Touria Nakkouch: A Moroccan Vociferous Poetess Spelling Out her Gendered Voice Anew

Abstract

Few are those Arab poetesses whose voices have made an outreach beyond their locale. Touria Nakkouch, an outspoken Moroccan poetess from the city of Agadir, and a university professor of comparative literature, is one of them. In her maiden collection of poems entitled The Dance of the Moon, published in Casablanca in 2009, professor Nakkouch braves the traditional, worn-out Establishment of Morocco and the Arab World by initiating a disquieting feminist monologue in search of a constructive dialogue with the other gender in a world punctuated by masculine hegemony. She redefines her own gender and feminist identity in a reluctant discourse embedded in an internal monologue which seems to transmit various messages addressed to the powerful other. This paper looks at the discursive features of one of her poems entitled “Musings Before Birth”, in which she ascribes to herself the voice of a stubborn fetus resisting to be born into a world a female newborn is almost unwelcome as a guest. To this effect, the paper uses a discourse analysis approach, informed by positioning theory, to uncover the multi-layered feminist message implied in the text to create a gender-focused understanding of the audience. Keywords: Nakkouch, establishment, discourse, positioning, dialogue, monologue, feminist