Degrees of untranslatability: Muhammad Shukri’s quest for representation

ABSTRACT

The publication history of Moroccan writer Muhammad Shukri’s autobiographical book Al-khubz al-hafi is paradigmatic of the role played by national contexts in the reception of world literature, and of the rigid hierarchies of prestige associated with each field of cultural production. Originally published in English translation by Paul Bowles in 1973, in French translation by Tahar Ben Jelloun in 1980 and in Spanish translation by Abdellah Djbilou in 1982 – the same year as the first publication of the text in Arabic appeared – it quickly became an international sensation. In this article, I pay special attention to the role played by the Moroccan Hispanophone literary community in the late twentieth century, and by the Spanish language, in the crafting of Shukri’s original narrative. I contend that the narrative simultaneously seeks to invite and resist its own translation, by going beyond formal and ideological expectations, and that the ultimate untranslatability of Shukri’s fictionalized biography is not a defense of an essentialized Moroccan identity, but rather reflects a constant triangulation among Morocco’s diglossic reality and the European languages of his translators.

KEYWORDS:

• World literature
• untranslatability
• Paul Bowles
• Tahar Ben Jelloun
• Abdellah Djibilou

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Benita Sampedro Vizcaya for her feedback and for the long conversations that helped us shape the scope and purpose of this essay and the special issue in which it appears. I am also grateful to Eric Calderwood whose comments and suggestions about my approach to Shukri’s work and our efforts to define the field of Global Hispanophone studies were extremely useful. I presented an earlier version of this essay at the Global Arab and Arab American forum at the 2019 MLA; I want to thank its organizer Karim Mattar and the other panelists for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Adolfo Campoy-Cubillo is an Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Oakland University. He is the author of Memories of the Maghreb: Transnational Identities in Spanish Cultural Production (Palgrave 2012); coeditor, with Jill Robbins, of the special issue “Considering the Western Sahara: Multi-Disciplinary Approaches to Post-Colonialism” published in Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Production of the Luso-Hispanic World (2015); coauthor, with Borja Rodríguez, of a critical edition of Ramón J. Sender’s novel Imán (Stockcero 2014) and also coauthor, with Paul Southern, of a critical edition and translation of José Díaz Fernández’s novel El Blocao (Oxbow Books 2016). Email: [email protected].

Notes

1 Muhammad Shukri’s name has been transliterated from Arabic as “Chukri” in Spanish, and “Choukri” in French and English. “Shukri” is the most commonly used transliteration today in English. The origin of his last name can be traced back to Ayt Chiker, the Moroccan area where he grew up. Like many Amazigh, he used the Arabic version of his name once he left the rural Rif region for the city.

2 The Protectorate of Morocco was established in 1912 by a treaty between France and Spain that assigned the northern Moroccan regions of Kert, Rif, Xauen, Yebala and Locus as well as the southern territories around Cape Juby and Saguia el-Hamra to Spain, and the rest of the country to France. The extension of the Spanish protectorate in northern Morocco coincided with the port cities of Melilla (located in Kert) and Ceuta (located in Yebala) that had been Spanish colonies since the seventeenth and late fifteenth centuries respectively. Cape Juby had loosely been under Spanish control since 1799 when Moroccan Sultan Selim ceded it to Spain. The northern territories of the Spanish Protectorate were returned to Morocco in 1956, when Morocco declared its independence; the territories around Cape Juby were ceded to Morocco in 1958 after the Ifni War of 1957.

3 Embarek López’s joint translations of Shukri’s trilogy aimed to overcome the limitations of Djibilou’s translation of Al-khubz al-hafi while also making the other two volumes available in Spanish. These translations, all of them published by Cabaret Voltaire, contributed to the recovery of Shukri’s work and of his critique of the Spanish Protectorate at the same time as a series of commercial blockbusters such as Lorenzo Silva’s El nombre de los nuestros (2001) and Carta blanca (2004) and María Dueñas El tiempo entre costuras (2009), among others, presented nostalgic accounts of the Spanish colonial presence in Morocco. I have discussed Silva’s and Dueñas’s work elsewhere (Campoy-Cubillo 2016).

4 The first cohort of Hispanophone Moroccan writers began publishing their work in Spanish dailies, like El Diario de África, in the 1940s. Their essayistic and literary production was typically published by the Instituto General Franco de Estudios e Investigación Hispano-Árabe, the Instituto de Estudios Africanos and the Instituto Hispano-Árabe de Cultura. The literary magazines Al-Motamid and Ketama appeared in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

5 Shukri’s memoir about his acquaintance with Paul Bowles, included in In Tangier, was originally published in French translation as Paul Bowles: Le reclus de Tanger, in 1997. The English translation was not available until 2008, in an edition that combined Shukri’s memoirs and connection with Bowles with his experiences in Tangier with Jean Genet and Tennessee Williams. The sections on Genet and Williams, translated into English by Paul Bowles, had been published before, but the section on Bowles was translated into English (by Gretchen Head and John Garrett) only for the 2008 edition.

6 Critics have read Shukri’s literary production as an expression of Amazigh identity. Khazaal (2013), for instance, has argued that Al-khubz al-hafi is a modern reelaboration of the pre-Islamic bandit poets known as ṣaʿālīk. Fernández Parrilla (2002) has criticized this reading as a common attempt on the part of Moroccan nationalist scholars to connect any form of contemporary cultural expression to an unbroken national lineage. My own reading of Al-khubz al-hafi contends that, rather than prioritizing one identity over another, the author looked for representation in the interplay between the different identitarian narratives available to him.

7 Salih Altoma confirmed, in an article published in 2011, that Bowles did not speak standard Arabic and that he was hardly fluent in Maghribian Arabic.

8 For a detailed analysis of Spanish desencanto, see Vilarós (1998).

9 An early example of Benumeya’s idiosyncratic form of colonial andalucismo is his long article “El islam español y la ‘Reconquista’ desde el Sur” published in three installments in the Revista de Tropas Coloniales (1925).

10 For a detailed analysis of the efforts to cultivate a cultural elite sympathetic to Francoist ideology, see monograph by Larramendi, González, and López García (2015).

11 For an early and detailed analysis of both magazines, see De Agreda Burillo (1976).