Conference panel @ XVI SeSaMO Conference
Crossings and contaminations. Practices, languages and politics in transit in the Middle East and North Africa
Università degli Studi di Cagliari Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche e Sociali
3-5 ottobre 2024
In Le roman maghrébin (1979), Abdelkébir Khatibi claims that writing fiction is deploying “un ensemble d’attitudes” vis-à-vis both the extra-textual reality and the writing itself. Every literary work, in fact, is a description of the world and a piece of meta-literature at once. Moreover, from Khatibi’s postcolonial point of view, Moroccan (and Maghrebi) literature also participates in the nation building process, creating imaginaries and (re)designing national boundaries. But which kind of imaginaries and boundaries does Moroccan literature create today?
In the 1960s, after a couple of decades in which the Maghrebi novel had grown within the French novel, the window of experimental fiction opened up. The formalistic, experimental, and (to some extent) self-referential dimension of the text, which had found in narratology and structuralist literary criticism a faithful ally – or, as critic Yaḥyà bin al-Walīd (2012) calls it, “a religion” – in the 1980s, seems to have been almost completely eclipsed today, so much that some Moroccan writers complain about the blowup of bulky historical novels at the expenses of any other novelistic forms. Moroccan critics (and writers), however, have never renounced to considering the novel as a part of the social structure (Fernández Parrilla 2006). As a young Moroccan writer puts it, “the Moroccan novel keeps clinging on realism, yet it does not shy away from inventing marvellous worlds” (Ballūṭ 2023).
Following global aesthetic trends and circulation patterns influenced by the material dynamics of the cultural industry, today’s Moroccan novel in Arabic is experiencing a revival of the great narratives that postmodern literature had somewhat disdained. The Arabic historical novel has made a resounding comeback into the limelight in recent years (Boustani et al. 2022), even hybridized with new forms, such as what scholars have called the “maximalist novel” (Ercolino 2015), the new epic, and so on. The pan-Arab literary prizes of the Gulf, which encourage the “grand narratives” at the expense of the Deleuzian “minor literature”, can be also listed among the causes for the resurgence of such genres.
At the same time as this trend seems to be consolidating, Moroccan literature is also giving place to “other” narratives. After the end of the Years of Lead and the start of the civil reconciliation process at the beginning of the third millennium, the need to record the repression and state violence suffered, as well as to build “other-archives” (El Guabli 2023) that would compensate for the “memory lapses” of official archives, became increasingly pressing. And so became the urge of giving voice to phenomena with high social impact such as migration, racism, and the rediscovery of other indigenous identities after the end of the postcolonial season of Arabisation. In this trend, feminist issues and the role of women have also become increasingly present in Moroccan literature. The first two decades of the 21st century have witnessed a raise both in the publication of women’s writing and in the attention drawn by it. A trend of feminist literary criticism initiated in the 1990s has experienced a considerable push in the past decades, bringing forward debates that explore the implications of the relationship between women and writing and promoting the study of writing by women free from misogynistic perspectives (Binmasʿūd 1994, 2006; Kurrām 2004; al-Madagrī 2009; Labṣīr 2013; al-Nāṣir 2014. 2016; Kaddū 2014; Brāhima 2019; Būqafṭān 2021). As for the new novels published by women, they are both reviving older yet not-surpassed motives, such as the participation of women during the Years of Lead, and reflecting newer issues related to individual freedoms and sexuality, amongst other matters that became more present in the public debate after the Arab Spring. Finally, it is necessary to mention the increasing interest in fiction and poetry written in Tamazight, witnessed – for instance – by the recent establishment of the Tamazgha Studies Journal (2023), which also testifies the progressive expansion of Maghrebi studies in English.
Thus, one of the keywords of the new Moroccan novel in Arabic seems to be representation in its double meaning of portraying reality and giving someone a voice – the latter point especially referring to minoritised gendered subjectivities, subaltern social classes, oppressed political entities, racialised individuals or groups, and so on. While the interest in the referential world is revived and realism is resurgent, what this label contains is nonetheless everchanging: narratives with strong national connotations, but in which the structure of the nation is enlarged, expanded, pluralised, under the banner of the recognition of the ever new and different elements that make it up. The conception of what is considered as “Moroccan literature” has been enlarged in the past few decades, to encompass literature not only written in different languages, but also produced from different geographies (Fernández Parrilla and Calderwood 2021). The polyphony becomes extremely rich and varied, as much at the level of individual works as at the level of the literary field. The Moroccan novel, more precisely, can be conceived as an intersection of fields whose primary boundaries run along the lines of the written language – Arabic, French, Spanish and, more recently, Tamazight and English – but are not limited to it. The picture that emerges is that of a plural and extremely diverse ecosystem where different languages, traditions, themes, and audiences coexist, and where one of the challenges for scholars is that of “reading together” (Laachir 2016) these articulated and multilayered writings.
This panel aims to bring out the new trajectories of fiction in contemporary Morocco, exploring how representation with its double-edged meaning is at work in different genres, themes, and modes of expression. Proposals may focus on:
- novel and short story
- poetry
- graphic novel
- literary criticism
- women’s writing
- Moroccan literature beyond Arabic and French
- literary prizes
- book circulation mechanisms inside and outside Morocco
- book market and the publishing industry
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References
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