Do you know what "leblouh" is? No? Well prepare to leblarf. Leblouh is the traditional Mauritanian practice of force-feeding women until they are big and beautiful/large and lascivious. While we have been longstanding proponents of the burgeoning ""Yes Fat Chicks"" movement, we tend to draw the line short of force-feeding 5-year-old girls camel milk until they ralph and then using wooden rolling pins to give them stretchmarks.Mauritania is a poor country even by African standards. A fifth of the population lives on less than $1.25 per day. The country's also historically nomadic (90% circa its 1960 independence from France), which may explain why certain Mauritanians have taken Western Africa's traditional preference for hefty frames to the nauseating extreme. When the better part of your day consists of walking around in the desert, what could be more appealing than someone who's visibly rich enough to sit in the same place for months at a time? It's basically the same rationale behind Western men's fixation on bodies that can only be achieved through a steady regiment of cocaine and gym time. The luxurious connotations of fatty-fatty-boombalattyness are so entrenched in Mauritanian culture that old poets even regularly referred to the tebtath (stretchmarks) of their beloved as "my lady's jewels."
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