Contemporary Moroccan urban experiences in Dārija: a reading of Youssouf Amine Elalamy’s Tqarqīb Ennāb (Chatter)

ABSTRACT

Through the lens of the modern-day Moroccan city, I examine contemporary literary and sociocultural issues represented in Youssouf Amine Elalamy’s 2005 Tqarqīb Ennāb (Chatter), the first Moroccan book written entirely in Dārija (the Moroccan dialect of Arabic). I also explore the ways in which Elalamy uses everyday language in Tqarqīb Ennāb as a form of artistic expression that aims to engage the masses in the reading and understanding of the sociocultural and political developments in contemporary Morocco. The author depicts in his book urban experiences through conceptual art to express concerns about his society—a narrative in which he captures twenty-first-century Moroccan society by means of iconography and visual art but also through text and popular language in rhymed prose. In particular, I investigate Elalamy’s use of a new aesthetics of the big city, a fragmented and ailing space, while addressing an array of issues related to language, identity, religion, race, gender, terrorism, and globalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Dārija
• aesthetics of the city
• Moroccan fiction narratives
• contemporary urban experiences
• Moroccan popular culture

Acknowledgment

This article is based on my dissertation originally written in French ‘La ville Marocaine: une quête du vécu, de la mémoire, et des tiers lieux dans le roman du XXe et XXIe siècle’ (‘The Moroccan City: The Quest for Lived Experience, Memory, and Third Spaces in the 20th- and twenty-first-Century Novel') at the University of Oklahoma in December of 2018. I am grateful to Michael Winston, my dissertation director, and my committee members at OU for their feedback on my work. I am also thankful to Pamela Genova, Cynthia Ruder, Jeorg Sauer, and Aiyub Palmer for taking the time to read and comment on the article manuscript. Special thanks to Kristian Takvam Kindt and Tewodros Aragie Kebede for giving me permission to reproduce a table and figure from their study on the use of Arabic dialects in North African as a written language. Special thanks to Youssouf Amine Elalamy for sharing his insights and updates about his artistic and creative work. Lastly, I very much appreciate the thoughtful and exten- sive observation and constructive criticism from anonymous reviewers that signifi- cantly enhanced the quality of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Here, I am using the expression of conceptual art as ‘the concepts or ideas [which] constitute the artwork’s “material”’, an art form that is ‘philosophical,’ ‘intellectual,’ and ‘analytic’ engaged in ‘the business of creating and transmitting ideas’ a part of the movement in which [a]rtists are authors of meaning rather that skilled craftsmen’ as Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens (2007) put it, ‘since it is the idea, and not the art object, that is at the heart of the artistic experience’ (ix-x).

2 Ṭāriq Ibn Ziyādi is a Berber chief who commanded the Muslim troops during the conquest of Andalusia in 711. Some historians point out that he made a historic speech to his soldiers before they crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from North Africa to Spain, calling on his army to be courageous, truthful to their mission, and patient.

3 Qur’an and classical literature are written in Classical Arabic. Modern Standard Arabic emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century as a result of major language reforms during the Nahda (the Arab Renaissance or Enlightenment).

4 This novel won the 2001 prize of Grand Atlas Maroc.

5 In his introduction of The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel, Stephen Tabachnick (2017) states that ‘[i]f you don’t take graphic novels seriously, then you don’t take contemporary literature seriously’ (3). Coined in 1964 by the American critic Richard Kyle, the expression ‘graphic novel’ appeared on Will Eisner’s book cover, A Contract with God And Other Tenement Stories, published in 1978. With its content being at the intersection of reality and fiction, dealing with historical and political issues and its stylistic that is closer to prose narratives destined to adults in a form that ‘often autobiographical or biographical,’ the graphic novel marked an emerging literary genre that is distinct from the comic books, a supposedly less ‘serious’ art form (26).

6 Lahcen Ouasmi is a professor and researcher in linguistics and director of the Laboratory of Languages, Literatures and Communication (LALICO) at Hassan II University in Casablanca.

7 In S/Z (Barthes and Miller 1974), Barthes defines the ‘writerly text,’ a text that can be rewritten by the reader allowing the latter to leave the status of a consumer to become a creator of the text. The readerly text is its counterpart—'its negative, reactive value’ (10). The ‘readerly’ text ‘can be read, but not written’ making the reader ‘the user’ and ‘customer’ of the text instead of being its ‘producer,’ ‘its owner,’ and ‘its author.’ Barthes goes on to consider all ‘readerly’ texts as ‘classical’ (28).

8 ‘Nayda is the active participle of the verb nad “to rise”; it was an expression used in youth language “it’s moving, it’s rocking,” and it became the name of the Moroccan Movida.’ Regarding the genesis of Nayda as a cultural movement, Dominique Caubet wrote: ‘ [T]he key year is 2003, when two dramatic episodes contributed to the course of events: first the arrest of 14 young heavy metal music lovers, their trial in February 2003, and the public mobilisation that followed; second, on May 16, seven simultaneous kamikaze fundamentalist bombings involving 14 youngsters from a neglected neighbourhood in Casablanca (Sidi Moumen), causing the death of 33 people (apart from themselves), and leading to the massive public questioning in Moroccan society. As a consequence, the ‘legal’ fundamentalists (the present Prime Minister’s party, the PJD) disappeared from political life for a whole year and brought a breath of freedom. This is when the underground movement started to grow on a public scene until it became a socio-cultural movement, and was heavily mediatized from 2006. … Dārija played a central part in the artistic productions of the new music scene, and artists claimed that it was their language and that they were proud of it. Dārija was a means to convey things in a Moroccan way, to try and to speak the language of the people (117–18).