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Introduction t is well known that modern Maghrebi prose shows a strong autobiographical tendency. The seemingly self-centred and individualistic subject of my life dominates many works, regardless if they are written in French or Arabic. However, at the same time, in the eyes of the readers, the close individual focus of this literature tends to shift to a wider one comprising society as a whole. The private microcosm of the author regularly reveals the macrocosm of the people, in fact.1 This expansion of the meaning of the autobiographical narrative is the result of symbolical interpretation and the use of analogy. Thus, at one level, the typical text emphasises the singularity of its hero (or, occasionally, heroine), that is, pictures his otherness, his dissimilarity and difference from the surrounding group and its norms a normal method used by the writer to achieve this contrastive effect is to select interpersonal conflicts or private crises for the kernel events of the story. But on another level the unique hero has a vital representative function. Often pictured in conflict, in a struggle to liberate himself from the constraints and limitations of a given social heritage or historical situation, the hero should also be read as a symbol. He may appear as the symbol of his social class, his gender, his generation, or, as I will be arguing, his nation. The identity being constructed in the autobiographical text, then, is not just that of the author-hero himself, but also that of the nation to which he belongs, and the narrative can be read as a kind of national allegory. Indeed, in an essay some years ago, Fredric Jameson gave the concept of national allegory prime importance for the proper reading of all thirdworld literary texts.2 The aim of the present article is to use this particular

1 For examples of readings of autobiographical narratives from the Maghreb as representations of collective experiences see: Bouraoui, H. A., Creative Project and Literary Projection in Francophone North Africa, in: Critical Perspectives on Modern Arabic Literature, Boullata, I. J. (ed.), Washington, Three Continents Press, 1980, p. 129-44, esp. p. 136-137; Hafez, Sabry [fi, .], al-Binyah al-nayah li-srat al-ta|arrur min al-qahr, in: al-ur, ukr, M., London, Saqi Books, 1992, p. 21942, esp. p. 231-233; Hkanson, Gunilla, Le Texte narratif maghrbin et marocain de langue franaise dpuis 1945, thse pour le doctorat, Gteborg, Universit de Gteborg, Institut dtudes Romanes, 1995, p. 191-192 and 195. 2 Jameson, Fredric, Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism, in: Social Text, 15 (Fall 1986), New York, p. 65-88.
OM, n.s. XVII (LXXVII), 2-3, 1997

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concept as a tool for analysing three Moroccan autobiographies, two relatively speaking older and well-known ones, F l-uflah by Abd alMad ibn alln, published in the first period after Moroccan independence, and al-ubz al-|f by Mu|ammad ukr, written in the early 1970s, and one very recent (1995), al-Ra|l by the singer and musician Larbi Batma [al-Arab Bm] (1948-1997), of the popular group Ns alwn. The assumption is that these three works, all of them, contain allegorical structures related to the formation of a Moroccan national identity under different periods. In this connection, the concept of national identity itself will also be touched upon and the role of literature in how it is imagined discussed. National Allegory Fredric Jameson starts his argument for the interest and importance of literature from the so-called third world a concept that I take to include the Arab world by a provocative (?) statement: To readers from the United States or Europe, third-world literature on the whole appears naive, unmodern and unsatisfactory when compared with the first-world literary canon. Instead of sweeping this critique under the carpet by trying to prove that third-world texts are just as great as, say, the works by Proust or Joyce, critics should acknowledge the difference and explain it. According to Jameson, it is the result of radically different historical circumstances determining when and how the various texts were created, but also of the readers position, that is, of their historically and socially defined attitudes and expectations. Typically, to present-day Western readers, whose tastes have been formed by the modernisms of the nineteenth and twentieth century, a popular or socially realistic third-world novel tends to come before them, not immediately, but as though already-read, Jameson explains and continues: We sense, between ourselves and the alien text, the presence of another reader, of the Other reader, for whom a narrative, which strikes us as conventional or naive, has a freshness of information and a social interest that we cannot share.3 The frequent want of sympathy in the metropolis for texts from the periphery simply has to do with the readers unwillingness or fear to identify themselves with that Other ideal reader, Jameson infers, which is necessary to read the text adequately. This reluctance he traces to the fact that third-world literature as a rule is too political for western tastes and consequently resistant to conventional Western habits of reading. The root of the problem is the experience of imperialism and colonialism, which has caused the private and personal sphere of life to merge with the public and communal sphere in third-world literature. The Western division between Freud and Marx is not upheld:

3 Ibid., p. 66.

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Third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with properly libidinal dynamic necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society [italics in the original].4

If Jameson is correct in this statement, which of course is open to debate, searching for allegorical structures would be a productive critical approach to Arabic creative writing, too.5 In that case and in the context of Maghrebi literature the autobiography suggests itself as a rewarding genre to study. That is, firstly, because metaphors from biology are often applied to nations, so that the parallel personal self/national self is very easy to draw, and, secondly, because autobiography is a historical narrative where the story of the nation often figures as an explicit theme, forming a part of a wider discourse trying to define national identity and culture as elements of, or social frame for, the personal identity of the author-hero. Thus, the autobiographical text projects ideas about the national situation both on the allegorical level and the thematic one, a correspondence which might produce interesting literary effects. The Extended Meaning of Biography Nations are imagined communities, Benedict Anderson taught us;6 they are imagined as possessing a life just like persons, and just like persons they are born, experience a childhood, grow, mature and develop a certain identity, it is believed. Thus, nations and persons alike are provided with biographies in the form of narratives. These biographies depend on the work of memory, but also of forgetting: To the adult person it is impossible to truly remember the consciousness of childhood. The mental and biological changes involved are too profound. This inescapable amnesia creates a need for a narrative about the self, if the idea of a unified personal identity is to be upheld. The same law that applies to selfhood applies to nationhood, too. Its (hi)story must be narrated, since it cannot be remembered:
As with modern persons, so it is with nations. Awareness of being imbedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of

4 Ibid., p. 69. 5 Jameson was immediately attacked for being too reductive in his literary analysis of the texts involved, and for founding his whole argument on a false binary opposition between first world and third world, among other things. See Ahmad, Aijaz, Jamesons Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory, in: Social Text, 16 (Spring 1987), p. 3-25. See also Jamesons A Brief Response to this critique in the same issue of Social Text, p. 26-7. 6 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London and New York, Verso, (Revised Edition), 1991.

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continuity, yet of forgetting the experience of this continuity product of the ruptures of the late eighteenth century engenders the need for a narrative of identity.7

Accordingly, the biography of the modern person has a natural potential for being read (or written) as a narrative of national identity, too, especially so in contemporary North Africa. There, the nation state is young and nationalism a major political ideology that has engaged, on a gliding scale of commitment, a majority of the population during the latter half of this century. Moroccan autobiographical texts reflect this popular engagement. They are partly, or completely, historically set during the colonial era and the time of struggle for national independence. They very often centre on the authors experience of childhood and youth. In terms of internal structure, they are often liberation-stories trying to narrate the formation of an independent, unified, personal identity as a difficult but victorious struggle against authoritarian and oppressive rules in the family and/or society. An important theme in this struggle is education and the quest for knowledge, but other themes are common, too, like freedom from hunger and need, or the right to love and sex. In all this there is an allegorical dimension: The heroic Moroccan nation is young, just like the hero of Moroccan autobiography. Like him, it is, or was, engaged in a struggle against paternalistic and authoritarian rule in order to liberate itself. But if the personal identity being constructed in the text may be taken as a metaphor of national identity the question arises of the meaning of this identity. What values and practices are characteristic of it? How it is expressed? In short, what does it mean to be Moroccan in ones culture and language and actions? The Break with the Past The first text we will study with these questions in mind presents a rebellious and, at first look, nihilistic vision of personal/national identity. Because of this al-ubz al-|f [translated as For Bread Alone, 1972; first published in Arabic in 1982]8 is not available in many Arab countries; its distribution has also been suppressed in Morocco due to its provocative story and language. The author Mu|ammad ukr [Mohamed Choukri] (b. 1935) grew up under conditions of poverty excessive even for a thirdworld country. Several of his brothers and sisters died of malnutrition and neglect. Another brother was killed outright by ukrs father in an access of hunger and desperation. This traumatic event sets the tone of the narrative. Defencelessness, homelessness, exploitation and repression characterise the image of childhood it gives; starvation, brutality, prostitution, crime, drinking and drug abuse are typical motifs.

7 Ibid., p. 205. 8 ukr, M., al-ubz al-|f, London, Saqi Books, n.d.

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But at a closer look this work also tells an edifying story of the power of the peoples will to live and as an undercover morality of the Moroccan nation it represents a secret call for more virtue instead of the reverse, it may be argued. al-ubz al-|f mainly records the authors adolescence. The story begins with the forced migration of his family from the Rf mountains to Tangier when he is seven. That the native village is deleted from the records of memory is a symbolic break with the past and its traditions. The story ends in with the protagonists resolve at the age of twenty to learn how to read and write. All his youth he has led his life in the streets and never gone to school, but now he wants to begin. As the reader understands, Mu|ammad ukr did learn how to read and write and quite successfully. It was not, however, in his Berber mother tongue but in one of his acquired languages, Arabic.9 al-ubz al-|f is a cry of protest against the double standards of the establishment in all its aspects: Look, the text says, this is the backyard of our society. Dont pretend that the people who live on it do not exist! When will they gain their freedom from need and oppression? Chapter Eight (p. 97-115) is typical. It gives a version of the heros eternal search for bread (al-ubz). To him, bread is both a means of survival and a source of humiliation. Hungry as he often is he curses bread (p. 103) and equates it in his imagination with excrement (p. 101). He sees a monkey eating and a cat which is satisfied and compares these creatures with himself, living a worse life than an animal. Challenging the conventional nostalgic and romantic style in Arabic autobiographical literature, Mu|ammad ukr indulges in the filthy and ugly, both in images and vocabulary. The pages of Chapter Eight abound in words denoting different secretions of the body (excrement, urine, blood, vomit, spit, semen), genitals (both female and male), putrefaction (rotten food, stinking places), human decay (drunkards, drug addicts, whores) and violence (kicking, beating and hitting). The texts protest against the past includes a rejection of traditional morals. For example, the author does not stigmatise the prostitute girls or women of his story. Nor does he condemn the drug addicts or the thieves. Instead, he expresses pity for them all, the outcasts of society, the lumpenproletariat to which he himself once belonged. In the final analysis, immoral people are moralistic too, such is the message of the text. The nihilist surface has moral depth:

9 ukrs first language was Berber, the language of the Rf. His second was Spanish, which he learned in Tangier where the poor neighborhood of the family was dominated by Spanish gypsies. Only as his third language did he learn Moroccan colloquial Arabic. Despite this and despite his late start he became a teacher of Arabic and a writer with Arabic as his medium of expression. No direct information of this successful development is given in al-ubz al-|f, however. This story is told in the sequel al-Shur [translated as Streetwise, 1992] instead.

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I present immoral scenes in order to look for morality and ideals. The characters of my autobiography are not content with their immoral condition since they do not rejoice in being corrupt, they become corrupt through horrible social oppression. Their life is turned into a commodity and that is why they lose their human values.10

The national struggle for independence in Morocco coincided with the childhood and youth of Mu|ammad ukr; when the country won its independence in 1956, he was 21 years old. But apparently he himself did not take an active part in political life at this stage. In al-ubz al-|f the protagonist gets involved by accident in the crowd of an independence demonstration in Tangier on March 30, 1952. The demonstration develops into a riot and the police open fire and kill many people (p. 117-127). The narrative contains a vivid description of the fighting in the streets in front of the protagonist, who hides with a friend behind a stall. On the surface of the text, this bloody event constitutes one adventure among the rest, just one episode among others, which is registered but not commented. On a deeper level, it has a special symbolic significance, however. The demonstrators revolt against the colonial system is a sign of approaching national freedom but also of personal deliverance. Indirectly, it is the struggle for independence which lets the hero find the path leading out of hell. Later, having been arrested for no other reason than wrong company, Mu|ammad watches his friend writing two lines of a poem on the wall of the cell where they are detained together. These lines, which he cannot read himself, are the beginning of the famous nationalist poem Irdat al-|ayh (The Will to Live) by the Tunisian poet Ab al-Qsim al-bb (1909-1934):
I al-abu yawman arda al-|ayh / fa-l budda an-yastaba al-qadar Wa l budda lil-layli an yanal / wa l budda li l-qaydi an yankasir (p. 191). If some day the people decided to live, fate must bend to that desire There will be no more night when the chains have broken.11

When read aloud to him, because of their symbolic significance, these words inspire the hero to learn how to read and write. And this is the project which will ultimately free him and give him independence. Thus the lines of the poem the liberation of the young Mu|ammad ukr and of the

10 ukr, Mu|ammad, al-Kiyn wa l-makn (muqbalah), in: Alif, 6 (1986), Cairo, The American University, p. 67 and 73. 11 Translation by Paul Bowles in: Choukri, M., For Bread Alone, San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1987 [1973], p. 126.

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country. In the narrative, the life of the hero and the life of the nation merge.

Two Types of Storytelling

In The Power of the Story (1994) Mike Hanne explores the political impact of fiction and the way literary works may directly affect the outcome of the historical process.12 In the introduction to his case studies he establishes the basic unity between all kinds of written narratives, factual and fictional. Their basic unity springs from the fact that they all tell stories. Further, they tell stories because they imitate or reflect the disposition of the psyche, he suggests. By its very nature storytelling is reductive, a process of selection and exclusion, just like our manner of experiencing the world. Storytelling is a primary cognitive instrument of the human mind that suffers mental disorder and breaks down if the capacity to construct stories does not work properly. If we cannot create internal narratives about ourselves in the present, the past and the future, we are unable to negotiate our way through the chaos of daily life in a realistic and successful manner. In short, the individual is psychologically dependent on his or her capacity for storytelling.13 This adds to the understanding of all autobiography. If the written text represents a transposition, fixation and enlargement of the kind of inner narrative which each and every one of us constructs on a day-to-day basis when we act and react in society, autobiographical narrative allows reflection on the narrativity of the own self and its (hi)story. The central concern of Hanne, however, is not the psychological implications of storytelling, but its relation to social change. Here, he discerns two basic functions: 1) Storytelling is fundamentally conservative of the social structure. The reductive (and seductive) character of storytelling mystifies our understanding by giving a false sense of coherence and comprehensiveness to a selection of scattered events.14 Stories therefore, typically, perform acculturating, mystifying or legitimating roles in society, providing explanations or arguments in favour of the status quo. 2) But there exists the other kind of story, too, which primarily is disruptive, progressive and liberating: To tell a previously untold story is an act which can be extraordinarily disruptive to the existing social order, he says.15 If it spreads it may raise consciousness and create solidarity

12 Hanne, Mike, The Power of the Story. Fiction and Political Change, Oxford, Berghahn Books, 1994. 13 Ibid., p. 7-10. 14 Ibid., p. 11. 15 Ibid., p. 12.

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where none existed before, ultimately resulting in an empowerment of people who previously saw themselves as isolated and powerless.16 In relation to this dichotomy, what kind of storytelling does our text represent? In the context of modern Arabic literature, al-ubz al-|f tells a previously untold story in Hannes sense, a story which can be thought of as disruptive, progressive and liberating, providing you share some of its ideals. The consistent outsider perspective of the implicit author and his breaking of social and literary conventions make the text something new. It introduces a novel technique with the episodic scene as dominant narrative movement, new characters from the margin of society and new themes, the most important being hunger.17 ukr violates the conventions of traditional realism in Arabic literature by going beyond the limits of its politically correct ideologized vision of the world.18 As a representation of the Moroccan national identity the socioscape of this autobiography, using a term from Anderson,19 speaks of the oppressiveness of the existing social system, but also exposes the failure of nationalist rhetoric and ideology to solve the problem of the hungry nation. But autobiographical storytelling may function the other way around, too. Partaking in the process of shaping new cultural and national identities it may play a reductive, seductive role legitimising the power and policies of the national leadership. This does not prevent it from voicing social critique, however, as long as it is of the moderate kind. Thus, according to A|mad al-Madn, the quest for a national identity became a supreme concern in Maghrebi literature after independence.20 It was subject to ideologies which sought to build the nation state. Literature was ideologized, al-Madn says, assuming the responsibility of commitment and of consecrating itself to reality, in such a way that commitment to society, its problems and aspirations, became a guiding principle of literary activity which controlled its visions.21 Since ideologized visions of reality tend to mystify understanding, as said, this literature in the main was conservative providing arguments in favour of the continued dominance of the national bourgeoisie. Cultural Estrangement One example of a conservative text in this sense is F l-uflah (In Childhood, Part One 1957 and Part Two 1968) by Abd al-Mad ibn

16 Ibid., p. 10-16. 17 Hkanson, op. cit., p. 201-2. 18 Hafez, op. cit., p. 223. 19 Anderson, op. cit., p. 32. 20 al-Madini, Ahmed, The Maghrib, in: Ostle, R. (ed.), Modern Literature in the Near and Middle East 1850-1970, London and New York, Routledge, 1991, p. 193-212. 21 Ibid., p. 198.

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alln [Abdelmajid Benjelloun] (1919-1981).22 The author was in his youth politically active in the Moroccan independence movement. For this reason he lived in exile in Egypt for a period of more than fifteen years. It was also there that he more seriously began writing literature. When his country was liberated, he returned to Morocco in 1956. For a time he became editor of the daily al-Alam. Subsequently he entered the service of the foreign department, serving at one time as ambassador to Pakistan. Apart from his autobiography, he also had a rich production of essays, short-stories and poems. In other words, he was an influential member of the post-independence Moroccan political and intellectual lite. The most unique aspect of Ibn allns life, as narrated by himself in his autobiography, is that he grew up in Manchester, England, as the son of a wealthy merchant. There he lived until the age of eight. In fact, his first cultural identity was more English than Moroccan. The first third of his text is an attempt to recapture this early experience. The remaining two thirds of F l-uflah depict the authors childhood and adolescence in a traditional Moroccan madnah in the city of Fs. Initially, this environment is foreign to the boy, who has been raised in England. He does not even understand the Arabic language properly. Thus the tension between the childs two identities, the English and the Moroccan, becomes the storys central conflict. The same conflict is experienced today by many immigrants and their children in Europe, but in F l-uflah the problem is turned upsidedown. It is a Western child who has to adapt and become Arab. In its pattern of conflict, ibn allns autobiography conforms with a great number of works of modern Arab prose in which the confrontation between East and West is a paramount theme. To be torn between two worlds, to try to accommodate different cultural norms in one person, to search for a coherent and viable personal identity, such is the plight of the conventional hero of this literature.23 Yet, in relation to most other works of this type, the story of F l-uflah is original since home to the boyhero, initially at least, is not East but West. On the other hand, home to the adult author-narrator who tells his life-story in Arabic is East. Due to this split, he has never felt perfectly at home anywhere. He has always felt himself to be a stranger. His anguish at what appears to be an eternal cultural estrangement is one of the significant emotional chords of the text:

22 Ibn alln, Abd al-Mad, F l-uflah, Rab, Maktab al-Marif, 1975. Translated into French as Enfance entre deux rives by Francis Gouin, Casablanca, Wallada, 1992. 23 For a discussion of the confrontation between East and West as portrayed in Arabic novels see, for example, Boullata, I. J., Encounter Between East and West: A Theme in Contemporary Arabic Novels, in: Boullata, op. cit., p. 47-60.

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I was overwhelmed by a terrible feeling that I was created to be a stranger [arb]. In the country from which we had come, people used to look at me as a stranger, and in the country where we belonged according to what one said, people also looked at me as a stranger (p. 108).24

The story is the reverse of countless others in modern Arabic literature in which an Arab boy travels to Europe or America in search of learning. In this work Europe is well-known and native to the hero, while the Arab country is unknown and foreign. The Moroccan city is a new environment, difficult and painful to adapt to, requiring new skills and a new identity. In one interesting scene, after a short trip to Morocco but still unaware that he will soon go back for good, the boy tells his English friends about the foreign land he has visited (p. 115-121). In a dialogue of questions and answers, he juxtaposes the habits and customs of us with the awkward behaviour of them. The device is intended to let the Moroccan reader see himself with the eyes of the Other as in a distorting mirror. It allows the author to criticise some aspects of Moroccan society like bad education, but also to present his idea of national culture in positive terms describing the good food, peaceful mentality, civilised manners, colourful customs and European (!) racial features of the people, certainly not to be mistaken for black Africans: The people of that country may behave strangely in most things, but their skin is light (bay) and they look just like we do (p. 118). From the point of view of the Europeanised, reform minded Moroccan middle-class public the predicament of the hero is an allegory of the situation of the nation, whose mixed identity is a result of foreign upbringing (that is, the colonial experience) and native resurgence (the heritage), too. His life story is a story of becoming Moroccan that does not question the basic power-relations in society, yet his cultural estrangement immediately invites a figurative interpretation. From the time of the foundation of the Istiqll party as a national movement in the 1940s onwards Moroccan writers in a similar way had been involved in formulating ideas about their national culture. A literary discourse about the Moroccan personality perceived as in need of re-generation and a new modern identity had developed.25 One of the most suggestive themes in this respect in F l-uflah is the learning of language. That is because language is such a powerful symbol of national identity. The narrative describes the step by step acquisition of Arabic by the protagonist after returning to Morocco. Firstly, he learned colloquial spoken Moroccan (p. 152, 153, 154), then the written classical language (p. 207, 304, 313). Apparently he only spoke Eng
24 All translations from the Arabic sources appearing in this article are mine unless otherwise stated. 25 al-Madini, op. cit., p. 205.

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lish in Manchester; his total ignorance of Arabic is certainly mentioned in several places (p. 35, 36, 98, 116, 120, 128). In view of this, the text is a sign of how successful Ibn alln was in switching languages and overcoming his cultural alienation. His autobiography reads as a monument to his personal triumph in this respect. But as we know, the young Moroccan nation also experienced a language problem. Arabic, Berber, French and Spanish were spoken within its borders. In this context, Ibn allns story about learning Arabic is an allegory of how Moroccan society, too, can find its true national identity by promoting the Arab language. This message was originally strengthened by the symbolic value of the work as cultural artefact. Since it was one of the absolutely first full-scale novels published in Morocco in the Arabic language, F l-uflah became a national symbol of a re-generated and modern Arab cultural identity.

Re-Rooting in Popular Tradition

It follows from the truth that nations are imagined communities rather than naturally given phenomena like light or darkness, that national culture is a discursive device, too. By this device differences, oppositions and contradictions in society are unified as a common identity. In this game of narrating the nation, literature plays an important part, as do other arts like music. However, in many Islamic nations music enjoys an ambiguous status. Puritan Muslim rulers of the past sometimes banned music entirely within their realms. In recent times highly orthodox and devout Muslims have brought pressure to bear in local communities in many places to discourage the practice of music. As a result, music as a profession is often held in low esteem in the Islamic world. On the other hand, there is a rich court tradition of music in, for example, North Africa and the Middle East and todays musical stars shine bright on the sky of popularity almost everywhere. Just like literature, music has been appropriated for propaganda purposes by many Arab regimes. One example of this is how in Egypt the late Abd al-alm afi every year used to perform new patriotic songs (an waaniyyah) on the national holidays, celebrating the Egyptian revolution of 1952, its leader and accomplishments. These songs had titles like F bustn al-itirqiyyah, (In the Garden of Socialism), or al-Masliyyah (Responsibility) or Y ahlan bi l-marik (Welcome, battles), projecting a specific ideologized vision of the nation. But music has also been a channel for popular resistance against the injustices of life and an expression of national sentiments other than those of the leadership. Thus, in the early 1970s a musical group was formed in Casablanca by the name of Ns al-wn. The members were all but one from the same popular quarter of Casablanca, al-ayy al-Mu|ammad. In polyphonic rhythmical songs performed on traditional acoustic instruments like the bendr or frame drum, the sentr or three-stringed lute and others,

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with lyrics in Maghrebi colloquial, they the sang about the problems of common people. Ns al-wn was the first Moroccan musical group to consciously engage in a re-rooting of the identity in folk-culture and immediately enjoyed a great success, especially among the young and the poor. A cult almost developed round the group and, a bit like the Beatles in Europe Ns al-wn led a new wave in Moroccan Arab music hitherto characterised by the sentimental style of the Mashreq. A leading personality of the group was its singer and drummer Larbi Batma, who presents his version of the story of Ns al-wn in the autobiography al-Ra|l, (The Departure, 1995).26 He wrote and published this book after learning that he suffered from an incurable disease and was soon going to pass away, which explains the title. The story is absorbing for those especially interested in modern Moroccan pop-music, but also for everybody else, containing as it does a dying persons dialogue with death, a fate which none of us will escape. In addition, the individual destiny of the author is also a representation of his whole generations perceptions of life and its post-independence experience. This representative function of his life story is not at all strange to Larbi Batma. In fact he often explicitly describes himself in his book as a leader of his generation, for example like this:
I climbed the ladder of glory and fame and my voice delighted thousands of sad hearts. My songs educated a whole generation that was sleeping in a pool of brackish waters under the waves of repressive politics (siysah qamiyyah). When they heard my songs they revolted against those waves and abandoned the brackish pool (p. 106).

The text is divided into four parts and the narrative is chronologically structured. The time-span of the story is the childhood and youth of the author, from 1948 until 1972. This concentration on the formative years is the same as in the two texts previously discussed. Moreover, it is characteristic of the autobiographical literary tradition in other regions of the Arab world, too.27 Each of the four parts has a theme: The first part pictures Batmas first childhood in an insignificant rural village, where he grew up in an extended family in a traditional tribal community. This was the most beautiful and happy time of his life, the author states, and the theme is roots: Life in the bdiyah was free; nature inspired creativity; Bedouin food was delicious and better than in any international restaurant (p. 67); daily existence was characterised by a

26 Bm, al-Arab, al-Ra|l. Srah tyah, al-Dr al-Bay, Manrt al-rbiah, 1995. Just before his death the author finished the second book of his autobiography, al-Alam (The Pain), al-Dr al-Bay, Dr Tqbl, II ed., 1998. 27 On this tradition, see Rooke, Tetz, In My Childhood. A Study of Arabic Autobiography, Stockholm, Stockholm University, (Stockholm Oriental Studies n 15), 1997.

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sense of belonging. Life was primitive and harsh in many respects, but still a lot better than living in the city, the author thinks. The second part describes how he moved with his parents and a brother to a shanty-town in Casablanca. This was an ugly period of youth and the theme is rootlessness. The uprooting from the village is remembered as a catastrophe that the author wished never had happened (p. 74). Why did it happen? His father was active in the nationalist resistance movement during the time of the protectorate and a member of the Istiqll party, whose policy it was to encourage parents to educate their children. Therefore, after independence, he decided that the family should move to the city in order to provide the sons with better educational opportunities. However, the boy-hero failed in secondary school and dropped out. The only things he learned there was to fight and steal and smoke. The adult narrator blames the corruption of society in general and the authoritarian methods of instruction in particular for this own failure, but he also finds causes in his familys poverty and constant internal quarrelling. His father in particular is accused of having been insensitive and a bad example in terms of vices like drinking wine and smoking kf. The third part tells the story of how the author after much difficulty found his way to art, and the theme is liberation. It went through the theatre and amateur acting. One day his good singing voice was discovered and he became engaged by professionals. This event is represented as the turning point of his life:
I the child who used to cut reed-pipes in the bdiyah, I the troublemaker in the school of al-Azhar, the pick-pocket, the hasch smoker, the bicycle guard, I was going to be a member of a professional company! This was more than I had ever hoped for (p. 127).

Further, this third section of the text also contains a narrative of a period of hippie existence in France as an illegal immigrant. The fourth part, finally, which is the shortest one, documents the forming of the group Ns al-wn and its breakthrough, and the theme here is success. Each of the four parts is framed by the elegiac discourse of the dying author. He is full of anguish over his fate which condemns him to die young of a disease he will not mention by name, but which is cancer. He illustrates his sad story with sad verses from sad songs in Moroccan colloquial Arabic. This variety of language is also used for most of the dialogue in the text. That is a difficulty to the non-Moroccan reader, but not only to him perhaps. In the beginning the author feels inclined to give a translation of an utterance into standard Arabic (fu|), whereupon he writes:
I hope my explanation of this sentence in the vernacular (aldriah) is correct, because the colloquial language, and I do not

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say the colloquial dialect, has meanings which are difficult to translate. That is because it is a pearl hidden in the depth of the ocean (p. 34).

In this positive image of the vernacular as a pearl in the ocean, like in the upgrading of the Bedouin ethos and rural patterns of living, lies a new conception of national identity. al-Ra|l neither advocates a complete break with the past (as al-ubz al-|f), nor seeks a modernisation of the classical high culture in an attempt to seek a compromise between East and West (as F l-uflah). Rather, it anchors its vision of personal/national identity in folk-culture and popular traditions. Larbi Batma shows no complex for not being Western or modern enough; the music of Ns al-wn was inspired by the style known as gnw-music that shows strong similarities with traditional West African music and is often performed in spiritual sessions reminiscent of voodoo-rituals. This connection between the Moroccan personality and the African one does not trouble the author, on the contrary, he is proud of it and of his lowly profession.
Indeed, the bendr became my pen; from it I lived and with it I married, got things, bought clothes, a car, travelled by aeroplane and visited the whole world. This ancient instrument was my companion from childhood, and I am proud of its company and respect it. Moreover, I think it is an honourable instrument, a percussion instrument that rivals any international one (p. 129).

In this sentence Moroccan modernity is expressed as a self-conscious mixture of native and foreign. That mixture is no longer a dilemma causing cultural estrangement as it was to Ibn alln and his generation. In al-Ra|l the conventional conflict in Maghrebi literature between tradition and modernisation, between the two different worlds of the Maghreb and Europe, has vanished. Economic injustice is the most pressing national problem, together with the failure of the leaders to solve it; the corrupt national politician is a new character in the socioscape of the narrative, where he has replaced the colonialist as the source of evil. To some extent al-Ra|l reminds of al-ubz al-|f in its description of an adolescence marked by crime, drugs, alcohol and sex. The author confesses many illegal or immoral things he did in his life, like having sex in a public toilet. This provocative projection of a secularised, and alienated, personality is, however, curiously combined with frequent expressions of Islamic faith in the form of Qurnic references or religious sayings. This mixture in the text, of profane and sacred is also, perhaps, a metaphor of a late-modern situation in Morocco, a nation that has become a cultural hybrid, full of contradictions and free-floating identities, as national as they are international. Lastly, is al-Ra|l an example of distruptive or a conservative narrative, one may ask in connection with previously introduced distinction by Hanne? If the perspective includes modern Arabic literature as a whole,

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certainly, the story of poor boy makes good has been told many times before. Thus it is not original. In a sense, it was introduced already by the Egyptian writer and scholar h usayn in his autobiography al-Ayym (The Days, vols. I-II, 1929 and 1939) and has since been repeated many times both in Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian autobiography, for example.28 Even in the more narrow context of the Moroccan autobiographical tradition the story is familiar. al-ubz al-|f tells it, too, although here the final success of the hero is implicit only. Nevertheless, the narrative of al-Ra|l has a measure of disruptive force befitting to a musical rebel of the 1970s like Larbi Batma. Conventional as it may be in its basic story pattern, the de-sacralisation of the theme of repentance, for instance, or its preoccupation with the ordinary and the trivial are disturbing elements. That is because the popular in itself has a disruptive force in any society, it may be argued, at least if we agree with the 1997 Nobel Prize laureate Dario Fo: I think the popular is subversive in itself. Its basic themes lend themselves to that: hunger, the tragedy of having to survive, the problem of dignity, of liberty. Just speaking about these issues is subversive29. Concluding Remarks It is self-evident that autobiographical narrative has a collective dimension, that the individuals life story always to some extent reads as a metaphor of other peoples experience too; idiosyncrasies and universalities go together in human life, so there is always room for identification and generalisation. Further, social and historical circumstances are shared by many. This collective dimension of personal memory is one of the common reasons why autobiographers write and publish their texts in the first place. But autobiography is not just a remembering of things gone by. It is also a construction of the present and a vision of the future. It is a literary re-construction and construction of identity at once. This article has tried to show that one important dimension of this construction of the self in Moroccan autobiography is the national one. The life story may be interpreted as a national allegory it was argued, where the destiny of the author-hero is symbolical of the nation itself understood as an imagined community. How three different texts projects three different vision of the Moroccan personality was than discussed. Three different solutions to the identity problem of the nation were distinguished: a total break with the past and its traditions, a re-activation of the classical heritage, and a re-rooting in popular culture. If these readings are valid, they show that Fredric Jamesons theory about national allegory in third-world lit
28 Ibid., see chapter IX, The theme of poverty, p. 200-36. 29 Stephanson, A., and Salviolini, D., A short interview with Dario Fo, in: Social Text, 17 (Fall 1987), p. 163.

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erature can be a productive approach to Arabic creative writing, too. Moreover, his theory is a valuable contribution to the proper understanding of this literature, since it contextualises aesthetics (literary taste) and challenges the hegemony in critical discourse of Western-style modernism as the only true measure of literary merit. BIBLIOGRAPHY Ahmad, Aijaz, Jamesons Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory, in: Social Text, 16 (Spring 1987), p. 3-25. Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London and New York, Verso, (Revised Edition), 1991. Bm, al-Arab, al-Ra|l - Srah tiyyah, al-Dr al-Bay, Manrt al-rbiah, 1995. al-Alam. Al-Kitb al-n min al-srah tiyyah, al-Dr al-Bay, Dr Tqbl, II ed., 1998. Boullata, I. J., Encounter Between East and West: A Theme in Contemporary Arabic Novels, in: Boullata, I. J. (ed.), Critical Perspectives on Modern Arabic Literature, Washington, Three Continents Press, 1980, p. 47-60. Bouraoui, H. A., Creative Project and Literary Projection in Francophone North Africa, in: Boullata, I.J. (ed.), Critical Perspectives on Modern Arabic Literature, Washington, Three Continents Press, 1980, p. 129-144. Hafez, Sabry [Hfi, .], al-Binyah al-naiyyah li-srat al-ta|arrur min al-qahr, in: al-Shur, ukr, M., London, Saqi Books, 1992, p. 219-242. Hkanson Hanson Gunilla, Le Texte narratif maghrbin et marocain de langue franaise depuis 1945, thse pour le doctorat, Gteborg, Universit de Gteborg, Institut dtudes Romanes, 1995. Hanne, Mike, The Power of the Story. Fiction and Political Change, Oxford, Berghahn Books, 1994. Ibn alln, Abd al-Mad, F l-uflah, Rab, Maktab al-marif, 1975. Jameson, Fredric, Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism, in: Social Text, 15 (Fall 1986), New York, p. 65-88. A Brief Response, Social Text, 16 (Spring 1987), p. 26-27. al-Madini, Ahmed, The Maghrib, in: Ostle, R. (ed.), Modern Literature in the Near and Middle East 1850-1970, London and New York, Routledge, 1991, p. 193-212. Rooke, Tetz, In My Childhood. A Study of Arabic Autobiography, Stockholm, Stockholm University, (Stockholm Oriental Studies n 15), 1997. Stephanson, A., and Salviolini, D., A short interview with Dario Fo, in: Social Text, 17 (Fall 1987). ukr, Mu|ammad, [Choukri, M.], al-ubz al-|f, London, Saqi Books, n.d.

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al-Kiyn wa al-makn (muqbalah), in: Alif, 6 (1986), Cairo, The American University, p. 67-78. For Bread Alone, San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1987 [1973], p. 126. al-Shur, London, Saqi Books, 1992.