ABSTRACT

This study examines a novel, The Devil of Yudis (El Diablo de Yudis 1994), 1 written by Ahmed Daoudi, which foregrounds Gayatri Spivak’s question on whether the subaltern subject has a voice. Several critics have recently explained this question in relation to Spain and Morocco, most notably Susan Martin-Márquez and Daniela Flesler, who have both studied the problematics of Spanish authors representing the African migrant “Other.” The former has investigated Spanish texts that typically speak over and for the “Other,” even as they portend to achieve progressive reforms or even revolutionary objectives on the “Other’s” behalf. But this very representation of the “Other” is itself a case study in positionality, as Spanish authors, writers, and directors with their own agendas presume to put words into the “Other’s” mouth in an act that Martin-Márquez calls “ventriloquism” (333). 2 Flesler has studied similar aspects in her criticism of Spanish testimonials that comment on sociopolitical realities, but always by speaking for the concerned party, thus robbing the latter of any sense of subjectivity. In this chapter I will examine how Daoudi’s 1994 novel interrogates this tendency through a process of reversal whereby Moroccans, who had migrated to Spain but have returned to Morocco, perform various acts of voicing that mimic Spanish ventriloquism. At the same time, the tropes of burial and excavation uncover the relations of power and colonial dominance that Spanish discourse about migrants glosses over. Daoudi’s novel uncovers the varied past of Spanish colonialism, which is arguably the cause of Moroccan migration to begin with. To read literature written by those on the North African shore of Morocco is to bare Eurocentric (in this case Spanish-centric) positionalities of power and of unquestioned dominance. It is, as Debra Kelly writes, “to be aware of our own assumptions, whether cultural, political, gendered, generational, or based on our own personal experiences, and to be aware of our limitations” (8). Many of the texts studied by Martin-Márquez and by Flesler were written by Spaniards and for Spaniards, a disconcertingly insular fact, considering that immigration into Spain has been growing steadily since the 1980s (Michael Ugarte x), a reality that Martin-Márquez sees as forcing Spaniards “into an uncomfortable confrontation with the imperfectly buried ghosts of a less unquestionably Western past” (318). Her identification of a buried past brings to mind Kathleen Brogan’s research on reburial. Brogan’s inquiry on the importance of the construction of subjectivity to overcome the overwhelming power of trauma opens up new avenues of discussion regarding migration between Spain and Morocco. To date there has not been an analysis of a Moroccan viewpoint of burial in the context of immigration. This investigation of Daoudi’s text will include the analysis of three particular burials that play an important role in migrant subjectivity formation: (1) the crossing of both land and water burials, (2) the fictitious story of the Guaschusch religious sect performing burial before a group of onlookers, and (3) the burial by quicksand of neocolonial troops on a mission civilizatrice to save their southern neighbors from “the devil.”