Karima Laachir: 'Connecting Multilingual literary traditions in the Maghreb'

Karima Laachir: 'Connecting Multilingual literary traditions in the Maghreb'

Postcolonial studies have not adequately explored the linguistic and cultural diversity of regions like the Maghreb, particularly Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia where the politics of language and culture remain largely understudied. This multilingual region where vernacular languages such as Darija (spoken Maghrebi dialects) and Amazigh (the language of the indigenous population of the Maghreb) have cohabited with Fusha (standard Arabic used in print culture, media, and religious affairs, and modernised form of classical or Quranic Arabic), as well as Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Spanish. These languages have all shaped the oral and written cultures of the Maghreb. The arrival of the French and Spanish as colonial languages in late nineteenth and early twentieth century further complicated the picture, particularly as the French colonial power imposed their language as the sole language of education and administration. This linguistic diversity and multilingual cultural production are not unique to the Maghreb and a number of African and Asian countries share this linguistic plurality. However, what one finds in the Maghreb (as well in other postcolonial multilingual nations such as the case of India) is that these multilingual literary and cultural productions, particularly in Arabic and French, the most prolific so far, have been studied in postcolonial literary studies in separation from one another. This has created a polarized multilingual literary field and a division between these two literary worlds (Francophone and Arabophone), and an unproductive ideological dichotomy set up between languages that are perceived as ‘national’ and those perceived as ‘foreign’, although French has become an integral part of the multilingual literary scene in the Maghreb. The paper proposes ‘reading together’ Maghrebi novels in Arabic and French: a comparative, connected reading that highlights the particular ties of the Maghreb’s postcolonial multilingual literature to its pre-modern traditions, and to the Mashreqi, African and European influences; it also sheds light on their entangled ‘local’ aesthetics and politics, and their strong ties to a vernacular context.