There are writers whose departure only increases their glowing presence in the lanterns of memory. As the level of absence increases, they become immortal icons that shade the course of literary practices. “Death is an image before it is a metaphysical absence,” in the words of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard.
Therefore, the impact of true literature is not measured by the readability of the text and its digital spread today, but rather by the concepts it can carve and the deep wound it leaves in society, where serious works work to weave a captivating relationship with reality and accompany it in the “night of questioning.”
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In this context, the Moroccan novelist Idris Chraibi (1926-2007), whose birth centenary is currently passing, is considered one of the Arab literary models who was able to express society and reveal its faults and rifts through the genre of the novel, and in a language that has long been considered “the spoils of war,” as Algerian Kateb Yacine described it.
Anyone who contemplates the biography of the author of “The Simple Past” will find himself faced with a powerful experience in terms of form and original in terms of subject matter, building a type of realistic literature that reflects the transformations of Moroccan society since the 1950s.
Literature is a horizon of reality
In everything he wrote, Al-Sharabi was keen to remain faithful to the concepts that formed the “magic dictionary” from which he drew; Where writing is attached to the pores of exile, racism, memory, immigration, and diaspora.
These issues turned into paradigms through which stories and anecdotes crystallized, in the form of a literary project that re-practices a kind of “double criticism” of the local culture (the mother) and its foreign counterpart.
Because of Chraibi, these concepts became one of the prominent pillars within Moroccan literature written in French. He is credited with devoting these topics within the literary imagination, so that new generations begin to pursue the traces of immigrants and dissect their situation within European countries, or dissect the Moroccan identity and make it stand as a rival in the laboratory of Western modernity.
This intellectual tendency renewed Arabic literature and made it open to others and emerge from the cocoon of the self and the simulation of the post-independence reality, as writing at that time was either of a direct ideological nature, or merely tickled the feelings and nostalgia for years gone by. This writing – despite its aesthetic signs in the mid-sixties – remained of a traditional nature that spelled out the principles of literary modernism that penetrated the structure of Moroccan culture at the beginning of the seventies.
Criticism of Moroccan society
Fatn Idris Chraibi – whose centenary was celebrated during the activities of the 31st session of the International Publishing and Book Fair in Rabat – emphasized the importance of reality in attracting readers and pushing the text to be the son of its environment and not just a literary metaphor. Therefore, his first famous novel, “The Simple Past” (1954), appeared to us as a true testimony to Morocco on the eve of independence, in which it portrayed the political backwardness and social suffering at that time, which made the national elite harshly criticize him in that era, accusing him of betrayal, betrayal, and praising colonialism. While the reader today finds in the novel a real criticism of the concept of values within inherited traditions and their Western counterparts.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, academic and critic Dr. Mohamed Bouazza explained that Chraibi is considered one of the most controversial Moroccan writers, and that this debate was linked to what Abdelkebir Khatibi called “dialectical rivalry” in the reception of the novel “The Simple Past.”
The novel “The Simple Past” tells the dilemma of the civilizational clash between Arab-Islamic culture and Western culture, and between tradition and modernity, through the story of the hero Idris’s rebellion against the authority of the father, who represents conservative society.
Bouazza adds: “In this tense political context (the period of exile of King Mohammed V), the novel sparked angry reactions from the national elite, which saw it as a distortion of society at a time when it was being exposed to the injustices of the occupation, and considered the situation a justification for France’s crimes. What intensified the rejection was the French show elite’s welcome to the work, which prompted Chraibi to be accused of treason and seduction of the West.”
In order to do justice to the novelist, Bouazza points out that Abdelkebir Khatibi provided a psychological explanation for Chraibi’s violent stance. Stressing that it does not come from a political position, but rather expresses a deep existential separation that represents a radical model of the “problematic individual” who suffers from estrangement and absolute alienation within his society.
The author of the book “Cultural Narratives” believes that if we are liberated from the logic of rivalry, the novel constituted a moment of foundational aesthetic transformation that transferred the Moroccan narrative from the style of the folkloric ethnographic novel to the model of the civilizational novel and the psychological analysis of the individual’s consciousness torn between the culture of the colonizer and the culture of the colonized.
Bouazza concludes: “The most important intellectual achievement presented by the novel is the assertion that liberation from colonialism is not complete except through internal criticism of local cultural and political power structures, which are the first seeds of what Al-Khatibi later called double criticism.”
Moroccan literature by French pens…or an existential wound?
Chraibi has become the godfather of Moroccan literature written in French, a literature that has long been subjected to harsh criticism, considering it merely “French literature written with Moroccan pens.”
This criticism was later linked to subsequent generations, such as Tahar Ben Jelloun, Abdel Latif Laabi, Muhammad Khairuddin, and Fouad Al-Aroui, due to the tendency toward autobiography or intellectual affiliation to Francophone institutions as a cultural policy, in line with former French President François Mitterrand’s statement that Francophonism represents a political, economic, and cultural extension.
In this regard, the thinker and former Minister of Culture, Bensalem Himmich, in his famous book “Francophonism and the Tragedy of Our French Literature,” directed a sharp criticism of this literature, considering it a hybrid simulation, and placed his writings in the category of complicity with colonial expansion. However, what was missing from this proposal is that language, for these writers, was not just a means of communication, but rather an “existential wound” imposed on them through socialization and scientific training. Writing in French here directs the human body and thought in a hidden way.
Idris Chraibi says, describing this internal conflict:
For ten years, my Arab brain, thinking in Arabic, has been crushing European concepts in an extremely absurd way, turning them into intelligible bitterness. If it persists, it is not due to the rule of adaptation, but rather because it has endured more than it can bear from the reproducing meninges that are the only ones adapted to the Western world.
It should be recognized that this literature written in French contributed indirectly to liberating Moroccan literature written in Arabic from the influence of tradition and the perpetuation of self-centrism.
This renewal was not limited to subjects, but extended to artistic methods and aesthetic templates. Moroccans began to write with a critical consciousness that believed that literature was the foundation and pillar of thought. Novels appeared that dissected reality as a form of philosophical contemplation, and others invoked history and political facts with the aim of condemning the wounds of the present.
