Sexuality between Germany and North Africa

Mohamed, when I wanted to buy your book, I visited a large bookshop. Despite displaying it in the system, the staff couldn't find it. Finally, I found it in another branch of the same chain on the shelf for "spirituality guides". Is this a suitable category? Is it confusing to categorise your work here?

In fact, this has already happened to me. I work with a large publishing house that has excellent distribution and is one of the leaders on the German book market. Nevertheless, there are many people who have difficulties understanding which books should be on which shelves. There was even a large book chain that has a conservative attitude and was initially strictly against including the book on its shelves. Some bookshops then sorted it into the spirituality or advice categories, which is actually not ideal for the book. "Let's talk about sex, Habibi!" has a feminist, queer and sex-positive approach and should therefore also be found on the appropriate shelves. Neither I as the author nor the publisher ultimately have the power to decide where it is placed. It is up to the bookshop to either place it on the shelf or not. However, this also highlights the challenge of presenting alternative, queer and feminist ideas or texts appropriately in order to make them accessible to a wider audience.

As feedback for your work, you are sometimes told: "You're really advanced for a Mohamed". Is that supposed to be a compliment?

That's a poisonous compliment. And unfortunately you also hear it in progressive circles. On the one hand, it's a recognition of my modernity and progressiveness. On the other hand, it automatically leads to people being categorised as "different". Am I someone who would approve of a conservative lifestyle? Of course not. But I have no power to tell someone not to be a believer or not to do Ramadan.

I see this feedback as a subtle form of racism. In addition, many people in Germany have difficulty pronouncing my name Mohamed correctly. In panel discussions or conversations with colleagues in various editorial offices, I regularly notice a real discomfort when they have to pronounce my name because it has negative connotations in their minds. In my first two books, I tried to deconstruct this bias. The assumption that you can deduce a person's character and personality from their first name alone is absurd. I can't claim that someone is evil just because their name is Heinrich. There are certainly bad Heinrichs, but it's superficial to think that way. Unfortunately, this is something that I and many other Mohameds encounter on a daily basis.

With your third book, however, you are exploring other questions.

Yes, after two books about white people, I wanted to change the perspective and put others at the centre. And since I grew up partly in Morocco and travelled all over North Africa as a reporter, it quickly became clear that I wanted to write about North Africa. As humans, we are interested in sexuality and the sexuality of others, and so desire, love and sexuality are really just ways and bridges to talk about many other things: feminism, queerness, migration, tourism and power imbalances, colonialism and post-colonial structures. People of North African descent are still viewed with a racist minus view. That's why I wanted to decolonise a bit and simply show the reality without romanticising it. So it's not about saying everything is great, but about saying, here's the overall picture and it makes little sense in its entirety, but that's just life and that's reality. You can find everything in North Africa, e.g. sex-positive traditions. But there are also extremist religious forces that are hostile to sexuality. You can find parties that you can only dream of in Berlin. But you also find regimes that pursue anti-queer or misogynistic policies and yet are labelled secular. That's why it's important for me to present the region a little differently.

How did you manage to guide us through the diversity without reinforcing clichés?

I had plenty of material for my book: growing up in Morocco, I experienced the full range of adolescent years there for 12 years. I also worked as a reporter in North Africa for over 10 years. These experiences motivated me to write the book, because the more intensively and frequently you observe, the more nuanced you can write about it. Despite my efforts to avoid clichés, I received critical feedback. In the book, for example, I deal with the belief in magic in Morocco, which was considered a cliché by some, but which corresponds to reality. As a reporter, it is not my job to whitewash things, but first and foremost to describe them and present them in an entertaining way.

You address a lot of topics in the book that can trigger discussions. Was it difficult for you to choose the topics?

It was important to me to address different topics. That's why I had a list of topics, including feminist theory, colonialism and post-colonialism. I've actually always kept a diary where I just write quickly and in detail - it's routine for me. I then consulted my field research diary and tried to illustrate precisely these topics from this pool. For each important topic, I told at least one anecdote to create a meta-level. I wrote many stories and then discarded them because the people involved didn't want to appear in the book. But others agreed and gave me more details.

One topic that reminds me of my life in Cairo is the unpleasant situations with the pharmacists who judge you when you buy condoms. Would you like to comment briefly on this?

For me, buying condoms everywhere was a kind of research. The job of a pharmacy is to look after the health of its customers, without ideological colouring and without making people feel guilty. I have described four condom purchases in the book, but there are 50 other stories that are completely different, even within the same country. In Tunis, for example, I had the misfortune of meeting an ultra-conservative Salafist pharmacist, in Oran-Algerie it was also an ultra-conservative Salafist, but he even wanted to sell me lubricant. There are now condom vending machines in every street in Morocco. I also have to say quite frankly that it is sometimes easier to get an HIV test in Casablanca than in some German cities. If you want to take a test as a person who is particularly affected by racism, you also get funny, sometimes racist comments in some places in Germany.

Sex tourism and the paedophile tendencies of some tourists in North Africa are mentioned in the book. Why do you think that some European tourists there believe they can cross borders?

It definitely has a colonial component, but in a contemporary sense. Colonialists have been travelling to North Africa and making use of it for a very long time. In the book, I try to outline these many journeys by Europeans. For example, there is a British author who travelled to Egypt and even recorded in great detail in his diary how minors were sexually harassed and then celebrated this as a great freedom. This applies to almost all countries in North Africa, except for Algeria, where it's a bit different. White People, especially tourists, can more or less do what they want in the region. I describe this scene in the book where a European tourist takes a minor to his room and he's not even afraid of being caught because he knows he can go very far. In Morocco, there was also the case of a Spanish paedophile who raped several minors and was then convicted following pressure from protests. He was then pardoned at the request of the Spanish king and sent back to Spain. Paedocriminal activity there mainly comes from tourists from Europe, but also from the Gulf States, as they bring certain financial resources with them. They know: It's close, cheap and associated with a rather lower risk compared to other countries. There are definitely red lines and borders being crossed, and as North African societies, we absolutely have to talk about this violence.

Who should we talk to?

With ourselves! In formerly colonised societies, there is still an inferiority complex in some places, but it is slowly being eroded. I was in Morocco recently and noticed that there is a bit more self-confidence. Twenty years ago, people were more like: "God, a European, a tourist. You have to offer him everything." Nowadays, people in society tend to say: "If you can't behave yourself, you're not wanted here as a tourist either." In Germany, it is often said that foreigners "do what they want and are criminals". But in my opinion, the most problematic foreigners are the Germans abroad.

In another story, a Moroccan comes to Europe through a fictitious marriage, but returns to Morocco after a while because he doesn't like it in Europe. I hear similar stories again and again. Why do people come after long and complicated planning and then just drop everything and go back?

The fact that many people have stopped orientating themselves towards Europe really fascinates me. Many of my friends used to say: "How stupid are your parents? You were in Germany and they brought you back. How stupid is it to go back to Africa?" However, this has decreased significantly and has a lot to do with the increased self-confidence I was talking about. People have become more self-confident and say: "Why should I go somewhere where I'm treated like dirt?" Many have decided to bury this dream or not even dream about it. Of course, this assumes that you are well off and have a good income in Casablanca or Cairo and are not under political pressure. Then you can simply say: "Fine, I'll just live my middle-class life." I encounter this much more often than in the past. There are also many people in North Africa who are not allowed to travel to Europe. Some don't even want to come to Germany to live here, they just want to take a selfie in front of the Brandenburg Gate for Instagram - they just want to do tourism, and this is a structural injustice. Why can Germans travel everywhere and not the other way round? For many young people, this is a pressure and a fundamental injustice. That's why I believe that it would be better for humanity to get by without borders and let people do it first and then see what happens. But that's just a utopia. It is often assumed that people like being in Germany. That may be true, but many have had to leave their home country for security reasons. It's not easy to put up with all the racism here, not to think about it and not to say to yourself, then I'll just leave again.

When your parents moved back from supposedly "sinful Germany" to "more conservative Morocco" in 1995, they were disappointed because there was a brothel opposite. It was a shock at first, but over time a friendship developed between your mother and a woman from the brothel. What could such a story reveal?

This shows how many people are open to simply rethinking their opinions. It is often said that Muslim women are dogmatic, do not think things through and are not open-minded. This story can illustrate very well that this is not true. I wouldn't say that my mother is necessarily in favour of sex work, but she is very pragmatic. It also shows that women in North Africa in particular are very skilful at dealing with different things and conflicts, and that they have a certain solidarity with each other. I lived in a popular neighbourhood in Cairo for a year and a half, and there I learned that many people survive because the women maintain a certain solidarity among themselves and there is a solidarity network in the neighbourhood. There's nothing like that in Germany, for example. During the pandemic, my neighbour could have died of COVID and I wouldn't even have known because people don't talk to each other in the same house.

The Fassbinder film "Angst essen Seele auf" also inspired you to write the book.

This film is definitely a playing field where you could tell a lot more about their characters than the film does. The story is about a Moroccan guest worker Ali, a good-looking man with muscles and an active sex life, who doesn't speak German well and ends up in Munich. There he begins an affair with Emmi, an older German woman. She tries to process her trauma as a perpetrator during National Socialism a little with this relationship. She at least witnessed how the Holocaust happened and how the neighbours were deported. In it, I saw the story of my father, how he first came to Germany all alone, where he fornicated with prostitutes and bars in Frankfurt's railway station district. I was at a reading in Essen a few weeks ago where we watched an excerpt from the film, the scene where Emmy's girlfriends come from the neighbourhood and want to touch Ali's muscles. One of them touches him and says: "He's so clean", because from a racist German perspective, North Africans are all dirty. And then Emmy says: "Yes, he washes himself... even showers... every day." Then Ali, who doesn't really understand much else, is very offended because he has understood this, and then he leaves the house. In the next scene, he's with another friend and then you see him completely naked. At the time, it was a scandal to show a man naked with a penis. But "North Africans" from whiter Showing the perspective was "ok". I then found out that Ali doesn't actually speak in the film, but only moves his lips to a spoken text, which was recorded by a German actor who speaks with an imaginary Moroccan accent. This film has so many absurd levels and I just found it very exciting to somehow take it apart critically. Also because it is celebrated in intellectual German circles as a milestone in German film history.

You can also find a language analysis here. It analyses how the word masturbation is expressed.

It started in Egypt, when a mate explained to me what expression they use for masturbating there: "ten strokes". I was surprised because it's very specific but doesn't make much sense. Then I asked other people what it meant and we came up with various theories, but no clear answer. That's how I came up with this topic: Linguistically questioning what masturbation is even called in men. In Tunis, they talk about scraping, which is not so gentle. In Algeria, because of colonialism, a French word has been Arabised. I wanted to share the linguistic diversity, but also show that people also talk about sexuality. Then I asked myself what people call masturbating with the vulva. At first I looked in German, but there is no sexy word for it. There are only very infantile expressions that you can't talk about in a sexy way, like "unpacking your handbag". This showed me that sexuality is focussed on men across language barriers and also shows how creative language could be. My conclusion is that a lot of people in North Africa have a lot of fun and also understand how to be liberated. However, various components have been added in retrospect: Colonialism, Islamism and other extreme forms of religious impositions. This has somewhat destroyed the openness in these societies, but there is a return to tradition.

I'll quote from the book now. "What bothers me: a whiter (polygamous) man is the maximum of progress and sexual liberation, a nonwhiter A man with more than one partner is the ultimate in oppression and misogyny." Do you want to tell me that?

It is absolutely absurd to celebrate one and criticise the other. But that shows the double standard. Either both are stupid or both are good. I recently read another text about polyamory in which there was a white Thomas had. He had three partners and that was fine. But that's actually nothing more than polygamy. Polygamy is no longer practised very often in North Africa and is also an expression of patriarchal structures, because women can't be polygamous, officially at least. But that also shows a bit of the double standard. Why is one good and the other not good? Because one is done by Thomas and the other by Mohamed. That's why it was important for me to take a critical look at this perspective. Then it doesn't really matter what the names of those involved are or where they come from. We also talk a lot here about family, social models and family law. And when we talk about family law, we also have to talk about divorce, for example. I write in the book about how difficult it is to get divorced in Germany and how easy it is to get divorced in Morocco, even as a woman. There is yet another reform in Morocco and it will be simplified even more soon. This also shows how backward German family law is compared to Moroccan family law.

In "Let's talk about Sex, Habibi" I found a broad spectrum from sex positivity to repression. Are there any particular messages you would like to pass on to readers?

If there is one message I want to send, it is that we should stop pigeonholing people. Hopefully people will be open enough to engage with this reality, to read the book and also to break down their own prejudices and racist ways of thinking about the region and the people. This also applies to the relevant diaspora groups here in Germany or in Europe. As a journalist, it is my job to name the grievances and classify them without romanticising or talking down anything. We also have to talk about sexualised violence, misogyny and queerophobia, and I have done that in detail in the book. What I'm also really pleased about is the very broad positive reception of this book, where many, including white Germans, say: "I would never have thought that. But thank you for letting me learn that." Or how I described my puberty in the early 2000s in our school playground in Morocco, and how all the porn CDs were in circulation and the boys secretly watched porn. Then Germans my age come up to me and say: "It was the same in our school playground." That's nice, because hormones work in a similar way everywhere. At a reading in Morocco, there was a table with only young cis straight men. They came and wanted to talk about the book. At another in Casablanca, half of the audience was queer and they also wanted to talk about it. Even in Germany, when young people who grow up in conservative families and have read the book suddenly turn up at my readings and say: 'For me, this was an opportunity to deal with myself in terms of identity. I think that's super nice and is of course the biggest compliment for me.

Thank you very much for the interview, Mohamed!