The writing of space in the Moroccan narrative, 1968-1983 [Ressource électronique] / Andrea Flores

Ph. D. : Romance languages and literatures : Cambridge, Harvard University : 1998

Bibliogr. p. 266-269

This dissertation takes up the different inventions of cultural spaces in Moroccan literature written in French during the postcolonial years. I define "cultural spaces", in part, through the identification of culturally inflected languages and their sites of circulation. Arabic, French, English, Spanish and Berber move about in novels but call into question the location of given cultural territories. In addition, I define "cultural spaces" by way of the idioms or practices in dialogue with each other within discrete parts of ihe contemporary Moroccan city: the mosque, the home, the medina and the ville-nouvelle. In the first chapter I show how in Abdelwahab Meddeb's writing, within a description of Tunis appear images of other cities (like Fez, Paris, Rome, Cairo) to form an exterior image of home that nonetheless attests to a distinctly Arabo-Islamic inheritance. In chapter two Mohamed Choukri's narrative Le pain nu, translated from Arabic, depicts the home city of Tangier by way of the colonial languages existing within the city. In chapter three I study Agadir, Mohamed Khai'r-Eddine's first novel where the narrator's home city has been destroyed in an earthquake the narrative producing what I define as an "earthly" and horizontal vision of the home. In contrast, chapter four shows how Tahar Ben Jelloun, in La priere de 1'absent, writes of a home as to be recovered in a sacred, "typical", and original form. In chapter five I show how the "decolonized writer" in Abdelkebir Khatibi's La memoire tatouee. can remain in dialogue with "the origin" without producing a pure image of the home. In these texts "Western" and "Arabo-Islamic" literary references and cultural practices are mutually interrogated as homogeneous and dominant cultural entities. The West remains a narrative but is transformed into a useful narrative. By way of the West, Arabo-Islamic constructions of the home are included in a dialogue that has the advantage of resisting radicalism. I argue that through this literature, a solution to the vicious circle of "civilizational conflict" can begin to appear in the form of a literary narrative. Three interviews that address the work in the dissertation are appended to the thesis and may appear as publications at a later date: Abdelhak Serhane, Abdelwahab Meddeb and Mohamed Choukri.