Flash Fiction in Morocco: Pioneering Pens & Translated Samples

Abstract

In the pre-colonial period, Moroccan culture devoted a significant portion of its history to religious sciences and military activities. The medieval literature taught today in Moroccan schools and universities is not, strictly speaking, Moroccan literature; rather, it is Andalusian literature that migrated to medieval Morocco along with the Arab-Islamic heritage following the fall of Andalusia to the Spaniards. This historical migration, both human and symbolic, helped resolve Morocco’s cultural impasse, and from that point onward, major Moroccan poets began to emerge, including Sidi Abd al-Rahman al-Majdoub (sixteenth century), Sidi Bahloul al-Sharqi (seventeenth century), and Sidi Qaddour al-Alami (nineteenth century), among others who specialized in Sufi poetry composed in Moroccan vernacular Arabic. During the colonial period (1912–1955), however, Moroccans experienced a civilizational shock. They became aware of the extent of the backwardness under which they lived and recognized the need to work on two fronts. The first was the liberation of their country from French-Spanish colonialism; the second was the civilizational development of their country by adopting positive aspects of Western civilization as a foundational building block for their Moroccan project in the post-colonial period. Accordingly, many fields of knowledge were imported, including the exact sciences. Some social sciences and humanities were either permitted despite prior restrictions and tensions with the authorities, as was the case with philosophy; revived in a new form, as with theater; or introduced for the first time, as with the novel and the short story. Sixty years later, Morocco has become a leading center for the short story in North Africa and throughout the Arab world. Today, this distinction has been further reinforced by Morocco’s embrace of a new narrative form that remains unwelcomed in many other cultures: the very short narrative.