Moroccan Nation-building and the Bildungsroman in ʿAbd al-Karīm Ghallāb's Dafannā al-Māḍī and al-Muʿallim ʿAlī

Abstract

Despite some recent recognition for his novels, the Moroccan novelist, ʿAbd al-Karīm Ghallāb (b. 1917) has been considered, at best, a minor figure in the canon of 20th-century post-colonial writers in Arabic. However, I argue here that we should reconsider two of his nationalist novels, Dafannā al-Māḍī (We Buried the Past) and al-Muʿallim ʿAlī (Master ʿAli), as critical examples of ways in which mid-century novelists engaged in important questions of both domestic and international development on social and political levels. His works highlight important social themes, such as the status of women and entrenched racism, while also providing a coherent construction of national identity through a combination of ideological and historical trajectories. We see this primarily through the lives and progress of each work's primary protagonist; one from the class of local social elite in Fes, Morocco, and the other from the disenfranchised lower class in that same city. He does this by creating works that draw on both European (the Bildungsroman) and Arabic (the mudhakkirāt [memoirs]) literary models. This study places his novels within the larger canon of works written in Arabic in this time period and argues for increased study of his unique social vision, a vision that includes not only political and economic independence from the French colonial regime but also for a radical reconsideration of traditional social thought—namely, for more independence for women, the dismantling of the ossified class system, and a rejection of ingrained racial discrimination.