Moroccan Literature

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.

¡Otra vez aquí! Después de tres números de la revista, innumerables entradas tanto en la web como en facebook, comentarios en el twitter y un sinfín de desvelos, seguimos en la brecha sin desfallecer gracias a vuestra fidelidad que nos insufla, día a día, moral y fuerzas para seguir adelante.

Brújula óptima para tomar el pulso a la vitalidad de las relaciones hispano-marroquíes, la traducción nos muestra que, pese a las supuestamente privilegiadas relaciones -históricas, políticas, económicas y humanas-, durante las décadas transcurridas desde la independencia de Marruecos en 956 los flujos de traducción resultan más bien limitados. Hasta el año 2006 se han traducido al castellano unas cien obras de autores marroquíes. De acuerdo con esta cifra, podría parecer que hay una importante presencia de autores marroquíes traducidos al español, pero esa aparente abundancia es sobre todo fruto de fenómenos editoriales como Tahar Ben Jelloun o Fátima Mernissi, con veinte y diez obras respectivamente. En realidad, la presencia de las expresiones literaria y ensayística marroquíes en el panorama bibliográfico español es escasa, evidenciando unas relaciones inmaduras y descompensadas.

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!

The purpose of this article is to explore the possible meanings of the notion of roman maghr ebin in the Moroccan context. The phrase has been a dynamic concept since it was coined by Khatibi in the 1960s, and has changed along with transformations in Moroccan society and the development of the genre. Since the 1980s the novel has become one of the most relevant phenomena in the Moroccan cultural field. Already aware of the dynamic nature of literary genres and "national" cultures, Khatibi's visionary insights seem to contain all the elements of the cultural future of Morocco. With this in mind, I will explore how the novel and the critical debates around it reflect new perceptions of the national sphere in the twenty-first century.

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 essay develops key connections along lateral axes with other Moroccan litera- tures written in Castilian/spanish, Catalan, and English through a transcolonial per- spective. The unprecedented social and political developments that are taking place in  Morocco  today  have  also  generated  a  renewed  interest  in  the  country’s  literary production.  instead  of  regarding  the  writings  of  Moroccan  nationals  as  part  of Maghrebi literature, critics are now becoming more sensitive to the unique features of  this  literature,  against  the  backdrop  of  a  colonial  and  postcolonial  history  that  is markedly  different  from  that  of  the  two  other  countries  of  the  reduced  Maghreb: Algeria and Tunisia.1 Literary fiction texts can serve as evidence in a similar fashion as  empirically  based  political  or  social  observations;  processes  represented  within and  implicit  around  fictional  works,  which  can  be  discerned  by  a  reader  or  inter- preter, convey a reality or veracity about their geopolitical locations that is germane as[to],  say,  statistical  data  or  sociological  field  work  or  political  reports  (Gupta, “Literary studies” 873).

This article analyzes how Moroccan authors write today in their own dialect. Publications in Moroccan Arabic are rare: however, it seems that in the last years the situation is changing and Moroccan writers are beginning to pay more attention to their mother tongue, a language which allows them to reach better expressivity and more realism.

Al-Andalus or Andalucía which means “The land of the vandals" or "to become green at the end of the summer" is referred to the territory occupied by the Moroccan Muslim empire in Southern Spain. It is the most populated and the second largest in area of the autonomous communities in Spain. The Andalusia autonomous community is officially recognized as a nationality of Spain which refers to the cities of The territory is divided into eight provinces: Almería, Cádiz, Córdoba, Granada, Huelva, Jaén, Málaga and Seville. Its capital is the city of Seville (Spanish: Sevilla).This civilization spanned the eighth to the fifteenth century. In 711, Arabs crossed the strait of Gibraltar (derived from 'Jabal Al-Tariq': 'Mountain of Tariq') and established control over much of the Iberian Peninsula. The Arab conquest, Muslims called the area of the Iberian Peninsula they occupied, "Al-Andalus". This land called AlAndalus, hence often called "Andalusia" had at one point included Portugal, Southern France, and the Balearic Islands. Within 4 years, in 714, Muslims had occupied almost all the peninsula. Muslims crossed to Sicily and established control there for 130 years, until Muslim rule fell in 1091 to the Normans. Muslims also established rule in parts of France, but they were soon defeated by Charles Martel in 756, in which remains today one of the greatest victories for Christian Europe for bringing a halt to Islam's expansion. The Muslims who arrived and settled in Andalus were called "Moors," ('dark') a corrupt and negative term referring to the people who came from Morocco. They themselves, however, did not use the term to refer to themselves.

A few years after Morocco's much longed-for achievement of independence (1956), a new generation of intellectuals too young to have participated in what is widely called the nationalist movement burst onto the cultural and political scenes, and shifted the focus of debate from the "glorious" past towards social and international realities. The 1960s witnessed the appearance of a diverse group of political, scientific and especially cultural and literary journals that changed the course of intellectual life in Morocco. The creation of these new channels of expression out of the emerging institutions of independent Morocco meant a rupture with the prevailing patterns dominated by nationalist and salafī ideals. This article intends to highlight the role and spirit of these generally overlooked journals within their contextual and historical framework.

This chapter introduces the development and history of the Oral-Formulaic Theory and discusses its main findings and principles. It then describes the attempts to apply this theory to materials, not only to the ancient Greek epics and former Yugoslav poetry as was originally done, but also to Classical Arabic and dialectal Arabic poetry. It briefly treats the history of studying formulaic language in linguistics and touches on differences and similarities between approaches to formulaicity in the fields of literature and linguistics. The chapter also tells the reader about the history of literacy studies, stressing two theories, namely, the Theory of the Great Divide and the New Literacies Studies. It then describes the situation of literacy in the Arab world in general and Morocco in particular, paying special attention to bilingualism, which is an intrinsic characteristic of native speakers of Arabic. Finally, the chapter clarifies the current state of affairs regarding the ideas of Albert Lord, the founding father of the Formulaic Studies, about the negative impact of literacy on formulaicity.

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.

One of Morocco's most important novels is also a window into the unaddressed tension between Casablanca's center and its marginal bidonvilles. The city's public spaces and streets remain prescribed with an ordering of belonging and not belonging. Zafzaf's novel continues to resonate as a text that makes Casablanca's bidonvilles and their relation to the city center legible, providing crucial insight into the complexity of the city's lived realities.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/15525864-2886532

This article presents an analysis of the Moroccan writer Leila Abouzeid’s Rujuʿ ila altufula
(1993; Return to Childhood: The Memoir of a Modern Moroccan Woman, 1998) through the
prism of relational theories of autobiography. It exposes narrative strategies of voice and
language to bring out the autobiographical subject’s struggle to identify with and against
authority figures while forging her own voice. It highlights Abouzeid’s mother’s powerful
presence voicing indigenous and traditional perspectives and the father’s silent (and silenced)
voice, despite his patriarchal dominance. It unfolds the dynamics of “giving voice” to Abouzeid’s
illiterate mother and grandmother while challenging the content and principles
underlying their utterances. These dynamics are further complicated by her father’s formative
yet problematic political stances. The final section discusses Abouzeid’s engagement with
tensions triggered by colonial encounters and postcolonial nation building.

Tracing both the critical relevance and translational migration of Mikhail Bakhtin's 1935 essay " Discourse in the Novel " in the Maghreb, this essay explores the theoretical landscape of the roman maghr ebin over the last 50 years with a particular emphasis on Morocco. Focusing on the critical concepts of heteroglossia and heterology, it argues that the Arabophone and Francophone Maghrebi novel continues to be written and theorized as pluralistic, polyphonic, and polysemic. The roman maghr ebin thus disrupts those monoglossic and monolithic assumptions that inform a view of the novel as the genre par excellence for the hegemonic institutionalization of national identity, language, and literature. As such, the roman mag ebin relies upon a literary-critical poetics of opacity and untranslatability that in turn engenders particular reading practices and publics. This rendering of the novel as always already under translation, and yet untranslatable, further serves to destabilize not only the formal category of the novel, but also false binaries of the secular/sacred, personal/political and private/public.

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....

This article examines two literary responses to the prison experience in Morocco. These responses-Abdellatif Laâbi's Le chemin des ordalies (Path of Ordeals) and Khadija Marouazi's S ırat al-ram ad (Biography of Ashes)-seek to subvert the dominant discourse of the state through various narrative strategies including the use of storytelling techniques, shifting point of view, multiple narrators, and the inclusion of multiple languages and linguistic registers in the text. By way of literature, Laâbi and Marouazi expand the range of voices that are narrating the story of Morocco's 'Lead Years', and thus are contributing to a multi-voiced narrative of reconciliation with the past, and suggesting ways of moving forward.

Through a comparative study of Muḥammad Shukrī (Choukri) and Jean Genet, this article situates Shukrī as a “world writer” who utilizes a poetics of inversion to call socially constituted discourses of authority into question. Like Genet, this aesthetic strategy allows him to uncover the systemic and symbolic forms of violence endemic in his society. Beyond their autobiographical narratives, Shukrī’s only published play, al-Saʻādah (Happiness), is interpreted next to Genet’s philosophy of theater to illustrate the way in which their dramatic texts work to confront their respective audiences with their own complicity in the perpetuation of unjust social hierarchies.

This paper reviews ten historical-literary Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew works written late in the Second World War in Morocco: eight works I refer to as praise poems, by Moroccan Jews; one work I refer to as lament, written by a Jewish European refugee who found a safe wartime haven in Morocco, and another work, which I refer to as a utopian treatise, by a local Jewish man. All ten works were inspired by the war and recount its course in Europe, Asia and North Africa, while some also engage with the Holocaust. The comparison drawn here between the works – praise poetry, lament and utopian treatise – allows us to examine the authors’ various outlooks on the war, informed by their personal, familial or communal experience. These outlooks assume an actual form in the literary patterns of the authors’ works, as well as in the narratives, contents and ideas selected to feature in them. The reception varied among the Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew speaking community, in which a Jewish religious and modern national presence was predominant. Therefore, contents that had a universal concern were pushed to the margins of the local discourse.

This article examines the critical work of Rachida Benmassoud about female writing (kitaba nisa'iyya). Benmassoud is a feminist Moroccan scholar, whose literary criticism focuses on the relationship between women and writing. Through her work, she challenges the masculine, nationalist and paracolonial features of the Moroccan literary canon, and promotes the incorporation of the contribution of women writers into the cultural and intellectual realm. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the role of female literary criticism and its projection on the formation of Moroccan postcolonial identity. In approaching the canon, the article draws on literary canon theory as well as on postcolonial studies and feminist theory. In addition to this, the evolution of the role of women in the making of Moroccan identity and the way in which this process has been reflected on national literature is explored. Lastly, from this multifocal theoretical framework, the article analyzes the first work by Rachida Benmassoud, al-Mar'a wa-l-kitaba (1994, Woman and writing). Benmassoud's essay represents an important step in the recognition of women writers as an essential part of the Moroccan cultural realm. The feminization of the Moroccan literary canon through studies like this and the new ways to question literary texts proposed by Moroccan female critics constitutes also an opportunity for the decolonization of the canon.

This paper sets out to examine the social implications and functions of the contemporary body of gay Moroccan literature against Maria Pia Lara's readings of the creation and reception of literary works in the public sphere. Through a (re)reading of novels by Rachid O. and Abdellah Taïa, it is argued that these novels offer a privileged space that is not simply a metalinguistic and autonomous edifice, but also a means through which individual, societal and cultural self-assessment and comprehension can be affected in the domain of quotidian life. Ultimately, and possibly more importantly, this paper asserts that gay literary narratives reveal the heterogeneity of lived experiences, thereby producing innovative ways of considering sexuality which cannot be simply overlooked or invalidated. These narratives thus propose an alternative public-sphere which challenges hegemonic Moroccan norms and value systems.

Historically, education has always been the springboard for socioeconomic development of nations. Undoubtedly, education proved to be the catalyst of change and the front wagon that drives with it all the other wagons pertaining to other dynamic sectors. In effect, the role of education can be seen to provide pupils with the curriculum and hidden curriculum skills alike; teaching skills that will prepare them physically, mentally and socially for the world of work in later life. In Morocco, the country spends over 26% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on education. Unfortunately, though this number is important, Moroccan education (primary, secondary and higher education alike) still suffers from the mismatch between the state expenditures on education and the general product in reality. In this article, an attempt is made to touch on some relevant issues pertaining to higher education with special reference to Morocco. First, it provides some tentative definitions, mission and functions of university and higher education. Second, it gives a historical sketch of the major reforms that took place in Morocco as well as the major changes pertaining to these reforms respectively. Third, it provides a general overview of the history of higher education in Morocco, it also tackles an issue related to governance in higher education which is cost sharing. Fourth, it delves into the history of English Language Teaching (ELT), lists some characteristics of the English Departments in Morocco. Fifth, it discusses the issue of private vs. public higher education. Last, but not least, it tackles the issue of Brain Drain.

Resumen: La aparición a principios de los setenta del grupo Nass El Ghiwane supuso, además de una revolución musical, un auténtico fenómeno social y cultural, incluso político. Nass El Ghiwane trastocó la forma y los contenidos de la música popular marroquí, innovando la tradición hasta convertirse en símbolo de la nueva cultura marroquí. La peripecia vital de sus componentes, a veces trágica, ha contribuido a forjar aún más la leyenda de una de las bandas más importantes de finales del siglo XX.

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.

Fourteen kilometers." With these two words indicating the distance between the North African shore and Spain, Moroccan-American writer Laila Lalami sets her collection of short stories Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005) in the Strait of Gibraltar and the figurative space that lies between the two cultures. The wreckage of a patera, a rickety boat used by immigrants in this boundary water, serves as the point of departure for her stories, and this event situates the Strait as an important spatial metaphor for referencing the complex relation between the Maghreb and Europe in contemporary literature. This geographical setting functions metaphorically as a way to signal a narratological discourse that goes beyond the confinement of neatly defined borders-whether these borders are understood in geographical, political or cultural terms-in favor of expressing the conflicting dilemmas of subjects compelled to live in contact with the diverse social and cultural realities on both sides of the Strait. Thus, this geographical referent serves as the paradigm to represent the interconnection of two cultural and political realities that, like the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, are in constant motion. The Strait, which Lara N. Dotson-Renta has defined as a "nebulous space between the two coasts" (429), represents the site where historically eastern and western influences have mixed. In that regard, the Strait serves as an important metaphor in contemporary narratives to challenge the essentialist concept of identity that Edward Said identified as paramount to the construction of "Orientalist" ideology (26).

The aim of this paper is the study of some recent Moroccan prison writings as a practice in the politics of memory. Of particular interest is the significance of the different dimensions of the subject of this prison-writing; namely, the modes of memorialization, the cultivation of religiosity inside the jail and its relationship to the social fabric outside the jail, the methods of resistance developed by the prisoners to stand torture and secure survival, and – last but not least -- the nature of the prison as a State apparatus (a Panopticon) endowed with a particular socio-politico-religious corrective mission that looks after the nature of imprisoned subjects who have wandered off “the right path.”  The historical juncture that these writings are concerned with is post-independence Morocco, a period that has become known (in the language of Moroccan Human Rights culture) as “the Years of Lead” ("sanawaat arrassaass" in Arabic, or "les années de plomb" in French).  Within this framework, other sociopolitical and cultural issues of postcolonial Morocco emerge in this rich and impressive prison literature. Beside its role in securing individual survival and the impulse to reveal the truth about a crucial moment in the history of the Country, this literature presents a detailed view of the prisoners' tragedy and their metamorphosis, both physiologically due to torture and spiritually in terms of revising their attitudes towards a number of religious, human, philosophical, political and personal issues.  The return to religiosity in the prisons should have been read as a forecast of the religious upheals to come in the 21st century.

The purpose of this article consists in to re-conceptualising the idea of an Amazigh literature with regard to the transnational and plurilingual experiences from which it arises. Along these lines, the second generation of Amazigh writers born in the Netherlands – and/or those who migrated when they were children – rejects the label of writing ethnic literature, and/or being categorised under the umbrella of Dutch authors of Moroccan descent.

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.

This PhD thesis is preoccupied with an investigation of Moroccan author and cineaste Abdellah Taïa’s creative writing and public performances as expressions of both political commitment and aesthetic innovation. Since Taïa came out publicly in 2006, he has achieved almost iconic status as the “first” Moroccan with the courage to defy the anti-homosexuality laws and lay claim to his homosexuality in public. This status has, on the one hand, opened up a space for him to write about “marginal sexualities” and push for the recognition of LGBT rights. But on the other, it has tended to elevate him to the position of being “exceptional,” thus neglecting to account for how his coming-out interview relates to the public debate and LGBT activism in Morocco, or how his creative writing relates to a larger postcolonial tradition of committed writing. Moreover, confronted with the risk of becoming a “token Arab homosexual,” Taïa has been forced to navigate through a minefield of stereotypes—whether stereotypical conceptions of “authentic Arab sexuality,” stereotypical readings of autobiographical literature as ethnographic material, or stereotypical conceptions of French as a language of civilizational and sexual emancipation. I this respect, I argue that Taïa’s narrations of the “self-absorbed” as a site of queer commitment function as significant sites of aesthetic innovation and as multilayered sites of subversion.

In choosing a multidisciplinary and comparative approach the purpose of this research project has been to investigate how texts are brought to articulate meaning in particular discursive spaces. Thus by tracing the changes in Moroccan literature from the so-called ethnographic novel and the so-called novel of acculturation of the 1950s, through the literary avant-gardism of the 1960s–1980s, to a “naive realist literature of dissent” since the 1990s, this PhD thesis investigates how Taïa writes in dialogue with earlier and contemporary literary, linguistic, cultural, social and political practices. Whereas transgression of heteronormativity is the most obvious theme in Taïa’s novels, a comparative and multidisciplinary approach may reveal that his literary works are palimpsestuous layers of commitment—whether to dismantling the dichotomy between “authentic” culture and “universal” rights, to subverting the relation between fiction and fact, to deconstructing the language of the rich through the language of the “poor,” or to new efforts at rewriting Moroccan history in order to include the stories of those who have not been considered part of national recovery.