Professor Si Mohamed Laamiri on Maghrebi Literature in English

Writing North Africa: Maghrebi Literature in English,   A General Introduction and Bibliography

"Who in Morocco was, or is, interested in a Moroccan writing creative fiction in English?"

For about four and a half centuries, North Africa and its people were portrayed in hundreds of texts, travel accounts, reports, documents and other literary genres. Maghrebis did not even know about those writings because they did not speak English. Today things are changing and a return to those early travel writings is gradually established through academic research in North African  universities. We now witness the emergence of a Maghrebi creative literature in English in the form of poems, short stories, novels and plays. 

This paper provides a general introduction to a burgeoning North literature in English and a preliminary bibliography of this literature. However, we must reckon that the gathering of a corpus of this Literature was not easy not because of quantity but because of scarcity and the absence of any previous bibliographical work on the subject and the difficulty to trace individual publications in small and unknown local press houses or in out of reach publications by the North African Diaspora in Anglophone countries.  In 2003, a doctoral thesis prepared by Jacqueline Jondot entitled 'Les Ecrivains d'Expression Anglaise au Proche Orient Arabe' was defended at the Sorbonne in Paris.  In this gigantic work of about 1400 pages the only Maghrebi writers referred to are Anouar Majid and Sabiha Khemir  in an understandable unawareness of a number of North African creative texts in English. In fact, the author admits that:

L'établissement d'un corpus de textes de fiction d'expression anglaise au Proche-Orient arabe s'est vite révélé difficile et le résultat frustrant puisqu'il est très réduit et, comme on le verra, de qualité généralement assez médiocre.

Inspired by the successful experience of the "Littérature Maghrebine d'Expression Française", the paper draws attention to the existence of a corpus of texts which may one day reproduce the same experience in English. In the final course, the paper aims to raise a few issues about this newborn offshoot of North African Literature.

The following is not a study of individual works but the outline of a general introduction drawing attention to the existence of a body of texts which can no longer be ignored or considered as marginal individual literary enterprises. The paper aims above all at raising a few issues about this new born offshoot of North African Literature.

These writings may not be best sellers, they may not belong to the canon of British or American academia but they, nevertheless, represent the first harbingers of a new era where silenced cultures acquire an English voice. In North Africa, French, the language of the former colonizer, is used by a number of Maghrebi intellectuals as a means of artistic creativity. The increasing production of creative works in English in recent years speaks to a remarkable phenomenon that deserves due consideration.

The 1990s saw the first publications of creative writings in English by North African authors; these publications included poetry, the short story and the novel. However, unlike Indian, Nigerian or Australian literatures, Maghrebi writings in English do not seem to spring from a conscious political or cultural grudge against Britain. Rather, they seem to be the emanation of the hegemonic global expansion of the English language and Anglo-American literatures. It is also an indication of the expansion of English in the Maghreb though the production and consumption context of works in English is extremely limited.  The paper also raises the question of whether there is a future for this literature and whether it has the potential to develop into a more significant component of literary production or whether it is bound to remain marginal. In addition, a study of Maghrebi literature in English needs to account for its genesis, objectives, the institutional enhancement it receives and the personal and intellectual drive of the authors who choose to write in this language.

In former British colonies such as Nigeria, the pre-colonial culture was suppressed by military conquest or enslavement and writers like Chinua Achebe use English "to bear the burden" of the experience."  In the North African context, it is yet too early to foreground any distinctive creative deviation in the use of English by Moroccan, Algerian or Tunisian authors. For this, we have to wait for a quantitative and qualitative accumulation of literary texts. However, even at this stage, these texts raise a number of questions: What are the special characteristics of these writings? Can we speak of a regional model of writing? How does this model relate to other models especially to the Moroccan literature in French? What are their concerns and primary themes? Do they have any common predominant thematic feature? In what ways are these writings different from or similar to their Anglo-American counterparts? Do the North African writers use English to express a certain difference or do they use a foreign language simply because it is the language they can better express themselves in?

What is striking about these writings is the absence of themes relating to the common historical period between North Africa on the one hand and the United Kingdom and the USA on the other. We note a sort of historical amnesia regarding the historical dimension of the political, cultural and economic links which marked the British-North African relations for a period of more than three centuries. While the British writings on North Africa or Barbary States -as the area was called- addressed these issues in fictional as well as in 'realistic' writings, Maghrebi authors do not seem to draw matter for their writings from the historical legation common to the two countries. 
 

Because if its lack of a historical tradition and a consistent corpus, North African literature in English has but little theoretical application compared with other regional literatures of former British colonies. What is certain is that this literature is not only a manifest expression of Maghrebi identity but also an English translation of some aspects of its culture and another communicative voice that reaches out to other nations and other cultures.

If we want to link this literature to similar writings by Arabs, can we then refer North African and Middle Eastern literature in English as a regional literature with Arab-Islamic and African distinctive aesthetic and thematic poetics in the same way the West Indian or the South Pacific literatures are? Is it an offshoot of North African literature or an offshoot of World English literature? Or is it simply part of Terranglia?

North African creative works originally written in English remain marginal and lacking in aesthetic and structural maturity and independence. This may be explained by the fact that in the Maghrebi linguistic map, English is only the fourth language after Berber, Arabic and French. The writer performs the function of the ethnographer and interpreter of his culture to an Anglophone audience far remote from their immediate environment. As a post-colonial writer, the Maghrebi artist is simultaneously an interpreter of his culture and the subject of his own interpretation. As Ashcroft et al argue:

Such writing is, in effect, an ethnography of the writer's own culture. The post-colonial writer, whose gaze is turned in two directions, stands already in that position which will come to be occupied by an interpretation, for he/she is not the object of an interpretation, but the first interpreter. Editorial intrusions, such as the footnote, the glossary, and the explanatory preface, where these are made by the author, are a good example of this. Situated outside the text, they represent a reading rather than a writing, primordial sorties into that interpretative territory in which the Other (as reader) stands. 

The Maghrebi writer reads his culture to his remote audiences but he is not a mere author or creative writer but an agent who represents and embodies that culture. The audience may even be more interested in the cultural, social, religious and political realities of the artist's community than in his art or creative talents. A colleague who was invited to the U.S. to read his creative writings within an academic cooperation programme reports that he felt his audience was more interested in him as an exotic cultural curiosity than a fully-fledged writer with a distinctive aesthetic voice.  The problematic faced by writers in conveying their cultural specificity in a different language is clearly explained by the Indian Kanthapura Raja Rao in the foreword to his novel:

The Telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a language that is not one's own the spirit that is one's own. ...We are instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and in English. We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. (as cited in Aschcroft, 1989:61)

This self-conscious portrayal of the writer's dilemma between his mother-tongue language and his writing in another language acquired at school permeates most Moroccan writings in English. The protagonist in Ahmed Radi's novel Changing Times expresses this dilemma:

A small miracle writing in the oppressive language of Shakespeare his first poem in a foreign land, within a minority culture, with the deep and unconscious feeling that he was always on the Moroccan soil. Both at that time and at this very moment, he has felt all the contradiction of his situation; he has been using that other language in his poor native land in the south where most of its inhabitants are illiterate. He has also guessed at his colleagues' not¬ so-nice remarks about his romantic flight and his arrogance to deform the English language that is meant here to be taught at school. His sin is worse, for he has forsaken his mother tongue, the tongue of his grandmother, the language of his father and of the Koran. For him, however, falling in love, with the other language, with that other woman, does not need to be justified; it is his fate, his destiny, the coincidence of life, perhaps also his luck, something to be enjoyed without any feeling of guilt.

The problematic of the choice of language is of primordial importance in these writings and no study of North African literature in English could ignore this language issue.
 
Another issue writers face bears on the cultural or ethnographic terms with no direct equivalent in English. In such cases, even writers can choose between the use of a glossary, parenthetical translations of individual words and similar authorial intrusions:

The problem with glossing in the cross-cultural text is that, at its worst, it may lead to a considerable stilted movement of plot as the story is forced to drag an explanatory machinery behind it. Yet in one sense virtually everything that happens or everything that is said can be ethnographic. (Aschcroft et al, 1989:62)

Some writers chose to use un-translated words as a device to convey their cultural difference. In Stories Under The Sun, for example, Jilali El-Koudia does not translate the Arabic terms he uses to underline cultural difference. Abdellatif Akbib, Hassan Zrizi and Mohamed Benouarrek, among others, adopt the same strategy. Conversely, Anouar Majid begins his novel Si Yussef with a glossary of Arabic words used in the novel. The same attitude was taken by Sabiha Khemir who gave a four-page glossary at the beginning of her Waiting in the Future for the Past to Come. Let's note here that in the last two cases the authors wrote their novels abroad for predominantly American and British audiences.

Besides the glossary issue, these writings may sometimes present another distinctive feature Nemser calls 'interlanguage.'  'Interlanguage' is a concept which characterizes the genuine and discreet linguistic system in which the linguistic structures of two languages are fused. This process generates an internal linguistic exchange and a cultural fusion which gives to some non-native works their typical and distinctive feature. African literature in English is replete with examples where local African syntax is used to convey distinctiveness, locality and remoteness from Standard English. 
 
In his analysis of regional and marginal literatures in English, Ashcroft (1989:10) limits the conditions allowing the appearance of offshoots of English literature in remote countries to areas where 1) the local language is systematically destroyed by enslavement or 2) areas where the language has been rendered unprivileged by the imposition of the language of a colonizing power. This may be true for other areas but not for North Africa as neither case applies here: Arabic and Berber have not been destroyed by an Anglo-American power and English has not overshadowed Arabic, Berber or French. Though Ashcroft (1989:10) thinks that "some admixture of one or the other of these models can describe the situation of all post-colonial societies," neither model applies to Maghrebi writings in English.

Besides the language issue, the institutional education of Maghrebi writers plays an important role in moulding their art. Most have been trained in local Departments of English and abroad and have thus been influenced by the British and American philosophical and aesthetic systems of representation. It is obvious that this western background interferes in the genesis and the making of this literature by providing the literary techniques and the tools to reproduce their own culture within a foreign context. Hence questions about the way some of these writings are the emanation of a cultural and intellectual immersion in centre culture following academic migration to the UK or the United States; the Tunisian Sabiha Khmeir in England and the Moroccan Anouar Majid and Laila Lalami in the USA are cases in point.

One of the recurrent features of this literature may be a yearning for lost Moroccan values and nostalgia for childhood or for a bygone and irretrievable era where social relations were marked by ancestral ethics of behaviour and by a traditional way of living. This nostalgia permeates the poetry of Abu-Talib, Saber, Bouinidane but also in a different and indirect way the fiction of Anouar Majid, Abdellatif Akbib and Jilali El-Koudia. In her brilliant study of Moroccan poetry, Deborah Kapchan noted that:

Indeed, nostalgia emerges as a major theme in the [Moroccan] poetry of post-colonial writers, coloring the oeuvre with a tone of longing and melancholy. While emigration and diaspora have cultivated a nostalgia for home and for a homeland, new consumption practices and the media have transformed daily Moroccan ways of life to such an extent that intense nostalgia emerges for traditional practices, architectures and artisanship, as well as for their corresponding temporalities. 

Though Kapchan's analysis was on Arabic poetry, her remarks about nostalgia in this poetry are also valid for the English version of Moroccan poetry.

In what follows, I provide a preliminary list of English publications by Maghrebi writers. Though all endeavours have been made to provide an exhaustive list, some titles, especially those published abroad and not advertised in Morocco, must have escaped my attention. Where possible I have provided succinct reviews of the works leaving a more thorough reading of the texts to a further project.

Bibliography of Maghrebi Literature in English

I- Poetry:
 The number of published books on poetry by North African writers is very limited and amounts to a few volumes beside scattered poems in magazines or anthologies. This makes the evaluation of North African poetry written in English a hazardous enterprise. I have tried to collect a maximum number of published poetry by North African writers, originally written in English, but have found it very hard to gather a consistent amount of texts to allow the publication of a specific bibliography. Most poets try their hand at poetry but do not go beyond a first volume. However with the limited amount of available texts, one can only hope to begin to draw the broad lines characterizing these writings.

Mohammed Abu-Talib: 
• Whispers of Anger. London & New York: Regency Press, 1970

The late Professor Mohammed Abu-Talib, the father of the Departments of English in Morocco, is, to my knowledge, the first Moroccan professor to publish a volume of poetry in 1970. His poetry captures the spirit of the sixties and beyond. Whispers of Anger reflects its author's grudge against the overwhelming invasion of the Western culture and the displacement of Moroccan and North African values. Other issues that had an influence on his poetic sensibility included his personal experience of racism in the U.S. and his perception of the degeneration of Western youth.
 Abu-Talib's poetry is marked by social and political criticism of the Moroccan system of the seventies and by a concern about the fading religious and cultural values of Moroccan society. In "Drink to The Prophet", for example, he wonders why at a Moroccan evening party Christian Europeans ordered soft drinks while Moroccans ordered alcoholic ones:

Cocktail parties shook our festive customs;
Alien habits invaded thoughts and homes.
"Whisky alone - no ice, the Muslim ordered.
The Christian neighbour looked and pondered:
"An Oulmès for me -doctor's orders,
"The rest gives nothing but stomach ulcers."
--------------------------------------------------  
"Gin-tonic!" another fasting believer.
"Coca-cola!" another rotten Kafer.
He laments the non-respect of Ramadan by young people who he thought were influenced by revolutionary atheist propaganda of the sixties and seventies. Most themes of Abu-Talib's poetry are comments on the social mutations lived by Moroccan society and what he considered the loss of Moroccan cultural values and the negative Western influence on Moroccan youths. Whispers of Anger was written when the poet was still young, which accounts for the number of poems about women and love. He used plain Standard English and did not attempt to 'Morocconize' or 'arabize' the diction or the content.

Hassan MEKOUAR:  

• The Future Remains, Part One, 1999. Casablanca: Imprimerie Najah El Jadida, 1999
• The Future Remains, Part Two, 2000. Casablanca: Imprimerie Najah El Jadida,  2000.
• The Future Remains, Part Three, 2001. Casablanca: Imprimerie Najah El Jadida, 2001
• The Wings of the Walrus. Casablanca: Imprimerie Najah El Jadida, 2003
• Stories in very Free Verse and 7 (both texts appear in the same volume)      Casablanca: Imprimerie Najah El Jadida, 2007.

Hassan Mekouar is Professor of American Literature at the Faculty of Letters, University Mohammed V, Rabat. He was Dean of the same faculty and President of the University Mohamed I of Oujda in North East Morocco. With five or six published volumes, Hassan Mekouar is the most prolific Moroccan poet writing in English. The first volume of his trilogy The Future Remains was published in 1999, while the two other volumes came out respectively in 2000 and 2001. The Wings of the Walrus appeared in 2003 and in 2007 he published a double volume as Stories in (Very) Free Verse.

In its style and in its approach, Mekouar's poetry reflects the poet's immersion and mastery of Anglo-American tradition. His poetry draws its strength from the poet's rich vocabulary and the wide array of subjects he addresses. Mekouar is an acute observer of his immediate environment. He may address a tiny detail of everyday life with the same fervour he tackles universal existential issues. His approach to nature bears a realistic appearance but holds deep symbolic meanings to be fathomed by his readers. In 'Erfoud Marbles', the poet sees in the sealed shapes of fish and other sea creatures within the solid rock his own shape maybe in millions of years. His poetry also reflects his travelling experience by train and plane from Oujda where he works and Rabat where his family lives. Chapter two of The Future Remains Part Three is about travel, ports, airports, trains, metro, delays etc. Some poems reflect his frustrations with delays at the airport and his experiences with the Oujda-Rabat night train.

In The Future Remains the different parts (or chapters) correspond to different thematic choices. We find for example the following divisions: "Haloes" which consists of 21 poems dealing with a mixture of reflections, reveries, love songs, a marvelling at existence intermingled with a prayer to life and an admiration of nature. Another section entitled "I itch therefore I am" has 12 poems mostly concerned with autobiographical themes and existential questioning. The 19 poems of 'Anima Animus' are exquisite poems about animals and human behaviour, a theme to which the author returns in the second part of The Future Remains. 

Mekouar is an acute observer of nature in its cosmological dimension and in its most tiny and insignificant manifestations; he tackles with the same fervour cosmic and natural issues in poems about Nature, the seasons, the cosmos and the Oceans. The language could be considered as standard and with good respect of the canonical poetry writing traditions. He does not overuse Arabic words and whenever he does he explains the meaning in a footnote. There is no affected exoticism but a sincere listening to nature and to the events of his own experiences. Mekouar's poetry is so deep and so rich that it cannot be given its full due within the scope of this general introduction of North African literature in English.

Ahmed Saber: 
• Voices From Underground, Fes: Imrimerie Info-Print, 2004
Ahmed Saber is Professor of African and Comparative Literatures at Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University, Fez, Morocco. His Voices From Underground (Fes 2004) covers a period of almost thirty years and some of the poems in the collection were written while he was a student in the U.S. in the mid-seventies.

Overall, his poems remain focused on Moroccan cultural values even if he has experimented with a wide array of subjects including peace, the Vietnam War and Iraq. Some poems are direct and open reactions to international political issues including for example civil war and terrorism in Algeria, racism in South Africa and the Iraq war. Poems like "Our M'kaddem" and "Bassrim" address the human rights issue in Morocco in a direct and biting comment on the violation of human rights under Basri, the once powerful Interior Minister under late King Hassan II.

To highlight his Moroccan cultural distinctiveness, Saber does not hesitate to include Arabic terms in his poems without providing a glossary for his foreign readers. Saber shows a clear adherence to old Moroccan values and evokes with clear nostalgia the old educational system represented by M'sid and Al Qarouiyine University. Somewhere between the lines of his poems we feel the allegiance to the same values as Abu-Talib.

Ahmed RADI:   
• Ephemeral Fragments: Writing Poetry in English in the Moroccan Context. Marrakech: Imprimerie Al Watania, 1998.
• Re-Reading Joyce. Marrakech: Al Watania, 2002.
• Aesthetics and Politics in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Marrakech: Al Watania, 2002.
• Changing Times, Mobile Landscapes. Marrakech: Imprimerie Al Watania, 2006.

Ahmed Radi is Professor of English at Cadi Ayyad University, Marrakech, Morocco. He did his MA at Strathclyde University, UK, and his Ph.D. at Indiana University, USA. Ahmed Radi is also a novelist (see section on fiction below)
 The title of his first collection Ephemeral Fragments: Writing Poetry in English in the Moroccan Context (1998) provides a succinct statement about the skepticism and anxiety Moroccan poets writing in English must negotiate. Radi includes in his volume of English poetry two poems in Arabic. One of the Arabic poems refers directly to the return of the poet to the mother tongue language which, in his opinion, can convey feelings and thoughts no other acquired language can extend.

 Radi's poetry deals with a variety of themes including autobiographical reminiscences of solitude, exile and loneliness as in 'Silence', 'Di-illusion', 'Solitude' etc., love and its frustrations as in 'Faxing From Abroad'. Some of the themes also deal with the misery of the poverty-stricken peripheral areas of urban centres as in 'Schizophrenia'. Other poems provide a critique of social life in the city. 'The Gendered Gaze', for example, analyzes the café phenomenon in Moroccan cities and towns and the way cafés have invaded urban space:

Throughout the town, streets and avenues
Are invaded by Cafés and eyes,
With endless rows of tables and chairs
That occupy a public landscape
Meant initially for free movement and children's play. (p.20)
Laila Bouinidane:    

• Atlas Rhymes In The Lurid Shades of Fate (Poems), Rabat: Top Press, 2006
In the Preface, Bouinidane gives details about her education and professional career and advice on how to read her poetry: "The reader may find it hard to get the point I am driving at in my verses. Still, what I recommend is to read between the lines to get the meaning"(p.5). She also warns that "reading [her] poems may be a heavy task for some for the great efforts it requires to comprehend the underlying meaning"(p.6). The themes in her poetry "range from dichotomies like life and death, morals and values, society and culture, love and hatred, men and women, moods and inner feelings, last but not least fate and luck."

Overall, Bouinidane's poetry reveals a sensitive soul which conveys its feelings, states of mind and perceptions in beautiful lyric poetry as illustrated in the following excerpt taken from the back cover of the Collection:

Life is but a stroke of luck what can one do
If one is born under an unlucky star, one's fate can only be a friend or foe

"The Martyr Prince"
A true orphan is the one whose friends are fake
And never hesitate their bond to break
"The True Orphan"
I should have been limited to what you permitted
When my perversity was mildly indulged the way not meritted [sic]
"Mother"

Anissa TAOUIL   

• Rhapsodies, Poems and Paintings, Rabat: Imprimerie Brodard, 2000
Anissa Taouil is Professor of English Literature at the Faculty of Letters, Mohamadia; Morocco. Taouil's Rhapsodies is a collection of fourteen poems coupled with an equal number of paintings by the author. In the introduction, she compares her poetry to visual arts and explains that her "paintings and poetry portray the world of [her] dreams - a world plain, subtle and pure." Anissa Taouil's poetry also covers a wide range of themes which include love tribulations, women's liberation and illegal immigrants.

II-Fiction

Anouar Majid: 
• Si Yussef, London: Quartet Books, 1992
Anouar Majid is Chair of the Department of English Language Studies at the University of New England. Anouar Majid has been described as one of a few "towering Islamic intellectuals." His writings examine the place of religion and Islam in postcolonial theory and the culture of globalization. In his books on Islam, Majid "displays a wide intellectual range that crosses disciplinary boundaries and draws on Anglo-American, French, and Arab scholarship." Majid's

Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World, (2000) was described as "a passionately argued, academically grounded work about the ongoing crisis of Muslim societies faced with new global realities engendered by world capitalism and the cultural hegemony of the West."  His Freedom and Orthodoxy: Islam and Difference in the Post-Andalusian Age was hailed by the British Magazine New Statesman as one of the best books of 2004.   Majid's new book, A Call for Heresy:  Why Dissent is Vital to Islam and America was the University of Minnesota Press's lead title of the Fall 2007 season. It went into a second printing in less than three months.

Majid is a native of Tangier. His Si Yussef, is a vivid image of Tangier in particular and of Morocco in general. His personal experience and his acute sense of observation allowed him to grasp unique moments of Moroccan social life. His Tangier and Tanjawi characters are real and vivid. Through Lamin, a student at the University of Fèz, the narrative conveys a sense of youthful sincerity which echoes biographical and social experiences of Majid's native Tangier.

Majid's narrative draws its basic philosophy from the Islamic faith as immersed in the cultural beliefs and traditions of Moroccan society. The novel is replete with references to the Moroccan Islamic wisdom which, in all events, submits things to God's will as a final justification for whatever happens. A comparative study of Si Yussef and Paul Bowles's novel Let It Come Down has been published on line by Professor Mohamed Elkouche. Si Yussef was the subject of a book chapter by Dr. Chourouq Nasri entitled "Tangier: a Place Reinvented, Made and Unmade by Anouar Majid in Si Yussef." In Representing Minorities: Studies in Literature and Criticism, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2006. For Chourouq Nasri:

Anouar Majid's novel describes the psychological journey of Lamin (Majid as a young man) into the idealized past of Tangier. Tangier, the writer's native city becomes the locale of identity. It is transformed into a symbolic space onto which multiple tales and diverse identities transmitting the rediscovered memory of the past are projected. The novel invites readers to question fixed definitions of identity and to take a journey towards diversity and plurality." 

Si Yussef was the subject of many favourable and appreciative articles in Morocco and in the States. The novel gave matter to many studies and his name as novelist was always raised in colloquia about Tangier as a site for literary and intellectual inspiration.

• Khemir, Sabiha :
Waiting in the Future for the Past to Come, Quartet Books, London 1993
Tunisian historian of Islamic art, illustrator, and writer, Sabiha Khemir is the Chief Curator of Doha's Museum of Islamic Art. She studied at the University of Tunis and received a Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. In her essay "Mobile Identity and the Focal Distance of Memory", Khemir writes about issues of identity, history, and memory in the Arab world and the Arab Diaspora, drawing on her personal experience. She has also written and presented two documentaries on Islamic art for British television. She published her first novel, Waiting in the Future for the Past to Come, in 1993. The novel begins with a four page glossary to help her Anglophone readership understand the untranslatable Arab terminology used to express cultural artefacts strange to English. But after that her narrative moves on smoothly and artistically in a marvellous description of the Tunisian life of a young girl from her early age to her leaving to London to study English at the university.

From the book jacket:

"Exceptional for being written in English by a Tunisian, this novel employs poignant visual images to create a vivid sense of place and atmosphere which take us to another world, giving us an insight into a culture and its people. With powerful simplicity it reflects the dramatic shifts of cultural values in post-colonial Tunisia. Korba, a small coastal town, is the setting for the many stories woven together. The narrative moves freely between reality and imagination, mourning and celebration, rejection and compassion, painting an  unexpectedly sharp picture on a broad canvas of emotion"

From the Novel
"I will tell you about reality until I reach the boundaries of credibility, then I will tell you fiction. And I will tell you fiction until I reach the boundaries of imagination, then I will tell you about reality. I will tell you about mysterious realities and real mysteries. I will tell you about the mysteries of realities until I can no longer be credible then I will tell you fiction. I will tell you about real dreams and dreamy realities. I will tell you what I know until what I don't know finds its way out. I will dive in in order to come out. I will come out in order to dive in again. I will tell you about dreams which trans¬formed realities and realities which transformed dreams. I will break the mirror of reality and pick up the pieces to build a garden of dreams. I will dig a well where there is already a fountain and I will follow the water where it wants to fun.

I will narrate events. There will be crimes that cannot be seen, screams trapped in silence, passion burning in water, beauty veiled in the darkness of night. When I speak, you will hear many voices. These voices are one, coming from different places and different times, from very far and from very near…

I will tell you a story and where I end, another one will start. And so every end is a start and every start is an end. But I would not know which end to start with. I will tell you what I have witnessed but the story does not start with me nor does it end after me. A breath of life. I will give you threads of colour and, together, we can weave a carpet of time with which we will travel. I will start with the beginning but there is no beginning as such. I will go as far as I can remember but what I really want to tell you is beyond what I can remember."
(The Future Remains for the Past to Come pp 27-28)

Laila Lalami:           
Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2005
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American woman novelist. Lalami was born and raised in Morocco. She had her B.A. at the Faculty of Letters of Human Sciences in Rabat, Morocco before she went on to pursue her graduate education in the U.K. and then the U.S. Now she is one of the most talented Moroccan writers in the U.S. Her work has appeared in the Baltimore Review, the Los Angeles Times, the Independent, Moby, and elsewhere. She is the creator and editor of the literary blog www.moorishgirl.com, which has been the subject of articles in USA Today and the Washington Post. Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits marks the beginning of her career as a novelist. It was favourably reviewed by literary critics who hailed it as:

A bracing and beautiful little novel…All this is about far more than crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. "Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits" is about the downside of globalization and what happens to those who live far down the human food chain. They lose not only their jobs but also their customs, relatives, families, friends. And that's when they get just a little bit mad. But this little novel is not worker-lit. It does no more than tell the stories of four engaging people we wouldn't otherwise know. The author accomplishes it with supreme grace and style. 

Lalami has also published a number of short stories in different magazines; these include: "Turning Tide" in Elle India, "Better Luck Tomorrow" in The Baltimore Review "The Lessons" in Mizna, "A Nice Young Man" in Pindeldyboz . Secret Son, Lalami's coming novel is advertised for pre-orders and is expected in April 2009. It is hailed by a critic as "A tale of contemporary Morocco straddling the personal and the political, told simply, beautifully, with heart and panache. Lalami has talent to burn."

Jilali El Koudia
• Moroccan Short Stories: From The Beginning To the Nineties. Translated by Jilali El Koudia. Fes: I'Media, 1998
• Stories Under the Sun. Fes: I'Media, 1999
• That Night and Other Stories. Fes: I'Media, 2001
• Moroccan Folktales. Syracruse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2003
• Up and Down The Road and Other Stories. Casablanca: Najah El-Jadida, 2006

Jilali El Koudia, Professor of English and American Literature at the University Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah, Fes, is an acclaimed Moroccan literary critic, prolific short story writer and translator of many Moroccan literary works. El Koudia is the winner of First Prize of the British Council for Moroccan Writers in English 2000 (Fiction category). He has also translated Wolfgang Iser's The Act of Reading and The Fictive and the Imaginary, and Robert C. Holub's Reception Theory. He edited and translated an anthology of Moroccan Short Stories into English. He also published his own stories in English, Stories Under the Sun and That Night and Other Stories and UP and Down The Road and Other Stories.

In Moroccan Folktales, El Koudia draws on stories he heard as a boy from female relatives. The stories are written in an exquisite and fresh style while they keep their original richness and mystery. As he notes in the introduction, El Koudia did not merely transcribe the thirty-one tales he heard, but rewrote, reconstructed and retold them, eliminating wordiness and repetition. In the words of his publisher, the stories are populated "with ghouls and fools, kind magic and wicked, eternal bonds and earthly wishes, these are mesmerizing stories to be savored, studied, or simply treasured." 

Stories Under the Sun (1999) is a collection of twenty-three short stories with a variety of themes portraying facets of Moroccan culture and depicting rural life in its vibrant yet sometimes dramatic reality. In his review of  "Stories Under the Sun", Said Mentak states that:

These stories encompass all of the concerns and predicaments that there are `under the sun': hope and despair, life and death, hate and love, justice and injustice, weakness and power, and finally the ability of man and woman to survive the destructive elements in life that come most of the time as suddenly as sparks of fire. In short, the collection is concerned with life itself, life as we experience it, particularly in Morocco, under the sun.  

El Koudia also writes short stories in Arabic and some of his creative pieces were published in daily newspapers such as Al-Alam Athakafi and Al-Monâtaf Athakafi. A number of these pieces were translated into English by the author and included in Up and Down the Road, a collection of twenty-nine stories published in 2006.

Abdellatif Akbib
Graffiti. Tangier: Slaiki Frères, 1997.
Between the Lines. Tangier: Slaiki Frères, 1998.
The Lost Generation. Tangier: Slaiki Frères, 2000.
Tangier's Eyes on America. Tangier: Slaiki Frères, 2001
Embers. Tangier: Slaiki Frères, 2004

Abdellatif Akbib, an acclaimed Moroccan novelist and prolific short story writer, is Professor of English Language and Literature at Abdelmalek Essaadi University in Tetouan. He was the recipient of the British Council Literary Prize for Moroccan Writers in English in 2003 (Fiction Category).

Akbib's fiction is marked by Tangier as a city and as social structure. His stories are staged in and around Tangier and his protagonists portray a social life fully immersed in the local culture of Northern Morocco to the extent that the author's account of his travel to the U.S. becomes Tangier's Eyes on America (2001). As El Kouche states in his reading of Akbib's fiction:  "Just as Dublin has spoken through James Joyce in his Dubliners or Ohio through Sherwood Anderson in his Winesburg Ohio so it can be said that Tangier has spoken through Akbib in most of his short - as well as his long - narratives."

In Graffiti and Between the Lines, Akbib develops a number of themes related to individuals struggling to come to terms with complex issues imposed on them by intricate social structures, knotty family relations and corrupt political situations. Domestic scenes and themes of alienation, self deception, poverty, drug and alcohol issues, corruption and class differences engaged with in Graffiti were further developed in Between the Lines and The Lost Generation.

Akbib's Hearts of Embers (2004) is cast in the form of a long monologue, or a long narrative in which, Said, a man on his deathbed in a clinic relives episodes of his life asking himself over and over again, "could I have been a different man?" For Kiessling, Hearts of Embers is "Akbib's best work. The writing is more authoritative than in earlier short stories. The level of writing is consistently high from beginning to end."

Mona Hejaiej:
Behind Closed Dooors: Women's Oral Narratives in Tunis, Quartet Books, London, 1996
Hejaiej has collected some forty-seven different stories from three representative women who belong to the "Beldi" class of Tunis. According to the author's introduction the term Beldi is used to designate "a class of elite and highly civilized city dwellers" (p. 4) of the old city of Tunis. Until very recently, the Beldi were seen as an elite class who were urbanized, culturally refined, and learned. Hejaiej's research notes that the Beldi traditionally occupied positions of religious authority as `ulama (religious scholars) and qadis (judges), as well as merchants and skilled artisans who controlled the production and sale of luxury goods, for example silk and perfume. The narratives gathered during Hejaiej's research are especially fascinating for the wealth of cultural, political, and religious information about this social class; this knowledge is presented both explicitly and implicitly in the women's tales.

With the author's help, readers are able to learn that the Beldi women who told tales for this collector are not merely "... tradition bearers, but they are also creators in their own right..." (p. 85). As a reference work or a principal text, Hejaiej's book will no doubt prove to be invaluable for university courses in several fields: Gender Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and folklore and/or comparative literature programs. Read together with Hejaiej's valuable introduction, the narratives contained in Behind Closed Doors, reveal multi-layered forms of Tunisian women's discourse that is at once a traditional oral art form and a means of personal communication and expression.  

Mohamed Benouarrek

The Journey. Casablanca: Calliope, 1999
Mohamed Benouarrek holds a B.A. in English from Mohammed V University in Rabat and a Master's degree in Applied Humanities from Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane. He is now the Head of Human resources at a multinational company.

For Benouarrek, The Journey is " a poem written in prose. It may have no rhyme, but one thing is certain: it teems with metaphors and could be read both forward and backward."  The novel tells the story of "a young Moroccan, son of a single mother, dreaming of relationships, and trying to discover a way of supporting himself." It is a portrayal of the dilemma of Moroccan youths facing unemployment and poverty and dreaming of a better life in what they believed to be the European El Dorado. Mohammed Benouarrek's first novel has "a wonderful freshness interwoven with compelling reality."               

                      
Ahmed Radi
Changing Times, Mobile Landscapes (A Novella). Marrakech, 2006
Ahmed Radi is a critic, a poet and a novelist (see the poetry section above). As the annual class picture on the front cover of the text reveals, Changing Times, Mobile Landscapes is an autobiographical novella. Said, a university teacher of English in his forties, gives free vent to his memories about his school life as a child and later as a university student. Through a simple and unassuming narrative, Said brings back souvenirs of his experiences at school and at the university. His UK experience when he was studying for an MA in English Literature is dramatized as his first encounter with otherness. The novella is a testimony about the changes that have taken place in the educational system. It is also a nostalgic yearning for childhood school life and a critique of the deterioration of the Moroccan educational system. The tone of the text is given by the narrator/teacher from the first page:

He stands in front of a small group of students, who are dispersed in a classroom which has not been restored to good condition since the creation of the university two decades ago. Decay, in fact, takes various forms, physical, moral and metaphorical. … Even in the courtyard, a few wild weeds are left uncultivated; dust settles undisturbed in a few corners of the inhospitable classrooms … Tamed by some unidentified forces, both the professor and his students lack that vital enthusiasm, that flame, that desire to pursue knowledge for the sake of truth. (p. 5)

The narrator/author has ambivalent feelings towards lives his experience as a writer of fiction in English. He feels that he has betrayed his cultural community and forsaken his mother for the "oppressive language of Shakespeare."

Writing in a foreign language is further problematized when the narrator raises colonial and post-colonial issues and the link between language, culture and politics.

Abdelkader Hamouchi    
Creeds and Deeds. Rabat: Top-Press, 2001.
Abdelkader Hamouchi was born Tinejdad, a small village in the province of Errachidia. He got a B.A. in English at My Ismail University in Meknes and later joined the Ecole Normale Supérieure to become teacher of English. Creeds and Deeds is Hamouchi's first novel. The novel is an autobiographical narrative which gives a vivid portrayal of traditional society in the South of Morocco.

Hassan Zrizi        
Jomana, Place of publication :n.a.: Nada-Com, 2006
Hassan Zrizi is Professor of English Language and literature at University Hassan II in Mohammedia. In Jomana, he dramatizes the lot of Moroccan women and their predicament in a conservative society. The setting of the novel is Jamaa L'Fna, the famous public square in Marrakech, which gives the author the opportunity to make the parallel between the novelist and the public story teller in their functions as entertainers who rely on orality and the written text to commune with their audiences. Marrakech serves as a setting to portray Moroccan culture and the complex social relations of traditional families while Jomana epitomizes the hard life endured by many Moroccan women.

Hamid Qabbal

Head of Mule. Essaouira: Imprimerie Hiba, 2005

Hamid Qabbal was born in Matmata, near Fes, and now teaches English at a high school in Essaouira. Head of Mule, Qabbal's first published work, is a biographical novel which traces the school life and education of the protagonist Said.