Maghrebian Mosaic: A Literature in Transition

Abstract

Mildred Mortimer, ed. Maghrebian Mosaic A Literature in Transition. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001. vii + 325 pp. Bibliography. Index. $59.95. Cloth. This volume focuses on Maghrebian literature of French expression in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, exploring the works of Maghrebian writers who negotiate their colonial legacy in literature. These writers, according to Mortimer, the colonizer's language as a revolutionary tool to express an ideology and aesthetics of difference (3-4). Berber speakers and writers are several times removed from a Francophone context, as is the official language of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, competing with French. The volume deals with two eras: the movement of resistance to colonialism, and the postcolonial search for identity. Especially important in these essays is the issue of cultural pluralism, which is palpable in each of the four sections dealing with identity, internality, women's views, and Algerians resident in France. In Inscribing a Maghrebian Identity in Farida Abu-Haidar examines cultural plurality in French, Arabic, and Berber contexts in both content and mode of expression. She demonstrates that the French-Arabic struggle leaves Maghrebian fiction outside the realm of a wider Western context, in which English is now the dominant language. Some Maghreb writers lack fluency in Arabic, while others Arabicize French in their writings, creating a Maghrebian French word order resembling syntax. Other authors feel free to express themselves in Arabic, unconstrained by cultural prohibitions against self-revelation inherent in the language of the Qur'an. Rachid Boudjedra's novels often appear in both languages, with versions of the novel differing according to its mode of expression: Dialogue in tends to be longer... [and] family matters are given in detail in but not in French... [while] names of well-known Europeans... are usually omitted in the Arabic (17). Abu-Haidar also cites examples of the symbolic use of colonial language in the works of several other Maghrebian authors, explaining the ways in which language depicts multiculturality and characters respond to a variety of cultural and historical influences. Richard Serrano's chapter on the novels of Rachid Boudjedra underlines the difficulty of separating culture from language; translation involves a shifting of concepts into different cultural contexts. In exploring the bilingual success of Boudjedra's French and writings, Serrano raises the crucial question of language as the key to cultural access, as a political tool, and as the determinant of personal identity. His incisive analysis of metaphors working more successfully in one language than another illuminates the cultural limitations of a range of related terms and clarifies the need in translation to create parallel multivalent images in the second language. This means that translation is effective only to the degree that the work's context is understood in the culture of each language. Translation's limits occur at the points of cultural divergence. Having understood this makes the success of Boudjedra's translations of his own French works into and works into French all the more remarkable. One hesitates to wish for an English translation after experiencing Serrano's energetic explanation of the complexity of the translation process. Boudjedra's work is described further, along with that of the Moroccan writer Abdel Kadir Khatabi, in Giles Carjuzaa's essay on the confluence of modernity and tradition. Defining tradition as what comes from within a culture and modernity as what is imposed from without, Carjuzaa offers a rich array of examples in which the Maghrebian writers draw on the past to reinterpret their contemporary circumstances, particularly in terms of women's roles, rebels' activities, and the realization of linguistic/cultural autonomy in a culture. …