The Postcolonial Malaise in Narration

Abstract

Arṣifah Wa Judrān (Sidewalks and Walls) is associated with some of the aspects inherent in the postcolonial social and cultural transformations that Morocco had witnessed due to the illusive narrative of independence. Lack of political stability, repression, stagnation, and social disparities created helpless and alienated individuals torn between the utopian impulse for a better way of being and the forceful neocolonial crippling situation of aborted desires and hopes. When it first came out, the narrative raised questions about the nihilistic and existentialist position of the protagonist in a Moroccan society at the crossroads of colonial desires and postcolonial drifts. Arṣifah Wa Judrān remaps the contours of an unremitting condition marked out by the predicaments of existence in a society of contrasts par excellence. It demonstrates how the systematic social sufferings of the characters reach absurd extremes, and it casts nihilism and the mendacity of life in the postcolonial setting as restrictive, unreasonable and tragic. This essay attempts to reflect on how nation and narration, gender and sexuality in Arṣifah Wa Judrān coalesce to bring a distrustful glance through narrative themes that resonate with imposed nihilism and absurdity within a cruel society of shattered dreams and unfulfilled promises. It seeks to understand how characters strive to confront the existential crises dictated by loss, weariness, disappointment and the dystopian condition of the postcolony.

Keywords:

• Absurdity
• extentialism
• Moroccan literature
• nation and narration
• postcolonialism
• Zafzaf, Mohamed

Acknowledgments

This essay has benefited from rigorous reading by the peer reviewers of Interventions. Its merits are derived from their insightful remarks; its shortcomings are entirely my own responsibility. I would very much like to thank them for their inspiring comments.

Notes

1 Translations from Arabic are mine unless stated otherwise. The transliterations used are from the Index Translationum of UNESCO.

2 For an insightful article on Camus’ position towards the colonizer–colonized binary, see Kałuża (2019).