The post-colonial novel and the re-construction of national identity in Morocco: conflicts and paradoxes

ABSTRACT

Tainted by decades of direct colonial influence, Moroccan cultural identity in the postcolonial era became the battleground for conflicting discourses and competing voices grappling for recognition and dominance. The project of cultural decolonisation and national identity construction was avidly endorsed by Moroccan nationalist authors whose ‘engaged’ literature aimed at resurrecting Moroccanness on solid Islamic and nationalist foundations. Modernist writers, however, espoused a different vision that is based on modernisation, liberalism and secularism. Some other writers wrote ‘undesirable’ literature that is highly individualistic and unconcerned with the question of identity. The cultural scene in general and the novel genre in particular, being a new and a widely receptive genre, vehicled these postcolonial conflicting discourses and ideologies and reflected the discursive and ideological heterogeneity of postcolonial Morocco. This article sheds light on this heterogeneity as manifested in the works of prominent Moroccan post-colonial novelists. I, therefore, contend that there were several literatures at play subsequent to Morocco’s political independence; one is progressive, another reactionary, and the other is ahistorical; all representing the three major currents of post-colonial Moroccan literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-colonial literature
• Moroccan novel
• identity
• nationalism
• decolonisation

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 All translations from original sources appearing in this article are mine unless otherwise indicated.

2 Examples of these critics are Evelyne Accad in Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East, Anouar Majid in Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World, and Jacqueline Kaye and Abdelhamid Zoubir in The Ambiguous Compromise: Language, Literature and National Identity in Algeria and Morocco, among many others.

3 The statistics of the High Commissariat of the Veteran Resistance Fighters and Members of the Moroccan Liberation Army speak of more than four hundred and forty-six women among the resistance movement in Morocco, thirty-two of whom were martyred. However, I assume the number of women who were part of the resistance and who were killed, raped, or made to suffer is higher if we take into account those who went unnoticed in far-off villages and remote douars (small rural communities).