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Master of the Maghreb
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19600 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
4,983 Words |
| Author
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Hedi Abdel-Jaouad
Hedi Abdel-Jaouad is assistant professor of French at Skidmore
College. He publishes frequently in the journals Studies in
20th Century Literature and CEL-FAN Review. |
NAISSANCE A L'AUBE (Birth at dawn)
Driss Chraibi
Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986
188 pp.
MOTHER COMES OF AGE (Translated from La civilization, ma mere! By Hugh Harter)
Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1990
121 pp., $9.50
French literature of the Maghreb (an area comprising Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco) continues to flourish, despite the prediction of its demise with the end of the colonial rule. Written by Arabs, Berbers, and Jews, this literature exploded on the world scene in the 1950s with the writings of, to cite only a few, Ahmed Sefrioui (Morocco), Mouloud Feraoun (Algeria), and Albert Memmi (Tunisia). One of the giants of this literature, whose career spans four decades, is the Moroccan Driss Chraibi. In his fiction, which is rooted in two cultures--Arab and French--Chraibi explores the contours of the universal human condition with mordant humor.
Born in 1926 at Al Jadida on the Atlantic coast of Morocco to a well-to-do traditional Muslim family, Chraibi is a man of at least two worlds (Europe and Africa), two eras (colonial and postcolonial), two cultures (Arab, Berber and Islamic, as well as French), and two languages (French and Arabic).
After attending the Koranic school where he learned the rudiments of the Islamic religion and the Arabic language, the young Driss was cast at the age of ten into the lion's den, that is the French school. For Chraibi, the passage from the traditional to the modern and secular school was tantamount to an epistemological break. Besides learning a different alphabet, which, unlike Arabic, reads from left to right, Driss had to adapt to a new and foreign mode of thinking. Later, as an adult writer, he would act out the traumatic passage from tradition to modernity in a novel significantly titled La Civilisation, ma mere! (1972) [Available in translation as Mother Comes of Age] as a story of a Moroccan mother coming to grips with the wondrous inventions of modern civilization.
The young Chraibi did very well at the French school. After he successfully completed his secondary education at the Lycee Lyautey in Casablanca, Chraibi was accepted into a prestigious "Grande Ecole," a highly selective institution of higher learning in Paris,
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