Abderrahman El Fathi: An Averroist Perspective of His Poetry 1

The first contemporary Moroccan literary works addressing the migration of African citizens to Europe originate from the 1950s to the 1970s. They were written in Arabic or French by a range of Moroccan authors publishing in Morocco, including Mohamed Zafzaf, Driss Chraïbi, Abdallah Laroui, and Tahar Ben Jelloun, among others. On February 7, 1992, 300 Maghrebs were shipwrecked off the coast of Almeria, Andalusia. ³ The first Moroccan intellectuals who reacted to this modern, clandestine migration in Castilian did so in the supplement of the Moroccan newspaper L’Opinion (“L’Opinion Semanal”) and in La Mañana del Sahara y del Maghreb (La Mañana, 1990–2006), the cultural section of the first and only Moroccan newspaper produced in Rabat by Moroccan nationals and printed entirely in Castilian. Later, in 1993, Mohamed Sibari published El Caballo, the first Moroccan novel about migration written in Castilian, whose main character is a desperate young man who wants to migrate to Spain. ⁴