rooke moroccan autobiography

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concept as a tool for analysing three Moroccan autobiographies, two rela-tively speaking older and well-known ones, F l-uflahby Abd al-Mad ibn alln, published in the first period after Moroccan independ-ence, and al-ubz al-|f by Mu|ammad ukr, written in the early1970s, and one very recent (1995), al-Ra|lby the singer and musicianLarbi Batma [al-Arab Bm] (1948-1997), of the popular group Ns al-

wn. The assumption is that these three works, all of them, contain al-legorical structures related to the formation of a Moroccan national iden-tity under different periods. In this connection, the concept of nationalidentity itself will also be touched upon and the role of literature in howit is imagined discussed.

National Allegory

Fredric Jameson starts his argument for the interest and importance of lit-erature from the so-called third world a concept that I take to includethe Arab world by a provocative (?) statement: To readers from theUnited States or Europe, third-world literature on the whole appears na-ive, unmodern and unsatisfactory when compared with the first-world

literary canon. Instead of sweeping this critique under the carpet by tryingto prove that third-world texts are just as great as, say, the works byProust or Joyce, critics should acknowledge the difference and explain it.According to Jameson, it is the result of radically different historical cir-cumstances determining when and how the various texts were created,but also of the readers position, that is, of their historically and sociallydefined attitudes and expectations. Typically, to present-day Westernreaders, whose tastes have been formed by the modernisms of the nine-teenth and twentieth century, a popular or socially realistic third-worldnovel tends to come before them, not immediately, but as though al-ready-read, Jameson explains and continues: We sense, between our-selves and the alien text, the presence of another reader, of the Other reader,

for whom a narrative, which strikes us as conventional or naive, has afreshness of information and a social interest that we cannot share.3The frequent want of sympathy in the metropolis for texts from the

periphery simply has to do with the readers unwillingness or fear toidentify themselves with that Other ideal reader, Jameson infers, whichis necessary to read the text adequately. This reluctance he traces to thefact that third-world literature as a rule is too political for western tastesand consequently resistant to conventional Western habits of reading. Theroot of the problem is the experience of imperialism and colonialism,which has caused the private and personal sphere of life to merge with thepublic and communal sphere in third-world literature. The Western di-vision between Freud and Marx is not upheld:

3 Ibid., p. 66.


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MOROCCAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY ASNATIONAL ALLEGORY 291

Third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private andinvested with properly libidinal dynamic necessarily project a

political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story ofthe private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embat-tled situation of the public third-world culture and society [italicsin the original].4

If Jameson is correct in this statement, which of course is open to de-bate, searching for allegorical structures would be a productive criticalapproach to Arabic creative writing, too.5 In that case and in the contextof Maghrebi literature the autobiography suggests itself as a rewardinggenre to study. That is, firstly, because metaphors from biology are oftenapplied to nations, so that the parallel personal self/national self isvery easy to draw, and, secondly, because autobiography is a historicalnarrative where the story of the nation often figures as an explicittheme, forming a part of a wider discourse trying to define national iden-tity and culture as elements of, or social frame for, the personal identityof the author-hero. Thus, the autobiographical text projects ideas aboutthe national situation both on the allegorical level and the thematic one, a

correspondence which might produce interesting literary effects.The Extended Meaning of Biography

Nations are imagined communities, Benedict Anderson taught us;6 theyare imagined as possessing a life just like persons, and just like personsthey are born, experience a childhood, grow, mature and developa certain identity, it is believed. Thus, nations and persons alike areprovided with biographies in the form of narratives. These biographiesdepend on the work of memory, but also of forgetting: To the adult per-son it is impossible to truly remember the consciousness of childhood.The mental and biological changes involved are too profound. This ines-capable amnesia creates a need for a narrative about the self, if the idea

of a unified personal identity is to be upheld. The same law that applies toselfhood applies to nationhood, too. Its (hi)story must be narrated, since itcannot be remembered:

As with modern persons, so it is with nations. Awareness of be-ing imbedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of

4 Ibid., p. 69.5 Jameson was immediately attacked for being too reductive in his literary analysisof the texts involved, and for founding his whole argument on a false binary opposi-tion between first world and third world, among other things. See Ahmad, Aijaz,Jamesons Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory, in: Social Text, 16(Spring 1987), p. 3-25. See also Jamesons A Brief Response to this critique in the

same issue ofSocial Text, p. 26-7.

6 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin andSpread of Nationalism, London and New York, Verso, (Revised Edition), 1991.


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But at a closer look this work also tells an edifying story of the powerof the peoples will to live and as an undercover morality of the Mo-roccan nation it represents a secret call formore virtue instead of the re-verse, it may be argued.

al-ubz al-|f mainly records the authors adolescence. The storybegins with the forced migration of his family from the Rf mountains to

Tangier when he is seven. That the native village is deleted from the re-cords of memory is a symbolic break with the past and its traditions. Thestory ends in with the protagonists resolve at the age of twenty to learnhow to read and write. All his youth he has led his life in the streets andnever gone to school, but now he wants to begin. As the reader under-stands, Mu|ammad ukr did learn how to read and write and quite suc-cessfully. It was not, however, in his Berber mother tongue but in one ofhis acquired languages, Arabic.9

al-ubz al-|fis a cry of protest against the double standards of theestablishment in all its aspects: Look, the text says, this is the back-yard of our society. Dont pretend that the people who live on it do notexist! When will they gain their freedom from need and oppression?

Chapter Eight (p. 97-115) is typical. It gives a version of the heros eter-nal search for bread (al-ubz). To him, bread is both a means of survivaland a source of humiliation. Hungry as he often is he curses bread (p.103) and equates it in his imagination with excrement (p. 101). He sees amonkey eating and a cat which is satisfied and compares these creatureswith himself, living a worse life than an animal. Challenging the conven-tional nostalgic and romantic style in Arabic autobiographical literature,Mu|ammad ukr indulges in the filthy and ugly, both in images and vo-cabulary. The pages of Chapter Eight abound in words denoting differentsecretions of the body (excrement, urine, blood, vomit, spit, semen),genitals (both female and male), putrefaction (rotten food, stinkingplaces), human decay (drunkards, drug addicts, whores) and violence(kicking, beating and hitting).

The texts protest against the past includes a rejection of traditionalmorals. For example, the author does not stigmatise the prostitute girls orwomen of his story. Nor does he condemn the drug addicts or the thieves.Instead, he expresses pity for them all, the outcasts of society, the lum-penproletariat to which he himself once belonged. In the final analysis,immoral people are moralistic too, such is the message of the text. Thenihilist surface has moral depth:

9 ukrs first language was Berber, the language of the Rf. His second was Span-ish, which he learned in Tangier where the poor neighborhood of the family wasdominated by Spanish gypsies. Only as his third language did he learn Moroccan col-loquial Arabic. Despite this and despite his late start he became a teacher of Arabic

and a writer with Arabic as his medium of expression. No direct information of thissuccessful development is given in al-ubz al-|f, however. This story is told in thesequel al-Shur[translated as Streetwise, 1992] instead.


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I present immoral scenes in order to look for morality and ideals.The characters of my autobiography are not content with theirimmoral condition since they do not rejoice in being corrupt, they

become corrupt through horrible social oppression. Their life isturned into a commodity and that is why they lose their humanvalues.10

The national struggle for independence in Morocco coincided with thechildhood and youth of Mu|ammad ukr; when the country won its in-dependence in 1956, he was 21 years old. But apparently he himself didnot take an active part in political life at this stage. In al-ubz al-|ftheprotagonist gets involved by accident in the crowd of an independencedemonstration in Tangier on March 30, 1952. The demonstration devel-ops into a riot and the police open fire and kill many people (p. 117-127).The narrative contains a vivid description of the fighting in the streets infront of the protagonist, who hides with a friend behind a stall. On thesurface of the text, this bloody event constitutes one adventure amongthe rest, just one episode among others, which is registered but not com-mented. On a deeper level, it has a special symbolic significance, how-

ever. The demonstrators revolt against the colonial system is a sign ofapproaching national freedom but also of personal deliverance. Indirectly,it is the struggle for independence which lets the hero find the path lead-ing out of hell. Later, having been arrested for no other reason thanwrong company, Mu|ammad watches his friend writing two lines of apoem on the wall of the cell where they are detained together. Theselines, which he cannot read himself, are the beginning of the famous na-tionalist poem Irdat al-|ayh (The Will to Live) by the Tunisian poetAb al-Qsim al-bb (1909-1934):

I al-abu yawman arda al-|ayh / fa-l budda an-yastabaal-qadarWa l budda lil-layli an yanal / wa l budda li l-qaydi an

yankasir(p. 191).

If some day the people decided to live, fate must bend to that de-sireThere will be no more night when the chains have broken. 11

When read aloud to him, because of their symbolic significance, thesewords inspire the hero to learn how to read and write. And this is the pro-ject which will ultimately free him and give him independence. Thus thelines of the poem the liberation of the young Mu|ammad ukr andof the

10 ukr, Mu|ammad, al-Kiyn wa l-makn (muqbalah), in: Alif, 6 (1986),

Cairo, The American University, p. 67 and 73.

11 Translation by Paul Bowles in: Choukri, M., For Bread Alone, San Francisco,City Lights Books, 1987 [1973], p. 126.


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country. In the narrative, the life of the hero and the life of the nationmerge.

Two Types of Storytelling

In The Power of the Story (1994) Mike Hanne explores the political im-

pact of fiction and the way literary works may directly affect the outcomeof the historical process.12 In the introduction to his case studies he estab-lishes the basic unity between all kinds of written narratives, factual andfictional. Their basic unity springs from the fact that they all tell stories.Further, they tell stories because they imitate or reflect the dispositionof the psyche, he suggests. By its very nature storytelling is reductive, aprocess of selection and exclusion, just like our manner of experiencingthe world. Storytelling is a primary cognitive instrument of the humanmind that suffers mental disorder and breaks down if the capacity to con-struct stories does not work properly. If we cannot create internal narra-tives about ourselves in the present, the past and the future, we are unableto negotiate our way through the chaos of daily life in a realistic and suc-cessful manner. In short, the individual is psychologically dependent on

his or her capacity for storytelling.13This adds to the understanding of all autobiography. If the written text

represents a transposition, fixation and enlargement of the kind of innernarrative which each and every one of us constructs on a day-to-day ba-sis when we act and react in society, autobiographical narrative allows re-flection on the narrativity of the own self and its (hi)story. The centralconcern of Hanne, however, is not the psychological implications of sto-rytelling, but its relation to social change. Here, he discerns two basicfunctions:

1) Storytelling is fundamentally conservative of the social structure.The reductive (and seductive) character of storytelling mystifies our un-derstanding by giving a false sense of coherence and comprehensiveness

to a selection of scattered events.14

Stories therefore, typically, performacculturating, mystifying or legitimating roles in society, providing ex-planations or arguments in favour of the status quo.

2) But there exists the other kind of story, too, which primarily is dis-ruptive, progressive and liberating: To tell a previously untold story is anact which can be extraordinarily disruptive to the existing social order,he says.15 If it spreads it may raise consciousness and create solidarity

12 Hanne, Mike, The Power of the Story. Fiction and Political Change, Oxford,Berghahn Books, 1994.13 Ibid., p. 7-10.14 Ibid., p. 11.15 Ibid., p. 12.


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where none existed before, ultimately resulting in an empowerment ofpeople who previously saw themselves as isolated and powerless.16

In relation to this dichotomy, what kind of storytelling does our textrepresent? In the context of modern Arabic literature, al-ubz al-|ftellsa previously untold story in Hannes sense, a story which can be thoughtof as disruptive, progressive and liberating, providing you share some of

its ideals. The consistent outsider perspective of the implicit author andhis breaking of social and literary conventions make the text somethingnew. It introduces a novel technique with the episodic scene as dominantnarrative movement, new characters from the margin of society and newthemes, the most important being hunger.17 ukr violates the conven-tions of traditional realism in Arabic literature by going beyond the limitsof its politically correct ideologized vision of the world.18 As a repre-sentation of the Moroccan national identity the socioscape of this auto-biography, using a term from Anderson,19 speaks of the oppressiveness ofthe existing social system, but also exposes the failure of nationalistrhetoric and ideology to solve the problem of the hungry nation.

But autobiographical storytelling may function the other way around,

too. Partaking in the process of shaping new cultural and national identi-ties it may play a reductive, seductive role legitimising the power andpolicies of the national leadership. This does not prevent it from voicingsocial critique, however, as long as it is of the moderate kind. Thus, ac-cording to A|mad al-Madn, the quest for a national identity became asupreme concern in Maghrebi literature after independence.20 It was sub-ject to ideologies which sought to build the nation state. Literature wasideologized, al-Madn says, assuming the responsibility of commit-ment and of consecrating itself to reality, in such a way that commitmentto society, its problems and aspirations, became a guiding principle of lit-erary activity which controlled its visions.21 Since ideologized visions ofreality tend to mystify understanding, as said, this literature in the mainwas conservative providing arguments in favour of the continued domi-nance of the national bourgeoisie.

Cultural Estrangement

One example of a conservative text in this sense is F l-uflah (InChildhood, Part One 1957 and Part Two 1968) by Abd al-Mad ibn

16 Ibid., p. 10-16.17 Hkanson, op. cit., p. 201-2.18 Hafez, op. cit., p. 223.19 Anderson, op. cit., p. 32.20 al-Madini, Ahmed, The Maghrib, in: Ostle, R. (ed.), Modern Literature in theNear and Middle East 1850-1970, London and New York, Routledge, 1991, p. 193-212.21 Ibid., p. 198.


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alln [Abdelmajid Benjelloun] (1919-1981).22 The author was in hisyouth politically active in the Moroccan independence movement. Forthis reason he lived in exile in Egypt for a period of more than fifteenyears. It was also there that he more seriously began writing literature.When his country was liberated, he returned to Morocco in 1956. For atime he became editor of the daily al-Alam. Subsequently he entered the

service of the foreign department, serving at one time as ambassador toPakistan. Apart from his autobiography, he also had a rich production ofessays, short-stories and poems. In other words, he was an influential mem-ber of the post-independence Moroccan political and intellectual lite.

The most unique aspect of Ibn allns life, as narrated by himself inhis autobiography, is that he grew up in Manchester, England, as the sonof a wealthy merchant. There he lived until the age of eight. In fact, hisfirst cultural identity was more English than Moroccan. The first third ofhis text is an attempt to recapture this early experience. The remainingtwo thirds ofF l-uflah depict the authors childhood and adolescencein a traditional Moroccan madnah in the city of Fs. Initially, this envi-ronment is foreign to the boy, who has been raised in England. He does

not even understand the Arabic language properly. Thus the tension be-tween the childs two identities, the English and the Moroccan, becomesthe storys central conflict.

The same conflict is experienced today by many immigrants and theirchildren in Europe, but in F l-uflah the problem is turned upside-down. It is a Western child who has to adapt and become Arab.

In its pattern of conflict, ibn allns autobiography conforms with agreat number of works of modern Arab prose in which the confrontationbetween East and West is a paramount theme. To be torn between twoworlds, to try to accommodate different cultural norms in one person, tosearch for a coherent and viable personal identity, such is the plight of theconventional hero of this literature.23 Yet, in relation to most other worksof this type, the story ofF l-uflah is original since home to the boy-hero, initially at least, is not East but West. On the other hand, hometo the adult author-narrator who tells his life-story in Arabic is East.Due to this split, he has never felt perfectly at home anywhere. He hasalways felt himself to be a stranger. His anguish at what appears to be aneternal cultural estrangement is one of the significant emotional chords ofthe text:

22 Ibn alln, Abd al-Mad, F l-uflah, Rab, Maktab al-Marif, 1975.Translated into French as Enfance entre deux rives by Francis Gouin, Casablanca,Wallada, 1992.

23 For a discussion of the confrontation between East and West as portrayed inArabic novels see, for example, Boullata, I. J., Encounter Between East and West: ATheme in Contemporary Arabic Novels, in: Boullata, op. cit., p. 47-60.


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I was overwhelmed by a terrible feeling that I was created to be astranger[arb]. In the country from which we had come, peopleused to look at me as a stranger, and in the country where we be-longed according to what one said, people also looked at me as astranger (p. 108).24

The story is the reverse of countless others in modern Arabic literature

in which an Arab boy travels to Europe or America in search of learning.In this work Europe is well-known and native to the hero, while theArab country is unknown and foreign. The Moroccan city is a new en-vironment, difficult and painful to adapt to, requiring new skills and anew identity. In one interesting scene, after a short trip to Morocco butstill unaware that he will soon go back for good, the boy tells his Englishfriends about the foreign land he has visited (p. 115-121). In a dialogue ofquestions and answers, he juxtaposes the habits and customs of us withthe awkward behaviour of them. The device is intended to let the Mo-roccan reader see himself with the eyes of the Other as in a distorting mir-ror. It allows the author to criticise some aspects of Moroccan society likebad education, but also to present his idea of national culture in positive

terms describing the good food, peaceful mentality, civilised manners,colourful customs and European (!) racial features of the people, certainlynot to be mistaken for black Africans: The people of that country maybehave strangely in most things, but their skin is light (bay) and theylook just like we do (p. 118).

From the point of view of the Europeanised, reform minded Moroccanmiddle-class public the predicament of the hero is an allegory of thesituation of the nation, whose mixed identity is a result of foreign up-bringing (that is, the colonial experience) and native resurgence (theheritage), too. His life story is a story of becoming Moroccan that doesnot question the basic power-relations in society, yet his cultural es-trangement immediately invites a figurative interpretation. From the timeof the foundation of the Istiqllparty as a national movement in the1940s onwards Moroccan writers in a similar way had been involved informulating ideas about their national culture. A literary discourseabout the Moroccan personality perceived as in need of re-generationand a new modern identity had developed.25

One of the most suggestive themes in this respect in F l-uflah isthe learning of language. That is because language is such a powerfulsymbol of national identity. The narrative describes the step by step ac-quisition of Arabic by the protagonist after returning to Morocco. Firstly,he learned colloquial spoken Moroccan (p. 152, 153, 154), then the writ-ten classical language (p. 207, 304, 313). Apparently he only spoke Eng-

24 All translations from the Arabic sources appearing in this article are mine unlessotherwise stated.25 al-Madini, op. cit., p. 205.


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lish in Manchester; his total ignorance of Arabic is certainly mentioned inseveral places (p. 35, 36, 98, 116, 120, 128). In view of this, the text is asign of how successful Ibn alln was in switching languages and over-coming his cultural alienation. His autobiography reads as a monument tohis personal triumph in this respect. But as we know, the young Moroc-can nation also experienced a language problem. Arabic, Berber, French

and Spanish were spoken within its borders. In this context, Ibn allnsstory about learning Arabic is an allegory of how Moroccan society, too,can find its true national identity by promoting the Arab language. Thismessage was originally strengthened by the symbolic value of the work ascultural artefact. Since it was one of the absolutely first full-scale novelspublished in Morocco in the Arabic language,F l-uflahbecame a na-tional symbol of a re-generated and modern Arab cultural identity.

Re-Rooting in Popular Tradition

It follows from the truth that nations are imagined communities ratherthan naturally given phenomena like light or darkness, that national cul-ture is a discursive device, too. By this device differences, oppositions

and contradictions in society are unified as a common identity. In thisgame of narrating the nation, literature plays an important part, as doother arts like music. However, in many Islamic nations music enjoys anambiguous status. Puritan Muslim rulers of the past sometimes bannedmusic entirely within their realms. In recent times highly orthodox anddevout Muslims have brought pressure to bear in local communities inmany places to discourage the practice of music. As a result, music as aprofession is often held in low esteem in the Islamic world. On the otherhand, there is a rich court tradition of music in, for example, North Africaand the Middle East and todays musical stars shine bright on the sky ofpopularity almost everywhere.

Just like literature, music has been appropriated for propaganda pur-

poses by many Arab regimes. One example of this is how in Egypt thelate Abd al-alm afi every year used to perform new patrioticsongs (an waaniyyah) on the national holidays, celebrating theEgyptian revolution of 1952, its leader and accomplishments. Thesesongs had titles like F bustn al-itirqiyyah, (In the Garden of Social-ism), oral-Masliyyah (Responsibility) orY ahlan bi l-marik(Wel-come, battles), projecting a specific ideologized vision of the nation. Butmusic has also been a channel for popular resistance against the injusticesof life and an expression of national sentiments other than those of theleadership.

Thus, in the early 1970s a musical group was formed in Casablancaby the name of Ns al-wn. The members were all but one from thesame popular quarter of Casablanca, al-ayy al-Mu|ammad. In poly-phonic rhythmical songs performed on traditional acoustic instrumentslike the bendror frame drum, thesentror three-stringed lute and others,


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with lyrics in Maghrebi colloquial, they the sang about the problems ofcommon people. Ns al-wn was the first Moroccan musical group toconsciously engage in a re-rooting of the identity in folk-culture and im-mediately enjoyed a great success, especially among the young and thepoor. A cult almost developed round the group and, a bit like the Beatlesin Europe Ns al-wn led a new wave in Moroccan Arab music hith-

erto characterised by the sentimental style of the Mashreq.A leading personality of the group was its singer and drummer LarbiBatma, who presents his version of the story of Ns al-wn in the auto-biography al-Ra|l, (The Departure, 1995).26 He wrote and published thisbook after learning that he suffered from an incurable disease and wassoon going to pass away, which explains the title. The story is absorbingfor those especially interested in modern Moroccan pop-music, but alsofor everybody else, containing as it does a dying persons dialogue withdeath, a fate which none of us will escape.

In addition, the individual destiny of the author is also a representationof his whole generations perceptions of life and its post-independenceexperience. This representative function of his life story is not at all

strange to Larbi Batma. In fact he often explicitly describes himself in hisbook as a leader of his generation, for example like this:

I climbed the ladder of glory and fame and my voice delightedthousands of sad hearts. My songs educated a whole generationthat was sleeping in a pool of brackish waters under the waves ofrepressive politics (siysah qamiyyah). When they heard my songsthey revolted against those waves and abandoned the brackish

pool (p. 106).

The text is divided into four parts and the narrative is chronologicallystructured. The time-span of the story is the childhood and youth of theauthor, from 1948 until 1972. This concentration on the formative yearsis the same as in the two texts previously discussed. Moreover, it is char-

acteristic of the autobiographical literary tradition in other regions of theArab world, too.27 Each of the four parts has a theme:The first part pictures Batmas first childhood in an insignificant rural

village, where he grew up in an extended family in a traditional tribalcommunity. This was the most beautiful and happy time of his life, theauthor states, and the theme is roots: Life in the bdiyah was free; na-ture inspired creativity; Bedouin food was delicious and better than in anyinternational restaurant (p. 67); daily existence was characterised by a

26 Bm, al-Arab, al-Ra|l. Srah tyah,al-Dr al-Bay, Manrt al-rbiah,1995. Just before his death the author finished the second book of his autobiography,al-Alam (The Pain), al-Dr al-Bay, Dr Tqbl, II ed., 1998.27 On this tradition, see Rooke, Tetz, In My Childhood. A Study of Arabic Autobi-ography, Stockholm, Stockholm University, (Stockholm Oriental Studies n 15),1997.


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sense of belonging. Life was primitive and harsh in many respects, butstill a lot better than living in the city, the author thinks.

The second part describes how he moved with his parents and abrother to a shanty-town in Casablanca. This was an ugly period of youthand the theme is rootlessness. The uprooting from the village is re-membered as a catastrophe that the author wished never had happened

(p. 74). Why did it happen? His father was active in the nationalist resis-tance movement during the time of the protectorate and a member of theIstiqll party, whose policy it was to encourage parents to educate theirchildren. Therefore, after independence, he decided that the family shouldmove to the city in order to provide the sons with better educational op-portunities. However, the boy-hero failed in secondary school anddropped out. The only things he learned there was to fight and steal andsmoke. The adult narrator blames the corruption of society in general andthe authoritarian methods of instruction in particular for this own failure,but he also finds causes in his familys poverty and constant internalquarrelling. His father in particular is accused of having been insensitiveand a bad example in terms of vices like drinking wine and smoking kf.

The third part tells the story of how the author after much difficultyfound his way to art, and the theme is liberation. It went through thetheatre and amateur acting. One day his good singing voice was discov-ered and he became engaged by professionals. This event is representedas the turning point of his life:

I the child who used to cut reed-pipes in the bdiyah, I the trou-blemaker in the school of al-Azhar, the pick-pocket, the haschsmoker, the bicycle guard, I was going to be a member of a pro-fessional company! This was more than I had ever hoped for (p.127).

Further, this third section of the text also contains a narrative of a pe-riod of hippie existence in France as an illegal immigrant.

The fourth part, finally, which is the shortest one, documents theforming of the group Ns al-wn and its breakthrough, and the themehere is success.

Each of the four parts is framed by the elegiac discourse of the dyingauthor. He is full of anguish over his fate which condemns him to dieyoung of a disease he will not mention by name, but which is cancer. Heillustrates his sad story with sad verses from sad songs in Moroccan col-loquial Arabic. This variety of language is also used for most of the dia-logue in the text. That is a difficulty to the non-Moroccan reader, but notonly to him perhaps. In the beginning the author feels inclined to give atranslation of an utterance into standard Arabic (fu|),whereupon hewrites:

I hope my explanation of this sentence in the vernacular (al-driah) is correct, because the colloquial language, and I do not


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say the colloquial dialect, has meanings which are difficult totranslate. That is because it is a pearl hidden in the depth of theocean (p. 34).

In this positive image of the vernacular as a pearl in the ocean, like inthe upgrading of the Bedouin ethos and rural patterns of living, lies a newconception of national identity. al-Ra|l neither advocates a completebreak with the past (as al-ubz al-|f), nor seeks a modernisation of theclassical high culture in an attempt to seek a compromise between Eastand West (as F l-uflah). Rather, it anchors its vision of personal/na-tional identity in folk-culture and popular traditions. Larbi Batma showsno complex for not being Western or modern enough; the music ofNs al-wn was inspired by the style known as gnw-music thatshows strong similarities with traditional West African music and is oftenperformed in spiritual sessions reminiscent of voodoo-rituals. This con-nection between the Moroccan personality and the African one doesnot trouble the author, on the contrary, he is proud of it and of his lowlyprofession.

Indeed, the bendr became my pen; from it I lived and with it Imarried, got things, bought clothes, a car, travelled by aeroplaneand visited the whole world. This ancient instrument was mycompanion from childhood, and I am proud of its company and re-spect it. Moreover, I think it is an honourable instrument, a per-cussion instrument that rivals any international one (p. 129).

In this sentence Moroccan modernity is expressed as a self-consciousmixture of native and foreign. That mixture is no longer a dilemmacausing cultural estrangement as it was to Ibn alln and his generation.In al-Ra|lthe conventional conflict in Maghrebi literature between tradi-tion and modernisation, between the two different worlds of the Maghreband Europe, has vanished. Economic injustice is the most pressing na-tional problem, together with the failure of the leaders to solve it; the cor-

rupt national politician is a new character in the socioscape of the nar-rative, where he has replaced the colonialist as the source of evil.

To some extent al-Ra|lreminds ofal-ubz al-|fin its descriptionof an adolescence marked by crime, drugs, alcohol and sex. The authorconfesses many illegal or immoral things he did in his life, like havingsex in a public toilet. This provocative projection of a secularised, andalienated, personality is, however, curiously combined with frequent ex-pressions of Islamic faith in the form of Qurnic references or religioussayings. This mixture in the text, of profane and sacred is also, perhaps, ametaphor of a late-modern situation in Morocco, a nation that has be-come a cultural hybrid, full of contradictions and free-floating identities,as national as they are international.

Lastly, is al-Ra|lan example of distruptive or a conservative narra-tive, one may ask in connection with previously introduced distinction byHanne? If the perspective includes modern Arabic literature as a whole,


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certainly, the story of poor boy makes good has been told many timesbefore. Thus it is not original. In a sense, it was introduced already by theEgyptian writer and scholar h usayn in his autobiography al-Ayym(The Days, vols. I-II, 1929 and 1939) and has since been repeated manytimes both in Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian autobiography, for exam-ple.28 Even in the more narrow context of the Moroccan autobiographical

tradition the story is familiar. al-ubz al-|f tells it, too, although herethe final success of the hero is implicit only. Nevertheless, the narrativeofal-Ra|lhas a measure of disruptive force befitting to a musical rebelof the 1970s like Larbi Batma. Conventional as it may be in its basicstory pattern, the de-sacralisation of the theme of repentance, for instance,or its preoccupation with the ordinary and the trivial are disturbingelements. That is because the popular in itself has a disruptive force inany society, it may be argued, at least if we agree with the 1997 NobelPrize laureate Dario Fo: I think the popular is subversive in itself. Its ba-sic themes lend themselves to that: hunger, the tragedy of having to sur-vive, the problem of dignity, of liberty. Just speaking about these issues issubversive29.

Concluding Remarks

It is self-evident that autobiographical narrative has a collective di-mension, that the individuals life story always to some extent reads as ametaphor of other peoples experience too; idiosyncrasies and universali-ties go together in human life, so there is always room for identificationand generalisation. Further, social and historical circumstances are sharedby many. This collective dimension of personal memory is one of thecommon reasons why autobiographers write and publish their texts in thefirst place.

But autobiography is not just a remembering of things gone by. It isalso a construction of the present and a vision of the future. It is a literary

re-construction and construction of identity at once. This article has triedto show that one important dimension of this construction of the self inMoroccan autobiography is the national one. The life story may be inter-preted as a national allegory it was argued, where the destiny of the au-thor-hero is symbolical of the nation itself understood as an imaginedcommunity. How three different texts projects three different vision ofthe Moroccan personality was than discussed. Three different solutionsto the identity problem of the nation were distinguished: a total breakwith the past and its traditions, a re-activation of the classical heritage,and a re-rooting in popular culture. If these readings are valid, they showthat Fredric Jamesons theory about national allegory in third-world lit-

28 Ibid., see chapter IX, The theme of poverty, p. 200-36.29 Stephanson, A., and Salviolini, D., A short interview with Dario Fo, in: SocialText, 17 (Fall 1987), p. 163.


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erature can be a productive approach to Arabic creative writing, too.Moreover, his theory is a valuable contribution to the proper understand-ing of this literature, since it contextualises aesthetics (literary taste)and challenges the hegemony in critical discourse of Western-style mod-ernism as the only true measure of literary merit.

BIBLIOGRAPHYAhmad, Aijaz, Jamesons Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Alle-

gory, in: Social Text,16 (Spring 1987), p. 3-25.Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin

and Spread of Nationalism, London and New York, Verso, (RevisedEdition), 1991.

Bm, al-Arab, al-Ra|l - Srah tiyyah,al-Dr al-Bay, Manrtal-rbiah, 1995.

al-Alam. Al-Kitb al-n min al-srah tiyyah, al-Dr al-Bay, DrTqbl, II ed., 1998.

Boullata, I. J., Encounter Between East and West: A Theme in Contem-porary Arabic Novels, in: Boullata, I. J. (ed.), Critical Perspectives

on Modern Arabic Literature,Washington, Three Continents Press,

1980, p. 47-60.Bouraoui, H. A., Creative Project and Literary Projection in Franco-

phone North Africa, in: Boullata, I.J. (ed.), Critical Perspectives onModern Arabic Literature, Washington, Three Continents Press,1980, p. 129-144.

Hafez, Sabry [Hfi, .], al-Binyah al-naiyyah li-srat al-ta|arrur minal-qahr, in: al-Shur, ukr, M., London, Saqi Books, 1992, p.219-242.

Hkanson Hanson Gunilla, Le Texte narratif maghrbin et marocain delangue franaise depuis 1945, thse pour le doctorat, Gteborg, Uni-versit de Gteborg, Institut dtudes Romanes, 1995.

Hanne, Mike, The Power of the Story. Fiction and Political Change, Ox-ford, Berghahn Books, 1994.Ibn alln, Abd al-Mad,F l-uflah,Rab, Maktab al-marif, 1975.Jameson, Fredric, Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational

Capitalism, in: Social Text, 15 (Fall 1986), New York, p. 65-88. A Brief Response, Social Text,16 (Spring 1987), p. 26-27.al-Madini, Ahmed, The Maghrib, in: Ostle, R. (ed.),Modern Literature

in the Near and Middle East 1850-1970, London and New York,Routledge, 1991, p. 193-212.

Rooke, Tetz, In My Childhood. A Study of Arabic Autobiography, Stock-holm, Stockholm University, (Stockholm Oriental Studies n 15), 1997.

Stephanson, A., and Salviolini, D., A short interview with Dario Fo, in:Social Text, 17 (Fall 1987).

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al-Kiyn wa al-makn (muqbalah), in: Alif, 6 (1986), Cairo, TheAmerican University, p. 67-78.

For Bread Alone, San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1987 [1973], p.126.

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