AN ANTHOLOGY OF MOROCCAN
NEW SHORT STORY, VOLUME 1
The Power of Dream
In
The Moroccan Dream
(“The Three Keys”, 1st Volume:
An Anthology of Moroccan New Short Story)
Written By Mohamed Saïd Raïhani
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’’ 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
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:
« Whom are
they celebrating their rituals for while I am away. »
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 /
July 20th 2006
***********
*The translator, Mohamed Saïd Raïhani, is a Moroccan
translator, scholar & short-story writer, born on December 23rd 1968
in Ksar El Kébir. He published in Arabic "The Singularity Will" (A Semiotic Study on First-names) 2001, "Waiting For the Morning" (Short stories) 2003,"Thus Spoke Santa Lugar-Verde" (Short stories) 2005, "The Season Of Migration to Anywhere" (Short stories) 2006, "The Three Keys: Freedom, Dream & Love" (An anthology of Moroccan New Short Story in Three
Volumes) 2006-2007-2008, "The History of Manipulating Professional Contests in
Morocco" (Syndical manifestos in Two Volumes) 2009-2011, "Death of the Author" 2010…
He is getting ready for printing:"Beyond Writing & Reading» (testimonies), "Kais & Juliet" ( Novel) and ""When Photo
Talks" (Photo-Autobiography).
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