(toc) #title= (Table of Content)
BIOGRAPHY
Driss Chraı¨bi, a prolific writer, is considered to be the father of the modern Moroccan novel. Born in 1926 in El Jadida, Morocco, he attended Koranic school as a young boy. His father, a successful tea merchant, was orphaned by age thirteen with seven siblings and no skills or education. Although he main- tained a Muslim household, the father perceived Western education as a means to a modern Morocco. When the family moved from El Jadida to Casablanca, he sent his sons, including Driss, to the French Lyce´e. A good student, Chrabi was interested in writing and literature and holds fond memories of his teachers. As an adolescent, he became aware of social injustices that are consistently reflected in his work. As a young man, he studied chemical engineering in France and considered becoming a doctor. Continuing to reside in France with his first wife and their children, he devoted himself to writing in 1952 and published his first novel, Le passe´ simple, in 1954. In 1956 he began writing for French radio and television and has written for many journals and newspa- pers. He taught in Canada for a year after his second divorce but returned to live in France. However, his unabated love of Morocco is manifested in much of his writing. Although he is critical of the injustices within French society and perpetuated by France in North Africa, his humanism draws on French and Western culture as a source of enrichment rather than effacement. He is a writer who has been the center of much controversy and misunderstanding; his con- tinuing writing career includes fifteen novels and two children’s books. As with many Maghreb writers, his works draw heavily from his own life and probe the writer’s role as healer and educator in modern society. Like other modern Ma- ghreb writers, Chraı¨bi was influenced by the American writer William Faulkner.
Chraı¨bi’s novels place themselves in both a universal and national context by their references to other literary works, to his other works, and to historical and contemporary political events.
MAJOR WORKS AND THEMES
Chraı¨bi’s first novel, Le passe´ simple, caused a furor when it was published in 1954 and continues to elicit critical discourse. The novel, which begins re- alistically, tells of a young French-educated man’s revolt against his tyrannical Moslem father. It depicts the clash of two cultures as well as two generations. Through the harsh perception of the adolescent protagonist, the novel is a re- vealing indictment of the strict and often hypocritical Islamic traditions that hold people prisoners from finding self-fulfillment. The young man, a bright student, riddled with patricidal fantasies, sympathizes with his submissive mother. While Driss accompanies his mother on a visit to her family, the father strikes the younger and sickly brother twice in the head for helping Driss take the necessary finances for his mother’s trip. Consequently, the younger brother dies and Driss can no longer abide his father. He is equally disillusioned by his mother, who makes herself up in an effort to seduce the father in order to have another child. He begins his odyssey of revolt by emptying the father’s storehouse and by revealing to the family the hypocritical behavior of the father, such as his ille- gitimate children and his cabinet of alcohol. The father banishes Driss from the home. At this point, the novel departs from its realistic style, and the narrative becomes self-conscious of its own evolvement into the form of a novel. The narrator begins to intrude on the plot narrative to comment on the re-creation of his life as a novel and to include observations on Moroccan society. When Driss is thrown into the streets, the range of the novel moves with its protagonist out of the domestic situation into the streets of Morocco. Driss turns to his friends for solace but is refused their hospitality; subsequently he realizes the powerful and far-reaching extent of his father’s influence. After passing his exams with distinction, Driss returns home only to find that his mother has committed suicide in his absence. The father blames Driss for planting the seeds of revolt in his mother. Yet in a touching scene, the father begins to treat Driss as an adult in an effort at reconciliation. He confides to Driss, as a means of explanation, his life and rather unhappy but respectable marriage to the mother. The father shares his hopes for Driss’s future and his disappointment in his other sons. The novel closes with Driss’s departure for France, which he, like many other young Moroccans, conceives of as the land of liberty. The novel’s final image is Driss’s urine falling from the plane to France on the heads of those back home.
Chraı¨bi’s second novel, Les Boucs, is a bitter portrayal of the Arab immigrants living in poverty in France. The title refers to the French racist terminology for the immigrants, and the novel’s bitter realism and scenes of the Boucs’ camp- sites are reminiscent of Gorky’sLower Depths. The novel’s protagonist is Walid, an Algerian writer who has a son, Fabrice, by a French woman, Simone. Upon Walid’s release from prison for assault, he returns to the squalor of poverty. His son is dying of meningitis, the disease whose menacing threat haunts Chraı¨bi’s later novels and also claimed the author’s youngest brother, Hamid, at the age of nine. As in Le passe´ simple, the tragedy of youth and hope is the indictment of society and the catalyst that destroys human relationships. Walid’s profound despair moves him into a course of self-destruction. Mac O’Mac, an expert on Arab culture, is an acrid portrayal of the publishing industry, and some critics read his character as a reproach of the French writer Franc¸ois Mauriac. Mac considers publishing Walid’s manuscript, but in the process, he callously dis- misses Walid by purchasing an airplane ticket back to Algeria for Walid. Mac seduces Simone with small luxuries such as cordials, cigarettes, and, ironically, a story. Walid turns to his friend Rauss and wine for refuge. Rauss introduces Walid to the prostitute Isabelle, an orphaned survivor of the war and Nazi oc- cupation. She has no pity for Walid and tells him to stop blaming others. She represents some hope for Walid, who is at home neither with the Boucs, who treat him like a Christian and do not understand his desire to write his story, nor the French pseudo-intellectuals. The novel, whose plot does not follow a linear time frame, closes with the image of a Young Arab who could be Walid whose family sells their last goat to finance his trip to France at the urging of a Priest, which suggests a cycle of displacement and the devastation of French hypocrisy.
Chraı¨bi’s next three works move from the realism of Les Boucs to a more symbolic realm but preserve his concern with the political realities and spiritu- ality of man. Each of these works explores the role of the individual caught in a historical whirlwind of modernization that erodes an innate spiritualism and in the crowd’s engulfment of individuality. L’ane (1956) is set in Morocco during the colonization. The novel explores the despair caused by the dashed hopes and illusions of freedom in the modern world and suggests the possibil- ities of drawing on a heritage of spirituality as a source of strength. The novel depicts its characters during a rapidly changing Morocco. The main character, Moussa, is a rural barber who leaves his donkey behind and takes the train for the very first time. In leaving his previous occupation behind, he finds a pro- phetic mission in the midst of confusion and changes. The novel’s ending, the lynching of the passive and mystical Moussa by a mob that later builds a mau- soleum to its scapegoat, foreshadows the later political fable, La foule. In 1958 Chraı¨bi published De tous les horizons, a provocative collection of stories and parables that the author refers to as a novel, and that was republished in 1986 as D’autres voix in Morocco. La foule contains both political satire and comedy in its examination of the illusion of leadership and the role of political discourse in the creation of both a communal reality and the future. In the novel, Mathurin, a retiring history teacher, finds himself President, and his presidency is covered in the African press by the two twin journalists who have taken great care with their attire but cannot read or write.
Chraı¨bi returns to the milieu of Le passe´ simple and his protagonist ‘‘Driss’’ in Succession ouverte, published in 1962. The novel opens with Driss’s visit to a doctor because he is experiencing an anxious restlessness and has become unpleasant with his loved ones. His health problems are a manifestation of his crisis over the value of civilization. The crisis of the ‘‘prodigal son’’ who has previously refused his father’s financial support even though he has faced many difficulties in France is a filial premonition. While Driss is in the doctor’s office, he receives word of his father’s death. Upon his return to Morocco for his father’s funeral, the novel introduces an endearing panorama of Moroccan so- ciety through his diverse brothers and aged but lively mother. His father’s death marks the end of one era, and his brothers are left with the legacy of decolo- nization. Overtly his father leaves Driss out of his tape-recorded legacy, but he actually sends Driss on a quest as his final paternal gesture. Before returning to France, Driss begins to appreciate his father’s foresight, and his death quest reaffirms their affinity rather than severance.
Un ami viendra vous voir moves out of Morocco and into the modern bour- geois of Paris as two men, a doctor and a talk-show host, examine a young woman’s life. A young mother, a documenter for the Institute de Documentation, is haunted by an angst of emptiness. She appears on a national talk show in an effort to find a solution to her alienation, but the experience only increases her sense of isolation. When the cameras and the talk-show host leave, she murders her toddler son and is admitted to a mental hospital. Her assigned middle-aged doctor, who has problems with his own wife and leads a stagnated life that he relieves with food, realizes that her angst is her thirst for life. She, the patient, cures the doctor of his own malaise as they become lovers. The novel, which leaves the reader in the air as to the outcome of the affair, questions our mode of communication, value standards, and perceptions of others in the modern world.
La civilisation, ma me`re! (1972) is the affectionate story of a cloistered Arab mother’s liberation through education and contact with the Western world. Her education begins at home when her elder son, Nagib, brings a radio into the house, a magic box that speaks and comes to be known as Monsieur Kteu. Her two sons buy her Western clothes and begin to take her on outings, awakening her innate quest for knowledge, life, and justice. She becomes a vital member of the outside community when she enrolls in school for the first time and eventually utilizes her indomitable social skills to organize protests against World War II. The novel ends with the mother and Nagib’s departure from Morocco to join Driss in France.
In Mort au Canada, Chraı¨bi returns to the Western world in a novel that recalls Un ami viendra vous voir. The novel recounts the failed and poignant love story of the protagonist, a composer and a doctor at a psychiatric clinic. In Canada, the composer meets a young girl of twelve who has lost her father first to divorce and then to death. His relationship with the young girl elicits his painful memories of his failed love affairs and his own neglected children. Despite his pain, the novel is a celebration of the generous human capacity to love and to rejuvenate itself. Like the love affair of Un ami viendra vous voir, the novel juxtaposes the psychological idea of health and the instinctive thirst for life.
Driss’s epic Berber trilogy which includes Une enquete au pays, La Mre du Printemps (L’Oum-er Bia), and naissance a` l’aube, is a monumental tapestry of moods, writing style, and history. The three novels date from the Arab con- quest of North Africa to the present. The first novel, Une enquete au pays, begins with the arrival of the delightfully humorous Inspector Ali and his su- perior, the Chief of Police, in the hot and isolated Berber mountains on a mys- terious detective mission. Inspector Ali is caught between the ineffective tantrums and advice against any ‘‘insectuals’’ of his chief and the villagers, who have maintained their difficult but hospitable way of life. The comical clash between the modern city dwellers and the mountain Berbers borders on farce but takes an abrupt stylistic and thematic twist when the chief’s mission is revealed. In the subsequent role reversal, Ali, who fantasizes about leaving his city life to return to the village life to take a rural wife, finds himself defending the bureaucracy before the village tribunal council in order to save his life. The novel ends with Ali’s armed return to the village.
The second novel of the trilogy, La Me`re du Printemps, is dedicated to the river Oum-er Bia, the mouth of the river that begins in Chraı¨bi’s birthplace, El Jadida. Historical and mythical, the novel of the Berbers begins the journey into the past, to the Arab conquest of North Africa under the banner of Islam in the late 600s. The novel continues the clash between the village and the city and opens with an ironic depiction of the problem of population records that the tribal unit presents for the French bureaucrats. From the historical imposition of colonization, the novel’s focus heralds back to the story of Azwan, the ancient tribal leader, and the consistent presence of the river Oum-er Bia. Azwaw, who converts to Islam to save the lives of his tribesmen, vows to keep their Berber identity that is intricately connected to the water and the land. He uses the minaret and call to prayers to warn the other tribes, and, fulfilling the prophecy, his punishment upon being discovered is to have his tongue cut out.
The final novel, la naissance a` l’aube, which is dedicated to Morocco and its people, continues to discuss the Berbers and their intrinsic relationship to the water. In its completion of the story of Azwan and his modern descendants who are once again displaced by the French colonization, the reader is introduced to the historical Moor conqueror Tarik, who conquered Spain in the name of Islam. The trilogy, which, like many other modern Maghreb novels, does not follow a linear narrative, nevertheless underscores the importance of the past and human spiritual relationships to nature and to each other. The descendant of the mythic and spiritual Berber leader, Azwaw, is a modern-day porter at the train station and card shark at the cafes. The tenets of Islam have not been an effective sword against the spiritual erosion of modern life.
Chraı¨bi’s two mostrecent novels recall the humor of La civilisation, mame`re! L’inspecteur Ali (1991) introduces the author of the successful Inspector Ali series, and Une place au soleil (1993) reintroduces the character, Inspector Ali, in his first detective search. L’inspecteur Ali, a domestic comedy of Brahim Orourke and his family’s adventures, mischievously brings to life the author at home, at the bank, and at the university. He is under financial pressure to write another novel but is having difficulty finding inspiration upon demand. Simul- taneously, his family is preparing for the arrival of their third child and the visit of his wife’s British parents. The cultural clash is a pretext for humor in this recent novel. Although L’inspecteur Ali depicts life in El Jadida as rather idyllic, the novel refers to the current political turmoil of the Gulf War and the Middle East. The author-protagonist, Orourke, is surprised by his elevated artist stature and decides to write Le second passe´ simple, an obvious reference to the real author’s first text. Orourke himself hears the voice of his character Ali during the course of his day. The self-reference highlights the proximity between the author and the text. The references to past literary success and critical debate draw attention to the possible stagnation of literature and criticism that contin- ually reiterates itself. Through his wit, Chraı¨bi examines serious questions about the adverse effects of literary consumerism. The birth of Orourke and his wife’s baby is a humble reminder of the importance of life and creation in the midst of our modern pretentiousness.
Chraı¨bi’s most recent novel, Une place au soleil, is the first adventure of Inspector Ali and can be read as the novel Orourke writes in L’inspecteur Ali. Inspector Ali is taken from his armed arrival in the Berber mountains that dis- turbs the community and set in the city, where he reestablishes such time-worn values as justice. His detective novel playfully exploits the character of the ‘‘street-smart’’ and moral detective who has a risque´ way with women and is able to see directly to the heart of men. Single-handedly, he reestablishes justice in Morocco when he manages to derail the corrupt plots of the international wealthy and spare the innocent. Inspector Ali cleans house at home as well by ridding himself of his wife, who wants everything that she sees on TV. Although Inspector Ali is dressed in dungarees with a moderate income, he has an appre- ciation of traditional Oriental music and a worldly knowledge of literature that he often manages to misquote with no loss of significance. Chraı¨bi plays on the reader’s expectations and good-naturedly fulfills them. Naturally, Inspector Ali falls in love with the beautiful and pure Sophia. Like so many of Chraı¨bi’s characters, Inspector Ali gets another chance at life, and his story is a confir- mation of human benevolence.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
The reception of the controversial Le passe´ simple was a critical maelstrom. Many of Chraı¨bi’s compatriots saw him as a traitor to the Arab world and referred to the author as an ‘‘assassin of hope.’’ For the French conservatives, the novel was a realistic document that depicted the savagery of everyday life in the Arab world that justified their continued presence in Morocco. At one point, the young writer was even moved to deny his early literary efforts. Other critics drew the parallel between the patriarchal authority and the French pres- ence, and still others noted the love for the mother as a manifestation of love for the motherland. Chraı¨bi’s first novel continues to generate critical discussion and interpretation. Although previous critics read the mother’s suicide as indic- ative of her submission, for Moroccan critic Abderrahman Tenkoul, the mother’s suicide is her fatal revolt motivated by her sense of dignity. Rather than a passive act, her suicide is an act of defiance. ‘‘Elle a voulu la manifester par un geste fatal, subversif. Ni l’e´thique sociale, ni l’interdite religieux n’ont pu contraindre sa de´cision tragique de transformer sa faiblesse en de´fi absolu’’ (Tenkoul, 128).
The change of setting and criticism from Morocco to France in Chraı¨bi’s second novel, Les Boucs, caused critics to speculate that it was the author’s attempt to balance his criticism of the Arab world with a criticism of France. The influence of his treatment of patriarchal oppression, exile, and social injus- tices is easily evident in the later writings of younger Moroccan writers such as Tahar Ben Jelloun, Mohammed Khaı¨r-Eddine, and Abdelhak Serhane. The im- portance of Le passe´ simple and Les Boucs as initiating a new era of Maghreb literature cannot be overestimated. The Souffles generation, the second genera- tion of modern Moroccan writers, readily proclaim their admiration for Chrabi and acknowledge his influence on their own writing. Although he claims to be neither a colonist nor a decolonist, Chraı¨bi has been viewed by younger Maghreb writers as a predecessor in the fight against the cultural reduction to consumer folklore and the artistic void triggered by colonization.
Chraı¨bi’s writing has been referred to as a literature of rupture and alienation. He has been influential in subject matter but also in his style and use of language. His polyphonic novels do not follow a linear temporal structure, which gives freedom to the width and depth of his verbal rendering of the modern world. Although he writes against the stagnation of civilization, his novels celebrate our perpetual ability to rejuvenate. Whether through the violence of his early novels, his symbolic mysticism, his epic scope, or his humor, Chraı¨bi constantly and humbly reminds us of our basic human dignity and of our obligations to ourselves, others, and our world.
Chraı¨bi’s fight against social oppression and injustices, which has included support of women, has won him the respect and admiration of Arab feminists. He never presumes to speak for women, as some well-meaning writers do, but presents his women characters in light of his generous humanism in all his works, not only in the most obvious example, La civilisation, ma me`re! His sympathetic treatment of women shows warmth and understanding, as exem- plified by the doctor’s question in Un ami viendra vous voir; the doctor asks the woman’s husband if he knows his wife’s thoughts, dreams, and desires. The woman’s anguish is never minimized or portrayed solely as a middle-class mal- aise. Chraı¨bi’s compassion toward women is never judgmental; in Succession ouverte, when Driss’s mother confides to him that a prisoner learns to love her prison, Driss understands rather than promote a different lifestyle.
Unfortunately, the importance of Le passe´ simple and the enormous amount of criticism that it has generated have seemed to overshadow Chraı¨bi’s later work. Yet in all of Chraı¨bi’s novels, there is a great capacity for love and perpetual rebirth of man’s spirituality as well as a disparagement of social in- justices and individual stagnation. His range of style from epic to comedy is testimony to his versatility. Hopefully, younger critics will continue to appreciate his early works but also begin to focus on his more recent works.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Driss Chrabi
Le passe´ simple. Paris: ´Editions Denoe¨l, 1954.
Les Boucs. Paris: ´Editions Denoe¨l, 1955.
De tous les horizons. Paris: Denoe¨l, 1958.
L’ne. Paris: ´Editions Denoe¨l, 1956.
La foule. Paris: ´Editions Denoe¨l, 1961.
Succession ouverte. Paris: ´Editions Denoe¨l, 1962.
Un ami viendra vous voir. Paris: ´Editions Denoe¨l, 1966.
La civilisation, ma me`re! Paris: ´Editions Denoe¨l, 1972.
Mort au Canada. Paris: ´Editions Denoe¨l, 1974.
Une enque入te au pays. Paris: ´Editions du Seuil, 1981.
La Me`re du Printemps (L’Oum-er Bia). Paris: ´Editions du Seuil, 1982. D’autres voix. El Jadida: ´Editions Soden, 1986.
Naissance a` l’aube. Paris: ´Editions du Seuil, 1986.
L’inspecteur Ali. Paris: ´Editions Denoe¨l, 1991.
Une place au soleil. Paris: ´Editions Denoe¨l, 1993.
Translations of Works by Driss Chraı¨bi
Heirs to the Past. London: Heinemann International, 1971.
The Butts. Trans. Hugh A. Harter. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1983.
Mother Comes of Age. Trans. Hugh Harter. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1984.
Flutes of Death. Trans. Robin Roosevelt. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1985.
Mother Spring. Trans. Hugh Harter. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1989.
Birth at Dawn. Trans. Ann Woollcombe. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1990.
Inspector Ali. Trans. Lara McGlashan. Colorado Springs, Colo.: Three Continents Press, 1994.
Translation of A Place in the Sun is forthcoming by Three Continents Press.
Selected Studies of Driss Chra bi¨ı
Accad, Evelyne. Veil of Shame: The Role of Women in the Contemporary Fiction of North Africa and the Arab World. Quebec: Editions Naaman, 1978.
Bet, Marie-Therese. ‘‘La Litte´rature maghre´bine francophone.’’ Cahiers de l’Association
Internationale des ´Etudes Franc¸aises 44 (May 1992): 67–80.
Kadra-Hadjadji, Houaria. Contestation et re´volte dans l’oeuvre de Driss Chrabi. Algers: E.N.A.L., 1986.
Khatibi, Abdelkebir. Le roman maghre´bin. Rabat: Soci te´ e´ Marocaine des ´Editeurs Re´u-
nis, 1979.
Marx-Scouras, Danielle. ‘‘A Literature of Departure: The Cross-Cultural Writing of Driss Chraı¨bi.’’ Research in African Literatures 23.2 (Summer 1992): 131–44.
Sellin, Eric, ed. Revue CELFAN 5.2 (February 1986): issue devoted to Driss Chraı¨bi.
Tenkoul, Abderrahman. Litte´rature marocaine d’e´criture franc¸aise. Casablanca: Afrique Orient, 1985.
©LYNNE DUMONT ROGERS
Leave a comment behind