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The Moroccan Dream
(An Anthology of Moroccan New Short Story)
I)-Introduction :
The idea
of translating Moroccan short stories into English
shone, at first, to counterbalance the scarcity of
Moroccan narrative texts written in or translated
into English. This sense of reconsideration,
however, was not the only urge to launch this
initiative; there was also the need to contribute to
the new universal tendency to dialogue between human
cultures throughout the globe. Accordingly, the
present literary project of translating Moroccan new
short stories into English will be prolonged to
cover three volumes with three central themes around
which are weaved all the narrative texts:
‘‘The Anthology of Moroccan Dream’’ Where
the central theme will be Dream in its
broader aspects, ‘‘The Anthology of Moroccan
love’’ dealing basically with Love
as a source of emancipation and creation and
‘‘The Anthology of Freedom’’ where
Freedom is the first and last preoccupation
of all the texts within.
II)- ‘‘Dream’’ In The Anthology of Moroccan Dreaming
short-story writers :
‘‘The Anthology of Moroccan Dream’’
texts are organized thematically from prophecy to
ordinary dream, day-dreaming, hallucination,
nightmare and finally to madness as the most
unacceptable aspect of all kinds of dreams.
Consequently, short stories in ‘‘The Anthology
of Moroccan Dream’’ graduate from prophecy
in Moustapha Laghtiri’s ‘‘Dream’’, to
ordinary dreams in Najib Kaaouachi’s ‘‘Me,
Revealed to Myself’’, khadija El Younoussi’s
‘‘Books and Apples’’, fatima
Bouziane’s ‘‘Normal’’, Zahra ramij’s
‘‘Dreams’’, Saïd Ahoubate’s ‘‘
The Voice and the Hammer’’, Mohamed Saïd
Raïhani’s ‘‘Open, Sesame !’’,
Noureddine Mhakkak’s ‘‘The Interpretation of
Dreams’’ and Mouna Ouafiq’s
‘‘ Grenade-Man’’… to day-dreams in Abdennour
Driss’s ‘‘Shehrayar’s Dream’’ , to
hallucination and illusion in malika Moustadraf’s
‘‘ A Space For An Impossible Dream’’
and Abdelouahid Kafih’s ‘‘Bomb’’…to
nightmares in Faouzi Boukhriss’s ‘‘Nightmare’’,
Abdoullah Mouttaqi’s ‘‘Rebellious Dreams’’
and Mouna Benhaddou’s ‘‘For Everybody His Own
Hell’’. The Dreaming Anthology will conclude
its journey with madness in Mohamed Zitoune’s
‘‘Castle Incense’’ regarding that madness is
the highest planes of all nightmares…
III)-‘‘The
Anthology of Moroccan Dream’’reviewed :
A)-Moustapha
Laghtiri’s ‘‘Dream’’ :
This text
is a pure attempt to grasp a runaway dream soon
after waking up. It starts from the conclusion
taking hold of the remains of the dream that still
resound in memory, deepening the difficult journey
backwards towards the eventual beginnings of the
dream/story facing many jerks and quakes until
remembering the heart of the runaway dream:
The bird. It is only then that the story
finds its tempo and gathers its components,
delivering itself and emancipating the reader:
« It
is only then that the world seemed to be in his own
hands, that a happy event is in the way to be
achieved and that all he had to do is just to sit
and wait. »
B)- Najib Kaaouachi’s ‘‘Me, Revealed to Myself’’:
No
adventure could be as valuable as the adventure of
scratching out one’s own self buried under the daily
hullabaloo and the taming habit… The greatest
achievement that a man can ever realize is not
discovering the word around him but exploring the
word inside him.
In this
context, ‘‘Me, Revealed to Myself’’
shows an unusual obsession with this theme:
Self-discovery. The narrator, all along the story,
keeps faithful to his will to chase that mysterious
face which resists any approach but only to make
sure that all along the dream/pursuit, the narrator
was chasing nobody but himself:
« The luminous halo surrounding his face is slowly
fading away until it disappeared completely and I
saw my own face within : I was that one passing by
myself all along the way indiscreetly, with no trace
or shadow behind… »
C)- Khadija El Younoussi’s ‘‘Books and Apples’’:
If books
symbolize Knowledge and guarantee Its immortality,
apples in religious stories are linked to
Immortality in Its broader sense. However, in the
absence of Adam and Eve, Eternity will remain
incomplete.
In
‘‘Books and Apples’’, there is a fabulous
combination between bodily nourishment (=apples),
intellectual nourishment (=books) and
spiritual nourishment (=love). This
combination blossoms better in the light of the
duality of the severe established order where
destitution reigns and the dreamily ideal order
where everything is within reach: with the stranger
becoming a lover, the expensive books spraying their
titles about in the air and apples, Heaven’s fruits,
are close at hand…
Being
aware of the severity of reality waiting ahead for
her, the narrator clings obstinately to the dream
she is shaving, refusing to wake up, stretching out
her hand to silence the alarm-clock, hoping to live
the beautiful dream to eternity.
D)- Fatima Bouzian’s ‘‘Normal’’:
‘‘Normal’’
is a
reversed journey starting from the beautiful dream
and ending with the bitter reality destined to be
the centre of life making despair ordinary,
depression ordinary, humiliation ordinary…
‘‘Normal’’
is focused
on love at first sight:
« I
feel him a real copy of the ideal man’s image that I
have been developing deep inside me from all that I
have admired in men since the very moment when that
hot hormonal flow run in my blood. »
The first
sentences of the text evoke a transitional period of
life, leaving an old depression phase based on ‘‘ear
culture’’ up to a new flourishing phase
based on ‘‘eye culture’’:
« Today, I can hear with my eyes ».
However,
the dominance of Depression and the power of Habit
do not allow any right in Change, Joy and Love
intervening at the right moment to pull down the
whole dream castle into a mere hopeless shatter in
scattered poetic free verses written by Arab Poet
Saleh Harbi.
E)- Zahra Ramij’s ‘‘ Dreams’’:
‘‘Dreams’’
is a
compound of four dreams around a week-end breakfast
and narrated by four dreamy narrators whose worlds
and horizons are revealed through the subject-matter
of their dreams:
§
The child dreams of more creative worlds.
§
The maid dreams of Deliverance and Self- Respect.
§
The little girl dream of returning to the warmth of
the motherly fœtus, very close to the heartbeat.
§
The mother dreams of returning to the childhood
making use of the same dreams that she used to have
in her childhood: Flying.
«Freedom »,
in Its absolute innocence, is the principal engine
operating the four dreams in the mother text,
“Dreams”: The child dreams of leaving school
programmes, flying away towards the spacious worlds
of literature where free-speech is the only power
there is; the maid dreams of swimming across the
Mediterranean Sea hoping to restore her freedom and
self-respect in another land with other people; the
little girl dreams of the greatest freedom,
‘‘the freedom to choose her own fate and decide her
own destiny with her own hands’’; and the
mother narrator dreams of flying the way no-one in
living memory has ever done.
Zahra
Ramij’s ‘‘Dreams’’ is a dream about
Freedom.
F)- Saïd Ahoubate’s ‘‘The Voice and the Hammer”:
The title
‘‘The Voice and the Hammer” is
composed of two words: ‘‘voice’’ or
‘‘call’’ and ‘‘hammer’’ or
‘‘action”. The text, therefore, is a
‘‘call for action’’.
The emitter
of this call is a female prisoner moaning across the
wall: ‘‘If you deliver me, you will deliver
yourself’’, a supplication showing a
universal yearn for Liberation and Freedom the first
symbolic barrier of which is ‘‘The Wall’’.
‘‘The
Voice and the Hammer”
focuses on liberating the other
or delivering the self reflected on the other,
opening the door wide open before a future society
reserved exclusively for The Free, giving new
spaces for human lungs to breath self-respect and
different horizons to dream of higher freedom :
“Dear
fellows, we feel humiliation being so marginalized
in this city, we Vanguards. Our dangerous mission is
to set new values on the ruins of this sinful city
and establish a newer regime… A regime that will set
us free. So, dear fellows, go on your sacred
mission…”
Here,
‘‘The Voice and the Hammer” meets another
narrative text in ‘‘The Anthology of Moroccan
Dream’’, ‘‘Open, sesame!’’ by
Mohamed Saïd Raïhani.
G)- Mohamed Saïd
Raïhani’s ‘‘Open, Sesame!’’:
The stream
of consciousness has made of ‘‘Open, Sesame!’’
an eternal opening on different, renewed
worlds within the dream/text, starting with worlds
of destitution and despotism and ending with worlds
of propagandist poetry and the countdown for the
ultimate deluge that is gathering its energies to
purify the word, fertilize the fields and blow new
spirits in the free, honest, new human race…
The text
ends with the dreaming narrator waking up to the
rhythm of the knock on the door to see his
individual dream being adopted by far-away people
and becoming already a collective dream:
« He
knocks on the door, waits for the answer, knocks
again, examines his registers, searches for insured
mail and leaned on the door again, calling:
"Open, Sesame!"
The postman looks me persistently in the eyes. His
features resist a strong smile that he could not
control any further. The smile overwhelms him at
last and he sets it free. »
H)- Noureddine Mhakkak’s ‘‘ The Interpretation of
Dreams’’ :
The central
theme in ‘‘The Interpretation Of Dreams’’
is the alienation of the short-story writer in a
world where publishing is impossible reading and
reception are difficult:
« I
decided to gather those foreigners, around there, to
tell them my stories. However, those people looked
as if they were dead. They do not move nor do they
speak or look or hear. They looked as if they were
bewitched into stone beings by some evil witch. »
Being a
messenger, the short-story writer should find a
receptive public for his text. For this reason, he
keeps moving from world to world seeking interactive
readers. There were, first, the trees proud of
having stories written on their leaves; there was
also that smart snake which never gets tired of
listening to stories and asking for more stories;
there were equally birds coming from afar to read
their experiences immortalized in beautifully
narrative texts… But only the loving female remains
the really good reader freeing herself from her bad
fate and setting free the short-story writer from
his alienation.
I)- Mouna Ouafiq’s ‘‘Grenade-Man’’:
‘‘Grenade-Man’’ is
quite different from the remaining texts of ‘‘The
Dreaming Anthology’’. It is totally reversed
as the narrator ‘‘dreams’’ when he
‘‘wakes up’’:
« I
woke up to dream an astonishing dream ».
The text
chases the flow of Life Force all along the text,
making use of a very functionally artistic device,
‘‘Re-incarnation’’, making the
dream/text returning eternally to the very
beginning: The death of the marginal character in
that balcony between cats with a grenade stamped on
his neck is resurrected in this balcony in a new
body looking for a new band of cats to accompany him
in a quite clear message : Exclusion,
seclusion and marginalisation never kill the
beautiful spirits yearning to live…
J)-Abdennour Driss’s ‘‘Shehrayar’s Dream’’:
‘‘Shehrayar’s Dream’’
is a poetic text, par excellence.
Because of the irrelevance of denotative language
and the centrality of despair which necessitates a
language as ambiguous as the catastrophic fate of
the central character wandering all along the
sequences of the text, dreaming of having a baby boy
to get him out of his existential labyrinth (his
illusory, labyrinthine virility and heroism) and set
his wives from their maze (the maze of absolute
passivity and belonging to the ‘‘shameful’’
gender) :
« Cursed
is he who gives birth to females! »
K)-Malika Moustasaf’s ‘‘A Space For An Impossible
Dream’’ :
When
reality turns more severe, dream becomes the only
refuge to keep one’s mental and psychological
balance, however, when dream itself turns
impossible, the impasse is worth the title ‘‘A
Space For An Impossible Dream’’.
The text,
‘‘A Space For An Impossible Dream’’,
reflects the altered balance between the ideal order
and the established order where reigns unemployment,
unfit habitation, sexual deprivation and the
impossibility of a better life in a better place…
The result is ‘‘the vicious circle’’
that the text formally embodies beginning and ending
with the same paragraph, drawing a circular
prison for all the characters:
« He
went out , loudly insulting everybody starting with
his old parents who were at the source of his
existence in this wretched world and ending with
his sister who got married to an old French man and
travelled away with him…».
L)- Abdelouahid Kafih’s « Bomb » :
« It
is all over, now. The faces that have dreamt for
such a long time to change the world have
disappeared. The period of detention that he has
counted minute after minute and second after second
is over now. »
These are the first sentences in Abdelouahid Kafih’s
« Bomb » restricting “the dream
of changing the world” in the period of “Detention”
in the jail space and culture where Dream and Hope
are important only to keep alive.
From the
very beginning, the ideal order was declared to be
down, leaving space for the established order to
dominate the whole events of the text intensifying
the feeling of narrator’s alienation among bastards
in his own home:
«It’s all the same, Rabbit. Whether present or
absent, husbands are not necessary for their wives’
pregnancy».
L)- Faouzi Boukhris’s « Nightmare» :
« Nightmare» focuses
on an internal feeling of absolute boredom due to
the fatal trivialities taking place in the outside
world. Thus, in the heart of the absolute banality
and the general boredom, no-one among the characters
in the text can take the lead and narrate the story.
To fill the void, there must be an independent
narrator who would not only narrate the story but
also to describe for either characters or readers
their own thoughts and feelings making use of
the second-person pronoun “you” as long as
the whole life is numb or dull in the realm of
Boredom.
The
narrator makes use of the second-person
pronoun “you” to address himself to either
characters or readers whose senses have grown dull
with deadly repetitive routine in their daily lives
until they find it impossible to dream. Even at the
doorstep of dream, the narrator stands up to depict
“for you” the “form” of
the dream, deliberately skipping its “content”:
« Suddenly, you feel something monstrously heavy
lying on your chest paralyzing your entire being.
You cannot do the slightest movement. You feel
suffocated. You gather all your strengths and try to
stand up and get rid of the monstrous body but in
vain… You fall down helpless. You breathe with great
difficulty, feeling that you are breathing the
ultimate oxygen atom into your lungs... »
M)- Abdoullah Al-Mouttaqi’s « Rebellious Dreams » :
Fiction
narration with the first-person pronoun “I”
denies the reader his neutrality and
objectivity while using the third-person
pronoun “He/She/It” makes it possible to
keep distance and judge the course of things
objectively.
Since every
narrative pronoun (Be it first or second or
third pronoun) has its own communicative and
narrative function, dream narration is better
conveyed through the use of the first-person
pronoun “I”. However, in his
“Rebellious Dreams”, Abdoullah Al-Mouttaqi
opposes the tradition preferring detached narration
to intimate confession, making use of the
omniscient viewpoint (the third-person pronoun
“He”) in order to make the reader believe
that the story is taking place for other
characters in other places in
other times… Before all reader’s convictions
are reversed by the end of the text, all at once:
«The
cock’s beak did not find the laughing sun. The hen’s
found nothing but white lice. The chicks are still
busy playing. The wife is hanging the washing on to
dry whereas the husband is … scribbling this short
story. »
Only
at the end of the text does the reader come to know
that the whole text has been narrated in the
first-person pronoun “I” and that the
original narrator is no other than the central
character, the cheated husband, who is caught
finally in the act of scribbling the very short
story.
N)- Mouna Ben Haddou’s « For Everybody His Own
Hell » :
“For
Everybody His Own Hell”,
from the title, shows a universal justice devoted to
give, on equal terms, everybody his due share of
unhappiness. Considering that Hell is everybody’s
ration, dream is doomed to have its share of hell,
too; so is sobriety
in a way that makes the
whole existence seem a continuous nightmare…
On this
basis, “For Everybody His Own Hell”
has been weaved controlling the progression of the
story with two threads: the first one is concerned
with dreaming about a girlfriend getting ready to
commit suicide; and the second one hangs in the air
where the suicidal act is definitely fulfilled:
«
Some tender hands have shaken me out of my
nightmare. I looked up to find my girlfriend’s
mother asking me about her daughter who had been
sitting next to me watching ‘For Everybody His Own
Hell!’, the film.
I was so absorbed by
the events of the film that I did not notice her
withdrawal. My eyes were automatically directed to
the door opening on the stair-cases swirling up to
Hell. The mother’s eyes followed my eyes’ movements
and in no time she was hysterically climbing up the
stairs. »
O)- Mohamed Zitoune’s « Castle Incense » :
In
« Castle Incense » , the last text in
‘‘The Moroccan Dream: Anthology of Moroccan new
short story”, incense as an aesthetic device
is wonderfully handled to match the overwhelming
mystery in the text in such a way that no-one can
see across the intense incense and have access to
Truth for the sake of which the whole caravan in the
story has started its journey, making of the
narrator the aim of the journey and the centre of
the text although he, himself, knows nothing about
the events around nor does he know the goal of the
caravan nor even can he distinguish his presence
from his absence:
-“But whom is that
celebration for?”
Omission
and poetry have doubled the density of ambiguity
encircling the nature and destiny of the central
character but the title of the caravan “Bouya
Omar”, one of the traditional curing centres
in Morocco where lunatics are jailed and tamed,
affirms the narrator’s madness and expects from this
journey his deliverance of his hallucinations and
nightmares in order to come back again to his
group’s culture and meet his relatives’
expectations.
III)- Conclusion:
“The
Moroccan Dream”
embodies the plurality of the Moroccan narrative
dream starting from vision to day-dream to illusion
to nightmare to madness. A plurality paralleled by a
diversity of viewpoints and narrative techniques
used to conform to the subject of the narrative
message: prophecy, propaganda, alienation, despair,
madness…
The common
target of “The Moroccan Dream” texts
was the yearning to Unity: the unity
of Form and Content,
Surface and Essence,
outer self and deeper self…
The yearning to Deliverance, which
will remain forever the dream of all dreams:
The greatest dream of all.
Mohamed Saïd Raïhani
Ksar El Kebir / Morocco
July 20th 2006
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