There were no PEN/Heim grants for Arabic literature for 2016 — and, as per PEN/Heim, no fully completed submissions — but there was one to French-English translator Emma Ramadan to bring prose poems by Ahmed Bouanani (1938 – 2011) to English.

About the collection, PEN writes:

This volume of prose poems—by turns haunting, elegant, and surreal—is a key text by a major Francophone Moroccan poet and filmmaker, deftly translated by Emma Ramadan. These poems arc across geography, history, and folklore to rescue Moroccan cultural memory, an act of remembering in the face of colonial and state projects of forgetting. (Available for publication)

There is also an excerpt on the PEN America website. It begins:

If you want…

I tell myself each day: if you want to see the black dogs of your childhood again, give yourself a reason. Throw your hair into the river of lies, plunge, plunge further still into the blood of insanity. The masks don’t matter, but give yourself a reason and die if necessary among the bald heads, the shanty town kids who eat grasshoppers and hot moons, and the black dogs that play in the garbage dumps of the suburbs.

In that time,

the seasons rained colors, the moon rained legendary dragons. The beneficent sky opened onto white cavaliers. Just as the coquettish old women sang over the terraces of Casablanca.

Bouanani’s cult-classic novel L’hôpital is set to come out in English next year from New Directions.

In Bouanani’s lifetime, according to translator-poet Oma Berrada, he published four books: three poetry collections and the novella L’hôpital (1980). Also interested in film, Bouanini released one feature film,Mirage, and four shorts.

This, however, was only the tip of the artist-author’s ouevre, as what he left behind “is not a collection of notebooks, but several dozen *finished* manuscripts (i.e. written, re-written, proofread, sometimes typed, dated, etc.).” These were not just prose or poetry, but a wide array of genres: poetry, fiction, plays, film scripts, essays, history books, as well as drawings and graphic novels.”

Bouanani, Berrada said, spent a lot of his life documenting Moroccan oral poetry, crafts, ceremonies, popular myths and beliefs. “He didn’t see them as fixed folklore or museum material, but rather as as locus where collective memory is embodied, preserved, and constantly renewed.”

Get to know Bouanani’s work:

From Brooklyn Rail: The beginning of L’hôpital, trans. Lara Vergnaud

On Words Without Borders: From “Photograms,” trans. Emma Ramadan

From Le Magazine: Two short essays

Berrada notes that the “recent anthology of Souffles (www.sup.org/books/title/?id=25641) has a great early essay he wrote on Moroccan oral poetry.”

From World Literature Today: “The Illiterate Man,” trans. Emma Ramadan.

On YouTube, one of Bouanani’s short films: “6&12“

Also on YouTube, a twelve-minute excerpt from Mirage.

Earlier this month, on August 2, a court in the small central-Moroccan city of Ouarzazate gave writer and philosophy professor Aziz Benhaddouch a two-month suspended sentence and a fine of 1,000 dirhams, with an additional 20,000 in reparations, on charges of “libel and defamation”:

At issue was Benhaddouch’s 2014 novel The Island of Men. According to Telquel, it centers on patriarchy, mythology, and “ghost children,” or paper children, who have birth certificates but don’t exist, and are used to secure government benefits.

An initial complaint against the novel was filed in early 2015, apparently by fellow townspeople who felt the book was about them, although Benhaddouch denied basing his novel on real-world characters, according to reports in Telquel and CNN.

Benhadouch lives in Taznakht, a small town near Ouarzazate.

The Middle East Monitor reported that two NGOs, the Media and Expression Liberties Organisation and House of Wisdom, “criticised the prosecution in separate statements, calling it a ‘crackdown on freedom of expression and creativity.'”

According to ArtsFreedom, Benhadouch said in a statement that “this is the first conviction of its kind against a novelist in the history of Morocco,” and felt that this decision — using press law — could set a precedent to be used against other artists.

The author, who is also a philosophy professor, is reportedly currently in Agadir, appealing the ruling.

The lede of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) news release on their 2017 Literature Translation Fellowships, announced on Thursday, boasts a “German science fiction novel, a 12th-century Arabic folk epic, and a Czech author’s autobiographical account of her battle with breast cancer”:

The grants promise $325,000 to 23 translators working with fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry from 13 different languages, including the 12th-century Arabic project and a 20th-century Francophone Moroccan novel.

The criteria for selected projects include, according to the release, “the translators’ skill, but also the importance of a particular work of international literature to English-speaking audiences, including those authors and languages that are often underrepresented.”

The 12th century Arabic epic, to be translated by Melanie Magidow:

Melanie A. Magidow, South Kingstown, RI ($12,500) To support the translation from the Arabic of the 12th century folk epic The Tale of Lady Dhat al-Himma. This 7,000-page work is the longest extant Arabic epic … and the only one named for a woman. While the author is unknown, the epics were known to be recited and performed by storytellers, especially during the holiday month of Ramadan and during leisure times. Complete with fight scenes, love scenes, and warrior women, this epic follows a woman and her son and their posse of friends as they move back and forth primarily in the Arab-Byzantine borderlands, with visits to Constantinople and to the caliph’s court in Baghdad.

Melanie A. Magidow works as a freelance Arabic-English translator, specializing in literary translation. She recently received a PhD in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures from The University of Texas at Austin, where she taught classes in Arabic. She has also taught at the University of Rhode Island, Middlebury College, Hunter College, and the City University of New York. Prior to teaching, she was an Arabic newspaper collator for the Library of Congress.

And the Moroccan poetry collection, to be translated by Emma Ramadan:

Emma Ramadan, Providence, RI ($12,500) To support the translation from the French of the poetry collection The Shutters by Moroccan writer Ahmed Bouanani. Bouanani (1938-2011) was a novelist, poet, film director, and documenter of traditional arts in different regions of the country. The Shutters is a powerful and surreal mapping of Morocco’s cultural history and collective memory. The book is divided into several sections, all of which revolve around a house where the narrator lives with his grandmother, and through which a series of ancestors and mythical beings pass. Bouanani weaves together references to the Second World War, the Rif War, the Spanish and French protectorates, and the dead soldiers, prisoners, and poets who give voice to the violence inflicted on them. Bouanani believed that tradition held the key to a country’s heart and identity. He dedicated his life to tracking Morocco’s heritage that has been forgotten but not annihilated.

Emma Ramadan translates from Providence, Rhode Island, where she is the co-owner of Riffraff, a bookstore and bar opening this fall. Her translations include Sphinx by Anne Garréta, Monospace by Anne Parian, 33 Flat Sonnets by Frédéric Forte, and The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers by Fouad Laroui. She recently spent a year in Morocco on a Fulbright grant to catalog and translate the archives of Ahmed Bouanani, with the help of his daughter, Touda Bouanani, and the Dar al-Ma’mûn artist residency. Upon her return she edited a special issue on Moroccan writing for the online journal Words Without Borders.

A complete list of winners is available at the NEA website.

The 2016 ‘Prix de la Littérature Arabe’ was awarded this week to Inaam Kachachi’s Tashari, translated as Dispersés (2016) by François Zabbal:

The 10,000€ prize is sponsored by by the Arab World Institute and the Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation.

The jury also gave a 5,000€ special mention to Reda Dalil’s Best-seller (2016) whose “resolutely contemporary writing shows very promising talent.”

Kachachi is the Prix de la Littérature Arabe’s fourth laureate, and the first from Iraq. This is not the first award for her Tashari — an Iraqi word for a hunting rifle that scatters buckshot in all directions. The novel was also shortlisted for the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF).

Tashari tells the story of an Iraqi Christian doctor, Wardiya, who is forced to seek asylum in France at the end of her life, at 84, having seen her family scattered to all corners of the earth.

In a 2014 interview for ArabLit, Kachachi said: “For years I’ve been collecting the content and the documentation for Tashari and transposing it into fiction. The writing itself took me over a year, but don’t forget that I’ve been working with the language and a trainer about the editing for over 40 years. The pregnancy period was long, but eventually a child was given birth without a c-section.”

Kachachi has also published a biography, Lorna, about the British artist Lorna Hales. Her debut novel Heart Springs appeared in 2005, and her second novel, The American Granddaughter, was shortlisted for IPAF in 2009.

Reda Dalil is a Moroccan journalist and writer. His first novel, The Job, took the Manounia prize in 2014. Best-Seller is his sophomore work.

The award ceremony is set for October 12, 2016, to be held at the Arab World Institute in Paris.

Moroccan-French author Leila Slimani’s Chanson douce (Sweet Song) has made the four-title finalist list for the Goncourt, France’s most prominent literary prize, as well as the five-title finalist’s list for the Renaudot:

Régis Jauffret Cannibales is the only other book to have made both lists.

Slimani has previously won Morocco’s Mamounia literary prize for her novel In the Garden of the Ogre, about a woman who’s a sex addict. It doesn’t seem that any of her work has been translated into English.

Chanson douce is, according to reports, an excavation of class and cultural prejudice, as well as a story of murder that foregrounds Miriam, mother of two who goes back to work as a lawyer, and Louise, the family’s working-class nanny.

Although the novel is set in France, Slimani said in a recent HuffPost Maghreb interview that it would be very interesting to transpose into a Moroccan reality.

Also yesterday, Lebanese-American novelist Rabih Alameddine took this year’s Prix Femina Étranger for Les Vies de papier (the French version of An Unnecessary Woman), as translated by Nicolas Richard.

Samar Yazbek’s Les portes du néant made the second cut for the Prix Médicis “foreign books” list; the finalists’ lists for the Prix Médicis are set to be announced tomorrow. Yazbek’s book was also translated into English as The Crossing by Nashwa Gowanlock and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp (2015)

The four on the Goncourt final list:

• Catherine Cusset L’Autre qu’on adorait Gallimard
• Gaël Faye Petit pays Grasset
• Régis Jauffret Cannibales Seuil
• Leila Slimani Chanson douce Gallimard

The five on the Renaudot final list:

• Adélaïde de Clermont-Tonnerre, Le dernier des nôtres (Grasset)
• Régis Jauffret, Cannibales (Seuil)
• Simon Liberati, California girls (Grasset)
• Yasmina Reza, Babylone (Flammarion)
• Leila Slimani, Chanson douce (Gallimard)

The winners will be announced in November.

What’s going on in the fictional Moroccan classroom?

By Erin Twohig

Something troubling is happening to classroom scenes in Moroccan literature in French. The fictional classroom isn’t filled with stories of students learning lessons, taking exams, growing up and succeeding in the school and in life. The fictional classroom is filled with desperation, anarchy, and even revolt. Students throw rocks while teachers take off to watch football matches in Moha Souag’s short stories. A teacher causes himself physical harm in order to get a break from his classroom in My Seddik Rabbaj’s L’Ecole des sables. A single misunderstood word causes the paralysis of an entire school system in Fouad Laroui’s “L’affaire du cahier bounni” What’s going on in the fictional Moroccan classroom?

Educational angst inside literature mirrors, to some extent, angst about real-world classrooms. To read just a little about education in Morocco is to discover panic about a system in crisis: a survey of recent newspaper headlines turns up talk of frustration and resentment among students, exclusion of the most vulnerable members of society, fear over poor job prospects, and multiple “rescue plans” to save a struggling system. Discussions about education and literature both focus on loss and lack: the readers that the school doesn’t create, the disposable income and leisure time for reading that graduates do not possess, the audience that authors cannot find inside or outside the classroom, the absence of authors publishing locally when it is more lucrative to do so overseas.

However, to answer our initial question by simply saying “education literature is bleak because the prospects for education are too” would do a disservice to the fascinating debates happening around both literature and education. There’s much more going on in education literature than just hand-wringing despair about the failure of the classroom, and authors are far from giving up on tackling the problems they see. Rather than disengaging, Moroccan authors have produced creative, stylistically experimental, and even subversive novels that engage with education as a system that calls for critique, but also dynamic reform.

What follows is an overview of just some of the ways that Moroccan literature has responded to debates about education: and indeed not just responded, but actively participated and proposed solutions. My focus is primarily on Francophone literature, which has a unique relationship to the education system.

The “dark side” of the literary classroom 

Perhaps the simplest answer to “what happens in literature when education is in crisis?” is that things become extremely, violently dark. Tragic, melodramatic narratives of death and suffering are increasingly present on the Moroccan educational-literary landscape in French. Two notable examples can be found in the aformentioned L’école des sables, where a desperate public-school teacher pours boiling oil on himself to escape his position in a remote rural school, and Mohamed Nedali’s Triste Jeunesse, where administrative corruption and a struggling job market lead to tragedy for two high school graduates.

It’s tempting to read these novels as documentary realism, and were that simply the case, they would still be of interest: Triste Jeunesse especially was praised for shedding literary light on the problem of diplômés chômeurs (unemployed graduates). But these novels also have something to tell us about the changing role of literature, and can get us asking bigger questions about what literature “does” with social issues. We’re used to thinking of literature as part of the education system, yet these darker narratives show that authors may no longer be looking to publish books that will be recycled back into the educational system. Instead, this educational literature is increasingly critical, striving to work outside the classroom, recording its problems in a way that is not dissimilar to testimonial writing. The idea of testimony has been critical to Moroccan literature (especially prison narratives), and this category of books suggests that we might add the classroom to the list of places that require witnessing. While many of these narratives stylistically restrict themselves to a bleak realism, they are nonetheless interesting for how they change the way we think about literature, moving its function away from reproduction of the educational canon, and towards an outsider’s witnessing.

Lessons in nonsense

Not all education literature is full of doom and gloom, however. In fact, one of the most interesting trends is towards the use of humor (though still definitely a dark humor) to describe education. Many of these novels describe schools where nonsense, instead of actual content, is taught. The teachers in these schools are often unconcerned with teaching, preferring to watch football, sing songs, or spout jargon than teach. One common referent of “nonsense” in Francophone school literature is the educational policy of Arabization, which made Arabic the official language of the classroom after Morocco’s independence from France. While Arabization was lauded as a necessary step in decolonization and affirmation of national identity, its uneven application and subsequent problems turned it into a frequent scapegoat for educational underperformance. Fouad Laroui responds to Arabization in his short story “L’affaire du cahier bounni” (“The affair of the bounni notebook”). He describes a school year that descends into chaos when nobody can figure out what color the government intends when it orders students to buy bounni– colored notebooks. With citizens unable to define what bounni looks like, control over the meaning of the word falls to corrupt politicians, who collude with businessmen to corner the market on bounni and rack up the prices of notebooks of their chosen color.

Laroui’s short story uses “nonsense” to suggest that when people are taught a language that isn’t their mother tongue they are deprived of power and control over their education. As amusing as Laroui’s and other francophone depictions of Arabization as “nonsense” are, however, there is perhaps even more for us to learn from what they omit or fail to consider than from what they critique. To begin with, the idea that teaching in Fusha is equivalent to teaching “nonsense” because Fusha is not a native spoken language proposes a fairly limited vision of how a language becomes meaningful to those who learn it. While Fusha might not be a language spoken from birth, it is nonetheless a language that carries multiple types of meaning, from religious, to nationalist, to literary, to historical and especially anti-colonial. Furthermore, while these novels rightly point out that language can always be manipulated by those in power, they often fail to consider how much French is manipulated by the powerful in Morocco, especially to economically marginalize students (Charis Boutieri’s work on the “two speeds” of Moroccan education that reserves French mastery, and the ensuing access to the job market, for the rich, is a critical read on this topic). Often, depictions of Arabization as “nonsense” fall short of engaging with just how complex the linguistic situation of Morocco is.

Nonsense in the school isn’t only about Arabization, however. Several examples of school nonsense don’t directly reference language policy, from Mohamed Nedali’s depictions of students who spend class filling in crossword puzzles, to Moha Souag’s short stories where math teachers write a stream of numbers on the board, place a division sign in the middle, and call it a day. By not directly referring to Arabization, these narratives suggest other ways to interpret the complex mix of factors that have contributed to the Moroccan education “crisis.” The school’s failure to “make sense” in literature could represent its failure to “make” a number of things: to make education accessible to all children regardless of social status or geographical location; to make social mobility a possibility; to make economic success a reality for diploma-holding graduates. Yet the nonsense at the center of the literary school also points readers to what should have been taking its place: the teaching of Moroccan literature to students. In the summer of 2015, I had the opportunity to talk to authors and publishers throughout Morocco about their perceptions of the school system, in the context of a larger book project about education and literature in French and Arabic. A common refrain kept returning throughout these encounters: those in the literary world feel that the school, which should be a place of encounter between authors and readers, is actually erecting barriers between them. Many schools lack libraries for students, and books are often prohibitively expensive. In French classes in particular, the “classics” of metropolitan French literature are often given preference over the works of local authors. Nonsense in the literary classroom, then, is perhaps a way for authors to self-reflexively debate their work’s place in the classroom, and their own place society.

Conclusion

It’s easy to become pessimistic about the challenges facing Moroccan education, and the struggles of authors to connect with young audiences. There is still cause for optimism as we read French-language narratives of education, however : all of these authors remain creatively engaged with the classroom, using their writing as a way to debate and imagine change. The creativity of these efforts suggest that literature is far from disengaging with the school and with its readership. On the whole, the dark, satiric, and nonsensical novels of the classroom are perhaps authors’ way of coming to terms with what literature means and where it belongs in society, when it is increasingly doesn’t seem to “belong” in the classroom. On that topic, we all have something to learn: panic over declining readership is certainly not unique to Morocco, nor are the ways in which literature itself will continue to evolve as it finds its shifting place in the world.

Erin Twohig (@erinktwohig) is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown University. Her current book project, Contested Classrooms: Literature and Education in North Africa, explores education as a theme in French and Arabic language novels from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. She also has scholarly articles forthcoming in Francosphères and Research in African Literatures.

Last year’s Prix Goncourt — France’s most prestigious literary award — went to Moroccan writer Leila Slimani for her Chanson Douce. Why this novel? What work does this prize do? From an essay that originally appeared in Arabic on Al Modon:

By Ayoub El Mouzaïne

Translated by Dana Dawud

Crédits photo : François Mori

When asked in an interview about his opinion on the pleasure of text, the French philosopher Roland Barthes candidly expressed his belief that there existed both a rightist and a leftist literature. As in modern political traditions, the division depends on the text’s proximity to the Erotic, in content and approach. According to this distinction, a leftist literature would offer committed texts, dissenting to, and void of, distraction or excess; since these texts are written for the sake of educating the people and inciting them for revolutionary means. On the other hand, the literary production of a right-leaning kind, according to Barthes, would be erotically charged in content and form, distancing itself as far as possible from commitment and struggle in its dialectical sense.

In the history of French literary criticism, it is said that bourgeois literature played both the role of educating and entertaining, raising awareness and offering solace. But there is a bourgeois face of literature that exists on the margins of the text, a face that closed the book and opened venues for authors to build their fame and glory by exploiting family ties, financial privilege, and the media. This distinction opens up a series of questions: Why do writers write? What is the purpose of publishing? What is the value of literature? And if it does have value, what is at stake for awards?

In 2015, the novelist Mathias Enard was awarded the Prix Goncourt, one of France’s oldest and most prestigious literary accolades, for his novel Boussole (Compass).Using a composite language and different levels of narration, Mathias worked his way through an orientalist purview, moving along its mental and cultural delimitations. His protagonist is a man suffering from insomnia. Unable to sleep any longer than an hour at a time, he narrates his memories, travel tales, and his fantasies, creating for pleasure its own labyrinths of knowledge and pleasure. Enard was aiming for a “comprehensive work” that would convey his own relationship to the East and reflect his views of civilization, politics, and art. And perhaps he succeeded, without being consumed by the coronation.

A year later, in early November 2016, a woman in her early thirties appeared on one of the terraces of building number 199, on Boulevard Saint-Germain, in the 7th arrondissement‎. She was seen smiling, holding two copies of a book in her hands. Were they the Old and New Testament? What did this kind woman want? Did she feel lonely and decide to ask the passersby to come up to her home for a cup of green tea? And why was she standing like that on the terrace, as if she was the Pope?

A poisoned award

One could hardly remember a single name from the numerous receivers of the Goncourt; they all had been forgotten, and there isn’t a place made for them amidst the Pantheon of great intellectuals in the Latin Quarter cemetery. Although an exception has been made for the literary famous among them, such as Proust, Malraux, and Duras, we remember them through their works and not because of the award. For literary awards don’t necessarily create authors, and neither do they grant literary works immunity to face the profundity of language and the atrocious work of time. In 1932, the members of the academy voted for the award to be given to Guy Mazeline for his novel Les Loups (The Wolves) while Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s infamous novel Journey to the End of the Night has been eliminated from the competition. What do we know of Mazeline other than the fact that he was friends with the jury at that time? The French writer Jules Renard writes mocking the establishment supervising the award: “The Goncourt Academy seems ill to me, as if it’s an infirmary for old friends. The world of literature would not give it much interest in the future.”

Ever since its establishment, the ability to grant the award has been exclusively the business of a few well-known publishing houses. A journalist has even used “Galligrasseuil” to sarcastically describe the award, this invented term being composed of the names of three prominent publishing houses: Gallimard, Grasset, and “Editions du Seuil.” The aims of the award have also been reduced to settling accounts between French writers, and as a way for colleagues and friends to show their support for each other, or as a means to honor the “loyal” descendants of deserted colonies, for the award has been given to writers such as Amin Maalouf, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and most recently to Leila Slimani. Born in 1981 in Rabat, Slimani is that woman on the terrace.

Chanson Douce (Soft Song, 2016) is Slimani’s second novel, and the one that won her the award. Many reviews claim the title of the novel is deceptive, giving an impression of gentleness and domesticity while the novel itself is brutal. The novel starts with a stern opening line: “The infant died, it didn’t take more than a few seconds.” But the novel in its entirety is a domesticated variation of narrative, and truly is deceptive in its naivety but not in its technique, reminding us of Henry Salvador’s famous song by the same name “Une Chanson Douce,” and the lullabies grandmothers use to sing their infants to sleep! Her work, with its focus on the family, is a favorite theme among Francophones, especially Tahar Ben Jelloun, the young novelist’s godfather, if he’s considered to be the “commercial model.”

With a flat language, tedious adorned words follow each other like nails being manicured with care in a Parisian parlor—superficial words lacking in intensity compose her second novel. And, as in her first work In the Garden of the Ogre (2014), Slimani does not depend on style, since the pleasure of the text with her stems from social clichés, an ideological confusion, and an identity-sadism. The author claims in press statements that she has shed folklore and that her writing is free of stereotypes, that she has reconciled with her native/mother country. She goes on to present herself as a “universal” writer. She holds to her image as a bold Muslim writer whose main concern is “building characters.”

Nonetheless, in the same novel, she doesn’t hesitate to spill out all kinds of obsolete reactionary discourses on Arabs, Muslims, and North Africans, including the enslavement of babysitters for their North-African roots and the ruminations of a Moroccan prostitute being saved from her misery by a white old French man. This is exactly the price to be paid for the award.

Francophone orphans

Publishing a work in French doesn’t always mean pledging an eternal unconditional allegiance to a Francophone ideological hegemony that dominates cultural identity and ethnicity as they struggle to gain independence from a colonial era that has yet to end. During the end of the Eighties, France officially shifted the discussion from what it calls “French Literature” to Francophone literature in an attempt to affirm and draw attention to the richness and variety of French dialects (African, American, etc.) It also saw this as a way to melt down the iceberg of discord that has separated intellectuals and writers who have gradually liberated themselves from the shackles of patriarchal language and cultural centrism.

Derrida, in a letter to Abdelkebir Khatibi, wrote: “But, as you can see, I do not belong to any of these distinctly specified groups. ‘My identity’ does not disclose any of these categories (France’s French, non-Maghrebi Francophone, French-Maghrebi).Where do I stand then? What categorization could be created? I assume that I exist here, maybe alone, the only one who could be Maghrebi (which is not a citizenship), and a French citizen, being them both at the same time. Even better, being them both at birth.”

There are Moroccan Francophone authors, or authors of Moroccan descent, like al-Khatibi and Mohammad Laftah, who maintain their loyalty to the French language without having to give in to its authoritative icons, and continue to contemplate the issues underlying the duplicity of the tongue and the pleasures of language—contemplation that breeds confusion, creates joy, and instigates anxiety.

But when it comes to Leila Slimani and a whole other generation of writers, among them Fuadal-Orwy, Muhammad al-Nidali and others, they have chosen to align themselves from the outset on the “safe side” of things. Their literary path is familiar and formulaic: they start by publishing bohemian-bourgeois texts to join the ranks of Ben Jelloun. They then receive the La Mamounia Hotel Award in Marrakech as a first step to reach the terrace of the Goncourt. And finally, they end up being used as cards in the hands of the media of an untenable empire. They are progressive in their “criticism” of tradition, making sure to please France, their loving mother, the “other” who praises them while secretly talking behind their backs. They swing back and forth like a pendulum, between the right and the left, depending on the swaying of the voices and the oscillation of interests at the doors of the Elysee Palace.

The Prix Goncourt, as much as it deals with French literature in a serious and selective manner—at least in the case of Enard’s novel Compass—remains a political ovation par excellence. As in the case of foreign literature that is written in French, it tacitly exposes the binary on which the academy bases its evaluation of a literary text, and reveals its political bias on issues of difference, identity, and creativity.

“We,” the orphans of al-Khatibi, love language and are on its side, while remaining against its politics. And we don’t hate ourselves, as much as the Francophonic orphans insist on flagellating genealogy and the alphabet. For after all, they surely know the value of literature in the stock exchange of awards.

Ayoub Mouzaine (@AMouzaine) is a writer and translator based in Casablanca, Morocco.

Periodically, Words Without Borders recommends a text to be translated. They have previously recommended Magdy al-Shafie’s Metro (translated into English by Chip Rossetti) and Zeina Abirached’s popular A Game for Swallows. Now, they’re recommending Aziz BineBine’s Tazmamort (2009):

WWB writes, of Tazmamort:

How does one survive the unthinkable? And how does one describe the unspeakable? Tazmamart was a secret prison for political prisoners built in the wake of a second failed coup d’état against King Hassan II of Morocco in 1972. The young officer Aziz BineBine was one of the soldiers caught up in that day’s events who found themselves arrested, convicted, and condemned to tiny underground cells in notoriously inhumane conditions. Over half would die there. BineBine was released after eighteen years. Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun’s This Blinding Absence of Light (which won the 2014 International IMPAC Award) was based principally on BineBine’s experiences in Tazmamart; here, for the first time, BineBine presents his own account. He wrote his story to honor the friends and comrades who lived and died alongside him by telling theirs: “to describe not only their deaths, but their lives.” The book is not only an invaluable document of a crucial part of Moroccan history and a powerful contribution to human rights literature, but a moving testament to human resilience and the power of storytelling.

Aziz BineBine was born in Marrakesh in 1946. He completed his secondary education in the French lycée system and then entered the Royal Military Academy, becoming an officer in the Moroccan army. Appointed as an instructor to train recruits at Ahermoumou military school, he was involved in the 1971 coup d’état against King Hassan II. Judged and condemned, he spent eighteen years in the horrific prison of Tazmamart. Ten years after his release, to honor his comrades who died in prison, he wrote a memoir, Tazmamort.

They add:

• Partial English translation available
• Author has appeared at human rights conferences
• All rights available

And watch:

Longlisted for the 2017 International Prize for Arabic Fiction and one of acclaimed Moroccan short-story writer Anis Arrafai’s “favorites of 2016,” Yassin Adnan’s Hot Maroc brings something new to Arabic literature:

By Annamaria Bianco

Hot Maroc is the first and only novel by leading Moroccan journalist and poet Yassin Adnan, who has succeeded in making a unique addition to contemporary Arabic — and world — literature.

First off, in this novel set in an urban Marrakesh, the author gives his characters animal features and traits: We have Ahmad the hyena, ‘Abd al-Salam the mantis, Halima the swan, ‘Aziz the greyhound, Murad the gerbil, ‘Atiqa the cow, Bucha‘ib the elephant, al-Yazid the dog, and Rahhal Laâouina, the squirrel, the protagonist of this so-called animal comedy, which takes place on the Web. This jarring element is another mark of the book’s originality: most of the events take place on the internet or through it.

The titular “Hot Maroc” is the name of a webzine founded by the protagonist, Rahhal, with a couple of friends after university. It’s a free space where he writes articles criticizing society, intellectuals, and politicians. But as Rahhal is the anti-hero par excellence, shy and cowardly, these articles are anonymous and he doesn’t take responsibility for his words and actions. Instead, it’s the squirrel’s fault, the alter ego who will finally replace Rahhal in the end.

This dual personality seems to act as a metaphor of the alienation caused by the online society we are living in nowadays, on both sides of the Mediterranean.

Even so, the novel is still deeply tied to Moroccan history and culture: It opens with demonstrations at UNEM (L’Union nationale des étudiants du Maroc) in the 70s and 80s, and then it leads into other critical social issues, such as the wild urbanization policies in Marrakesh during the 90s, the relations between Arabs and Amazigh, Marxism and Islamism, the living conditions of African immigrants and the stigma of illegal prostitution, the clash of generations, corruption, and the weaknesses of the political system.

All these secondary stories contribute to and shape the background of cultural decay that Adnan seems to suggest from the novel’s beginning, which is full of gloomy poetry quotations from the pre-Islamic period.

If, on the one hand, this richness of themes and narrative layers makes the reading more interesting and dynamic, sometimes the result can be a bit difficult and disorienting, particularly to a non-Moroccan audience. However, Adnan’s prose is simple, made up of short sentences in Modern Standard Arabic and brief dialogues in colloquial darija, vivid and also funny. The humorous element is key. It’s a comedy, both in the modern and ancient senses of the word, where his author allows the reader a laugh off fictional lives and events in order to make us think about reality and its contradictions.

Everybody can talk about revolution and change behind a screen, but what’s next?

This book is strongly recommended to anybody who is tired of cyberbullying and fake rebels.

Annamaria Bianco holds both a BA in Comparative Languages and Literatures and a MA in Arabic and Islamic studies from the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. She was also an exchange-student at INALCO in Paris and a Banipal intern. She works as translator and journalist and is currently enrolled in a MA program in Editorial and Literary Translation from Arabic.

If you’re in NYC tomorrow, translator Alex Elinson will be discussing A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me at the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center at the City University of New York. Also tomorrow, ArabLit will run a Q&A with Elinson about the novel.

This review originally appeared on Bookwitty:

It’s as a playwright that Youssef Fadel appears at this year’s Paris book fair, Livre Paris (March 24-27), where Morocco is the guest of honor. Yet the Casablanca native is also a celebrated novelist: His A Rare Blue Bird that Flies with Me won the 2014 Prix du Maroc du Livre and went on to be shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. An earlier novel, Hashish, won Morocco’s Grand Atlas Prize in 2000.

Strangely overlooked is Fadel’s novel A Beautiful White Cat Walks With Me, published in Arabic in 2011 and now in artful English translation by Alexander E. Elinson.

The book is set against the backdrop of war between Morocco and the Western Sahara, told in alternating sections by a young comedian who’s sent off to fight, and his father, who works in the palace as the king’s private jester. These two characters—who are both similar and opposite—could be fodder for slapstick. But Fadel plays it differently. The novel’s “comic” sections are discomfortingly tragic, while the tragic scenes are often darkly funny.

The main characters are echoes of real men: King Hassan II (1929-1999), General Ahmed Dlimi (d. 1983), and real-life court jester Mohammed Binebine (d. 2008). The book’s events also echo real power struggles, protests, and the conflict with the Sahrawi desert people. Yet A Beautiful White Cat Walks With Me doesn’t name the king, his war, or the foreign dignitary who has come for talks. Elinson’s foreword provides historical context for those who want it, but the book’s absurdist appeal is exactly in Fadel’s elisions, which leave enough space for us to see the king as the Almohad caliph Muhammad III with his thirteenth-century jester, or US President Donald Trump, with a jester who works in the 2017 White House.

The first section begins with jester Balloute’s grotesque description of human laughter, which he calls a “hurricane that fills veins, eyes, and mouths.” It “squeezes one man’s midsection, his cheeks reddening and the blood almost bursting from his pores.” The sounds of laughter are even more ridiculous, a mélange of animal noises from a braying donkey to “the clucking of a chicken to the cackle of a hyena.”

It’s not particularly fun when the jester tells his jokes for the king. Balloute is wracked by performance anxiety, and he is constantly jockeying with a hunchback, as well as ministers, in order to keep his privileged position. For the most part, the jester is played as a straight man, with a comically blind allegiance to his king. When the unnamed foreigner comes to negotiate on the question of war, the jester wonders: “Can His Majesty not solve a minor issue like the Sahara on his own, just as he has done before with everything else he faced?”

When the meetings are over, the jester jokes — at a Moroccan minister’s expense — before the foreign dignitary. The jester willfully misunderstands when the dignitary begins “to pull nervously at his suit as if it were causing him some discomfort.” Balloute brings his straight-man myopia into his personal life as well, particularly when relating to his third wife, who is nearly forty years his junior.

If Balloute the jester isn’t funny when he’s telling jokes, he is funny when he’s trying to understand the world. Young Aziza, for instance, should be grateful for her association with him. When he recalls that she attempted suicide days before their wedding, he does so with a shrug: “Who can understand women?” He imagines that, under the bandages on her wrists, there were “minor cuts, signs of her love[.]”

When it comes to women, father and son are very similar. Both Balloute and his sketch-comedian son Hassan have a hard time understanding why women are constantly getting the better of them. Hassan is much more sensitive to the world around him, but he still can’t quite grasp his wife Zineb. While at the front, he believes she’s sick at home. In truth, she’s gone to live in an open relationship with a pair of socialist doctors.

All male-female relationships in the book are portrayed as prickly, especially those between poor men and more powerful women. After refusing to wed the general’s spoiled daughter, Hassan is sent off to die. Balloute’s second wife, meanwhile, has the jester do her dirty work while she gallivants with her first husband.

Yet the father and son are opposites, too. The father’s humor is about keeping the powerful feeling strong, while the son’s humor questions power. In one instance, Hassan writes a sketch about a man pushed aside at the butcher’s by a rich woman buying cuts of meat for her dog. Hassan is told his work is leftist and political, although he doesn’t have much love for the socialists.

As far as the government is concerned, Hassan’s comedy falls into a gray space. Much as with Fadel’s novels, it’s not clear if Hassan’s writing is authorized or not. When he brings a sketch to a TV company, near the end of the book, at first, he’s welcomed. But later, Hassan is told the comedy doesn’t meet management’s “standards.”

The universe Fadel opens up in A Beautiful White Cat Walks With Me continues in his next novel, A Rare Blue Bird That Flies with Me, translated by Jonathan Smolin. Those caught up in the world of the Beautiful White Cat might well make their way over to see what happens next.

This originally appeared on Bookwitty.

If you’re in NYC today, translator Alex Elinson will be discussing A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me at the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center at the City University of New York:

According to Elinson, the talk will be informal, and it will be followed by a reading of some passages by himself and Mark Drury, a PhD candidate in Anthropology who is working on the Western Sahara. They’ll discuss the novel’s context and Elinson will talk about Fadel, his use of darija, and, Elinson said, “what I perceive to be his move from the local Moroccan scene to the broader Arab market.”

How would you describe Youssef Fadel’s writing in the current constellation of Moroccan, Arabic, and world literatures to someone unfamiliar with his work? What would your elevator pitch for Fadel and this novel be?

Alexander Elinson: Youssef Fadel is a novelist, television and movie screenwriter, and playwright. All of his works deal with everyday people and everyday problems – emigration, un- and underemployment, sexual frustration, violence, suspicion and distrust between family and friends.

He is an established writer who has been experimenting over the years with different uses of voice, language register, levels of realism and magical realism, and narrative structures. His extensive work for stage and screen results in novelistic writing that is vivid, visual, and character driven. A Beautiful White Cat is a novel about Morocco in the 1980s during Morocco’s war in the Western Sahara, narrated by a comic writer son and his royal jester father who are both striving to find their way in a country where assertions of power and control are played out and felt on a macro (state) and micro (personal) level. It is the story of the power of laughter in the face of economic and social despair, and the ultimate struggle to keep smiling when all seems lost.

What was your journey to translating A Beautiful White Cat Walks With Me?

AE: I came to know Youssef Fadel and his work by way of my research on language change in Morocco, specifically the increasing use of colloquial Arabic (darija) in writing. Fadel’s earlier works (Hashish, Zoo Story, A Metro Tall?! Impossible to name three) utilize darija extensively and I was very interested in his motivations for doing so, how this fit into larger questions of language change in writing in Morocco and the Arab world, and how the works were received critically.

After spending considerable time with his work, I can only say that I became quite taken with it and decided to translate it. It is interesting that although it was my interest in Fadel’s use of darija that initially brought me to his work, A Beautiful White Cat has almost none. Perhaps this is because it is the first of his novels to be published outside of Morocco (jointly by Fennec in Casablanca and Dar al-Adab in Beirut) and thus must take into account a non-Moroccan readership. However, what I still find so compelling about Fadel is his ability to write using a language that sounds colloquial and natural. He creates characters that one can imagine, hear, and sympathize with.

One of the reasons it moves so beautifully into English is your smooth and colloquial translation of course, but also the simultaneous specificity of the Moroccan landscape and yet how many things are not named (the king, the year, the state visitor, the reasons for protest and war), such that it feels like this could be, well, Trump and his court jester and his war. (Does Trump have a jester?) Just so, there is a moment when a man builds a house bigger than the king’s (and loses it) and it could be an anecdote from the Abassid era. What do you feel are the (literary) influences on this novel and the way it reconstructs history?

AE: Talking about influences is a tricky business. I prefer simply to place the novel into a certain constellation of recent works that are set in imaginary (or semi-imaginary) yet entirely recognizable settings – works such as The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz, Otared by Mohammed Rabie, Paul Beatty’s Sellout, Dave Eggers’ A Hologram for the King, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. All of these novels take us to places we can imagine, that seem real or are partially real, yet at the same time, cannot possibly be for all of their absurdities and inhumane acts (can they?). It is this juxtaposition between fiction and fact, the unreality of reality, that makes works like these so powerful.

The scenes you mention about the king’s minister who attempts to build a house bigger than the king’s, and the fact that the king has a jester do draw from a broader, folkloric 1001-Nights-like context that seems to come from another era. Indeed when I first sat with Fadel to talk about translating this book, I asked about the difference in meaning and sense between clown and jester (both muharrij in Arabic) – the Arabic version of the novel is adorned with pictures of clowns on the cover – adding that in English, jester seems strange because it evokes a medieval setting of a royal court. He replied that it is exactly this seeming disconnect between a bygone age and the present that he wanted to depict, that the system in Morocco, while quite real and in the present, seems to harken back to another time. It is exactly this unreal, medieval quality that he wished to evoke. At the same time however, King Hassan II did have one, Mohamed Binebine who died in 2008.

The two narrators’ relationships with women are universally difficult, with the jester-father Balloute seeming to misunderstand just about everything: Aziza’s premarital suicide attempt, for instance, about which he reflects, “Who can understand women?” But even the more sensitive Hassan is unable to understand his wife Zineb or his relationship with her, and she is continually moving further from him. (At least he understands his relationship with the general’s spoiled daughter Joumana.) How did you read the opacity and difficulties of the male-female relationships?

AE: Balloute is, quite simply, a pompous, self-centered ass, but there are definite aspects of his character that are sympathetic, I think. It is true that he is unable to see how his actions affect others, and his treatment of women is entirely for his own self-satisfaction. However, he is also very much caught in a web of power that in many ways reproduces itself from the top down. He comes off as very confident and sure of himself when we first meet him, but we very quickly realize that he is running scared – scared of spending his whole life as a petty performer in Marrakech, scared of running afoul of the king, scared of losing his place in the palace.

He views the women in is life as either useful for his physical pleasure, for his upward mobility, or not useful at all. He never tries to ‘understand women.’ He barely gives them a thought, but, then, he barely gives anyone a thought. Hassan is entirely different, but also almost completely unrealistic in the way he views his relationship with Zineb. When it comes to women, he is an idealistic dreamer. Having had little to no experience with women before meeting Zineb, he views her in almost cartoonish fashion – beautiful, modest, seductive, dutiful, all his. Hassan’s relationship with Zineb is like everything else in his life – elusive, frustrating, ultimately tragic. Actually, that’s not entirely true. Hassan seems to view everything in life with a certain cynicism, except for his relationship with Zineb. This is the one thing in his life that is perfect, so it seems.

If someone were going to build a class with/around this novel, what would you suggest they teach alongside it?

AE: Selections from Aristotle’s Poetics (on tragedy and comedy)

Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye

Western Sahara: War, Nationalism, and Conflict Irresolution by Jacob Mundy and Stephen Zunes

Any number of short stories by Mohammed Zafzaf, Yusuf Idris

Yes! Short stories by Idris would teach really well with this. If someone were to build a library display with/around this novel, what expected and unexpected texts would you suggest they put with it?

AE: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

The Theocrat: A Modern Arabic Novel by Bensalem Himmich

Redeployment by Phil Klay

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist by Emile Habiby

This a tragicomedy where often it’s the comedy that’s tragic, and the tragedy that’s comic, with the two bleeding into each other. (Like for me one of the funniest parts was where the activists don’t want to pay Hassan for his comic work, which is probably resonant for any freelancer in any capitalist or quasi-capitalist economy, anywhere. Other funny parts, like his “Who can understand women?” are more painfully funny.) How would you describe the relationship between tragedy, history, and comedy in the book?

AE: What better way to tell the story of war, corruption, and heartbreak in Morocco than with the voices of two comic performers, both walking a fine line between comedic success and failure on all fronts?

A Beautiful White Cat is a painfully sad story. The juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy in the work is a necessary element, I think, both in terms of internal plot, and in its effect on how it is read. Hassan’s and Balloute’s job is to make people laugh, and for a while they are quite successful at it. However, laughter and what is funny are complex and elusive, as Balloute describes in detail in an early chapter when he attempts to define them. Each character represents a different aspect of comedy – Hassan the political satirist and Balloute the buffoon entertainer. Hassan’s job is to focus attention on injustice and the absurd (although he often denies being political at all), whereas Balloute’s job is to entertain the king, to make him forget his troubles. In the end, though, real life events become too overwhelming for both of them and their ability to make people laugh, including the reader is lost. From a reader’s perspective the quick movement from laughter to social realist critic is startling, like have a rug pulled out from under you every few pages.

Why did you decide the book needed a foreword? What else would you have included (if anything) with more space?

AE: The book is both very Moroccan in its setting and context, and quite universal in many of the themes it treats. I think the book could read beautifully and effectively without the foreword. However, this would have removed much of the context of the book, and risked stranding the English language reader alone in the desert with very few signposts to help guide the way.

While no names are mentioned, Moroccans, at least of a certain age, would recognize many of the references to the king and other known figures such as General Ahmed Dlimi, commander of the armed forces in the Sahara, or Mohammed Binebine, King Hassan II’s boon companion and jester. The suggestion to include a forward came from the publisher, and while it does risk locating the novel too squarely in a particular Moroccan context, and even reading too ‘academically,’ I agree that it’s important to provide the English language reader with a context to fully understand not just the historical events where the novel occurs, but its boldness too. A story about absolute power and a war of questionable motivations is, in itself, a compelling one. Writing about a specific absolute power and a particular war that is not supposed to be questioned is extremely bold.

Translation involves not just moving from one language to another, but also moving the context along with the original into the translated text as much as possible. This novel was written in a context where questioning the king’s motives for any action, and critically discussing the Western Sahara region are red lines not to be crossed, and the book represents a bold challenge to these pieties. When translating, it is important to try to keep the original’s impact intact. If a work is oppositional and rebellious in its original language but, when translated into another language confirms certain stereotypes (“those Moroccans have always been a violent, dishonest bunch!” said the English language reader), it is only a partial translation and hasn’t fully brought the spirit of the work to the reader of the translated text. The forward gives the English language reader some help in understanding what this place was like, and what it means to criticize it.

What is this beautiful white cat smiling at him?

AE: Lost in translation is the wordplay between the word ‘sentence’ in the book’s epigraph and the ‘cat’ of the title that appears at the end of the novel. Both words are the same in Arabic (qitt); a relationship I’ll leave to experts in etymology to explain. Reading the epigraph (Qur’an 38:16: They say: ‘Our Lord! Hasten for us our sentence even before the Day of Reckoning!’) along with the brief mention of the white cat walking alongside the narrator at the end of the novel during his darkest hour, the white cat may evoke hope or light, or a darker, inescapable fate.

How does this novel fit in with the narratives and builds of Fadel’s other recent novels?

AE: A Beautiful White Cat is the first in a trilogy about Morocco in the 1980s, a period that was a particularly important one in terms of Morocco’s transition from an extremely repressive state in the 1970s and 1980s during the ‘Lead Years’ into the 1990s when Morocco began to enact several human rights and other reforms. Each of the three novels focuses on well-known aspects or icons of Moroccan life during that period. A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me centers on the palace and the war in the Western Sahara. A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me focuses on forced disappearance and the prison, and Farah looks at the building of the Hassan II mosque, the effects of that project on the Casablanca neighborhood where it was built, and the residents it displaced. All three novels, and in fact most of Fadel’s novels, are about regular people; lower and lower middle class people trying simply to survive in a place where it seems that everything is stacked against them, and success is fleeting.

If you were going to recommend any Moroccan work for translation, what would it be?

AE: Hot Maroc by Yasin Adnan

Exile by Abdallah Laroui

Any number of works by Moroccan zajal (colloquial poetry) poets such as Driss Amghar Mesnaoui, Ahmed Lemsyeh, Adil Latefi, Mourad Qadery, Nouhad Benaguida

If you were going to recommend any Moroccan work (other than this) as a must-read that’s already translated, what would it be?

AE: A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me by Youssef Fadel

Whitefly by Abdelilah Hamdouchi

The Bottom of the Jar by Abdellatif Laabi (or anything else by him!)

The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami (written in English)

Many thanks!

Moroccan poet, short-story writer, and playwright Taha Adnan, in Belgium for more than 20 years, was recently in Kuwait to talk about language, literature, and literary community:

By Vittoria Volgare

Photo credit: Vittoria Volgare.

KUWAIT CITY – We can change many things, among them our haircut or our clothes, but not the language we use to write literature. This is the belief of Taha Adnan, a Belgian Moroccan writer who has spent more than twenty years living in Brussels, and who works for the Francophone Ministry of Education, but who continues to write his poems and books in Arabic.

Adnan was recently in Kuwait to represent Belgium during the celebration of the Francophone days and to commemorate the victims of the Brussels attacks of 22/3/16. On an invitation from the Belgian Embassy, Adnan appeared during a conference at the Union of Kuwaiti writers and at a cultural salon hosted by famous Kuwaiti writer Taleb Al Refai, where he explained his fidelity to Arabic.

“I arrived to Brussels from Marrakesh when I was 26, therefore I was already a semi-finished product, Made in Morocco,” Adnan said in describing himself. He saw it as inevitable for him to write in his mother tongue. He added that he can freely live this “Arabness,” his Arab and Moroccan identity, thanks to the multiculturality of Brussels:

It is a special place where there is no authority of language, but instead a certain language insecurity: there are the Francophones, the Flemish, the bilinguals, the presence of the European institutions and NATO, where the main language is English. It is a context where there is no linguistic supremacy; no one is sure of his language. I even have the impression that Arabic is one of the languages of Brussels.

According to the poet, his work can be considered both Arabic and Belgian literature. If Arabic comes natural to him, Adnan admits that in French he has to think and elaborate, a mental process that would directly kill poetry. Moreover, he associates French with the language of work.

“Luckily, to solve this problem we have translation. I write in Arabic and I leave the rest to the translator. If the work is well done, we will surely manage to reach the public.”

The importance of translation and the Arab responsibility

Photo credit: Vittoria Volgare.

Adnan surely attained his goal, with works translated into Spanish, French, English, and Italian. Translation, in fact, is a big issue for Arab authors. Being published in foreign languages opens doors of recognition.

“Unfortunately, not all the works that deserve to be translated reach this goal, and Arabs have a responsibility in this. Our national cultural institutions don’t make any effort to promote our literature. Therefore, Arabs should create a space of dialogue or a mechanism that encourages editing and translation, facilitating at the same time the choice for a foreign publisher,” Adnan added.

It is also necessary to multiply independent institutions that aim to select contemporary Arabic literature, Adnan said. This is what the prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction, among others, has tried to do since its launch in 2007 in Abu Dhabi, actively encouraging the translation of shortlisted novels from all over the Arab world. Moreover, recognition from IPAF brings attention and novels associated with it increase their sale and notoriety.

Can Arabic literature written in Europe be considered also European? 

Adnan is mainly known for his poems, but he has also written short stories, articles published in various newspapers, and a theatre work “Bye Bye Gillo,” staged in different countries and languages giving voice to the situation of illegal immigrants in Europe. More recently, he published a collection of poems, Your Smile is More Beautiful Than the National Flag (Almutawassit Books, 2006), and has coordinated the publication of a pan-Arab-Belgian collection of short stories entitled This is Not a Suitcase. The title is a celebration of a work by the Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte, but it also refers to the fact that Arab writers are capable of bringing their heritage wherever they go, of packing it in  the titular suitcase.

In this last work, 17 writers from Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Morocco, Egypt and Sudan — including Adnan himself –speak about a very multicultural Belgium, living between “Arabness” and “Belgitude,” a Belgian identity defined by what it’s not. In Belgium, a country with three official languages, the Francophone are not French, the Flemish are not Dutch, and Germanophones are not German; Belgians define themselves for their affiliation to a region, a city, or a language.

The way to manage this cultural complexity isn’t obvious, and this is when Belgitude unifies Belgians. This panorama becomes even more complex if we consider the large presence of people with foreign backgrounds, especially from Morocco. Coming from different countries, the authors of This is Not a Suitcase have chosen to live in Belgium for various reasons, but what they all have in common is that they never abandoned their mother tongue. They continue to produce an Arabic literature that Adnan considers also a European contemporary literature.

Some writers have emigrated because they chose so, others were forced to, fleeing their countries in search of safety and security. Their stories take place in numerous Belgian cities, such as Brussels, Bruges, Liege, Charleroi, Antwerp, Leuven and others; the themes vary from exile to racism, extremism, exclusion, and coexistence of cultures. The texts can be considered literature of migration, of exile, or of integration. It is a book, according to Adnan, whose aim it is to change prejudices against Arabs who are not the enemy but who, on the contrary, declare their appreciation for Belgium.

Literature produced by Arabs living in Europe already existed in France and Great Britain, but wasn’t known in Belgium. Adnan said he realized there was a void, even though many Arab intellectuals were meeting regularly in Brussels to discuss literature. This is when he thought of creating This is Not a Suitcase, which has recently been translated into French (La Croisee des Chemins). Previously, he had also overseen the publication of a book entitled Brussels the Moroccan (Editions Le Fennec), a collection of texts by Moroccan writers who live or have spent some time in the capital of Europe.

Read Taha Adnan’s “Your Smile is Sweeter Than the National Flag,” translated by Robin Moger.

Translator Alex Elinson — who brought Youssef Fadel’s funny A Beautiful White Cat Walks With Me into bright, playful, enjoyable English — recently gave a talk at CUNY alongside anthropologist Mark Drury:

The relationship between anthropology and literature is a discussion for a different day; in any case, the talk opens — after a reading that sets the audience into giggles — with a discussion of the use of Moroccan colloquial. Elinson says:

“What brought me to the writing of Youssef Fadel was his extensive use of Moroccan colloquial Arabic in writing. Not only did I find it interesting, but really sort of brilliant, the way he’s able to use colloquial in a written form, in a way that’s really theatrical.

“This novel actually has no colloquial in it. So what brought me to the writer was that aspect, but in this novel he does not use a single word of darija, Moroccan colloquial Arabic.”

Elinson added that the second novel in the trilogy, A Rare Blue Bird Flies With Me, which has been translated by Jonathan Smolin, also doesn’t have colloquial. While the third in the trilogy, the recently published Farah, does have a little.

“I have not asked Youssef why this is the case — why he stepped back from this, I don’t know if it’s an obsession, but he was definitely experimenting with narrative language and use of Moroccan colloquial — why the change? I have a couple of guesses.

“Prior to the publication of A Beautiful White Cat Walks With Me in 2011, all of his novels were Moroccan novels, and they were published by Moroccan presses, for Moroccans. And that was his audience. This book is the first novel that he’s published outside of Morocco. It’s a joint publication between Fennec and Dar al-Adab, so it’s a shared publication, Moroccan and Lebanese.

“So I don’t know if the suggestion to not include Moroccan Arabic [came from the publisher]. As those of us familiar with Moroccan Arabic know, no one could possibly understand Moroccan Arabic, unless you’re a Moroccan (or that’s what other Arabs say).

“But also, I honestly do think that he himself, just in the act of publishing with a non-Moroccan publisher…he is reaching for a larger audience. And I don’t mean that in a commercial sense. I think he would like to reach readers beyond Morocco. Frankly, I don’t blame him, when books in Morocco sell in the dozens.

“[Fadel], like other skilled Arabic writers, when he uses darija in a limited way, I think he writes it in a way that’s understandable. Well, I know darija, so I’m at an advantage. But I think he writes a darija that non-Moroccans can understand. And that’s a very difficult thing to do — to write colloquially but in a pan-Arabic kind of way.”

Watch — or download — the whole talk at videostreaming.gc.cuny.edu/videos/video/4807/.

Ismail Chaib and other “30 Maghreb” organizers are looking for stories on how Maghrebians see their countries in 30 years:

The call-for-interest has been posted online, and reads:

The Maghreb region in North Africa encompasses over 100 Million inhabitants 2/3 of which are under 30. Yet this trove of talents has found very little avenues to fully reveal its potential and nothing so far, signals that this is about to change…

The consensus is of a gloomy, hopeless future. If we want things to change for the better, we ought to change the narrative, demonstrate alternatives and successes and inspire young people through out the region. The next 30 years could be better then the one behind us!

30 Maghreb(s) ambitions to gather 30 individuals of 30 years old or under to share their views and opinions about the future of the region. Whether dystopian or utopian, fictional or fact-based, we would like you to answer the following question “how do you see your the Maghreb in the next 30 years?” in an up to 2000-words essay. The results will be published through a new media online and in a book.

We believe this work of prospective would help shed lights on some upcoming luminaries while disrupting the current consensus, paving the way for a brighter future.

Whether your are from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia or abroad but feel a strong tie to the region, please leave your details below so we can reach out to you!

#Maghreb30s

Interested Maghrebis can fill out the form through google docs.

This story, by celebrated Moroccan writer Malika Moustadraf (1962–2006), originally ran on The Common and appears here, with permission, for Women in Translation Month.

Moustadraf died of kidney disease at the age of forty-four, leaving behind a novel (Wounds of the Soul and the Body) and a celebrated collection of short stories (Trente-Six). The collection takes its name from the psychiatric wing of the Casablanca hospital.

Just Different

By Malika Moustadraf

Translated by Alice Guthie

Avenue Mohammed V is silent and desolate this late at night, empty apart from a few stray cats meowing like newborn babies; it’s a creepy sound. Then a she-dog ambles up, stops in front of me, and raises her tail at a black male dog limping past. A single bark of seduction from her and he’s mounting her. They’re cleaved to each other, clinging on, and she shuts her eyes in ecstasy, surrenders to his movements. A delicious tingle runs through me. How lucky they are! They do it in public. They’re shameless—as the saying goes, “Not only God sees them but his servants do too.” They don’t have to worry about a police patrol, or about what people will say.

Bushta shouts, “I’m gonna kick the fucking shit out of them!”

I take no notice of him. He flings a stone at the dogs, and when it hits them they both let out a shrill yelp that sounds like a human sob, and then separate. If I were them I’d attack him and bite his buttocks.

I’ve been pacing back and forth along the street for two hours now, and there hasn’t been a single customer. It’s a drought!

I touch the razor blade in my pocket, checking it’s still there. I always keep it on me in case someone suddenly does something dodgy—in case I get cornered. Bushta stands near Marché Central, leaning on a wall and singing his favorite song in a tuneless croak: “Red wine, red wine, ah, red wine! The sweetest way to get drunk!” His coarse voice rips through the still night. He’s waiting to take his cut. We sweat and stress and bear the repulsive customers, and he doesn’t have to lift a finger. Fuck him and his—

Naimah found a client earlier on, went off on the back of his motorbike. He seemed like a worker from one of the factories. She said, “I’m a fan of the working classes: they’re better than those inexperienced little pupils you’re obliged to teach the ABCs of love. I’m not some special learning car covered in L-plates for them to grind around in again and again.”

The heel on my shoe is hurting me. I can’t stand on it for very long at a time. I’d like to go home, drink a little beer and eat a plate of mussels with hot pepper. That’s the best prescription for warming a person up in this cold weather. But Bushta won’t leave me alone. Plus I’ve got so many expenses: food, clothes, transport, rent. Rent’s the main thing. I pay my share of the room I rent with Naimah and Scummy. I’m thinking about moving out and living alone—I can’t bear Scummy anymore. She only needs a couple drinks and she’s off, scandalizing us in the street, making a scene. She flips into this weird delirious state. She rants, she says all these totally irrational things, and she insults everyone and everything in foul language. Things get even more awful if she crosses paths with any other drunks.

The razor blade’s still in my hand: I’ve been practising using it ever since I got attacked by those bearded guys who said they wanted to clean up society. Since then I’ve hated anyone with a beard. They shaved my head. Bushta behaved atrociously—he ran away and left them to it. If the police patrol car hadn’t come by, something worse would have happened, for sure. It’s made me like the police, for the first time in my life; I’d always run from them, but that day I ran toward them, and I’m always pleased to see them nowadays. But the loss of my hair still pains me. My mother always used to love brushing it, and she’d deliberately let it grow long, right down past my shoulders. One time my father came back from one of his long trips. He’d go away for months on end, then come back with presents for us, and cheese, and tea—and lots of problems. This particular time he turned up and caught my mum putting lipstick on my cheeks as rouge, my hair pinned up in a bun. He beat her that day till she soiled herself, and told her: “You’re going to ruin this boy—he’ll turn into a girl.”

His hand felt like a pair of pliers digging into my arm as he propelled me along the street to the barber. My hair got shaved down to almost nothing, and I hid my exposed scalp under a blue woollen hat. Back at the house he took the Qur’an in his hands and recited the Fatiha. He opened his mouth so wide his decayed molars showed, plus his tonsils. My heart was pounding, rattling my ribs.

“In the name of God, the most merciful and most compassionate,” I began, stumbling over the words.

“Don’t you even know the Fatiha, you son of a Zoroastrian?” He bit down on his bottom lip with his false front teeth.

“You’ll go to hell, you dirty little bastard, and it’ll be full of women and fags like you.”

He gripped the Qur’an in both hands and smashed it down onto my head. The room spun, the planet Earth spun, and all the heavenly bodies spun too.

“You and your mother will both go to hell! Write out ‘I’m a man’ a thousand times.”

I bent my head and looked down at my hands. I touched my pinkie: I’m a man. I touched my ring finger: I’m a woman. Man, woman, m… woman.

I took a piece of paper and sat at the table. He sat near me. His lips never stopped moving; perhaps he was cursing me under his breath, or reciting suras from the Qur’an? He watched me with the indignant disgust of someone looking at the decaying corpse of a rat.

His white cotton ghandoura was so soaked in sweat it was sticking to his body. I could see his black and white striped underwear through it: it looked like zebra skin. I didn’t carry on looking for very long, to protect myself from his sharp tongue.

“Hands behind his back, the devil on his shoulder”—that was what he used to say to me if he caught me with my hands behind me. But my mother told me when she was brushing my hair one day that men are devils and women are bottles. The Prophet said that women are bottles, and the Prophet doesn’t lie.^[1]But my dad lies: he says that women are bottles with devils hiding inside them.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“A pilot,” I said shyly, almost inaudibly.

“A peanut?”

“A piiilooot—with an L.”

“A pilot, a pilot… Peee-Lot.” He pursed his bluish lips, then stuck them out as if sucking his teeth. He frowned, clearly thinking about something weighty, and kept repeating “Lot… pee-Lot.”^[2]Then he turned to me and said, “So you want to fly planes, do you? You’ll more likely be driving a dump truck, you miserable little shit.”

In our Arabic grammar class, the teacher said: “The subject is a ‘raised’ accusative noun, with an enclosure marked at the end. The object is an ‘erect’ nominative noun, with an opening at the end.”

So I fumbled around at the end of me, but there was no opening there, and nothing raised either. There was something down there about the size of my pinkie, like a little gerbil’s tail dangling between my thighs.

The teacher flayed my back with his wooden rod. I groaned. He took off his prescription glasses and cleaned them with the edge of his white teacher’s gown. He swept his gaze up and down me, then just down and down me. He had caught me groping that thing of mine that was like a little gerbil’s tail. He grabbed me by the shirt collar and threw me out of the classroom, repeating, “There are many children of sin. I won’t accept you in my class, other than accompanied by your father.” I didn’t tell my father anything about it, and I never attended grammar class again after that day.

The Islamic Education teacher began, as usual, with “In the name of God, the most compassionate and the most merciful,” followed by “There is no power and no might except for in God.” Invocations done, he then said: “The doer and the one it’s done to both burn in hellfire.”

His eyes roamed the room and then settled on my face. The other pupils looked over at me, and I bent my head in embarrassment as if apologizing for my presence among them. The eyes hemmed me in, and I was alone among them, nothing like them, and swathed in melancholy, sweating and shaking and wishing I could just disappear, evaporate into thin air.

My friend, unable to contain his sarcasm, said: “Madonna, Elton John, and Bouchaib el Bidaoui^[3]will all keep you company in hell. Hell’s going to be lots of fun. In heaven the Islamic Education teacher’ll be there, and your dad, and the students who get up and read at the blackboard in class. Heaven’ll be miserable.” He burst out laughing, and just like scabies it spread to everyone else.

As everyone was filing out of the classroom, the teacher had me stay behind. He stroked my face delicately, tenderly, and I doubted his good intentions.

“Your face is softer than it should be. All your friends have grown moustaches except you.” His fingers trembled, sending a shudder through my body. Feelings that were delicious, strange—and sinful. He wiped the droplets of sweat from my brow, his eyes blazing with something weird, like hunger; I lowered my head and left the classroom. His voice followed me out: “You must get on the straight and narrow, the straight and narrow!” His voice sounded like rumbling guts.

The last time I went to wash in the public hamam was years ago. I went into the women’s section, put my silver bracelets in the inner pocket of my handbag, and as soon as I started taking off my voluminous black djellaba, the women gathered around me. They pulled my hair. One of them had a knife in her hand and tried to do something embarrassing, rude, and violent with it. And one of them slid her hand down beneath my belly to check something. I was jammed in between their flabby bodies, getting squashed by their breasts and getting nauseated by the smell of sweat and henna and hair conditioner. By some miracle I got away from them. One of them called after me, “Go to the men’s hamam!”

Out in the street, their ululations, their prayers to the Prophet, and their lewd laughter all reached me. Their anger was a put-on, and so was their yelling.

Then I went into the men’s section. They grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and threw me out. “Go to the women’s hamam.” Whenever I recall that day—the most brutal day of my life—I feel the bile rise inside me and I want to puke.

I don’t know why they treat me this way: roughly, rudely, or sometimes with an indifference so extreme it borders on cruelty. In the street they look at me as if I’d come down from another planet, even though the head I carry on my shoulders is not so different from the rest of the heads around. Their eyes grow wide; they look confused, and then repulsed. They try to suppress their laughter, and let fly that horrible word, but just in a whisper, or in elegant French so as not to ruin the appearance of prudence. There are some who don’t know how to address me; they mix up the male and female pronouns so their sentences come out sounding ugly, all muddled up and wrong. But what’s wrong with the way I look? No one chooses their looks. Haven’t they heard the expression “She is one of God’s creations”?

The doctor I went to see couldn’t stop scratching the tip of his nose and sneezing. After several appointments, a lot of chat and money, and a few tests, he informed me of various things that I couldn’t really comprehend: hormones, genes, chromosomes. In the end he told me that what I had to do was accept my body as it was. What a genius! As if that magic sentence would solve all my problems. Naimah said the same thing to me in her own way: “Put cotton in your ears and live your life the way you want to.” But how could I convince other people not to freak out at how different I seemed to them?

It’s two a.m. now. My fingers are almost completely numb from the cold. Tonight is what we call “falso”—it’s a waste of time. I’ll go home, drink a little beer, and eat a plate of mussels with hot pepper.

Malika Moustadraf (1962–2006) was a preeminent arabophone Moroccan writer. She died of kidney disease at the age of forty-four, leaving behind a novel (Wounds of the Soul and the Body) and a collection of short stories (Trente-Six), which takes its name from the psychiatric wing of the Casablanca hospital. She is celebrated for writing about life in the margins, and the female body and experience. 

Alice Guthrie is a British translator, editor, journalist, and event producer specializing in Arabic-English literary and media content. Her work has appeared in a broad range of international publications and venues, with an increasing focus on Syria, where she studied Arabic.

Ahead of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Lebanese literary agent Yasmina Jraissati has five new must-translates to add to her list:

Jraissati promises: “A novel by one the most interesting emerging voices in Lebanon”; a new novel by Man Booker International finalist Hoda Barakat; novelist by International Prize for Arabic Fiction-shortlisted novelists Youssef Fadel, of Morocco, and Najwa Bin Shatwan, of Libya; and a new nonfiction work by PEN Pinter-winning Syrian novelist and activist Samar Yazbek.

Hilal Chouman, كانَ غدًا, Once Upon a Time, Tomorrow 

Chouman is the author of the charming, 2017 PEN-longlisted novel Limbo Beirut, translated into fluid, changeable English by Anna Ziajka Stanton. Limbo Beirut was described by its translator as a demand that the reader ″balance in the uneasy space between being a voyeur and a participant, gratifying our desire to get inside the head of that stranger we meet on the street…but on the other hand surprising us with the fact that you can never just be a witness, that you′re always going to somehow become involved in the other′s life, whether you mean to or not.″

Jraissati describes Chouman’s fourth, 2016 novel — published by Dar al-Saqi — as, “A fresh, funny and immensely clever take on what life is like for your average millennial in an unstable corrupt country – where anything is possible, and nothing can be relied upon.” It begins among a series of unexplained events in Beirut, as Khaled is trying to start a new relationship and help a friend find his missing wife.

Reviews and a brief summary are available at Chouman’s website; an excerpt is available from Raya Agency. Also: a three-city Skype conversation between Chouman, Stanton, and ArabLit editor M Lynx Qualey.

Hoda Barakat, بريد الليل, The Night Post

A new novel from one of the most significant contemporary voices in Arabic literature and a finalist for the Man Booker International, Barakat’s The Night Post is forthcoming in Arabic this winter.

A new book by Barakat will be an event.

In Jraissati’s words, “An illegal emigrant writes a letter to his lover. A woman writes the man she awaits. A torturer on the run writes his mother… They all connect by coincidence, and converge towards the airport looking for a new start elsewhere. Barakat tackles the dysfunctions of Arab societies that lead them to rupture.”

A sample and summary are available from the Raya Agency.

Najwa Bin Shatwan, زرايب العبيد, The Slave Pens  

This novel made the shortlist for the 2017 International Prize for Arabic Fiction and tells a story of the lives of enslaved people in Libya. From Jraissati: “Benghazi, Lybia, some time in the first half of the past century, Atiqa now a free woman, hears the story of her mother’s life as a slave and lover for the first time.”

You can read an excerpt on ArabLit. It opens:

The road was dusty, long, and narrow, its houses packed one against the next, built in the same shape and with the same faded white paint falling off in large flakes. The uneven heights were interrupted by a few small shops, most owned by the surrounding residents, and where this road turned into the next, there was a small pharmacy with no signboard. It was the only one around, and they called it “Giuseppe’s,” a name the owner didn’t like, that people called him behind his back.

You can also read a recent interview with Bin Shatwan, conducted for the Shubbak Festival in London.

Samar Yazbek, تسعة و عشرون إمرأة: سوريات يروين التاريخ,  Nineteen Women: Stories of Resilience from Syria

This book — by a recipient of the PEN-Tucholsky, PEN Oxfam-Novib, PEN Pinter, and of prestigious French “Best Foreign Book award” — will also be a winter release in Arabic.

In this book, according to Jraissati, “Yazbek gathers incredibly brave testimonies from the silenced actors of the revolution: Women. The book sheds light on the complexity of the conflict, and the situation of women in the region.”

A summary is currently available, and a translation sample is coming soon.

Youssef Fadel, فرح, Joy

Two of Fadel’s warm, funny, illuminating novels are available in English translation: A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me, tr. Jonathan Smolin, and A Beautiful White Cat Walks with Me, tr. Alexander Elinson.

Joy is the third book in the series, and is told in seven sections, from seven viewpoints, with an unhappy love story at its center.

Or, in Jraissati’s words: “Casablanca in the 1980’s, an enormous mosque being built in proximity of a very poor neighborhood forms the backdrop of a tragic love story.”

A summary is available from the Raya Agency, and there are a number of reviews online.

"It was the only book that Ahmed Bouanani wanted to publish, but he died believing that the manuscript had been destroyed when his house burned down."

"This is not a book of “high” culture only. It contains the tastes of many aspects of Moroccan society."

"I must say, I’ve never taught a course on Moroccan literature, until now, because I felt there hasn’t been enough work available. I feel like I’m now ready to start thinking about such a course."

African Writing Online has a strange, funny, and sometimes awkward interview with Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami in its latest issue.

It has some interesting moments, once the beginning awkwardness is over. And besides, it’s an excellent excuse to post some more of Esen’s photographs.

Lalami, who writes in English, speaks about her mother and step-mother tongues:

My mother tongue is Moroccan Arabic–it is the first language I learned and the language we spoke at home.  But when I was about to start kindergarten, my parents put me in a French school, so that I learned French at a very young age.  In fact, French was the language in which I was first exposed to literature, beginning with children’s comics like Tintin and Asterix, through young adult novels like those of Alexandre Dumas, all the way to classics like those of Victor Hugo.  That early dissonance between the world of the imagination and the world of reality is one that has marked me, I think. It wasn’t until I was a teenager, and in public school, that I finally came across Moroccan novels, written by Moroccan authors, and featuring Moroccan characters.  And it was the discovery of these works that enabled me to finally become the kind of writer that I am today.

Unfortunately, the interviewer didn’t ask which novels or writers those were. Ah well. Lalami also takes  a sideways swipe at the fos’ha/3meya divide:

Of course I would have preferred to write in my native language, but most Moroccan novels are actually written inModern Standard Arabic, a form that is learned in school, not at home.And because I went to a French school, I was never really trained to write properly in it, so that it wasn’t a possibility for me.

The five Moroccan authors she recommends:

I would recommend Mohamed Choukri, for his searing honesty about his characters’ lives; Tahar Ben Jelloun, for his playful language; Leila Abouzeid, for her keen eye on for the little hypocrisies in people; Fatema Mernissi, for her humor; and Abdellatif Laabi, for his intelligence.

The writer on Lalami’s list who hasn’t been mentioned here before—I guess I thought of her more as a scholar than as a writer—is Fatima Mernissi. A number of her books are available in English; you can read more about her on Wikipedia.

If you’re interested in learning more about Lalami, visit her website. Also, I review her novel Secret Son in some upcoming issue of Wasafiri.