Mohamed Berrada’s game of remembering and forgetting: expanding the horizons of contemporary Arabic literature

ABSTRACT

This article analyses Mohamed Berrada’s novel Luʿbat al-nisyān (1987, The Game of Forgetting, 1996), focusing on the book’s unorthodox narrative design, where multiplicity, metafiction, and fragmentation are strategic tools that bring to light the author’s vision of (post)modernist literature in a postcolonial nation. The article examines how the novel’s compelling experimental quality and efficacious engagement of cultural and socio-political issues are at work, highlighting thereby the text’s commitment overtones. The novel embeds narrative multiplicity and fragmentation within a key dialectic that informs and runs through the entire text: remembering and forgetting. These two acts (remembering and forgetting) provide discursive spheres that enhance the imagination of both the author and the reader, who enter into an unspoken partnership to take the literary text into vast interpretive realms, thus expanding and elevating the horizons of contemporary Moroccan and Arabic literature. Overall, Berrada resorts to quintessentially (post)modernist techniques – such as multiplicity, fragmentation, and metanarrative – anchored in the overarching game/dialectic of remembering and forgetting in order to deliver implicit social and political critique.

KEYWORDS:

• Remembering
• forgetting
• multiplicity
• fragmentation
• metafiction
• sexuality

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my thanks and gratitude to the anonymous reviewer(s) from the journal whose comments and suggestions greatly enhanced this article. I would also like to thank Dr. Jonathan P. Eburne and Dr. Hoda El Shakry for their helpful comments on an early version of this research project.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The book cover marks this work as ‘naṣṣ riwā’ī’ (narrative text) rather than ‘riwāyah’ (novel). Commenting on this label, Magda al-Nowaihi writes that ‘Berrada asserts the unconventionality of The Game of Forgetting when he calls it “narrative text” (naṣṣ riwā’ī) instead of a novel’; she adds that the author’s ‘refusal to confine the work within the limits of traditional genre […] and instead to give it an ambiguous, indefinable status is an attempt […] to escape the fetters of history into the freedom of new forms’. See Al-Nowaihi 2000, 383.

2 Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations and page citations of TGOF are from Boullata’s translation. I have kept Boullata’s rendering of the writer’s name as Mohamed Berrada; in his introduction, Boullata writes that this is how the writer himself ‘writes his name in the Latin alphabet’. See Boullata 1996, 11. The English translations of citations from all other Arabic sources are mine.

3 Whereas Boullata rendered ‘rāwī al-ruwwāt’ as ‘The Narrators’ Narrator’, I opted for ‘the chief narrator’, which I believe is closer to the original.

4 In discussing the concept of heteroglossia, Bakhtin writes:

When heteroglossia enters the novel it becomes subject to an artistic reworking. The social and historical voices populating language, all its words and all its forms, which provide language with its particular concrete conceptualizations, are organized in the novel into a structured stylistic system that expresses the differentiated socio-ideological position of the author amid the heteroglossia of his epoch. See Bakhtin 1981, 300.

5 I should note that the subject of ‘heteroglossia’ in ‘the roman maghrébin’ (the Maghrebian novel) was examined by Hoda El-Shakry. See: El-Shakry (2016).

6 See, for example, Al-Hamdāwī (2006) and Al-Yabūrī (1993), 56.

7 For Adorno’s study, see Notes to Literature Vol. One (1991, 24–29).

8 In fact, the novel makes a number of references and allusions to Freud and Freudian concepts. For explicit mention of Freud by name, see pages 100, 104, and 135. Also, in chapter three, aptly titled ‘Our Prehistory’, we read that Hādī’s ‘memory retained many words and poems from [his childhood] period and his heart was full of love for everything that echoed them in his unconscious’ (Berrada, 1996, 43; emphasis added).

9 A Freudian reading would suggest that a libidinal reaction is common and normal in moments of intense grief. In this regard, Carolyn Ambler Walter and Judith McCoyd write:

Freud allowed for the possibility of psychotic (turning away from reality) thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as an understandable (and normal) reaction to loss. […] In many ways, his was a task-based theory predicated on the idea that the mourner must de-cathect from the lost entity. Freud’s theory of behavior states that the psyche ‘cathects’ people and loved entities with libidinal energy that must be withdrawn for a mourner to heal after loss. He believed people experiencing melancholia […] had not successfully withdrawn the libidinal energy (cathexis) and needed help to do this. In Freud’s understanding, the next task was to transfer cathexis to a new love object.

See: Grief and Loss across the Lifespan: A Biopsychosocial Perspective (2009, 4).

10 Freud coins the term ‘Oedipus complex’ or ‘Oedipal complex’ in his 1899 book The Interpretation of Dreams. According to Encyclopedia Britannica:

Oedipus complex, in psychoanalytic theory, [is] a desire for sexual involvement with the parent of the opposite sex and a concomitant sense of rivalry with the parent of the same sex; a crucial stage in the normal developmental process. […] Freud attributed the Oedipus complex to children of about the ages three to five. He said the stage usually ended when the child identified with the parent of the same sex and repressed its sexual instincts. If previous relationships with the parents were relatively loving and nontraumatic, and if parental attitudes were neither excessively prohibitive nor excessively stimulating, the stage is passed through harmoniously. In the presence of trauma, however, there occurs an ‘infantile neurosis’ that is an important forerunner of similar reactions during the child’s adult life. The superego, the moral factor that dominates the conscious adult mind, also has its origin in the process of overcoming the Oedipus complex. Freud considered the reactions against the Oedipus complex the most important social achievements of the human mind.

See ‘Oedipus complex’. Encyclopedia Britannica.