Reading Around the World (5)

This is my fifth post about my project to read a novel by a woman from every country. This week it's Morocco. I'm learning a lot about how non-English and non-European writers conceive of the novel form and purpose. The language of composition undoubtedly plays a role.

Year of the Elephant: A Moroccan Woman’s Journey toward Independence, and Other Stories, by Leila Abouzeid

 

Translation from the Arabic by Barbara Parmenter

Introduction by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea

University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, 1989

 

In the tightly constructed novel of the title, Zahra returns to her home village after a sudden divorce. This is 1950s Morocco just after Independence. Her husband informs her she will receive whatever the law allows, which is one hundred days of support. After the years of fighting shoulder to shoulder with her husband and others for independence from France, the woman is stunned and angry, feeling betrayed and lost. Childless, she can return to live with a sibling but chooses instead to live in the room of the family estate she inherited from her father. The various rooms inherited by relatives have turned the old estate into an apartment building, but at least she has a place to live. A holy man in the local mosque listens and advises her as she recalls her years in the resistance, her many visits home bedecked in jewels and fine clothing, and her plans for a new life once the colonial power was driven from the land. She is unprepared for life as a divorced woman—no money, no skills, no family connections that she wants to submit to. A few friends attempt to aid her but there is little they can do and she wants her own life of dignity and position. She navigates this new world, assessing the changes in her old collaborators as well as her husband, but in the end she makes peace with the new nation of Morocco and her new self, and grows well beyond the woman her husband divorced.

 

Also included are eight short stories that are glimpses of life in Morocco as it struggles to transform itself from a traditional culture ruled as a French colony into a modern nation on the world stage. In most cases they read more like scenarios than fully developed stories but the view of a traditional culture clashing with the modern world is clear.

 

This is the first novel by a Moroccan woman written in Arabic and translated into English. As such it marks two important trends—the growing use of Arabic instead of French or English in literature and the rise of educated women in public and literary life. Although some reviewers have enjoyed the writing style, I didn’t find it admirable. The novella moves along well, and the ending is both ironic and hopeful.