Paradise of Plagiarism: The Internet, Copyright, and the Mystery of Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash

E-mail: NativeAngeleno@aol.com

Abstract

In spring 2005 a plagiarism scandal cast a shadow over the online poetry world. Wild theories sprouted quickly. Who was this Algerian poet named Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash [1] who apparently had worked hard to build a reputation as an up and coming talent by mixing stolen poems with his own? What motivation could he have had? Certainly he realized he would be caught one day. Why devote so much effort to a fraud doomed to fail? Many of the answers to these questions dreamed up by denizens of the Internet were gloriously inventive.

 
One blogger suggested that it might be a literary prank, a cryptic statement about the impotence of copyrights on the Internet, or the transcendental nature of inspiration. Another worried that Al-Ghushash might be a militant using poetry to send signals to his cohorts. Later, Al-Ghushash declared he was victimized by either a racist editor seeking to discredit moderate Arabs, or perhaps by a fellow Algerian in the name of revenge or politics.

Distinguished poet Ron Silliman went so far as to suggest in the March 20, 2005 entry for his online blog http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/ that Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash is a figment of my imagination! Some whisper that I am an ‘Ugly American’ who smeared Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash by foisting plagiarisms in his name, apparently in some misguided attempt to gain publicity for my band’s upcoming CD release: Public Domain: The Best of Lucid Nation. In an effort to prove my innocence I plunged into an online nightmare of jumped conclusions and unverifiable identities that typifies the paradise of plagiarism that is the Internet.

A Different Kind Of Identity Theft

When we hear the phrase identity theft we think of hackers stealing information and using it for profit. But plagiarism is also identity theft. Isn’t the work of a poet his or her identity, an identity that survives corporeality, an identity created by a lifetime of unique experiences? Plagiarism, everyone seems to agree, is epidemic in our schools. Software companies offer teachers programs like EVE [2] that can be used to capture a percentage of essay robbers, but of course the Internet is only making the thieves more skillful. In fact, the thieves don’t consider themselves thieves. Whether downloading music, or saving time by cutting and pasting the work of other writers into their papers, only some of them feel guilty about it. One hears statements like: “Why should I do work that’s already been done? Why not cut and paste the best answer? Isn’t knowing how to find the answer the real work? In the 21st Century, information exchange is about speed and quality of access, not antiquated rules of research and presentation.” Stealing a poem, however, disarms all such excuses. The way one person’s work can be hijacked loses all rationalization and the theft is clear.

As I imagined myself following this whodunit from Paris, France to Chelf, Algeria I wondered what the movie would be called. “What Happened to Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash?” or perhaps more accurately: “Who Is Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash (and Why Did He Do This to Me)?” And yet the title “Is Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash a Publicity Stunt?” would not be far fetched. But obviously it must be “In Search of Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash.” Is Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash a serial plagiarist? Did he change words here and there then dare to sign his name and submit as his own the works of masters like Ranjit Hoskote, one of India's most respected poets and critics? At least three of Ranjit Hoskote’s poems were submitted and published under Al-Ghushash’s name. Or is Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash really the victim of a slanderous hoax?

Pseudo Al-Ghushash’s plagiarisms span the globe, appearing in distinguished forums like The Mississippi Review and The Seneca Review. Didn’t pseudo Al-Ghushash think he would get caught? Did he underestimate the permanence and interconnection of text posted on the World Wide Web? Or was he trying to get caught, to discredit the poet whose name he stole? But to what purpose? Or was Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash himself behind all this? Was this his Morse code SOS, a publicity stunt, or an as yet unfinished statement in process?

From the Beginning

Ton van t’ Hof, editor of Poëziepamflet.nl, was at work on a translation of “Becoming” by the poet Roisin Tierney, when he noticed its similarity to the poem “Prehistoric Presence” published in Al-Ghushash’s name. Thanks to Ton’s diligence and that of other poetry editors, over two dozen plagiarized poems signed Al-Ghushash were discovered on the Internet. Yet, over fifty poems have been found that so far do not appear to have been plagiarized. These include most of the poems sent to me in French by email from someone purporting to be Al-Ghushash. But first let me explain exactly how I became embroiled in this mystery.

As Poet in Residence for Newtopia, and as a member of its NewPoetry Collective, I participate in the scrutiny of poetry submissions. It’s not a task I relish. I don’t like to judge other people’s work or discourage anyone brave enough to be playing with words, which is not unlike attempting to arrange live ants on a page. Several poems allegedly by Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash were submitted to Newtopia by email. I was impressed by some of the imagery, and by the subject matter, but the translations had most likely been done by people who did not speak English as their primary language, or who had used a free translation site or simple conversational software.

I could see from a quick perusal of the French that the poems were better than their English translations. But I was reluctant to take on the job of providing worthier renderings. Several weeks passed as I tried to avoid the task. One of the poems was haunting me. So far it does not appear to have been plagiarized. When I realized the poems would be published anyway “as is” I did hasty revisions of a few favorites. Here is the final version of my translation of that poem:

“Traduttore, traditore,” the Italian literary saying goes: “translator, traitor.” I tried to capture the flavor of a poet I considered my superior. Another member of the NewPoetry Collective, Randy Roark, liked the translations enough to bring them to the attention of Andrew Hoffman at Elik Press. Together Andy and I contacted Al-Ghushash by email. I requested a copy of his poems in French. I also asked him questions about what he had intended to convey in certain lines in French I had already found on the Internet. With his email response and his French text in hand I set about choosing and translating my favorites, looking forward to what I thought would be a beautiful chapbook representing a point of view that very much needed to be heard, the point of view of a cosmopolitan Arab.

I remember sitting outside the notorious now defunct Jabberjaw club in Los Angeles with Joey Karam long before he became keyboard player for The Locust. Thanks to the halfway house across the street and the gangs of Crenshaw you were taking your life in your hands whenever you left a show. My family of Holocaust survivors and his family of Palestinian refugees would probably have fled from the sight of each other, but thanks to America and punk rock, instead of enemies, we were friends. With the U.S. at war in Iraq I decided I felt good about taking the time to translate the work of a good poet from Algeria.

When I emailed Al-Ghushash the completed translations of the 22 poems I had chosen he emailed back a sincere thank you note. He promised to send me a package of pamphlets and magazines from Algeria. Andy approved the manuscript and was planning to get to it in February 2005. In December I received a package. It had obviously been opened and searched then taped up in such a way as to leave it gaping. Delighted by the colorful Algerian stamps, but chagrined by the unfortunately predictable mail tampering, I poured out a collection of what appeared to be tourist and cultural pamphlets and magazines from that month in Algeria, and a cover letter with an official looking initialed rubber stamp.

At the end of the cover letter Al-Ghushash adds in ostensibly his own writing that he would like to “open a North African and Middle East Bureau for Newtopia Magazine here in Algeria.” I talked this over with Charles Shaw, Newtopia’s Editor-in-Chief and Al-Ghushash was invited to submit an assignment of his choice. Typical of our communications with him, we heard nothing about it again. Certainly emails may have been lost.

When the plagiarism scandal erupted I wrote Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash right away but two weeks passed without a response. I began to wonder, as others were, could there be a real Algerian poet whose lack of access to the World Wide Web allowed an English speaking hoaxster to hijack his persona, spam the web with plagiarisms in his name, and create a publicity stunt?

At least two of the poems Al-Ghushash sent me for the Elik Press book were poems that are proven to have been plagiarized. Therefore either a package was sent to me from Algeria from someone pretending to be the Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash, or somehow the email of the French text I received was tampered with to include the plagiarized poems. These possibilities seem far fetched to me, but they are not impossible.

Who Is Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash?

So who is this Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash who shows up on the web in June 2002, whose plagiarisms begin in May 2004, the Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash whose persona exists for me only online and in a single package from Algeria? According to his online bios he is a member of the French Writers Union, a delegate-maghreb of the SJE (Union of Journalists and Writers), director of the Press and Communication Agency Arabesk (elsewhere called A2PUB) which he founded in 1999, and of the international literary magazine Arabesques. He claims he was born July 16, 1968 in Chelf, Algeria.

I couldn’t find the international literary journal Arabesques or the Societé Arabesques anywhere online except in reference to Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash. But that does not mean that they don’t exist. Neither could I find any independent references to a press agency called Arabesk or A2PUB. But A2P is a press agency in Chlef according to the Algerian Infobel yellow pages. There was apparently an Arabesk.com.tn/ once, a data bank on Tunisian artistic activities. But once again that doesn’t mean that Al-Ghushash’s Arabesk doesn’t exist.

So what evidence is there that Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash actually exists? Ton van t’ Hof reported: “On 5 and 6 February 2005 a cultural event took place in Paris, organized by ‘L’association Coup de soleil’, focusing on North African writers.” Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash is “on the programme listed under ‘authors present.” That’s a start, but unverifiable. Even if I could find somebody on the phone or Net that had been there how could I be sure they weren’t mistaken or lying?

It didn’t take me long to discover that SJE, The French Syndicat des Journalistes et Ecrivains, does exist. It led to an even better clue. In his biography at Interpoetry.com, Al-Ghushash provided a rare personal reference: “With the help of Mrs. Simone Balazard, editor in chief of the magazine LE JARDIN D'ESSAI to Paris and vice-president of the French Writers Union, he became a member of the organization in 2002.” At last, a clue worth investigating.

In 1991 Simone Balazard was elected to the first board of directors of the European Writer’s Congress, a great honor and responsibility. The EWC is the guiding body in the effort toward EU unification among European writers, tackling issues as diverse as moral codes for television writing and authors’ contractual rights laws in Germany. Her journal Le Jardin d’Essai, published in Paris, paid tribute to George Sand for that great writer’s bicentennial celebration, and it was thought especially appropriate, thanks to Simone Balazard’s achievements in literature and theater.

I emailed Simone Balazard at Le Jardin D’Essai to ask her if she had ever met Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash, and if she had indeed published his work. The next morning I found this response: “J'atteste l'existence d'Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash que j'ai d'abord rencontré à Paris et ensuite publié. Simone Balazard, directrice du jardin d'Essai.” [She attests to the existence of Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash and she published him.] Unfortunately I don’t have the resources to go speak to Simone Balazard face to face. Perhaps it was not she who emailed me back. If I phoned how could I be sure to whom I was really speaking?

To somewhat address the latter problem in regard to a phone number at the bottom of the stationery Al-Ghushash used I enlisted the help of friends. Underground guitar legend Art Johnson lives in the south of France these days with his Parisian born Algerian wife. Art is also an electric violin soloist at one of the most popular clubs frequented by Arabs in the region. He writes:

The second number Art refers to was the A2P Press Agency as listed in the Infobel Yellow Pages.

Art and his wife did more research. They report that Al-Ghushash “does not appear on official author sites of Paris, Algeria or Nice. They “went to the online library of the institut du monde arabe in Paris - he does not exist here either. Went to the site of "Arabesque" and dialed the phone number from that site which was different than the one you gave us and it too does not exist. Went to the site "le printemps des poetes” to search "le livre" where there is a long list of Algerian poets; he does not exist there.” Art’s wife lived through the revolution of 1962, she believes “no Algerian poet/writer would ever refer to French writers of the time of French Algeria thanking them for inspiration which he does in a paragraph online.”

Then at last Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash surfaced.

In a scathing letter to Ton van t’Hof and posted by Ton, Al-Ghushash denied committing any acts of plagiarism. He accused van t’Hof of perhaps being the perpetrator of a racist plot against him. He chided anyone who would accept at face value an email when email addresses and personal information are so easily stolen and faked on the Internet. He promised a response to the accusations that would be provided for all poets and editors, but now several weeks later there is none, only his assurance that he is working on a website. According to van t’Hof he has received a second letter from Al-Ghushash where Al-Ghushash writes: “And there are more probabilities, also, that it’s a person from here, from Algeria and I should pay?” Chlef was a hotspot for militant Islamic fundamentalism, one of the last subdued in Algeria. The imagination runs wild.

On March 30 a few days after Ton received a response, I opened an email allegedly from Al-Ghushash himself. He says in his letter to Ton he defended me against the accusations that I was responsible for the plagiarism. He adds “it is accentuated masochism to accuse everyone without any reason.” He asks for whatever information I have that might shed light on the situation, and asks that all the poems under his name be removed from NewtopiaMagazine.com.

Al-Ghushash alleges that “M. Ton van't Hof works in the Defense Ministry of Netherlands” and wonders why he “is interested in my person.” Suspecting van’t Hof’s rush to accuse, he suggests that the poets who had been plagiarized have made less of it than Ton. He says in his absence, strange things have happened in his name. Al-Ghushash apologizes for any trouble this has caused me and hopes we can continue our friendship. He says he suspects racism was the motive for the hoax, he mentions anti-Semitism, too. He says he will have more to report soon. The conspiracy theories multiply until one feels immobilized.

The Internet Means Never Having To Say You Are Sorry?

In the music business, my neck of the woods, copyrights are pretty much worthless. If you don’t have the money for long term lawyer payments the star or record company will win every time. Copyrights only have value for bands that win the corporate lottery so they can squeeze licensing fees and royalties out of the movie, TV and publishing divisions. As in the past, famous bands routinely feed on local bands that open for them, stealing their best riffs as a matter of course. The victim is supposed to feel honored, if he can’t take it, he’s too weak to join the frat and be one of the boys.

The mystery of Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash proves yet again how tenuous the laws of copyright are on the World Wide Web. Like music copyrights, they are only as good as their enforcement. How many other plagiarizers are out there? Could poetry websites and compilations be riddled with undiscovered plagiarism? And what if Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash should turn out to be both a great poet and a plagiarist? Is he to be punished or ostracized and his talent denied? If he has only plagiarized, even then has he not in some strange way brought all our attention to a set of poets and poems like a DJ remixing hit songs? But worst of all, what if he is an honest poet victimized by someone else for some insidious purpose, perhaps even a hacker’s practical joke? Can Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash ever clear his name now?

How can editors and poets protect themselves here on the World Wide Wild West? Jeff McMahon editor of Contrarymagazine.com offers good advice: “As a basic plagiarism test, we perform a Google search for unique lines in all submissions that we accept for publication. It’s not much, but it’s something a small magazine with limited resources can do easily.” Of course that doesn’t help when plagiarism crosses languages.

The history of literature is filled with plagiarism. The great Roman epic poet Virgil’s masterpiece The Aeneid lifted whole sections from Homer’s great epics. Shakespeare’s masterpieces did not suddenly appear like lightning in the void. In fact, many of the world’s cherished works were the result of a compilation and summation of all that came before. Can it be considered a tribute to have your work taken up and fit into a greater theme, to be immortalized by a genius, even if your identity is lost in the process?

CreativeCommons.org represents a laudable effort to address this problem by deeding or licensing sites and specifying how they present work when it is unchanged, modified, or under process of modification. But of course such efforts are voluntary and cannot be forced on the lurkers who flourish in the confusion the Internet affords. The Internet is not just a paradise for plagiarism when it comes to writing, art, music, and research. The very code that programmers use to create the myriad experiences of the online environment is itself a hotbed of confusion and contradiction concerning copyrights.

Most people feel helpless when confronted with so much chaos. As Lawrence Lessig wrote in his conclusion to Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace:

I received an apology from Ton van t’Hof for publishing online his suspicions that I might be the trickster behind the Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash mystery before consulting with me. He has since removed that part of his blog, including my response. My requests to the other editors and writers involved in this confusion to share comments or information have gone unanswered. In his last email to me Al-Ghushash says that Ton is no longer communicating with him.

Thanks to the hasty remarks of bloggers I myself, Newtopia Magazine, and my band Lucid Nation have been introduced to the community of poets under a cloud of suspicion. As with newspapers people tend to overplay the accusation, and the apology winds up buried in the back pages. I am left thinking of the ancient Egyptian scribes who never signed their own names, only the name of Thoth. They were practical people when it came to economy of action. I will not get back the days spent on translating the poems, or on defending myself from false accusations with this essay. Plagiarism destroys the trust between poets (and editors); it creates corrosion by distraction, as vain conspiracy theories occupy us, instead of inspiration and practice.

Notes

1. Editor’s note: Al-Sha’ar Al-Ghushash is a pseudonym translating from Arabic as “the cheating poet”, or “the poet-cheat”. The original version of this article was published in Newtopia magazine (no longer online) using Mr. Al-Ghushash’s real name—or perhaps the name being usurped by Mr. Al-Ghushash. A cached version of Ronnie Pontiac’s Newtopia article was still available online as of June 2007, and a number of online poetry magazines still list the retracted poems which were found to have been plagiarized by Mr. Al-Ghushash (or his impersonator). As of the date of publication, a few such retractions were still available:

http://www.theshoremag.com/43_amari.htm

http://www.unlikelystories.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?p=463&

http://www.iodinepoetryjournal.com/IPJFSpSm_05.html

http://www.angelfire.com/journal/wordsareair/amari.html

http://whimperbang.tripod.com/hamadene.html

2. Essay Verification Engine.

Ronnie Pontiac, guitarist for the band Lucid Nation, has previously served as Senior Editor and poet-in-residence for Newtopia magazine.