Moroccan Author Research Articles

<em>Francophone Voices of the ““New”” Morocco in Film and Print: (Re)presenting a Society in Transition</em>, by Valéérie K. Orlando

Reviewed by: Francophone Voices of the “New” Morocco in Film and Print: (Re)presenting a Society in Transition Katarzyna Pieprzak Francophone Voices of the “New” Morocco in Film and Print: (Re)presenting a Society in Transition Valérie K. Orlando New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Valérie Orlando’s book presents voices from contemporary literature and film that are rarely engaged outside of Morocco. In introducing, summarizing, and analyzing these often fascinating texts, Orlando also presents vivid visions of post-Hassan II Moroccan society and the challenges it faces. Perhaps the most important part of this book is its very idea—that works of fiction written in Morocco and published by small local publishing houses deserve and require critical attention. Firstly, this is a most welcome departure from the focus on canonic North African francophone writers that still often exists in American and French universities. In its treatment of authors such as Rida Lamrini, Touria Oulehri, Fatna El Bouih, Abdellah Taïa, Fouad Laroui, and Youssef Elalamy, the book joins a corpus of critical work that is interested in Moroccan francophone literature beyond Tahar Ben Jelloun. Secondly, the book counters a discourse of prestige politics often reproduced in Morocco that claims that local publishing houses are vanity presses, and that Parisian publishers set the mark of quality and taste. Orlando’s book demonstrates how small publishing houses produce timely and sometimes exquisite work that, free of the encouraged exoticism from the French publishing world, can serve as “an imperative link to future debates on reform, modernity, and cultural transitions” (xvi). In the introduction, Orlando presents a useful history of three generations of francophone writing in Morocco in order to contextualize the third and most recent generation that the book primarily addresses. This third generation, she argues, has broken with nationalist discourse in order to articulate relationships between the marginalized individual and on-going transformations in contemporary Moroccan society (14). Orlando’s approach throughout the book is to show how these third-generation authors function as activists, producing literary and filmic texts that engage contemporary societal debates about gender, political reform, human rights abuse, and, more generally, the role of the individual in the future of the country: “The Moroccan author and/or journalist (some are both) rarely writes without some connection to a sociocultural project that s/he hopes will alter the way citizens think about the ongoing sociopolitical and cultural developments taking place in the country” (130–31). In this light, Orlando devotes significant attention to the work of writers invested in giving voice to and [End Page 197] remembering the abuses of the Lead Years in Morocco, and to works that map the transformations of gender and sexuality in the country. She also presents a chapter on writers who articulate a new humanism that surpasses the nation’s borders. While Orlando draws on Moroccan literary criticism in her presentation of recent works, surprisingly the main theoretical reference point in her discussion of activism and humanism throughout the book is Jean-Paul Sartre. While Sartre’s “engaged public intellectual” may work for the book, it is a choice that requires some justification, considering the numerous models of engaged intellectuals that exist in an African context. In this regard Orlando’s book is symptomatic of francophone studies in general where the theoretical apparatus is too often routed through French theory and literature, and sustained engagement with interdisciplinary African studies or recent theory emerging from anthropology and cultural studies is regrettably absent. While the wide scope of the book doesn not allow for extensive engagement with each work or its aesthetic choices, Orlando succeeds in documenting how recent fiction and film represent contemporary issues in Moroccan society, and in this regard, provides a valuable roadmap to post-1999 Moroccan cultural production. Katarzyna Pieprzak Williams College kpieprza@williams.edu Copyright © 2011 Indiana University Press

The Plural Conjugation of Nadia in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Les Raisins de la galère

During her 2007 presidential campaign, Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, was asked to comment on solutions to the continuing violence in the immigrant-dominated suburbs of French cities. She responded by asserting, somewhat enigmatically, that the suburbs ‘ne doivent plus être considérés comme un problème mais comme une partie de la solution aux problèmes qu’a la France’ (France 2, 2007a). Her response pulls into focus a desirable change in attitude towards immigrants that reveals a shift away from the condemnatory reactions of the past to a more constructive approach to their presence — one that privileges the positive contribution they make to the plural society that is modern France. I would like to explore further this notion of accentuating the positive by examining a text by Moroccan author, Tahar Ben Jelloun, whose ‘récit’, Les Raisins de la galère (1996),1 explores the trials and tribulations of Nadia, a young woman of Algerian descent. Nadia is featured attempting to come to terms with her own plural identity, while working tirelessly to improve the lives of others like herself whose identities have had, in the past, to be negotiated around the historically rigid definition of what it is to be French.

Amours inter-dites: allers (et retours) Maroc-France

Rachid O and Abdellah Taa are Moroccan authors whose works and lives have much in common. Their texts often identified as novels on the title page are autobiographical, and recount their sexual awakening, first under the influence of a member of their family, and then with Europeans. This awakening to love goes hand in hand with their initiation to European culture. Though both authors have warm memories of their childhood, they cannot complete their sexual awakening in Morocco. While Europe is indispensable to the affirmation of their sexual identity, their day-to-day relationship with their new environment is sometimes difficult.

Research on Spectroscopy in Morocco from 1984 to 2006

The evolution of spectroscopy‐based research activity in Morocco was evaluated on the basis of publications that have appeared in the Science Citation Index, Expanded (SCI), during the cumulative period 1984–2006 (September). The most active research groups, and their universities or centers, were identified in this subject from their scientific production in the first years of this century. The preference to publish in specific journals, the main areas of interest to Moroccan authors, and the spectroscopy techniques most commonly employed for their studies were also appraised. This scientometric study was undertaken to introduce a group of papers in a special issue of Spectroscopy Letters on Moroccan research in spectroscopy.

Picturing the Maghreb: Literature, Photography, (Re)Presentation (review)

Reviewed by: Picturing the Maghreb: Literature, Photography, (Re)Presentation Hélène Tissières Picturing the Maghreb: Literature, Photography, (Re)Presentation by Mary B. Vogl Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. 227 pp. ISBN 0-7425-1546X paper. Picturing the Maghreb is a very well-grounded literary study of contemporary French and North African writers that analyzes the use and impact of photography in their novels set in the Maghreb. Mary Vogl discusses in depth the power of photography that is known to transmit misleading information, simulating a depiction of reality: "Among the visual media, photography is one of the most powerful means of [End Page 189] representation because of its immediacy and also its supposed objectivity, the illusion of reality, and factuality that it provides the viewer [. . .]" (3). She reminds the reader of the exploitation of images by the colonizer, who most often chose to present an exotic view of North Africa, appropriating the Other to express a personal fantasy, promoting long-lasting clichés that to this day have devastating effects. She also recalls the Maghrebian cultural approach, which has been known to demonstrate a strong reticence towards images. While considering the numerous debates around the use of photography, she challenges the way writers turn to pictures, examining their positions towards such a powerful and manipulative representation. In order to do so, she refers to a wide number of recent critical studies and theoretical essays on photography (Barthes, Baudrillard, Berger, Sontag, and others) to present different observations and to retrace the signification of terms related to the camera and the taking of pictures, drawing a parallel to the terminology of conquest. Furthermore, in order to enrich the problematic she develops in her study, Vogl also considers photography books that focus on North Africa. Vogl's study is centered on a selection of novels and essays by Michel Tournier, J. M. G. Le Clézio, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Leïla Sebbar, all of whose works are known and discussed in the West, at times even seen by critics as maintaining exotic and ambiguous views. Thus Vogl, by presenting the numerous facets of the debate and setting it in the larger context of literature, raises many fascinating questions, which do not necessarily always offer answers, but nevertheless bring us to reflect on crucial matters that engage us in reconsidering historical and cultural approaches as well as examining complex concepts that shape our culture. With regard to this latter matter, it is interesting that she has decided to turn only briefly to the Moroccan author Abdelkébir Khatibi, who has written extensively on the links between literature and visual images and who has reflected in depth on Segalen's redefinition of Exoticism, proposing elaborate thoughts on matters such as authenticity, otherness, and manipulation. Nor does she refer to the Tunisian writer Abdelwahab Meddeb, whose concepts often are seen as obscure and intricate. Both Khatibi and Meddeb have chosen to work away from dichotomies which they find dangerous (Occident/Orient; authentic/inauthentic; true/false). Focusing on views that have widely circulated in the West and molded the present political positions, Vogl has chosen to concentrate on the diverging views developed by the four authors analyzed, which closely reflect society's trends and at times are found caught in its web. She recaptures and summarizes the problematic treated with insight and sensitivity, inviting us by turning to literary texts to seriously question our interaction with images and search for ways to use visual representation in a constructive manner that breaks away from hegemonic and oppressive relations. Hélène Tissières University of Texas at Austin Copyright © 2004 The Indiana University Press

Colonial affairs: Bowles, Burroughs, and Chester write Tangier

A North African port city that was home to as many Europeans as Moroccans, postwar Tangier was truly an international zone, a place where the familiar boundaries of language, culture, nationality, and sexuality blurred, and anything seemed possible. In the 1950s and 1960s three leading American writers settled in Tangier, where they were able to find critical new ways of living and writing on the margins of society. A subtle literary portrait of Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs, and Alfred Chester, Colonial Affairs is also a complex and perceptive account of the ways colonialism and sexuality structure each other, particularly as reflected in the literature written in postwar Tangier. Sexual commerce and culture flourished in Tangier during these years, as gay expatriates fled repressive sexual norms at home. Greg Mullins explores the covert and overt representations of sex, fantasy, desire, and sexual identity in the literature of Bowles, Burroughs, Chester, and Moroccan authors who collaborated with Bowles. He argues that expatriate writing in Tangier articulates the desire to exceed national and other forms of identity through representations of sex, especially marginalized forms of sex and sexuality. The literature that emerges variously celebrates, critiques, and attempts to evade the double bind of colonial sexuality. Framed in relation to queer and postcolonial theory, Mullins's work is grounded in contemporary debates about sex, race, and desire. His sophisticated yet nimble analysis establishes beyond any doubt the central importance of colonialism and sexuality in the fiction of these writers working at once at the center and the margins of tradition - and reveals to contemporary readers the queer angles of their distinctly original work.

Ben Jelloun, Jean Genet, and Cultural Identity in The Street for Just One: Alberto Giacometti

Contemporary Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun and Jean Genet, the provocative postwar writer of France, have intertwined biographies, both in their personal lives and their work. Ben Jelloun, born in Morocco in 1944, went to France to pursue doctoral studies in social psychiatry in the late sixties. While completing his degree, he began what has become a distinguished career in both fiction and non-fiction. A highly prolific author, he is best known for his narrativeand gender-bending novels, Sandchild (L'Enfant de sable, 1985) and its sequel, Sacred Night Nuit sacree, 1987), winner of the prestigious French literary award, the Prix Concourt. Ben Jelloun has also published numerous essays, many on the political and social difficulties of Arabs in the Middle East, the Maghreb, and France, ranging from The Highest of Solitudes1 (La plus haute des solitudes, 1977), treating the plight of North African immigrants in France, to Racism Explained to My Daughter (Le Racisme explique a ma fille, 1998).Ben Jelloun's first meeting with Genet came about in 1974 after Genet had published an article on several neglected Maghrebine authors, Ben Jelloun among them. Genet, by this time in his life, had moved from the period of most of his major literary works, novels such as Lady of the Flowers and Thief's Journal and plays (The Maids, Blacks, Screens), to one of greater involvement in political causes. He worked, for example, with the Black Panthers in the US and, most importantly to him, with the Palestinians and other Arab groups. Genet's and Ben Jelloun's friendship, which lasted until Genet's death in 1986, was grounded in their common concern for Arab people, including immigrant workers in France. During those years, Ben Jelloun asked Genet to contribute to journals on the subject of the Palestinians, wrote about Genet, and interviewed him for the French newspaper Le Monde and other periodicals.Considering the importance of political issues in the relationship between Ben Jelloun and Genet, it is interesting that their connection surfaces in an essay by Ben Jelloun on a quite different subject: artistic creation. His Tahar Ben Jelloun & Alberto Giacometti, first issued in 1991,2 was reprinted four years later in smaller format as Street for Just One Rue pour un seul): Alberto Giacometti. As the title indicates, it treats the Swiss sculptor and painter, Giacometti, who lived and worked in Paris from the 1920s until his death in 1966. In his essay Ben Jelloun describes his reactions to the artist, one of the major forces in postwar modernism, with his trademark thin, majestic figurative sculptures and intense portraits and still lives. In addition to Giacometti, however, Jean Genet also occupies an important place in the piece. Genet had published a seminal essay on the artist, Studio of Albert Giacometti (L'Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti), in 1957;3 and Ben Jelloun, in his exploration of Giacometti some thirty-five years later, makes frequent reference to his predecessor. He quotes liberally from Studio, stating on the back cover of the 1995 edition, I was led to Giacometti by Jean Genet.The inclusion of Genet in Ben Jelloun's text is significant in biographical terms as a sign of the friendship of the two authors. In addition, it permits one to see and investigate another, more complicated question: that of language and cultural identity in relation to Ben Jelloun's work. Ben Jelloun writes in French, the language in which he was educated. much-discussed issue of writing in the tongue of the colonizer is especially pertinent and complex in Ben Jelloun's case because he has lived mainly in France for the past several decades and become a celebrated personality there. As a result of both his social journalism and his writing of fiction and poetry, he is a prominent spokesman on political and cultural aspects of France as well as issues pertaining to his country of origin. …

Maghrebian Mosaic: A Literature in Transition (review)

Mildred Mortimer compares the Maghreb to a mosaic surface embellished with a myriad of colorful tiles grouted together to form a central image. Her selection of essays that piece together the fragments of cultural, political, and social difference in the region as well as highlight what the texts of Algerian, Tunisian, and Moroccan authors have in common aptly reflects this guiding metaphor.

Blindfold justice

A Moroccan author serving a 20-year sentence for allegedly 'plotting against the state' describes scenes from a mass political trial in 1977