Writing the Multilingual in Maghrebi Literature

Abstract

Abstract Maghrebi literatures have been always approached from the lenses of colonial hegemony, either as postcolonial “Francophone” literatures, or as marginalized “derivative” literatures that mimic the “belle lettres.” Maghrebi literatures, however, offer a critical and highly crucial exercise to question and rethink the recent debates regarding the problematics of world literature. The main objective of this study is to intervene in the recent critical debates in the disciplines of comparative literature and world literature, with the postulates of a literary multilingualism that necessitates the task of rethinking the critical standards with which these disciplines approach literatures of the world. Writing the multilingual makes us think of the literary positionality of being a multilingual. This positionality is never understood without rethinking the very poetical and aesthetical dimensions of multilingual writing experience. Writing the multilingual highlights the imaginative space as a poetic factor that generates and evaluates those inner voices, images, rhythms, tensions, and memories as significant determinant of multilingual literatures. It rethinks in a sense what is common between languages of the same tongue. Furthermore, it transcends the linguistic barriers that avoid the realization of public sphere where all languages can meet and negotiate. In other words, writing the multilingual – literarily speaking – is making the realization of this shared space be possible, but also, it gives to the marginalized and subaltern spaces an opportunity to share its voiced world values.