Current Research
The
New Scheherazades: Women, Writing, and Politics in Morocco. Book
projectThe book opens with an essay on the history and status of Scheherazade, the paradigmatic figure of female power from The Arabian Nights, arguing that her power comes from the conjunctive force of speech, space, and sexuality. Using this trio of structures to articulate my study of Moroccan women’s writing, I begin Part I on Space with “From Harem to Hamman: Reflections on Space in Women’s Writing,” followed by essays “Writing in the House of the Father,” “Wings of Flight, Flights of Fancy,” “Women and the City: Cultural Space and Geographical Space.” Part II on Speech is prefaced by an essay entitled “The Myth of the Silent Woman” and follows with others on “Speech Acts and Siba,” “Declining the Pronouns: A New Definition of Umma,” and “Une Femme nommée Rachid.” Part III on Sexuality begins with “Hem, Hchouma, and Hudad,” followed by “The Diable au corps, jahiliyya, and the Violence of Sex” and ”Sex and Romance.” Part IV on Feminism and Democracy opens with a riff on the title of a film, “Still Ready,” followed by essays, “Feminism, Freethinkers, and Fundamentalism,” “Foucault’s Power and Bellefqih’s Public Scribe,” and “The Clash of Modernisms.”
The compelling nature of this project comes first in that it studies the dynamics of a young literature in existence only since the mid-1980s, and second in its challenge to Western stereotypes of the Arab world in general and Arab women in particular. By close readings of works by Rajae Benchemsi, Bahaa Trabelsi, Yasmine Chami-Kettani, Fatema Mernissi, Siham Benchekroun, Touria Oulehri, Ghita El Khayat, Souad Bahechar, Nadia Chafik, Fatna El Bouih, and others, I seek to demonstrate how, as literary critic Fouad Laroui has said, women’s writing constitutes one of the most exciting forms of intellectual production in the Maghreb today, and how, furthermore, the creative impulse both borrows and deviates from the historical moment in the journey toward democracy.
What professors of literature take for granted—reading—is a skill that one out of every five adults worldwide does not possess. In the 21st century, there are some 860 million adult illiterates, and in Morocco roughly half the population does not possess basic literacy skills. The lack of a veritable reading culture in a culturally rich but economically poor country is of major concern both to Moroccan government officials and the country’s intelligentsia. Using the notion of the cultural geography of democracy (Clive Barnett, Culture and Democracy: Media, Space, and Representation, 2003), this article examines issues involved in developing a culture of readers, including the multiplicity of national languages; the primacy of oral culture; an often sclerotic educational system; accessibility of reading materials, including the real costs of reading and the paucity of school and free public libraries; and finally, the quality of arguments put forth for cultivating the habit of reading for pleasure in a society of high unemployment in which educational degrees do not assure employment.