The Moroccan city: a quest for cultural memory in Francophone and Arabophone contemporary literature

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on representations of the city in 20th- and twenty-first-century Moroccan literature. In particular, this work concerns itself with the different social, historical, and political forces that together contribute to the construction of urban spaces, and it draws on a number of critical and theoretical fields, including cultural memory studies and literary studies, while at the same time considering different contemporary Moroccan urban structures from a spatio-temporal perspective. More precisely, this article addresses the city in Medieval, colonial, and postcolonial Morocco as a territory of individual and collective memory in Fās … Law cĀdat Ilayh (2003) (If Fez Returned to Him), a novel by Aḥmad al-Madīnī, and Le griot de Marrakech (2005), (The Griot of Marrakesh), a collection of short stories by Mahi Binebine. This study examines various cultural monuments, including the imperial city gates, the Mellah (Jewish quarter), texts both North African and Andalusi, and historical personalities, insofar as they function as lieux de mémoire according to Pierre Nora’s usage of the term. These components of Moroccan cultural heritage function as manifestations of history through memory, rooted both in material and immaterial figures, and constitute national identity: an interfaith, multiethnic, and pluri-linguistic Morocco.