Mohamed Berrada’s game of remembering and forgetting: expanding the horizons of contemporary Arabic literature

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article analyses Mohamed Berrada’s novel Luʿbat al-nisyān (1987, The Game of Forgetting, 1996), focusing on the book’s unorthodox narrative design, where multiplicity, metafiction, and fragmentation are strategic tools that bring to light the author’s vision of (post)modernist literature in a postcolonial nation. The article examines how the novel’s compelling experimental quality and efficacious engagement of cultural and socio-political issues are at work, highlighting thereby the text’s commitment overtones. The novel embeds narrative multiplicity and fragmentation within a key dialectic that informs and runs through the entire text: remembering and forgetting. These two acts (remembering and forgetting) provide discursive spheres that enhance the imagination of both the author and the reader, who enter into an unspoken partnership to take the literary text into vast interpretive realms, thus expanding and elevating the horizons of contemporary Moroccan and Arabic literature. Overall, Berrada resorts to quintessentially (post)modernist techniques – such as multiplicity, fragmentation, and metanarrative – anchored in the overarching game/dialectic of remembering and forgetting in order to deliver implicit social and political critique.