Aḥmad al-Madīnī: a poetics of dissent

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues that the subversive overtones in Aḥmad al-Madīnī's novel Zaman bayna l-wilāda wa l-ḥulm (Time between Birth and Dream, 1974) target two distinct poles of authority, textual and extra-textual. The novel adopts what I call “a poetics of dissent,” with a penchant for rebellion against the classical Arabic novel-seen as a subset of the European realist novel-and the Arab-Moslem heritage. Published a few years after the 1967 Naksa, and two failed coups d'état in 1971 and 1972 in Morocco, the novel paints a gloomy picture of life in Morocco and the Arab world. The novel's experimental gymnastics is an attempt to achieve a formal shift in literary technique and an ideological shift in the politics of literary representation. A politization of form that goes hand in hand with a formalization of politics emerges as a critical dialectic in Zaman and by extension Moroccan experimental literature post-Independence.