Download or read book An Arab Melancholia written by Abdellah Taïa and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-03-09 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An autobiographical portrait of a gay Arab man, living between cultures, seeking an identity through love and writing. I had to rediscover who I was. And that's why I left the apartment.... And there I was, right in the heart of the Arab world, a world that never tired of making the same mistakes over and over.... I had no more leniency when it came to the Arab world... None for the Arabs and none for myself. I suddenly saw things with merciless lucidity.... —An Arab Melancholia Salé, near Rabat. The mid 1980s. A lower-class teenager is running until he's out of breath. He's running after his dream, his dream to become a movie director. He's running after the Egyptian movie star, Souad Hosni, who's out there somewhere, miles away from this neighborhood—which is a place the teenager both loves and hates, the home at which he is not at home, an environment that will only allow him his identity through the cultural lens of shame and silence. Running is the only way he can stand up to the violence that is his Morocco. Irresistibly charming, angry, and wry, this autobiographical novel traces the emergence of Abdellah Taïa's identity as an openly gay Arab man living between cultures. The book spans twenty years, moving from Salé, to Paris, to Cairo. Part incantation, part polemic, and part love letter, this extraordinary novel creates a new world where the self is effaced by desire and love, and writing is always an act of discovery.

Download or read book Moroccan Soul written by Spencer D. Segalla and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before French conquest, education played an important role in Moroccan society as a means of cultural reproduction and as a form of cultural capital that defined a person's social position. Primarily religious and legal in character, the Moroccan educational system did not pursue European educational ideals. Following the French conquest of Morocco, however, the French established a network of colonial schools for Moroccan Muslims designed to further the agendas of the conquerors. The Moroccan Soul examines the history of the French education system in colonial Morocco, the development of Fren.

Download or read book In the Country of Others written by Leila Slimani and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning, #1 internationally bestselling new novel by the author of The Perfect Nanny that “lays bare women’s intimate, lacerating experience of war” (The New York Times Book Review) After World War II, Mathilde leaves France for Morocco to be with her husband, whom she met while he was fighting for the French army. A spirited young woman, she now finds herself a farmer’s wife, her vitality sapped by the isolation, the harsh climate, and the mistrust she inspires as a foreigner. But she refuses to be subjugated or confined to her role as mother of a growing family. As tensions mount between the Moroccans and the French colonists, Mathilde’s fierce desire for autonomy parallels her adopted country’s fight for independence in this lush and transporting novel about race, resilience, and women’s empowerment.

Download or read book The Ethnographic State written by Edmund Burke III and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2014-09-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alone among Muslim countries, Morocco is known for its own national form of Islam, "Moroccan Islam." However, this pathbreaking study reveals that Moroccan Islam was actually invented in the early twentieth century by French ethnographers and colonial officers who were influenced by British colonial practices in India. Between 1900 and 1920, these researchers compiled a social inventory of Morocco that in turn led to the emergence of a new object of study, Moroccan Islam, and a new field, Moroccan studies. In the process, they resurrected the monarchy and reinvented Morocco as a modern polity. This is an important contribution for scholars and readers interested in questions of orientalism and empire, colonialism and modernity, and the invention of traditions.

Download or read book Multilingualism Cultural Identity and Education in Morocco written by Moha Ennaji and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2005-01-20 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, I attempt to show how colonial and postcolonial political forces have endeavoured to reconstruct the national identity of Morocco, on the basis of cultural representations and ideological constructions closely related to nationalist and ethnolinguistic trends. I discuss how the issue of language is at the centre of the current cultural and political debates in Morocco. The present book is an investigation of the ramifications of multilingualism for language choice patterns and attitudes among Moroccans. More importantly, the book assesses the roles played by linguistic and cultural factors in the development and evolution of Moroccan society. It also focuses on the impact of multilingualism on cultural authenticity and national identity. Having been involved in research on language and culture for many years, I am particularly interested in linguistic and cultural assimilation or alienation, and under what conditions it takes place, especially today that more and more Moroccans speak French and are influenced by Western social behaviour more than ever before. In the process, I provide the reader with an updated description of the different facets of language use, language maintenance and shift, and language attitudes, focusing on the linguistic situation whose analysis is often blurred by emotional reactions, ideological discourses, political biases, simplistic assessments, and ethnolinguistic identities.

Download or read book The Simple Past written by Driss Chraibi and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Simple Past came out in 1954, and both in France and its author’s native Morocco the book caused an explosion of fury. The protagonist, who shares the author’s name, Driss, comes from a Moroccan family of means, his father a self-made tea merchant, the most devout of Muslims, quick to be provoked and ready to lash out verbally or physically, continually bent on subduing his timid wife and many children to his iron and ever-righteous will. He is known, simply, as the Lord, and Driss, who is in high school, is in full revolt against both him and the French colonial authorities, for whom, as much as for his father, he is no one. Driss Chraïbi’s classic coming-of-age story is about colonialism, Islam, the subjection of women, and finding, as his novel does, a voice that is as cutting and coruscating as it is original and free.

Download or read book A Country for Dying written by Abdellah Taïa and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exquisite novel of North Africans in Paris by "one of the most original and necessary voices in world literature" WINNER OF THE 2021 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE Paris, Summer 2010. Zahira is 40 years old, Moroccan, a prostitute, traumatized by her father's suicide decades prior, and in love with a man who no longer loves her. Zannouba, Zahira's friend and protege, formerly known as Aziz, prepares for gender confirmation surgery and reflects on the reoccuring trauma of loss, including the loss of her pre-transition male persona. Mojtaba is a gay Iranian revolutionary who, having fled to Paris, seeks refuge with Zahira for the month of Ramadan. Meanwhile, Allal, Zahira's first love back in Morocco, travels to Paris to find Zahira. Through swirling, perpendicular narratives, A Country for Dying follows the inner lives of emigrants as they contend with the space between their dreams and their realities, a schism of a postcolonial world where, as Taïa writes, "So many people find themselves in the same situation. It is our destiny: To pay with our bodies for other people's future."

Download or read book Infidels written by Abdellah Taïa and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Salé, Morocco—the hometown Abdellah Taïa fled but to which he returns again and again in his acclaimed fiction and films—Infidels follows the life of Jallal, the son of a prostitute witch doctor—"a woman who knew men, humanity, better than anyone. In sex. Beyond sex." As a ten-year-old sidekick to his mother, Jallal spits in the face of her enemies both real and imagined. The cast of characters that rush into their lives are unforgettable for their dreams of love and belonging that unravel in turn. Built as a series of monologues that are emotionally relentless—a mix of confession, heart's murmuring, and shouting match—the book follows Jallal out of boyhood on the path to Jihad. It's a path that surprises even him.

Download or read book A Moroccan Trilogy written by Jerome Tharaud and published by Eland Publishing. This book was released on 2022-04-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unique eyewitness account from 1917 of Morocco as a French protectorate.

Download or read book A History of Modern Morocco written by Susan Gilson Miller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A richly documented survey of modern Moroccan history that will enthral those searching for the background to present-day events in the region.

Download or read book The Curious Case of Dassoukine s Trousers written by Fouad Laroui and published by Deep Vellum Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning English-language debut by Morocco's most prominent contemporary author, a linked story collection exploring what it means to be foreign.

Download or read book A New History of French Literature written by Denis Hollier and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998-08-19 with total page 1202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Designed for the general reader, this splendid introduction to French literature from 842 A.D.—the date of the earliest surviving document in any Romance language—to the present decade is the most compact and imaginative single-volume guide available in English to the French literary tradition. In fact, no comparable work exists in either language. It is not the customary inventory of authors and titles but rather a collection of wide-angled views of historical and cultural phenomena. It sets before us writers, public figures, criminals, saints, and monarchs, as well as religious, cultural, and social revolutions. It gives us books, paintings, public monuments, even TV shows. Written by 164 American and European specialists, the essays are introduced by date and arranged in chronological order, but here ends the book’s resemblance to the usual history of literature. Each date is followed by a headline evoking an event that indicates the chronological point of departure. Usually the event is literary—the publication of an original work, a journal, a translation, the first performance of a play, the death of an author—but some events are literary only in terms of their repercussions and resonances. Essays devoted to a genre exist alongside essays devoted to one book, institutions are presented side by side with literary movements, and large surveys appear next to detailed discussions of specific landmarks. No article is limited to the “life and works” of a single author. Proust, for example, appears through various lenses: fleetingly, in 1701, apropos of Antoine Galland’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights; in 1898, in connection with the Dreyfus Affair; in 1905, on the occasion of the law on the separation of church and state; in 1911, in relation to Gide and their different treatments of homosexuality; and at his death in 1922. Without attempting to cover every author, work, and cultural development since the Serments de Strasbourg in 842, this history succeeds in being both informative and critical about the more than 1,000 years it describes. The contributors offer us a chance to appreciate not only French culture but also the major critical positions in literary studies today. A New History of French Literature will be essential reading for all engaged in the study of French culture and for all who are interested in it. It is an authoritative, lively, and readable volume.

Download or read book Year of the Elephant written by Barbara Parmenter and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes glossary and interview with the author.

Download or read book Two Novellas by YAE written by Youssouf Amine Elalamy and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008-10-23 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two Novellas by YAE comprises two works by Youssouf Amine Elalamy, also known as YAE, translated from French into English for the first time. A Moroccan in New York tells the tale of a young man seeking to make sense of two cultures which seemingly could not be more opposite, yet, are on many levels, so much the same. Autobiographical, YAE's story is the compilation of the musings of a young man on a Fulbright grant in New York in the early 1990s. In particular, the work reveals multiple misconceptions and misunderstandings Americans have about Moroccans and, other foreigners. Sea Drinkers is a compelling story that reveals the hurdles faced by Moroccan emigrants who illegally try to cross the slim stretch of water in small boats between Morocco and Spain. The hundreds who attempt the dangerous crossing every year are known as the harraga, which in Arabic means 'the burners.' The Moroccans who embark must literally 'burn' the bridges of their lives (their identity papers and passports), in order to clandestinely infiltrate into the countries across the water. These characters tell the tales of those who become stateless and who, more often than not, die untimely deaths in the waters between two continents (a distance of less than fifteen miles).

Download or read book Language Attitudes Among Arabic French Bilinguals in Morocco written by Abdelâli Bentahila and published by Multilingual Matters Limited. This book was released on 1983 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Languages and language situations in Morocco; bilingualism and code-switching.

Download or read book Poetic Justice written by Deborah Kapchan and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2022-06-15 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetic Justice is the first anthology of contemporary Moroccan poetry in English. The work is primarily composed of poets who began writing after Moroccan independence in 1956 and includes work written in Moroccan Arabic (darija), classical Arabic, French, and Tamazight. Why Poetic Justice? Moroccan poetry (and especially zajal, oral poetry now written in Moroccan Arabic) is often published in newspapers and journals and is thus a vibrant form of social commentary; what’s more, there is a law, a justice, in the aesthetic act that speaks back to the law of the land. Poetic Justice because literature has the power to shape the cultural and moral imagination in profound and just ways. Reading this oeuvre from independence until the new millennium and beyond, it is clear that what poet Driss Mesnaoui calls the “letters of time” have long been in the hands of Moroccan poets, as they write their ethics, their aesthetics, as well as their gendered and political lives into poetic being.

Download or read book In Morocco written by Edith Wharton and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2015-12-21 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1921, Edith Wharton became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, earning the award for The Age of Innocence. But Wharton also wrote several other novels, as well as poems and short stories that made her not only famous but popular among her contemporaries. That included her good friend Henry James, and she counted among her acquaintances Teddy Roosevelt and Sinclair Lewis.