toured the world with the story, from appearing on network television in the US to being selected for a citywide book club in Adelaide. While making her new home at a secret location in Queensland and fearing for her life, Khouri became a standard-bearer for oppressed Arab women and triggered a publishing trend of similar books. The truth is very different, and may affect Khouri's legal residency status in Australia. Khouri's real name is Norma Majid Khouri Michael Al-Bagain Toliopoulos, and she only lived in Jordan until she was three years old. She has a US passport and lived from 1973 until 2000 in Chicago. She is married with two children, 13 and 11. She has four American siblings and a mother who are desperate to hear news from her. But she has managed to conceal this double life from her publishers, her agent, lawyers in several continents, the Australian Department of Immigration and, until now, the public. Her mother, Asma, remembers her estranged daughter as a girl who "kept deep secrets". Norma's privacy has a reason: not to protect her safety, but to guard her secrets. Khouri's hoax will take its place in a long Australian tradition of literary fraud, from Ern Malley to Helen Darville-Demidenko. But no other fraudulent book has had such wide sales or impact, and in Darville's case the deception only involved her persona, not her book. Khouri has misled the world both on the page and in person. Suspicion first arose in Jordan, where readers posted on websites their belief that so much in the book was inaccurate, its factual basis was in doubt. A Jordanian women's group carried out some investigations, discovering that Khouri entered and left Jordan briefly in 2000 but may not have been there at the time of the book's events. The Herald found public records evidence of Norma and John Toliopoulos living in Chicago, and put this to Khouri in February. She denied she had ever lived in America, nor been there before a publicity tour in 2003. She said the records were "planted" to trick the Jordanian Government into giving her travel documents to escape. Subsequently, the Herald discovered records of Chicago real estate transactions listing Norma and John Toliopoulos as husband and wife. But as comprehensive as these were, as long as they remained solely on paper they did not necessarily contradict Norma's explanation. Visiting the addresses this month, however, the Herald found members of her family, neighbours and acquaintances who remembered Norma from her 27 years in Chicago, from age three to 30. Her 64-year-old mother keeps dozens of photos of the daughter who disappeared in 2000 and has not spoken to her since. Asma's one hope, she told the Herald, was for reconciliation. Asked how she coped with living secretly, Khouri once said: "It is very stressful and tiring, and I would not recommend it to anyone." There was more than a grain of truth in what she said. Yesterday the Herald put the results of its investigation to Khouri, and she continued to deny she had an American family. Despite the photos, interviews with family and acquaintances, public records of vehicle and real estate ownership and a US marriage, she said her mother, Asma, lived in Jordan. In Forbidden Love, Khouri told how she and Dalia were oppressed by patriarchal Jordanian laws, which protected Dalia's father from prosecution for the alleged murder. Since the book's publication she has embellished the story, saying the only family member she speaks to is an aunt in Jordan and that male relatives might kill her if they found her. She told an interviewer: "I know that my mother would support what I'm doing." And her father? "I hope he will eventually understand. And it would be nice to have him be proud of me some day, instead of ashamed of me." Norma's father, Majid Bagain, does live in Jordan, but that is where the coincidence between truth and fantasy ends. The Herald's 18-month investigation found that Majid Bagain, a machinist, took his wife Asma and their daughter Norma from Jordan to America in 1973. Majid and Asma separated in 1986 and he returned to Jordan. They divorced in 1994. Asma, now 64, a retired nurse who had open-heart surgery two years ago and now suffers from diabetes, has lived in south-west Chicago since the family came from Jordan and shares a townhouse in South Long Street with Norma's youngest brother Will, who was born in America in 1980. Norma has three other younger siblings - Diana, Rita and Mike - who live in Illinois and Indiana. Aside from a handful of emails sent to Diana, Norma has not contacted her family since she left Chicago suddenly about four years ago, at the time she began to write Forbidden Love. Until then, Norma lived a comparatively unremarkable suburban Chicago life, finishing her secondary education at a Catholic school before "studying computers", her mother says, for four years. She worked in a range of low-paying jobs before meeting John Toliopoulos, a Greek-American who, according to Illinois motor vehicle records, drove a 1985 Chevrolet Celebrity. They had a daughter, Zoe, in 1991, and a son, Christopher, in 1993. Norma and John married on November 27, 1993, in Chicago. Through the 1990s - at the time of Dalia's "murder" - Norma and John embarked on a series of property transactions, buying and refinancing houses near Asma's in 1995, 1996 and 1998. Publicly available Illinois State records show that the pair undertook these transactions as 'husband and wife'. Jordanian authorities state that Norma was issued with a US passport, valid for 10 years, in Chicago on March 26, 1996 - the time when, according to Forbidden Love, Dalia was murdered and Norma feared persecution for opposing the honour killing. Will Bagain said that around 1999 Norma and John moved into a house in Major Street, in a working-class suburb in south-west Chicago. John's brother Steve and her brother Will also lived there. The men clashed, and Will was kicked out. Although the circumstances are in dispute, Will was convicted for a firearms possession offence in 1999 and given a probationary sentence, court records show. Norma's other brother, Mike, had been convicted for drugs-related felonies and given a four-year prison term in 1997. Norma was a plaintiff in a $30,000 claim against the Northwest National Bank in 1995, but aside from that she and John have no court or criminal records. For a time Norma lived across the road from her mother in Long Street. A neighbour, Billy Phillips, remembers Norma as "quiet, OK, good to her mother". However, Toliopoulos and his family are not remembered so fondly among the Bagains. Norma began to drift away from her family after meeting Toliopoulos. "To tell the truth I hate that family," Will Bagain says. "I didn't like John from the start. Steve was crazy, thought he was God. I can't think of [John] at all, they make me too angry." Norma, John and their children continued living in the area, near Midway Airport, until 2000. Norma sold insurance, according to her brother, then enrolled in a bartending school. She drove a 1996 Nissan Sentra. Nobody knew her as a writer, although she owned a laptop and wrote on it, mostly poems, secretively. Then she, her husband and their children abruptly disappeared. "I don't know why she went," says Will Bagain. "She'd kind of run away with John when they first met. Then they came back for a while, but then they went again. One day she was there, the next she was gone." Will says he misses Norma, whom he gave away at her 1993 wedding to Toliopoulos, and particularly Zoe and Christopher. "They're my niece and nephew, you know." The reasons for Norma's disappearance remain cloudy. "I have no idea why they left," says Asma. "The mother's always the last to know ... They hurt me big. I miss them so much. But Norma always kept deep secrets. She kept things to herself." Diana Bagain did not want to discuss her sister, saying it was "unusual that someone would call me to ask about Norma". Norma's disappearance from Chicago was the start of a new life. She wrote the book and submitted it piecemeal to Christy Fletcher, a highly reputable New York literary agent. Fletcher edited it for fluency, but did not investigate the truth of Norma's story. She subsequently sold it to 16 publishers around the world, and it was comprehensively vetted by lawyers for Viacom in the US and Transworld in Britain. None of this uncovered Norma's real life. Having sold the lie, she came to Australia, enjoyed a rapturous welcome from readers, and continued to act out the fabrication. The Herald contacted Norma Khouri about these allegations earlier this year. She denied she had ever lived in America. She said: "Yes, I have paperwork that shows that I was married to [Toliopoulos]. This was to get my Jordanian passport without my father's involvement." Friends, she said, including "Michael", the man who fell in love with "Dalia", had "set up an address in America as though I was there. To get out, I had to show I was married to a foreigner in a foreign country ... "I have only ever been to America after the book was published, on a publicity tour. I have never had an American passport." After finding proof of Norma's US life, the Herald contacted her again yesterday. She repeatedly denied that she had ever lived in the US or had any children. She said: "I stand by what I wrote. I refute the allegations that you are making, and had I been given more ample time I would have supplied proof. I intend to do so in the future." In a statement released last night, her publisher said: ‘‘As a matter of principle, Random House Australia supports its authors and the claims they make. In the case of Forbidden Love we were mindful that the issue of concealing Ms Khouri's true identity was central to her fleeing Jordan as described in the book. "In light of the new information brought to our attention by the Herald,we are checking these claims with Ms Khouri." Her new book is due out in November. It is said to be a sequel to Forbidden Love, covering Norma's clandestine flight from Jordan after Dalia's death. That book's future must now be under question. Its title is A Matter of Honour. Source : http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/23/1090464854793.html?oneclick=true Further reading : http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/24/1090464906516.html?from=storyrhs http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/25/1090693835196.html?from=storyrhs |
| Re: Beware what you read |
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| jannah |
| 07/28/04 at 02:21:32 |
| [wlm] dude no doubt this stuff happens but all these over-dramatized books are ridiculous.. remember that whole "princess" series... what fictional garbage.. definitely be careful of what you read.. you don't need fiction to learn what goes on in the world today, just read the papers etc |
| Re: Beware what you read |
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| Nadeem |
| 07/28/04 at 11:33:31 |
| [slm] Hmm, point taken jannah, but aren't many of the papers and media these days verging on fiction themselves? :D I know its not a paper, but Fox News, for example is soooooo balanced and fair, it makes me wanna smile :D [wlm] |
| Re: Beware what you read |
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| jannah |
| 07/28/04 at 15:58:08 |
| [wlm] You should have seen the expression on my face when Fox News's new commercial tagline was "We give fair and balanced coverage". I didn't know whether to cry or double over laughing in hysterics... anyway true bro point taken, can't trust anyone these days sigh ::) |
| Re: Beware what you read |
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| al-ajnabia |
| 07/28/04 at 17:54:32 |
| [slm] I think we should probably cry. To many people beleive that stuff and they vote. |
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