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THE title of my topic raises interesting questions. The first is one that plunges us straight into some of the primary issues of the field and its pedagogy. What is the Maghrib? Well, the teacher in me starts by noting that it is the “noun of place” (ism makān in Arabic) of the verb implying the setting of the sun and so can be translated as “the West.” The term, with the particularizing epithet al-aqsā (“the furthest away”) sometimes appended, also means Morocco, which is a Europeanization of Marrakush, the fabled city in the south of the country. The Italians who managed to turn the Arabic adjective al-Qāhira (“the powerful”), into the word Cairo, seem to have been at work here too. In this context we can see part of our problem in the term al-aqsā—furthest away from whom exactly? It reminds me of that infamous song that started Disney’s cartoon film Aladdin: “I come from a land, from a faraway place. . . .” My point here is that Maghrib could also be considered a state of mind, implying the noncentral, or, in Arabic terms, the non-Mashriq (Mashriq means “the East, the place where the sun rises”). Incidentally, in medieval times (however they are to be defined chronologically) Maghrib meant Tunis specifically; in those days, that seemed to be far enough. So how exactly are we to subsume something called the West in Arabic into a field, discipline, and area called Middle Eastern studies? The answer, of course, is: with as much ease as we can convince the inhabitants of Morocco that, according to the American government, they are Middle Easterners. It all depends on where you’re standing and what your posture is to be.
Part of this problem revolves around the fact that the issue is not confined to Western scholarship and teaching. The inhabitants of the western regions of the Arabic-speaking world have for centuries been acutely interested in events and trends in the Mashriq, the eastern regions. Consider the careers of two enormously important figures in Arabic and Islamic history: the preeminently great and controversial Sufi Ibn al-‘Arabī (d. 1240 CE) and the equally famous historiographer Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406). In more literary terms, indigenous Andalusian Arabic genres like the muwashshah and zajal made their inexorable way across North Africa to the Middle East, where an Egyptian scholar such as the poet-critic Ibn Sanaū’ al-Mulk (d. 1211) could write a study of them, acknowledging their Andalusian origins and displaying a great interest in their potential but clearly not entirely sure about the poetic structures of the works that he was analyzing.
This pattern and direction of interest are not paralleled today by interest in the opposite direction. There are isolated instances in which scholars and creative writers in what orientalist writers used to term the central lands (but then even Egyptians call their land umm al-dunyā [“mother of the world”], don’t they?) pay some attention to the literary activities in other parts of the Arabic-speaking world, to east and west, but they are very much the exception rather than the rule. When we add to this scenario the appalling situation regarding book distribution (more accurately, the lack thereof) in the Arab world, the process of incorporating the Arabic output of the Maghrib region into a larger picture of Arab creativity becomes difficult.
For most indigenous literature scholars and critics the term Maghrib implies the triad of countries Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, leaving others such as Libya to the east and Mauretania and Mali to the south in some sort of cultural limbo, occasionally incorporated in the fold but more often than not excluded from it. Another key factor enters in: European colonialism. The Maghrib region belonged firmly in the French colonial camp, and Algeria—initially invaded in 1830, when the dey of Algiers fatally flipped his fly whisk in the French consul’s face—became, at least in French eyes, a départment of France itself. Whence the protracted and ruthless nature of the so-called War of a Million Martyrs, the conflict between popular forces in Algeria and the French army that began in earnest in 1954 and came to an end with Algerian independence in 1962. The political configurations exemplified and indeed amplified by that conflict continue to affect Algerian society and politics, most obviously in the relation between secularism and religion, but also in such spheres as family life and the role of women in society. For example, the women who had run guns through the streets beneath their enveloping black robes were invited to return to their homes once the conflict ended. These and other issues are, it hardly need be said, the topic of much fiction, in both Arabic and French.
In Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, programs of ta‘rīb (“Arabization” literally, a concerted effort to give the Arabic language a more prominent role in education and cultural life) have been implemented but with widely varying degrees of success. The least progress in that sphere seems to have been made in Algeria, where the complete gallicization of the educational system during the colonial period made efforts at linguistic change difficult after 1962. In all three countries, the efforts of the French government to maintain francophonie on a world scale act in some cases directly counter to the intentions of ta‘rīb. A year or so ago, I asked my renowned Moroccan colleague Abdelfattah Kilito why he did not write more works on Arabic literature in Arabic. He pointed out that when he writes in French, the publication is subsidized by the French government, whereas—during my same period of research in Morocco—the minister of culture made it clear to Moroccan writers that publication in Arabic had to stand on its own feet (he actually cited private-sector publication in Lebanon as a model for emulation).
But what about literary texts and teaching? I do not discuss here the many Maghribī writers who are renowned for their work in French: for example, Mohamed Dib, Yasin Kateb, ‘Abd al-Kabir al-Khatibi, and the Goncourt prizewinner, Tahar ben Jelloun. Nor do I take on the equally fascinating and much discussed topic of the late Paul Bowles and his influence on Moroccan writers from his base in Tangiers, most especially Muhammad Shukrī. I am more concerned with litterateurs writing in Arabic, what they write about, and how their addition to the list of Arab authors whose works may be studied and taught can provide interesting new dimensions to modern Arabic literature studies. I further restrict my comments to writers of fiction, because the situation and status of both poets and dramatists are too complex to fit into this essay.
Because of a cluster of issues, not the least of which is patterns of colonial influence, the Arabic fiction of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, compared with that of the regions and nations further to the east, is poorly covered in terms of both translations and critical studies available in the English language. The situation is slowly improving, but even if we allow for the scantly peopled realms of Arabic literature studies in the Western world, the number of specialists remains extremely small.
Tunisia is, regrettably, the country that can be covered in the shortest time. Leaving aside its current political situation, which can discreetly be described as unfavorable to the development of a literary community and its concomitant activities, the tradition of Tunisian fiction rests on twin literary pillars who could hardly be more different. The first is the complex figure of Mahmūd al-Mis‘adī (d. 2004), who, receiving a French education first in Tunisia and then in Paris, returned to his homeland to become an upholder of the most traditional attitude toward the immaculacy of the written Arabic language. Diametrically opposite to him was ‘Alī al-Du‘aūjī, trained in traditional Islamic schools, who went on to become the most renowned portrayer of popular life in Tunisia and utilizer of its colloquial levels of language. Between these two conflicting figures and in mostly unfavorable political circumstances, Tunisian fiction has trodden a difficult path. We are fortunate in that William Granara has published an anthology of al-Du‘aūjī’s lively stories (Sleepless Nights),1 and that al-Du‘aūjī’s “Tour of the Bars of the Mediterranean” is available in Italian. But beyond that, significant writers such as al-Bashīr Khurayyif, Hasan Nasr, ‘Arūsiyyah Naūlūtī, Salaūh Bū-Jaūh, Naūfila Dhahab, and ‘Aliyaū’ al-Taūbi‘ī await the attention of both translators and critics writing in the English language.
Of the three nations, Algeria has found the process of ta‘rīb the most challenging. The already noted gallicization of its educational system during the period of French rule is partially responsible for the continued prevalence of French in intellectual milieus. Even so, Algeria today can boast of some important writers of Arabic fiction, although they remain substantially unknown to critics and readers farther to the east. Once again, Granara has translated into English an excellent novel by al-Tahir Wattar, entitled al-Zilzal (The Earthquake). Wattar is a primary recorder in fictional form of the events of the prolonged Algerian War through the character of al-As (“the Ace”). From a transcultural point of view the most complex of the contemporary writers of fiction in Algeria (and thus one of the most rewarding to teach in literature courses) is Rashīd Abū Jadrah, whose works I consider below. But most recently the figure of Ahlaūm Mustaghaūnimī has come to great prominence. Like al-Mis‘adī she obtained a doctoral degree from Paris, but she has chosen to express her vision of contemporary Algeria and its revolutionary history through the lens of fiction, utilizing both male and female narrators to explore the complexities of life in both Algeria and exile in France (for Abū Jadrah, see Repudiation; for Mustaghaūnimī, see Memory and Chaos). The result is a bit Saganesque, but her status as the first Algerian woman novelist to achieve more than local fame places her into that interesting intercultural space that provokes not a little debate in both Arab and Western intellectual circles, something that I might term the Reading Lolita in Tehran syndrome.2
To an extent even greater than that in Tunisia, the process of Arabization in Morocco is well advanced. The literary community in a variety of Moroccan intellectual centers is a lively one and in recent years has moved beyond the achievement of independence and further into the past in quest of the beginnings of those trends in fiction writing that continue to the present day. For many years, a leader in this effort at redefinition was Muhammad Barraūdah, a novelist and the translator of Bakhtin into Arabic. Two of his novels, The Game of Forgetting and Fugitive Light, are available in English translation. Alongside Barraūdah there has been a relatively small yet influential group of novelists and short story writers, among whom I would include the already mentioned Shukrī (whose novelistic autobiography, as he calls it, For Bread Alone, is now known to Western readers), Ahmad al-Madīnī, Idrīs al-Khūrī, Muhammad Zifzaūf, Mubaūrak Rabī‘, Laylaū Abū Zayd, and more recently BenSaūlim Himmīch and Ahmad al-Tawfīq. I myself have translated Himmīch’s The Polymath and The Theocrat and al-Tawfīq’s Abu Musa’s Women Neighbors (now made into a film). Al-Tawfīq is currently the minister of religious affairs in Morocco.
The perception of distance from the intellectual centers of the Mashriq region to the east and the perception of continued linkages to the Andalusian heritage have affected the relation between present and past. The tradition of what might be termed classical music in Algeria and Morocco, for example, is still taught in schools of Andalusian music (especially in the city of Tlemcen). That Algeria and Morocco were at the very fringe of the Ottoman Empire—Morocco was actually outside it—produces a very different attitude toward the past and the anxiety of influence of the past’s various literary genres as they impinge on the present. In my experience this attitude is a major force in the process of rewriting the history of fictional genres that is so much in evidence in Morocco—not to mention in the composition of historical novels that explore that past in highly creative ways. What this movement is countering, of course, is the notion that radical change in the cultural sector was closely tied to the independence movement—the topic of Barraūdah’s wonderful novel The Game of Forgetting. Debate over the continuing role of French culture in the intellectual community is connected to that notion. I have mentioned the process of Arabization in the Maghribī countries, but what seems to be of current interest in both Morocco and Tunisia is the identification of the readerships for fiction in Arabic: comparing the preferences for works of French or Arabic expression and estimating the size of each subset of the total.
A final factor is that the Maghrib, especially Algeria and Morocco, consists of multilingual communities. The one community that tends to be left out of discussions of the French-Arabic dichotomy is that of the Amaūzīgh. The term may be unfamiliar, but the visiting researcher to those countries soon learns that the word Berber is as insulting to the peoples so designated as barbarian is in the European context. Reverting to the issue of readerships, we discover that for a sizable percentage of the populations of Algeria and Morocco, Tamazight (or another dialect) is the first language, Moroccan or Algerian Arabic dialect is a second, French a third, and written Arabic a distant fourth.
How exactly is one to reflect this sense of heritage, this cultural and linguistic diversity, and this set of postcolonial tensions through the process of studying and teaching the literary (fictional) texts of the region? I differentiate according to venue and language. If the use of Arabic texts is involved, as I often have the privilege of doing with my doctoral students, then, of course, the choice is open, highly diverse, and rich. My recent seminar on Maghribī novels covered these authors: Muhammad Barraūdah, Muhammad Shukrī, Ben Saūlim Himmīch, and Ahmad al-Tawfīq from Morocco; Rashīd Abū Jadrah from Algeria; and ‘Arūsiyyah Naūlūtī from Tunisia. The choice was personal, tilted heavily toward Moroccan creativity and reflecting my involvement with the litterateurs in question. Even so, it reflects diversity in the construction of the novel. If European-language translations are involved, there is another division to be made between French and English. Regrettably, and this situation is not confined to Maghribī literature of Arabic expression, there is a plethora of translated works available in French and miserably little in English.
When teaching the Maghribī novel in European-language translation, I choose to concentrate on a novelist whose career seems to encapsulate so many of the problems and so much of the promise implicit in the postcolonial situation in these countries and the cultural métissage that is its natural consequence. That writer is Abū Jadrah. His novel La répudiation (1969), originally written in French (we are told), was an enormous success in France; it was later translated twice into Arabic and is now also available in English. In 1981, Abū Jadrah announced that henceforth he would write his novels in Arabic. Since then what I would term the Arabic versions of his novels were indeed published first, but after a close reading of several of them and their French translations it remains entirely unclear to me (and to several other scholars working in both Arabic and French literature) which of the two languages (and cultures) is foremost in his mind as he writes.3
In the pedagogical context I stress two aspects of Abū Jadrah’s oeuvre; first, his subject matter, which is concerned with the family, male dominance, and taboos; second, his language. In La répudiation, a father who has sons in their twenties marries a fifteen-year-old girl; the result is a chaos of relationships, personal and sexual, in the two households, the old and the new. The tyrannical role of the senior male in the household is well captured in these novels, as is the subservient role of women—at least in the public domain in which the novel operates. A different kind of tyranny pervades another of Abū Jadrah’s novels, Ma‘rakat al-zuqāq (The Struggle in the Straits; the French version is La prise de Gibraltar). Here a young Algerian has been named Tāriq by his father, who is obsessed by history in general and, in particular, by the crossing of the Gibraltar Straits by Tāriq ibn Ziyād in 710 CE. The young boy is forced to memorize large segments of the great historian Ibn Khaldūn’s account of the crossing, not to mention an earlier historical account by the Roman historian Sallust, of the defeat of the Numidian general Jugurtha. The Roman account, in Latin, is duly included in the novel in both Arabic and French versions of the text, along with Tāriq’s school vocabulary lists. The postrevolutionary Algerian present impinges on this scene of oppressive family supervision when Tāriq’s schoolteacher challenges the veracity of Ibn Khaldūn’s account and is called a traitor by the boy’s father and the boy’s school companions, all of whom have apparently accepted the historical picture fostered by the revolutionary government. The father in this novel is frequently away on business, and it is in that context that the absence of the mother, killed during the bloody street demonstrations against the French in the city of Constantine during the revolutionary war (the War of a Million Martyrs), is particularly telling on the young boy.
In remarkable ways Abū Jadrah probes family tensions and, in many works, creates what is probably the most effective portrait by a male writer of the condition of women in Maghribī society. His narratives are a major contribution to such literature. But he is a poet as much as a novelist. Let me illustrate his style by citing what is purportedly the same passage in both Arabic and French describing the horsemen in a miniature painting that hangs on the wall in Tāriq’s house:
tuhawwiluhā fī ‘ayn al-nāzir ilā manzūmah kuriyūghrfiyyah rāqisah mutarannimah mukaddifah (?) mutatāwilah mutashannijah mutashāmikhah mutatāribah muta‘āzifah mutasāri‘ah mutaghāliyah mutafāwitah mutasābiqah ilā al-akh. . . .
Ce qui faisait apparaître les cavaliers quelque peu affectés, scléroses, figés, prudents, ralentis, hésitants, fuyants, impersonnels, voire inexistants!
[This made the horsemen appear somewhat affected, stiff, still, prudent, slow, hesitant, evasive, and impersonal, almost as if nonexistent.]
We face here the clear fact that few, if any, of Abū Jadrah’s narratives in one of the two languages is a translation of the other; both share larger features, but there are significant differences at the word and sentence levels. The phrase “ilā akhirihi” (et cetera) in the Arabic version points to a particular feature of Abū Jadrah’s textual strategizing, whereby he invites the reader to join him in his game of words and assonances by continuing the long strings of epithets with which he often fills his descriptive passages. His habit of including parentheses, with alternative word choices and explanations, often offered with a question mark, is another facet of this openness of the text. Those familiar with the relation between text and reader in the nouveau roman will be familiar with such devices. Indeed, my colleague Richard Serrano has pointed out that Ma‘rakat al-zuqāq is extraordinarily close in its narrative content and method to the novel Pharsalie by Claude Simon.
Abū Jadrah insists that his readers work hard as part of the reading process, in terms of both language and narrative strategy, in order to come to grips with the worlds that he wishes to create, which are full of political, social, and familial tensions. It is this combination of narrative, politics, and gender—with all their concomitant complications—that makes his works such a transforming and effective pedagogical medium.
I have not addressed many specific pedagogical issues in these remarks, yet the issues that I have identified will hopefully prompt the inclusion of some of these contributions to modern Arabic fiction in college and university courses—literary and nonliterary—that investigate broad cultural issues, whether in northwest Africa (the Maghrib) or other parts of the world where similar confrontations are to be found. But the Arabist in me wishes to conclude by noting that the inclusion of Maghribī arabophone literature in the purview of Arabic literature studies in academic institutions in the Western world could serve as an important contribution to (and expansion of) our awareness of the cultural heritage of a region of the world that continues to demand our attention. Perhaps the study of its literary output may afford insights into identity and motivation that are sadly absent from the often noisy debates in other spheres of inquiry.
1. Since I am discussing works of Arabic expression in the context of teaching primarily in the United States, my references are only to translations into English.
2. The reference is to the Western readership’s reaction to Nafisi’s, Reading Lolita in Tehran.
3. See my analysis of the Arabic and French versions of his La prise de Gibraltar, listed as a “French translation” of the original, Ma‘rakat al-zuqāq.
Abū Jadrah, Rashīd (Boujedra). The Repudiation. Trans. Golda Lambrova. Colorado Springs: Three Continents, 1995.
Allen, Roger. “Translation Translated.” Oriente Moderno 2–3 (1997): 165–76.
Barraūdah, Muhammad. Fugitive Light. Trans. Issa J. Boullata. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2002.
———. The Game of Forgetting. Trans. Issa J. Boullata. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996.
Du‘aūjī, Alī al-. Sleepless Nights. Trans. William Granara. Carthage: Beit al-Hikma, 1991.
Himmīch, BenSaūlim. The Polymath. Trans. Roger Allen. Cairo: Amer. U in Cairo P, 2004.
———. The Theocrat. Trans. Roger Allen. Cairo: Amer. U in Cairo P, 2005.
Mustaghaūnimī, Ahlaūm. Chaos of the Senses. Trans. Baria Ahmar. Cairo: Amer. U in Cairo P, 2004.
———. Memory in the Flesh. Trans. Baria Ahmar Sreih. Cairo: Amer. U in Cairo P, 2000.
Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran. New York: Random, 2003.
Serrano, Richard. “Translation and the Interlingual Text in the Novels of Rachid Boudjedra.” Maghrebian Mosaic: A Literature in Transition. Ed. Mildred Mortimer. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000. 27–40.
Shukrī, Muhammad. For Bread Alone. Trans. Paul Bowles. London: Owen, 1973. London: Saqi, 2000.
Tawfīq, Ahmad al-. Abu Musa’s Women Neighbors. Trans. Roger Allen. Santa Monica: PostApollo, 2005.
Wattar, al-Tahir. The Earthquake. Trans. William Granara. London: Saqi, 2000.
© 2005 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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