Post-colonial literature in Morocco

In the history of colonized nations, literature has served in the struggle for liberation and independence, the construction of national culture, the cementing of imagined bonds among the nation’s individuals and communities and the expansion of the boundaries of the nation beyond the country’s geographical territoriality. Besides mediating the nation’s identity, literature has also played the ‘negative’ and ‘subversive’ function of maintaining a distance from and critiquing the nation’s identity it paradoxically helps to construct. In post-colonial Africa, however, little research has been done to explore ways in which the institution of literature is participating in the development of the public sphere. ¹ Similarly, literature is given a subordinate importance in school and university curricula and public media. Even in bookstores, only a little space is devoted to literature stacks, which corroborates the systematic marginalization of the institution of literature. ² However, right from the time of its inception, Moroccan literature has been viewed as ‘a serious business’ and not, as conceived by Habermas, just the realm of ‘substitute relationships for reality’ (Habermas 1992: 50). Despite the scant literary production and consumption in post-colonial Morocco, literarture has been central to the long and arduous debate on who is entitled to represent Morocco’s national culture, under what conditions, and what kind of relationship they must hold with the country’s national language, history and identity.