Moroccan Literature

Although the 19th-century Sufi figure al-Shaikh Māʾ al-ʿAynain led a major resistance movement in the Northwestern Sahara and Morocco and was one of the most widely printed authors on the Fez lithographic press, very little information on his literary and scholarly output exists in Europhone sources. This is largely due to the marginalization of texts inconsistent with Middle East-centered narratives of reform and revival inspired by the encounter with Europe. As part of a larger effort to read Maghrebi literatures on their own terms rather than imposing European or Middle Eastern timelines and concepts, this paper reads Māʾ al-ʿAynain’s 1858 riḥla (travelogue) to Mecca for how he conceptualized his world and traveled within it, including local, regional, and transregional elements.

As works of Morocco’s most famed writers are being translated for English readers to discover, Khalid Lyamlahy explores how translators have sought to capture the full range of nuance and diversity in their volumes, offering a new perspective on Moroccan identity and culture.

Hassan makes a living in his native Marrakesh as a comic writer and performer, through satirical sketches critical of Morocco’s rulers. Yet, when he is suddenly conscripted into a losing war in the Sahara, and drafted to a far-flung desert outpost, it seems that all is lost.

Could his estranged father, close to power as the king’s private jester, have something to do with his sudden removal? And will he ever see his beloved wife Zinab again?

With flowing prose and black humor, Youssef Fadel subtly tells the story of 1980s Morocco. He evokes a system whose brutality emanates from the top, and is felt and reproduced in the countless uneven power relations of the people living underneath.

Since making headlines as the first Moroccan woman to be awarded the Goncourt prize in 2016, best-selling author and official face of “Francophone Affairs,” Leïla Slimani, has quickly become one of the most influential figures on the French literary scene. Noted for her ground- breaking departure from the predictable genre of “ethnic autobiography” and her incisive gaze on French bourgeois banality, Slimani has emerged as something of a poster-girl for post-racial society – a vocal proponent of Republican ideals such as freedom and equality and the “borderless” world of Francophone literature, Slimani appears to embody French “universalisme.” Yet, as Joan Wallach-Scott observes, such a concept is itself rooted in a very particular history of French nationalism and imperialism, whereby (especially Arabo-Muslim) societies cast as “anti-freedom” or “anti-equality” emerge not just as “anti-French,” but “anti- human” – even as this rhetoric is effectively deracialised.
This paper analyses the effects of de/racialisation and the negotiation of French racial/cultural anxieties in Slimani’s celebrated killer-nanny novel, Chanson douce [Lullaby]. Working from Sara Ahmed’s notion of racial dis/orientation in Queer Phenomenology, I ask to what extent the invisibilisation of race in the novel functions as a critique of “white space,” denaturalising the racial dynamics ordinarily concealed by universalist rhetoric, and as a mode of strategic assimilation on the part of the author herself – How does Slimani’s ability to “pass” expose “passing” as a technology of the State? And to what extent does the French public’s delight at her “passing” point to its own inability to get “past” race?

Engaging postcolonial, queer and literary theory, this book examines how Moroccan author and cineaste Abdellah Taïa’s literary works and public performances relate to globalized discourses on queer sexuality, current LGBT activism in Morocco and postcolonial traditions of committed writing in Moroccan literature since the 1950s.

Placing key novels such as Salvation Army, Infidels and A Country for Dying in dialogue with Moroccan writers including Driss Chraïbi, Abdelkébir Khatibi and Fatna El Bouih, this study shows how Taïa draws upon a long tradition of politically committed art in Morocco to subvert stereotypical conceptions of ‘authentic Arab sexuality’, stereotypical readings of autobiographical literature as ethnographic material, and stereotypical conceptions of French as a language of civilizational and sexual emancipation.

The present study is an attempt to investigate students' attitudes about the social status of Moroccan woman and the variables that may influence the cause of woman liberation. These variables may include feminism, female activism and international human rights on one hand. On the other hand, factors such as religion, patriarchy and marriage legislation could stand against the cause of female emancipation. The paper uses a theoretical and practical part. The review of literature is broad and inclusive that it trespasses the national intellectual framework on the issue of woman liberation to referring to western major feministic movements for woman emancipation worldwide such as liberal feminism. The field work is conducted through distributing a representative number of questionnaires, 350 questionnaires. Briefly, the findings proved that the majority of respondents, 55% hold the view that religion stands as a primary factor behind conservative gender perception, whereas, 49% of the respondents believe that education is the factor behind such perceptions. Furthermore, 40% believed that the patriarchal system is the element behind traditional treatment of gender. Concerning marriage legislation, 55% agree with the reforms in Al Mudawana in 2004. For female activism, 72% believe that women highly contributed in bringing about the changes in Al Mudawana reforms of 2004. This helped to generate an increasing female participation in politics as proved by 58% of the respondents. Finally, 65% hold the view that woman social status nowadays is semi-liberal and improving.

للمدينة المغربية حضور مركزيٌّ في السّرد المغربيّ يتجاوز حدود حضورها بوصفها مكوّنًا من مكوّنات السرد الذي يحتضن الأحداث والشخصيات. إنها فضاءٌ مُتحرّكٌ تنتظم فيه حركاتُ الشخصيات ومواقعها وما تؤسسه من تفاعلات ثقافيّة في البُنيان السّردي. ولعلّ الملمح الأساسيّ الذي تحضرُ فيه المدينة المغربيّة في خطابات سارديها أنها عوالمُ تجاوزيّةٌ وفق التصورات التأويلية الوجوديّة التي تُحفّز أبطالها وشخصياتها على البحث والانطلاق والمغامرة باتجاه المديات القصوى في الذّاكرة والهوية.
وتُحاججُ هذه الورقة العلمية في قضية مُفادها أنّ السرد المغربيّ، وفق مدوّنة النصوص والبحث، قدّم المدينة المغربية بوصفها فضاء مُتخيّلاً يسود فيه التّعايش، والتّسامح، والموت، والفجيعة، والهزيمة، والانغلاق، والإخفاق، والقلق، والرّعب، والذّعر، والجوع، والتّشرّد، والرّقابة.
ومن أجل بيان ملامح هذه التمثيلات والأنساق الرمزية سينصرفُ البحث إلى مدوّنة محددة سالكًا سبيل المنهج التأويلي الثقافي الذي يستنطقُ النصوص ويبحث في معالمها عن علامات المدينة المغربية وتمثيلاتها في الأعمال السّردية المُنتخبة، والكشف عن ملامح التّخييلات التي عاظمت من مفاعيل صّور المدن السردية في الثقافة والعالم.

A historical reference work on Morocco must take as its subject al-maghrib al-aqsa (the far west) as the Arabic scholars have generally referred to the approximate region of present-day Morocco, roughly the north-west corner of Africa but at times including much of the Iberian peninsula, because the modern nation-state is a relatively recent creation owing much to events in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. External influences on Morocco tend to come across the narrow straits of Gibraltar to the north, from the east along the Mediterranean litoral, or up from the Sahara. In each case, access is constrained by geography and continued control from outside the region has been difficult to manage over the long term. Although many of the dynasties that came to power in Morocco conquered much broader regions, history and topology have so conspired that there is still more coherence to an historical focus on al-maghrib al-aqsa than is the case for most modern nation-states.

This third edition of Historical Dictionary of Morocco contains a chronology, an introduction, a glossary, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 600 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Morocco.

Building on this previous work, I pose the following series of questions: What is the potential readership of this literature of diaspora? Why does it not have a place in Spain’s book market? What is its future? In this essay, I frame Moroccan and Equatorial Guinean literature written in Castilian and Catalan within the broader context of border studies and approach it from the theoretical perspective of intercultural and postcolonial studies. There is a group of Moroccan authors who show in their writings what Enrique Dussel (2005) calls “alteridad cultural de la poscolonización,” incorporating the best of Spanish and European modernity to develop, not a cultural style that tends to a globalized unit, undifferentiated or empty, but a trans-modern pluriverse that draws on a number of cultural contexts: European, Asian, African, Islamic, Christian, and Latin American.

This paper offers an analysis of the Moroccan novella "Jomana" by Hassan Zrizi. The story is that of seven sisters whose fates intertwine with the fates of story tellers in the famous Jamaa Lafna Square and dramatizes their struggles for survival against all odds of repression, exploitation, and marginalization. Jomana, whose name is made up of the first letter of each of her sisters' is the heroine who champions this feminine/female struggle for acknowledgement in an anti-women universe. She struggles  to become a story teller in the Square, trying to approriate the Logos as it were from the powers of a repressive patriarchal order....

Darija (Moroccan Arabic) has changed status - in the Moroccan society, if not in the official institutions - in the last ten years, reaching recognition as the national language. It had been confined to illiteracy, backwardness and considered incompatible with education or modernity. It accompanied the new social and cultural movement (the Moroccan ‘movida’, Nayda ), from the years 2005-2007, managing to both, overpass the linguistic ideologies in people’s judgements on Darija, and gain a new role with the help of the NTIC under a novel written form.
The first drastic change was the non-institutional language planning it experienced, under the form of a spontaneous passage to writing - on keyboards (cell phones first  and later, computers) – via different social networks from the beginning of the century. In the absence of any institutional support, people taught themselves to read and write Darija fluently in Latin script at first, and more recently in Arabic script , with a true DIY  spirit. Millions of messages have been written daily for nearly fifteen years.
In 2015, we are past the stage of basic exchanges that prevailed in the first stages, and we have entered the era of writing of long prose texts in Darija –mostly on the internet, be it on blogs, in long facebook posts, in slamming or rapping, or in comic strips: nothing less than an informal passage to literacy!

This article re-conceptualizes the idea of a "Moroccan" literature with regard io the transnational ard plurilingual experiences from which it arises. Advancing a comparative outlook that is grounded in linguistic difference, laila Lalami's narative not only reflects the current situation of the large majority of Moroccans today, but also captures the experience in writing of a fast growing number of individuals belonging to migrant communities in other pans of the world.

This dissertation investigates malḥūn poetry and its roles in contemporary Moroccan society.  It challenges modernist approaches to malḥūn that focus on structures
and overlook functions, contingencies and interdependencies. I propose an approach informed by performance studies and Bakhtinian dialogism. This study relies on three types of primary sources: printed collections, oral performances, and interviews. Oral and
written examples of malḥūn range across the past five hundred years. However, this study places priority on the various actors involved in malḥūn today: poets, singers, musicians, editors, scholars, politicians and fans. This dissertation demonstrates how the heteroglossia of
malḥūn performances affects Moroccans as they negotiate identities and re-imagine Moroccan society.

In 1612, a Spanish fleet captured a French ship whose stolen cargo included the entire manuscript collection of the Sultan of Morocco, Muley Zidan. Soon, the collection made its way to the royal library, El Escorial, transforming the library into an important repository of Arabic books, which, since then, Arabists from across Europe sought to visit. By focusing on the social life of the collection, from the moment of its capture up through the process of its incorporation into the Escorial, this article examines three related issues: the first regards the social trajectories of books and the elasticity of their meaning and function, which radically altered in nature. The second part of the article examines the circulation of the Moroccan manuscripts in relation to a complex economy of restrictions over the reading and possession of Arabic manuscripts in early modern Spain. Finally, the third part focuses on the political and legal debates that ensued the library’s capture, when the collection became the locus of international negotiations between Spain, Morocco, France and the Dutch United Provinces over Maritime law, captives, and banned knowledge. By placing and analyzing the journey of Zidan’s manuscripts within the context of Mediterranean history, the paper explains (1) why Spain established one of the largest collections of Arabic manuscripts exactly when it was cleansing its territories of Moriscos (Spanish forcibly converted Muslims), and (2) why the Moroccan collection was kept behind locked doors at the Escorial.

Tahar ben Jelloun's novel Partir deals with the emigration of young Moroccans to Spain, describing their attempts to gain a foothold there and their failure. The representation of the sea takes on a very
special meaning, which is examined in this article. Firstly, the sea is represented as a border whose crossing promises entry into the desired paradise of Europe. Secondly, it is an endless space of doom,
a symbol of the mass death of refugees, hence also a metaphor of the existential plight of migrants.
Thirdly Ben Jelloun attributes a utopian potential to the sea, because it also enables peaceful contact between cultures. However, this positive function of the sea is only represented at an allegorical level: In the final chapter of the novel, world literature appears as a ship that permits a path to new spaces and the understanding interaction of foreign people with one another.

This article aims at analyzing, through their representations of space, six Moroccan Novels of the 2000s: al-Dubāba al-bayḍā’ (The Whitefly), al-Rihān al-aḫīr (The Final Bet) and al-Mustanzafūn (Bled Dry), written in Arabic by ‘Abd al-Ilāh al-Ḥamdūšī; Meurtres à Mazagan, in French, et al-Sikkīn al-ḥarūn (The stubborn Knife), in Arabic, by Miloudi Hamdouchi; L’Inspecteur Dalil à Casablanca, written in French by Soufiane Chakkouche

This article aims to cast light on one of Moroccan women’s cinematic voices:
Narjiss Nejjar. Thanks to her growing filmography, she is nowadays
considered a promising member of women’s film community in the country.
Her debut feature film Al-Oyoun Al-Jaffa (Les Yeux Secs/Dry Eyes, Morocco and
France, 2003) has been widely acclaimed. I argue that this work negotiates
female spectatorship through two main strategies. First, it represents Amazigh
(Berber) women as full-fledged citizens away from any process of eroticisation
or fragmentation. Second, it pushes the spectators, male and female, to
identify with the female characters through this counteractive strategy of
representation. To identify with them, one has to identify with their journeys
of becoming. The film will be closely investigated from a postcolonial vision,
and read against the backdrop of political and social changes that have been
animating the contemporary Moroccan society in the recent decades.

Rethinking Arabic literary modernity, this article addresses what the act of reading means as Morocco moves from manuscript to print. In 1941, a leading figure of Morocco’s nahḍa, al-Tuhāmī al-Wazzānī, began to serialize his autobiography al-Zāwiya in one of the country’s earliest newspapers. Heralded as Morocco’s first novel, the moment marks the inauguration of a new reading public. Yet the text does not rely upon the reconfigured relationship with the reader accompanying the rise of print cultures in much of the Middle East and North Africa. Al-Zāwiya is a Sufi autobiography, a genre that invites its readers to assimilate the actions found within its pages. Al-Wazzānī draws upon this long tradition, using intertextual engagement to create a space of discourse that complicates the presumed secularity of Arabic literature during the nahḍa. Early Moroccan print culture thus provides an opportunity to reconsider the continuities of tradition embedded within modern literary practices.

La tesi presentata in queste pagine ha per oggetto il libro Pūl Buwlz wa ‘uzlat Ṭanğa, testimonianza dello scrittore marocchino Mohamed Choukri sulla vita di Paul Bowles, musicista, autore e traduttore letterario americano, di sua moglie Jane Auer, e di alcuni personaggi del loro entourage.L'obiettivo di questa tesi è fornire un paradigma metodologico per la traduzione dell'intero libro, attraverso continui confronti della mia traduzione, realizzata solo per una parte del libro, con le due precedenti, rispettivamente in francese e in spagnolo, e con gli strumenti teorici a mia disposizione.

Book:  open access:  http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/37329    hardcover: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9781496219633/  Individual chapter files on JSTOR.
"Empire and Catastrophe examines natural and anthropogenic disasters during the years of decolonization in Algeria, Morocco, and France, and explores the ways in which environmental catastrophes both shaped and were shaped by struggles over the dissolution of France’s empire in North Africa. Four disasters make up the core of the book: the 1954 earthquake in Algeria’s Chélif Valley, just weeks before the onset of the Algerian Revolution; a mass poisoning in Morocco in 1959 caused by toxic substances from an American military base; the 1959 Malpasset dam collapse in Fréjus, France, which devastated the Algerian immigrant community in the town but which was blamed on Algerian sabotage; and the 1960 earthquake in Agadir, Morocco, which set off a public relations war between the United States, France, and the Soviet Union, and which ignited a Moroccan national debate over modernity, identity, architecture, and urban planning. Empire and Catastrophe is the first book-length study of environmental disasters during the decolonization of the French empire. Interrogating distinctions between agent and environment and between political and environmental violence, through the lenses of state archives and through the remembered experiences and literary representations of disaster survivors, this book argues for the integration of environmental events into narratives of political and cultural decolonization. Empire and Catastrophe will be sought after by environmental historians and North Africa area studies specialists as well as historians of France and French imperialism. Written in engaging prose, the book will appeal to the broader public’s interest in natural disasters, and will become required reading for undergraduates in courses on natural disasters in world history."

Introduzione In questo lavoro intendo descrivere il sistema d'istruzione marocchi-no al tempo della formazione scolastica della Mernissi, mostrandone i cambiamenti nel tempo e sottolineando il ruolo che la scrittrice attribuisce all'educazione nel processo di emancipazione femminile. Studiosa cresciuta all'interno di due diverse culture, Fatema Mernissi si formò in un periodo in cui in Marocco l'educazione tradizionale si intersecava con quella coloniale francese e con quella nazionalista: fre-quentò la scuola "materna" coranica, la scuola primaria nazionalista e la scuola secondaria francese, poi proseguì gli studi in Francia per tornare, infine, a lavorare in patria. Nel romanzo La Terrazza Proibita troviamo interessanti indicazioni sul rapporto studente-insegnante, quando la scrittrice parla della maestra Làlla Tam e della sua insi-stenza sui sacri confini. L'attenzione in seguito sempre riservata dalla Mernissi alla questione dei confini nasce dall'importanza a essa at-tribuita nella sua educazione, sia in quella scolastica, sia in quella ricevuta nell'harem familiare, in cui il portone rappresentava per le donne, appunto, il confine da non attraversare (Mernissi ). . Fatema Mernissi e l'istruzione in Marocco Fatema Mernissi si formò all'interno del sistema di istruzione ma-rocchino tra il  e il , durante il periodo in cui il Marocco lottava per l'indipendenza, ottenuta nel . Questo la rese un'os-servatrice privilegiata dei cambiamenti che avvennero nel sistema scolastico nazionale in quel periodo, in quanto li visse personalmente. * Università della Calabria. 

Borrowing the concepts of “pornotroping” and “vestibular” from African
American literary criticism, I argue that the Moroccan writer Laila Lalami
has set her female characters as passive reversers of both orientalizing
demotions and misogynistic practices. In registering their objectification as “flesh-only,” that is through mapping the vestibular, these female characters have converged orientalism and misogyny and charted their own liberating subjectivity. The liberation specifies how orthodox Muslim jurisprudence is predicated on violence against femininity. Still, “Pornotroping” cannot function without its dialectical opposite, the vestibular. The latter elicits the amount of demystification carried on by North African gender activists in the manner of mudawana.

Abstract - This article analyses the archaeology in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco throughout its history. After a historical background of the nature and development of Spanish colonialism in North Africa, information about the archaeology in the first years of the Spanish Protectorate in North Morocco are given, both before and after the Civil War. The academic and political manoeuvres that brought a bright young archaeologist to Tétouan, Miguel Tarradell Mateu (or Miquel Tarradell i Mateu, in Catalan), is then discussed. Tarradell’s main successes for the understanding of the historical development of the area up to the end of the Roman period will be contrasted with the way Tarradell felt about living in Africa. The article concludes with a discussion of events after decolonisation and a discussion of the nature of Spanish colonialism in North Morocco and of Spanish academia. The aim of this article, therefore, is not to detail the scientific discussions taking place about interpretation of the past, but the social, political and economic context in which these took place.