Moroccan subaltern voices narrated: the historical imaginary of race and the legacy of slavery in Rabbaj’sLe Lutteur[The Wrestler] and El Hachimi’sDhākirat al-narjis[The Daffodil’s Memory]

Abstract

Nation in Moroccan historiography writings has traditionally been described as culturally, ethnically and racially homogeneous; an all-encompassing discourse that silences episodes about the historical legacy of slavery and racism in the country, and undermines multicultural Morocco. In fact, the history of Morocco’s blacks of sub-Saharan descent remains fragmented, scattered and undocumented – partly because of the scarcity of archival sources. Recent years, however, have witnessed the revival of an ‘African consciousness’ in Moroccan history and in literature. This is also the case of Maghrebi (North African) and Arabic literature from the Mashreq (the Middle East) and the Gulf. In this paper, we consider how two recent Moroccan novels, Le Lutteur [The Wrestler, in French] by My Seddick Rabbaj (2017) and Dhākirat al-narjis [The Daffodil's Memory, in Arabic] by Rachid al-Hachimi (2018), deal with salient moments of trans-Saharan cultural connections. We argue that the historical and the geographical imaginaries connecting North and sub-Saharan Africa compel a discussion of the ‘decolonial’ as outlined by the Moroccan critic Abdelkebir Khatibi, and enforce a rebound on the concept of ‘significant geographies’. In engaging with the narratives’ concern about the construction of racial and cultural identities in Morocco, we consider how these works resonate with the recovery of the subaltern history of black Morocco, and how gender, rural and ethnic identity inform and imbue the texts with a knot of ambivalent discourses.