what is Moroccan literature?
This is the question that a doctor asked me once, in France. He was making a USG scan of my thyroid gland and probably he needed me either to speak or to relax, so he asked me what I was doing. I told him about my research project involving Moroccan writers. "Oh, is there Moroccan literature?," he asked. "I've heard about Algerian one, but I didn't know there is also Moroccan."
Oh yes, there is. The literature in Morocco can be traced back to the Antiquity, and associated either with Latin or with the autochthonous languages of the Mediterranean, of which the Amazigh and other Berber tongues, written in a peculiar Libyco-Berber script. And later on, there is of course the great era of the Arabic literature, in which Morocco was making one cultural area with the Iberian Al-Andalus, a great focus of intellectual and literary culture.
This is why I say many, many things happened before the Francophone era. Nowadays, the literary culture is double and triple, divided between the writing in French, Arabic and Amazigh.
Oh yes, there is. The literature in Morocco can be traced back to the Antiquity, and associated either with Latin or with the autochthonous languages of the Mediterranean, of which the Amazigh and other Berber tongues, written in a peculiar Libyco-Berber script. And later on, there is of course the great era of the Arabic literature, in which Morocco was making one cultural area with the Iberian Al-Andalus, a great focus of intellectual and literary culture.
This is why I say many, many things happened before the Francophone era. Nowadays, the literary culture is double and triple, divided between the writing in French, Arabic and Amazigh.
I have readLeila Slimani, Sex et mensonges. La vie sexuelle au Maroc (2017)
Lhoussain Azergui, Le pain des corbeaux (2013) Abdellah Taïa, Une mélancolie arabe (2008) Fatéma Mernissi, Rêves des femmes Tahar Ben Jelloun, La Réclusion solitaire (1976), Moha le fou, Moha le sage (1978), Sur ma mère (2008) Driss Chraïbi, Un monde à côté (2001), Une enquête au pays (1981), Civilisation, ma mère!... (1972), Les Boucs (1956) Paul Bowles, Let It Come Down (1952) Georges Montbard, A Travers le Maroc. Notes et Croquis d'un Artiste (1886) |
Vertical Divider
|
I have writtenLe ruban de Möbius. Pour un modèle topologique de la continuité créatrice dans le monde méditerranéen
L'identité amazighe et la langue française. Autour de l'auto-traduction du roman Le Pain des corbeaux par Lhoussain Azergui Asgudi i taskla: przejście od oralności do pisma i nowa literatura w poszukiwaniach tożsamości marokańskich Berberów Od Ogrodu kochanków Ibn Qajjima al-Dżawzijji do arabszczyzny transkulturowej. Projekt restytucji języka intymnego w pisarstwie Fatemy Mernissi i jego kontynuacje |
a traveller's Morocco
Morocco has always been cherished by traveller writers; Paul Bowles is the most famous of them. But there is also a more recent, curious figure: that of Anglo-Afghan writer --or, if you prefer, a British traveller of Afghan-Indian descent, Tahir Shah. He is the author of some fifteen or more books speaking of his journeys through Africa, Asia and the Americas, all of them well-integrated in the traditional British genre of travel writing. In Morocco, he wrote The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca (2006), relating a year he lived, together with his family, in an old, delapidated Dar Khalifa, i.e. literally "the caliph's house", as it once belonged to the city's khaliph (the term used in the sense of spiritual leader). Yet rather than a site of Moroccan spiritual history, the house becomes a symbol of all the gone-by Orientalist fantasies and the dreams of leaving the squallor of London to live among the "rich aromas that whaft through narrow streets" (I've always admired the persistent naivete of the travellers who presume that Moroccan cities smell good).
Shah narrates, in a humorous, entertaining way, the Moroccan daily life, that of people and jinns (or more correctly, jnoon). The three guardians he employs are expert in them. The jinns may appear in any form, mostly after dark, taking on the body of a cat or a scorpion. They also live "in animated objects". This is why the family needs to keep up a number of precautions: sleep inside a circle drawn with coal, restrain themselves from laughing or laud conversations, be careful with water and water closets at night. They should also avoid impure thoughts, lest they attract Aicha Qandisha. Overall, the jinns are the true masters of the house and welcome offerings of couscous and meat left for them at night (in reality, the food is eaten by the guardians).
Eventually, the jinns could be evicted from the house, yet it results quite costly: a goat would have to be sacrificed in each room. So it is better just to accomodate and keep them at bay throwing hanfuls of salt in the corners or reciting certain verses from the Qur'an. Finally, a female seer consulted at the tomb of Sidi Abdur Rahman advises the writer to invite the members of the 'Isawa brotherhood to Dar Khalifa. The ceremony ends with the extatic hadra dance. The jinns are appeased so well that they only return in the new book, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams, published a couple of years later...
Tahir Shah, The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca, New York: Bantam, 2006.
Lisbon, 19th December, 2024.
Shah narrates, in a humorous, entertaining way, the Moroccan daily life, that of people and jinns (or more correctly, jnoon). The three guardians he employs are expert in them. The jinns may appear in any form, mostly after dark, taking on the body of a cat or a scorpion. They also live "in animated objects". This is why the family needs to keep up a number of precautions: sleep inside a circle drawn with coal, restrain themselves from laughing or laud conversations, be careful with water and water closets at night. They should also avoid impure thoughts, lest they attract Aicha Qandisha. Overall, the jinns are the true masters of the house and welcome offerings of couscous and meat left for them at night (in reality, the food is eaten by the guardians).
Eventually, the jinns could be evicted from the house, yet it results quite costly: a goat would have to be sacrificed in each room. So it is better just to accomodate and keep them at bay throwing hanfuls of salt in the corners or reciting certain verses from the Qur'an. Finally, a female seer consulted at the tomb of Sidi Abdur Rahman advises the writer to invite the members of the 'Isawa brotherhood to Dar Khalifa. The ceremony ends with the extatic hadra dance. The jinns are appeased so well that they only return in the new book, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams, published a couple of years later...
Tahir Shah, The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca, New York: Bantam, 2006.
Lisbon, 19th December, 2024.
|
Vertical Divider
|
A travers le Maroc
Et en entendant dans le calme des nuits lumineuses et parfumées ces sons étranges, ces mélopées primitives, ces mille bruits divers, si particulièrement caractéristiques, des villes de l'Orient; en respirant cette atmosphère arabe si voluptueusement troublante, où les senteurs suaves et pénétrantes des grandes étendues vierges viennent se mêler et se fondre avec l'odeur âcre des aromates, la puanteur des charognes laissées sur les chemins, les émanations fortes des bêtes, tout notre être tressaille, surpris par toutes ces choses inaccutumées, se détend, amolli et comme engourdi par les subtiles effluves. On se sent envahi par une sorte de torpeur irrésistible, de grande lassitude de l'esprit où tous les sentiments, assouplis, effacés, éteints, sombrent en une sensation intense de repos complet, de bien-être absolu. (p. 100)
A facsimile edition of the travel book of Georges Montbard, or Charles Auguste Loye (1841-1905) who chose this pseudonym for his artistic life, takes me back to one of the countries I love most. Even if the book is shallow, superficial, ordinary, both in its verbosity and the quality of the sketches illustrating it. Montbard did not pretend much in his artistic destiny; he was an illustrator and caricaturist working with various journals and newspapers of his time, in France and Great Britain. Apparently, his Moroccan volume recently brought back to the readers by the Editions Frontispice, was not a very well known one; he seems to be remembered in the first place for his Egyptian travels; anyway, those things are available nowadays in the digital archives. I would say that Montbard brings us back to the 19th-century beginnings of tourism, and makes us muse on the superficiality inscribed in the European concept of pleasure travel since its beginnings, two centuries ago. His journey is not a grand tour; he does not travel in order to learn and does not pretend to know much about the world he describes and depicts, although one of his English compagnons already carries a camera, cet espion maudit, à la fois myope et presbyte, voyant faux à travers l'arragement compliqué de ses lentilles concaves et convexes (p. 168); there is a curious deprecation that he launches, over a coupe of pages, against this new medium that would have such a glorious future. During his peregrination in the northern part of Morocco, started and finished in the port of Tangier, the picturesque is what Montbard is after, both in the landscape and in the people he encounters: Moors, countryside girls, the black population that seems over-represented in his depiction. Even as he reaches the Roman ruins of Volubilis, he finds little place for historical or erudite digressions. He is a sensationalist, to put it this way, an empty subject carrying no knowledge, aspiring to no insight, and open to perception through all his senses. The book is full of things he saw, landscapes, vegetation, weather, but also sounds and smells, calls of muezzins, stinking dogs and donkeys. He travels through the land inebriated in perception, reasoning little, and bringing little of what might eventually have an influence on the views of his readers. Undoubtedly, it is a piece of colonial literature, with few compliments paid to the subaltern who occasionally let their lice fall right onto immaculate pages of the artist's sketchbook. There is no political correctness in the way he treats the Jews, the Negroes and, last but not least, the Moors themselves. The traveller is intrusive and ready to make a good use from his influence and dominant position, appealing for more than just the hospitality of the inhabitants; if sometimes he pays for the food he eats and the service he recieves, it is just as a way of being kind and polite; for the rest, he takes the country as something that is due to him and his companions: nous avons une lettre de recommandation de Si-Torrès, le ministre des Affaires étrangères du Maroc, résidant à Tanger. Nous possédons aussi une lettre du Sultan, laquelle nous donne droit à la "mouna" et aux égards des pachas, sheiks, kaids et autres fonctionnaires de l'empire, qui répondent de nos existences sur leur tête. Nous préférons, toutefois, payer les vivres que les habitants nous apportent et notre kaid est chargé de leur en régler le montant (p. 141). Meanwhile, this intruding subject has little comprehension, and no respect, to whatever might be hold sacred in the local eyes. Holiness is yet another part of the picturesque, and as such, everything has similar value: the graves of local saints, as well as the storcks, are sacred because of some ancient superstition (leurs corps contiennent les âmes de leurs ancêtres, lesquels vivaient autrefois dans de grandes îles par delà l'Océan, et qui sous cette forme reviennent pour les protéger; p. 80). For the rest, the travellers suffer from spleen, and they find in hunting whatever they miss in cultural perspicacity (on a fait des hécatombes de perdrix; p. 139). Montbard finds everything in the convenient state of dilapidation and disrepair; poverty and ruins are picturesque; they occupy the eye of this early tourist. He would like to add more cruelty and pathos to his Oriental vision; this is why he is keen to visit prisons wherever he goes. But for a long time it seems that the only result of his search for shock, abjection and delight would be pieces of meat oozing blood on the souk. Till finally, in the kasba of Meknes (written Méquinez in the book), he encounters the very thing he came for: Au-dessus de l'entrée, des crocs en fer sont solidement fixés. Après chaque révolte de tribus, les chefs des rebelles précipités du haut des créneaux, avec une adresse cruelle, s'enganchent sur ces pointes sinistres, où ils restent exposés comme un example terrible de la tout-puissante justice du Sultan, et les oiseaux du ciel, tandis qu'ils respirent encore, viennent arracher les yeux de leurs orbites et déchirent leurs membres pantelants. Leurs cadavres restent suspendus là et les chairs putréfiées se détachent et tombent en lambeaux dégoûtants que les chiens dévorent le jour et les chacals viennent leur disputer la nuit (p. 162). But there are also some sights that truly charm them; perhaps the contrast makes them even more precious. There is a profusion of flowers (des lauriers-cerises; des amandiers; des cactus; des orangers; des grenadiers; des figuiers; des rosiers; des liserons; des loriots; des pinsons; des fauvettes; des mésanges; des glaieuls; des iris; des des fougères; des nénufars; all of them p. 167); there is also a profusion of multicoloured cloths, jewels, precious metals, carpets that make gardens over gardens: On a étalé devant nous de superbes tapis à nuances amorties, aux dessins délicieux; on a retiré de recoins ténébreux des vêtements de soie et de velours brodés d'or, des étoffes tissées d'or et lamées d'argent, des étriers niellés d'or, des armes rares, des sabres à lames damasquinées, et nous sommes partis éblouis de toutes ces richesses datant la plupart d'époques lointaines, que sortaient de leurs trous noirs ces marchands graves, polis, glissant silencieusement comme des ombres, enveloppés de leurs linceuls de mousseline (p. 168). This is what Orient is supposed to be: contrast, profusion, vertigo. G. Montbard, A Travers le Maroc. Notes et Croquis d'un Artiste, une reprise de 1886, Casablanca, Ed. Frontispice, 2013. Leiden, 26.03.2019 |
eating candies in a train compartment
(a humble Muslim from Poland writes back to Hajja Leila Slimani
on the subject of sex and lies)
I do not really know what to think about Sex et mensonges. La vie sexuelle au Maroc. The book makes me remember similar publications that I had to read, many years ago, in connection to Portuguese post-Salazarian feminism. Similar genre of histórias de mulheres: lack of sexual fulfilment, lack of sexual knowledge, lack of contraceptives, social pressure, abortion, servitude, violence. At the same time, the continuity between this book and the publications roughly contemporary of Portuguese feminism, such as L'Amour dans les pays musulmans by Fatéma Mernissi (written and discussed in the 1980s), is bitterly striking. Still more bitter to think how many things come close to the reality of my native Poland. Of course, sex as such is not penalised in Poland. But the laws concerning abortion, the reality of female suicide and many other things are gruesomely similar. In one of the testimonies, I read: Je me sentais coupable avant même d'avoir péché (p. 31). So did I, as young as eleven and twelve. This is why I would say, firstly, that those things do not happen to Moroccan women because they are Muslims. They could be Catholic, to exactly the same avail.
In the end, quite an opposite idea comes to the fore: that Islam fosters the sexual fulfilment rather than inhibits it. I suppose this is a statement that any student of Islamic cultural history will subscribe. And
In the end, quite an opposite idea comes to the fore: that Islam fosters the sexual fulfilment rather than inhibits it. I suppose this is a statement that any student of Islamic cultural history will subscribe. And