ABSTRACT

Driss Chraïbi, a prolific writer, is considered to be the father of the modern Moroccan novel. Born in 1926 in El Jadida, Morocco, he attended Koranic school as a young boy. His father, a successful tea merchant, was orphaned by age thirteen with seven siblings and no skills or education. Although he maintained a Muslim household, the father perceived Western education as a means to a modern Morocco. When the family moved from El Jadida to Casablanca, he sent his sons, including Driss, to the French Lycée. A good student, Chraïbi was interested in writing and literature and holds fond memories of his teachers. As an adolescent, he became aware of social injustices that are consistently reflected in his work. As a young man, he studied chemical engineering in France and considered becoming a doctor. Continuing to reside in France with his first wife and their children, he devoted himself to writing in 1952 and published his first novel, Le passé simple, in 1954. In 1956 he began writing for French radio and television and has written for many journals and newspapers. He taught in Canada for a year after his second divorce but returned to live in France. However, his unabated love of Morocco is manifested in much of his writing. Although he is critical of the injustices within French society and perpetuated by France in North Africa, his humanism draws on French and Western culture as a source of enrichment rather than effacement. He is a writer who has been the center of much controversy and misunderstanding; his continuing writing career includes fifteen novels and two children’s books. As with many Maghreb writers, his works draw heavily from his own life and probe the writer’s role as healer and educator in modern society. Like other modern Maghreb writers, Chraïbi was influenced by the American writer William Faulkner. Chraïbi’s novels place themselves in both a universal and national context by their references to other literary works, to his other works, and to historical and contemporary political events.