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General Overview
Maghrebian literature is the literature of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. 'Maghreb' is also the Arabic word for Morocco and comes from the word that means 'the place where the sun sets,' to distinguish it from the eastern part of the Arab world. The area has long been a crossroads of north-south and cultural commerce between Europe and Africa south of the Sahara and east-west religious/intellectual exchange. French, Arabic and Berber are the major literary languages. The so-called Greater Maghreb includes Mauritania and Libya, but the linguistic bonding through French has tended to cause people to group the first three countries, despite great differences in their internal political and social structures. There are writers in North Africa who were born and raised in North Africa but are, or were, French Pieds-Noirs, that is descendants of French settlers and, thus, not strictly-speaking Maghrebians.
Literature written in French by Arabs and Berbers exploded on the scene in the 1950s and '60s, with the writings of Moroccans Ahmed Sefrioui and Driss Chraibi, Algerians Mouloud Feraoun, Mohammed Dib, Mouloud Mammeri, and Kateb Yacine, and Tunisian Albert Memmi. Some of these novelists, like Feraoun, wrote in an ethnographic vein, describing from the inside cultural attitudes and events which had previously been ignored or misrepresented by European writers. Others, like Chraibi, Kateb, and the later Dib, analyzed the implications of colonization and cultural hybridization. The major works of this early period are Kateb Yacine's masterpiece Nedjma (1956), Dib's Qui se souvient de la mer (Who Remembers the Sea, 1962), Chraibi's Le passe simple (The Simple Past, 1954) and Succession ouverte (Heirs to the Past, 1962), Mammeri's La colline oubliee (The Inspired Hill, 1952), Albert Memmi's La statue de sel (The Pillar of Salt, 1953) and several essays on the psychology of colonization, and Feraoun's Le fils du pauvre (The Poor Man’s Son, 1950, new ed., 1954), a novel widely read today in Algerian schools.
Algerian writers who survive are tormented by the events and feel compelled to write about them and to honour those who have died. For example, Assia Djebar's work in recent years has dwelled on this tragedy. She has wanted to return to a tetralogy that she has nearly completed, but when she tries to do so, she feels she must first write yet again about the problem: Le blanc de l'Algerie (1995) was followed by Oran, langue morte (1997) and Les nuits de Strasbourg (1997). And BoudjeIdra (FIS de la haine, 1992) and Mimouni (De la barbarie en gendral et de l'integrisme en particulier, 1992) penned works critical of the rise of fundamentalism in Algeria. Maghrebians started writing in Arabic shortly after the Islamization and subsequent Arabization of the people in the Eighth Century. If Tunisia still lags behind Morocco, and especially Algeria, in Francophone literary production, its Arabic- language literature is more significant both in quantity and quality.
The strength of Berber literature lies in its strong allegiance to orality and the popular traditions of the folk tale and poetry; and the drama of Berber literature lies in the fact that the Berbers (or Imazighen) have long had to struggle to vouchsafe the survival of their language and its cultural corollaries. The Berber presence in Northern Africa goes back to times shrouded in mystery and there is much debate as to the origins of this group and its language(s). Despite this age-old presence, of which they are justly proud and protective, the Berber's "literature" has, in many areas, remained an "orature" and does not have an extensive written tradition or canon.
North African experience is an ineradicable part of the lives, and writing of a number of French authors. One can divide them roughly into four categories: (1) those, like Gustave Flaubert and Andre Gide whom some have termed tourist or "post-card" authors because they came to North Africa as to a foreign, exotic land; (2) those, like Jacques Derrida or Marie Cardinal, who were born and raised in North Africa but who left and more or less minimized their North-African roots until quite recently; (3) writers, like Camus, who continued to live their lives as North-African Frenchmen until Independence and then withdrew with some rancor; and 4) writers who cast their lot with the Independence movement and/or placed justice above personal interest, like Jean Senac, Emmanuel Robles, and Jean Pelegri. Within these larger linguistic categories of French, Arabic, and Berber, there are, of course, differences, for the Maghreb has for centuries lain at the crossroads of cultures of three continents that have interacted and continued to interact synchronically and diachronically with them.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1
Discuss in details the complex characteristic make up of North African literature.
Colonial Literature in North Africa: Driss Chraibi’s The Simple Past
Driss Chraïbi is a French-Moroccan novelist, considered to be the father of the modern Moroccan novel. Chraïbi's works draw heavily on his own life. Central theme in his novels is the clash between different cultures, the East and the West, Arab and French. Chraïbi's range of style changes from epic to comedy. He has been among the pioneers of Maghrebian writers to explore the oppression of women and children in an Islamic, patriarchal society. His father was a tea merchant, who perceived Western education as a means to modern Morocco. Chraïbi attended Koranic school as a young boy. When the family moved to Casablanca, Chraïbi continued his studies at the French Lycée. At age of nineteen he went to France planning to study chemical engineering and neuropsychiatry. After abandoning his studies, he traveled throughout Europe and Israel. Chraïbi settled in France with his first wife and children, and eventually devoted himself in 1952 to literature and journalism. In 1954 Chraïbi began writing for the National Radio and Television Broadcasting System. In 1978 he married Sheena McCalliion. From his first marriage he had five children. Chaïbi taught in Canada for a year after his second divorce but returned then to France. Chraïbi's works have been translated into English, Arabic, Italian, German, and Russian.
As a novelist Chraïbi made his debut with Le Passé simple (The Simple Past), which was published in 1954, two years before Morocco gained its independence. The book arose much controversy because of the inflammable political situation in North Africa. Chraïbi was criticized as a traitor to the Arab world and French conservatives saw that the book revealed the reason for French presence in Morocco. The protagonist in the novel is a young man, Driss, who revolts against his tyrannical Moslem father. The father banishes Driss from the home and Driss begins his wandering on the streets. Finally he returns home only to find that his mother has committed suicide in his absence. The novel ends with Driss's departure for France. Driss is an outsider in his own country, oppressed by his family and the feudal, religious traditions. Chraïbi was so disturbed by critics, that he publicly rejected the novel in 1957, but later regretted his action. The book was banned in Morocco until 1977.
In The Simple Past (1954), a student in a French missionary school confronts the violence he has done to his identity:
You were the issue of the Orient, and through your painful past, your imaginings, your education, you are going to triumph over the Orient. You have never believed in Allah. You know how to dissect the legends, you think in French, you are a reader of Voltaire and an admirer of Kant. [9]
Such existential crises may no longer seem likely in postcolonial Morocco, which seems, to the passing tourist eye at least, more liberal and Westernized than most Muslim societies. In the novel, a strange phenomenon called the Thin Line addresses the protagonist, Driss Ferdi, in an accusatory manner. It gives him a history lesson, makes fun of his predilection for things Western, and questions his beliefs:
The Thin Line is clear at present. Everything got misty in front of my eyes so that it would be clear. It said to me: you are black. You are black from generations back, crossed with white. You are about to cross the line. To lose your last drop of authentic black blood. Your facial angle opened up, and you are no longer woolly-haired or thick-lipped. You were the issue of the Orient, and through your painful past, your imaginings, your education, you are going to triumph over the Orient. You have never believed in Allah. You know how to dissect the legends; you think in French, you are a reader of Voltaire and an admirer of Kant. Only the occidental world for which you are destined seems to you sewn with stupidities and ugliness you are fleeing from. Moreover, you feel that it is a hostile world. It is not going to accept you right away, and, at the point of exchanging the box seat you now occupy for a jump seat, you have some setbacks. That is why I appear to you. Since the first day I appeared to you, you are nothing but an open wound (Chraibi 56).
What is not clear is where the Thin Line is located. Is it speaking from within Driss or outside of him? In essence, the Thin Line exists in the interior and exterior worlds of the protagonist. It is an intensely subjective moment where the boundaries between the inner and outer worlds of a person blur. The Thin Line cautions Driss that he is about to cross over a line, however, it seems that he has already entered into this strange state of extreme subjectivity that is both within and outside of him, and, perhaps, simultaneously, is neither these locations. It may also 'mark' the distance, intimacy, and alienation within oneself. This hallucinatory dissolution between the interior and exterior states of being informs the form of the novel, with its fragmented stream-of- consciousness narration, and, in the difficulty in telling apart interior and exterior realities. In a way, it may not matter which is which. The novel represents the shattering of the narrator's perceptions due to the disjunctions in his psychic and social lives. Driss Ferdi is in a state of irreconcilable realities.
If the Thin Line represents this sense of extimacy, an ambiguous intimate and distant awareness of one's states of being, it manifests itself in the act of writing in Chraibi's novel. More specifically, the author signifies this multiple movement of the self in the form of the hand. Chraibi writes:
My hand? You probably do not even feel it. Nevertheless, in that hand as in a kind of refuge, I shall transform everything, flesh and wound and avatars and grandoise complexes, into delirium. I have told you: I am nothing but a hand (Chraibi 109).
All else disappears, except for this hand. It is a metonym for his divided body, consciousness, and, more importantly, the act of writing; and it is poised, like the expressive hands in Picasso's Guernica, with silent anguish. A similar self-reflexive moment surfaces in Paul Smail's Smile, which references Chraibi's novel, among others. Smail's 'trance-like state' sounds a lot like the experience of the Thin Line. In both cases, the act of writing causes at least a double movement of intimacy and alienation within oneself. And it is through writing that both protagonist and author are able to transform and represent their painful, contradictory realities. Moreover, it is through these self-reflexive moments of writing where protagonist and writer intersect, or the entre- deux that occurs in the understanding of the Thin Line. In effect, it is in this intersection caused by self-awareness that the painful subject is borne, the subject that is able to write and express his pain. Yet what is interesting is what happens to expressions, specifically expressions of pain that are not as well articulated as in the forms of literature. What is the status of that kind of language of pain, since it is mediated by a psychiatrist-activist and an anthropologist, respectively?
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2
How do western values create the thin line that places the North African in a state of disconnection from his society? Use The Simple Past as your reference point.
Post-Colonial North Africa: Hisham Matar's in the Country of Men
In the Country of Men, its narrator Suleiman, a nine-year-old child in Libya, describes a statue of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus in Tripoli's Martyrs' Square. The Libya-born Severus stands with one arm pointing toward the sea, as though "urging Libya to look toward Rome." Suleiman himself often dreams about the lands across the Mediterranean, from where his father, a businessman, brings him his most cherished gifts. However, this is 1979, and as Colonel Qaddafi ruthlessly consolidates his regime, torturing and murdering thousands of dissenters, Libya appears to have moved far from its cosmopolitan past. Visiting Lepcis Magna, the Roman seaside colony where Septimius Severus was born, Suleiman finds that "absence was everywhere." Standing in the antique city's ruins, Suleiman's best friend's father, Ustath Rashid - one of the political liberals stealthily working against Qaddafi - recites an Arab poem: "Why this nothingness where once was a city? /Who will answer? Only the wind."
As In the Country of Men goes on to describe, Qaddafi's Libya suffers from a similar blankness, a political and intellectual vacuum maintained through fear and terror: in one of its scenes that dramatize the precariousness of the independent thinker in Libya, Qaddafi's Revolutionary Guards chase a man who has a typewriter. Exalted as the country's sole "Guide," Qaddafi not only disseminates his half-baked ideology of Islamic socialism through billboards, books, and magazines; he also invades people's homes through television, enforcing conformity through live telecasts of the interrogations and public hangings of his opponents.
A few educated and well-traveled men such as Ustath Rashid and Suleiman's father dare to challenge the regime. Gathering in a flat in Martyrs' Square, they write pamphlets inciting students to revolt against Qaddafi. But it doesn't take long for them to be discovered and then, under torture, to betray their colleagues. Ustath Rashid is publicly interrogated and then hanged in a basketball stadium. Though he does not name Suleiman's father as a coconspirator, the latter is nevertheless kidnapped and tortured by Qaddafi's guards.
For all the grim news it brings us from a murky region, In the Country of Men is not overtly political or polemical. It has few details about the scale and scope of anti-Qaddafi dissent in Libya in 1979. Far from being idealized, the pro-democracy activists in the novel come across as naive and inept. Matar's primary fidelity is to the truth of Suleiman's experience. Since he lives in Libya, the obscure deeds of distant adults have filled his life with more than the usual private mysteries, joys, and sorrows.
Living in a well-to-do suburb, Suleiman spends his school holidays playing on the roof of his house or in the streets with friends, swimming at the nearby beach, and climbing mulberry trees - daily activities that the disappearance of his father and the mysterious "illness" of his mother (what the reader recognizes as alcoholism) do not much restrict. At the heart of the novel is Suleiman's great love for his mother, who, in a country dominated by men, faces both domestic and political oppression.
Listening to his mother, Suleiman is able to reconstruct a central event in her life. Caught by a relative while holding hands with a boy at an Italian café in Martyrs' Square (most of the novel's dramatic events occur near the statue of the Roman emperor pointing to the promise of Europe), she is forced into marriage at the age of fourteen by male members of her family - the so-called "High Council," an ironic reminder of Qaddafi's revolutionary councils and committees. (Given her experience of men, Suleiman's mother tends to regard her husband and his colleagues as dangerous fools.) Each night, drunk on surreptitiously bought alcohol, she pours out her bitter stories to Suleiman, the son whom she had tried to abort and who develops a touching desire to protect her against a cruel world:
Mama and I spent most of the time together—she alone, I unable to leave her. I worried how the world might change if even for a second I was to look away, to relax the grip of my gaze. I was convinced that if my attention was applied fully, disaster would be kept at bay and she would return whole and uncorrupted, no longer lost, stranded on the opposite bank, waiting alone. But although her unpredictability and her urgent stories tormented me, my vigil and what I then could only explain as her illness bound us into an intimacy that has since occupied the innermost memory I have of love. If love starts somewhere, if it is a hidden force that is brought out by a person, like light off a mirror, for me that person was her. There was anger; there was pity, even the dark warm embrace of hate, but always love and always the joy that surrounds the beginning of love.
Suleiman's family phone is tapped, with threatening voices interrupting conversations. His mother is forced to burn her husband's books and put up pictures of Qaddafi on the walls. Revolutionary guards constantly monitor the house from a car parked outside. In this suffocating atmosphere, Suleiman's feeling for his mother grows:
She often, during those empty days when Baba [her husband] was away, walked aimlessly around the house. And she never sang to herself in that soft, absentminded way she often did when taking a bath or painting her eyes in front of the mirror or drawing in the garden. That singing that had always evoked a girl unaware of herself, walking home from school, brushing her fingers against the wall: a moment before the Italian Coffee House, a moment sheltered in the clarity of innocence, before the quick force that, without argument, without even the chance to say, "No," thrust her over the border and into womanhood, then irrevocably into motherhood.
Matar shows how ordinary human beings under severe pressures are as capable of great cruelty as of great sympathy. Suleiman, who is fascinated by the apparently powerful guards who stalk his house, abruptly beats up the local beggar. The novel really describes the arduous growth, in extremely unfavorable conditions, of a moral and emotional sensibility. In this, there is clean, supple prose. This vividly evokes days of idleness, long warm afternoons, the sensations of extreme heat, and the coolness of shuttered interiors.
After Suleiman's father returns home with a face disfigured by Qaddafi's torturers, his parents decide to send him away to Egypt. Years pass before he sees his mother again, fittingly in Alexandria, "the city of fallen grace." While still in Libya Suleiman had longed to grow up and distinguish himself from the people around him. "I couldn't wait to be a man. And not to do all the things normally associated with manhood and its license." It is the renewal of the filial bond - and remembrance and art - that seems to offer Suleiman some refuge from brutal machismo.
Having escaped Libya's oppressive solitude, Suleiman wonders about his new life in Egypt: "how readily and thinly we procure these fictional selves." The exile's experience of deracination and painful self-invention is also the fate of Laila Lalami's Moroccan characters in her novel Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. The young hijab-clad Faten, who has been a radical Islamist as a student in Rabat, becomes a prostitute in Madrid, uneasily satisfying the Arabian Nights fantasy of a Spanish client. Having failed to interest tourists in visiting Paul Bowles's home in Tangiers, Murad, who has a college degree in English literature, turns to hawking Moroccan artifacts. Another well-educated young man, Aziz, leaves a wife he barely knows to work as a dishwasher in a Madrid restaurant. Fleeing a violent husband in a Casablanca slum, Halima almost drowns in the sea off Spain. Rescued by her ten-year-old son, she returns to Morocco to see him unexpectedly exalted as a folk saint.
Political despotism is only partly to blame for the displacement and bewilderment suffered by Lalami's characters. Though Morocco's King Mohammed VI wields absolute power, commanding loyalty bordering on sycophancy from the parliamentary parties, Moroccans enjoy a higher degree of political freedom than their North African neighbors, the Algerians, Tunisians, and Libyans. However, corruption, especially in business deals with France, taints many politicians and bureaucrats, increasing the appeal of radical Islamists among the young and the unemployed.
The intense and usually thwarted search by young people for a stable job infects many lives with anxiety and anomie. Uprooted from their traditional livelihoods and exposed to modern education and urban life, millions of them have found their basic hopes disappointed throughout Morocco's postcolonial history. Not surprisingly, they find the promise of modern life incarnated with tempting vividness in Europe, particularly Spain, one of Morocco's former colonial overlords, which, increasingly prosperous and democratic, lies just a few miles across the Strait of Gibraltar.
Unable to create enough jobs, Morocco's economy is propped up by remittances sent by the approximately four million Moroccans abroad— roughly 12 percent of the country's population. Many of these often well-educated and skilled Moroccans live, often illegally, in Spain, the Netherlands, France, and Italy, bolstering the local economies with their
low-paid jobs. Their growing presence in relatively homogeneous societies has helped right-wing politicians in Europe to incite xenophobic sentiments against immigrants, particularly Muslims.
As it turns out, only two of them make it; the others are intercepted by the Spanish police and sent back to Morocco. The rest of the novel describes, in careful, limpid prose, their separate pasts and futures. Lalami, who was educated in Rabat and London, and now lives in Portland, Oregon, writes about her home country without the expatriate's self-indulgent and often condescending nostalgia. She brings a calm sympathy to all her characters, and so well chosen are they, from different classes and regions, that they manage to represent a broad panorama of a Moroccan society in troubled transition.
Returning to Morocco after a spell in Spain, Aziz notices a growing number of women wearing Islamic head-scarves; his own usually submissive wife startles him by claiming that it is "the right way." In Madrid Aziz has suffered the humiliations inflicted on all North African immigrants; but he has also found there a new idea of himself. Distractedly making love to his wife, he remembers the women he has slept with in Spain, and wonders "what his wife would look like in a sexy bustier, straddling him, her arms up in the air, moaning her pleasure out loud. He couldn't imagine Zohra doing it." Briskly and subtly, Lalami shows Aziz's growing alienation from his relatives and friends in Morocco; her evenhandedness offers us no scope for easy judgments.
Even those of her characters who are unable to make it to Europe find their inner lives in thrall to the Continent. Murad, the English literature major and reader of Paul Bowles, has spent much of his life imagining a life for himself in metropolitan Europe. In doing so, he has cut himself off from his own society; he can't remember any of the stories he heard as a child from his father; he feels he has no inherited culture to pass on to his own children. In a scene rich with irony he appears as a salesman in a gift shop. Half-listening to Western backpackers looking for bargains, he reconsiders the larger consequences of his perennial longing for the West:
He'd been so consumed with his imagined future that he hadn't noticed how it had started to overtake something inside him, bit by bit. He'd been living in the future, thinking of all his tomorrows in a better place, never realizing that his past was drifting. And now, when he thought of the future, he saw himself in front of his children, as mute as if his tongue had been cut off, unable to recount for them the stories he'd heard as a child.
In Morocco, as in many colonized countries, material want and constant fantasizing about a life elsewhere seem to have gradually damaged individual memory and, eventually, an entire cultural tradition built upon the transmission of memory. Murad follows in a long line of damaged men in postcolonial African fiction whom a Western-style education has unmoored from their tradition, and who abandon their own indigenous culture and society for the sake of the catastrophic, even suicidal, journeys to the Northern metropoles. With the best of intentions that went into setting up modern educational institutions, it created generations of rootless and confused men, who were likely, eventually, to focus their rage and despair on the modernizing West.
SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 3
Post-colonial Libya is a hybrid of corruption and anarchy. Using Matar's In the Country of Men as reference novel, expatiate on this issue.
CONCLUSION
The North African novel is a complex web of languages: French, Arabic and Berber. Maghrebian literature is a reaction to these complex realities. One observes that the novelists, especially the post colonial writers are concerned with identity because of the enslavement they experienced. There was that search for self. The thin line situation in Chraibi’s The Simple Past is an inquiry into purpose of being in their existence. There is the psychological torture which has affected the sensibilities of the people and makes them question the moral dispositions in their enslavement and/or colonialism. Thus, the past is not one simple past but a complex experience.
Hisham Matar's In the Country of Men takes a jab at post-colonial Libya. The grim situation is akin to the general experience in North Africa where monarchical ruling drowns democracy. Speaking of the corruption and injustice of the Moroccan elite, the student radical Faten says, "If we had been better Muslims, perhaps these problems wouldn't have been visited on our nation and on our brethren elsewhere." More often disappointed than realized, this sentimental vision of faith nevertheless remains popular among Muslims. This shows why religion remains attractive to so many North African writers because it would help in dictating a particular national setting, against the backdrop of political despotism, a stagnant economy, and deeply entrenched class divisions. Islam seems the moral board for their proper governance and existence.
SUMMARY
Both novelists, Chraibi and Matar have revealed the true states of North Africa at the two periods under review. We see them focus on specificity and distrusts large abstractions – the abstractions that have become of the greatest importance in understanding the diverse political and cultural choices of Muslims, who seem to have become subject to wilder generalizations than would be deemed intellectually respectable for non- Muslims. Both of them offer no false optimism. A meager modern society that consists of severe economic inequality, the stranglehold of corrupt ruling elite, and the crippling dependence on a widely distrusted West will continue to force many people in Muslim countries into the simple solutions and consolations of faith-based politics. As they reveal the darkening ambiguities of North Africa and its relationship with the West, these first novels make for antique exhortation to learn that Europe is not a good experience for them.
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