Although Chraïbi avoided overtly politicizing his descriptions of Quebec, his writing suggests that he found renewal and an escape from the pressures of colonial binaries in the Quiet Revolution’s political solidarities.Ĭhraïbi’s writing in French, too, is both political and presented as apolitical, or at least as avoiding the need to voice an anticolonial position as an anti-French one. This chapter argues that Quebec, where Chraïbi lived for a few months in the late sixties or early seventies, functioned for him as an outside space that, radically detached from the (post)colonial binary of Maghreb/France, 3 allowed him to reimagine human connection as well as his country of origin. Chraïbi eschewed national (Moroccan), ethnic (Maghrebi), and religious (Islamic) attachments (“J’ai toujours refusé les contraintes intellectuelles, religieuses, sociales et politiques” ) his exile and his writings represent an aspiration to radical detachment and individual identity beyond articulations that rely on political goals, nationalist or otherwise. 2 His position as a writer of Moroccan origin writing in French and in France seemed to promise a social or anthropological explanation of the Maghreb for French readers, but he refused to fulfill this expectation. Chraïbi remained in France for the majority of his life, in partly chosen exile (the controversy raised among Moroccan militants by his first novel, Le passé simple, contributed to his decision to stay in France), and struggled to affirm his right to speak for only himself and not as a representative of Moroccans either in Morocco or in France. This floating, intermediate self remains distinct from both potential landing places, although the colonial-versus-colonized in-betweenness is just as precarious and socially disparaged as Peters’s madness.Ĭhraïbi was born in El Jadida, Morocco, and moved to Paris at the age of twenty to study chemistry, a field he abandoned to turn to writing and journalism. Tous deux me semblaient dérisoires en regard de ma soif de vivre et d’aimer” (30). Writing becomes his way of navigating between these two worlds and of maintaining his distance from both of them: “J’écrivais pour me situer dans le monde, dans mon monde d’origine et dans celui vers lequel je me dirigeais à l’aveuglette. “Ma pensée est flottante, entre ici et là-bas, entre la langue de Voltaire et celle des médias ” (24). His solution is to present himself as “in-between”: between Morocco and France, between Arabic and French. In Le monde à côté, Chraïbi seeks an otherworldly perspective that, like madness, might enable him to define himself. 1 In the context of Peters’s novel, the “world next door” is the world of madness, an isolating condition that Chraïbi reads as potentially freeing: the patient’s personality “s’était épanouie, intégrée et même enrichie” (“Je suis d’une génération perdue” 41). In this search he drew inspiration, and his memoir’s title, from The World Next Door, a 1949 semiautobiographical novel by the American novelist Fritz Peters that Chraïbi and Peters hoped to adapt into a film.
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Metaphorical articulations of relation in these novels suggest that a shared interest in the French language nurtured the foundations of an unlikely solidarity between Chraïbi and the Quebec sovereignty struggle.ĭriss Chraïbi searched perpetually for an outside-for Le monde à côté, as he titled his 2001 memoir-or at least for a way to express or describe his own outsider position.
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This chapter examines how Quebecois political effervescence inspired the Canadian novels of Driss Chraïbi (1926–2007), the Moroccan French novelist, in spite of his own scorn for nationalism. Metaphorical articulations bridge gaps-in parallel with textual articulations of solidarity, which communicate across difference to imagine relation. The work of metaphor is to linguistically conciliate objects or concepts that are sometimes wildly different. 4 As through a Canadian Fog Mort au Canada and Other Moroccan Mysteries