"Jomana" and the Curse of Womanhood in Moroccan Muslim Culture: Reading Hassan Zrizi's novel

transcript

Battling the Curse of Womanhood

in Moroccan Culture: Reading Zrizi’s Jomana

Mohammed Ezroura Mohamed 5 University

A cursory reading of Hassan Zrizi‟s novella, Jomana (2006), offers the

reader plenty of statements from the text to support the view that womanhood

is portrayed as a curse that the women characters spend their lifetime

struggling against. The narrative traces the life-histories of a group of women

in battle to change their lot. Their project in life is an attempt to eradicate

their terrible condition by helping each female character rationalize her fate

and change her predicament. This project of liberation culminates

symbolically towards the end of the novel as the young woman Amani

performs a radical move by reaching university and militating in an

association for the defence of women‟s rights; hence seeking to change the

law to institute a just society. The following statements illustrate the

predicament faced by these women: “Destiny seemed to turn a cold shoulder

to [their] limitless efforts to better their lives” (Jomana, 49); “Oumnia had

found that women nearly always shared the same disastrous fate…”(50); and

“Facing the unavoidable injustice of an old-fashioned and wrongly made

world” (52). But to understand the significance of this existential condition of

the characters, and of Jomana in particular, one must look at the general

development of the story and the different entwined themes and philosophical

arguments presented by the narrator. From the start, I would prefer to

attribute the novel‟s consciousness and ideological positions to the narrator

Ezroura Jomana: Curse of Womanhood

whose views are limited to the text as it is read, rather than attributing them to

the author whose ideological positions are not always fixed and which could

vary from novel to novel and from period to period.

Jomana, a Textual Reading

Jomana offers three levels of reading which could be ranked on a scale

of complexity. Whether the author is aware of these levels of reading or not is

not a question that should bother us, for this is the lesson of critical theory

where critical approaches are limitless as long as the text lives on and is read

by humans like us (or may be by cyborgs in the future!). First, a basic flat

simple factual textual reading; the kind of reading that first-year university

students would provide or prefer to handle. This reading focuses on the

setting of the novel, its characters, themes, and general structure. Second,

the novel invites a thematic cultural, psychoanalytic, and ideological reading

which would borrow its concepts from dominant theories and disciplines. And

third, the architectural narratological reading that would borrow also from

recent theory of narrative and novel writing and would look at a text as a

mechanical product, a result of a painful labor using specific materials of

construction techniques that the author exploits in building his fictional

universe – which remains in the end as a paper universe. Here the reader

would evoke the formalist and structuralist adventures.

This novella is 108 pages long and is divided into 8 short chapters

(unnumbered and untitled). The story, which is narrated by an omniscient

narrator, tells the life-stories of seven sisters from Marrakech, who lead a life

of pain, struggling for bare survival and for simple recognition as human

beings. Their life histories crisscross each other and are told in the style of

Sheherazade‟s tales by their elder sister, Jomana. The setting is also

evocative of the mythical universe of the Arabian Nights. It is the world-

famous public Square in Marrakech, called Jamaa Lafna, where storytellers,

acrobats, snake-charmers, fortune tellers, food vendors, and wanderers from

different walks of life meet everyday to seek free entertainment, exhibit skills,

or sell some meager produce for basic survival. Although Jamaa Lafna is

topographically central to the city, it is paradoxically the universe of the

marginalized, the unwanted, and the homeless. It is like a junkyard of

humanity. Those who wander around aimlessly thread there like lost souls

hoping to find something to hold on to; either some little job, some

entertainment, or simply mere human contacts which symbolically would

grant them the status of being human. People flock to the Square also from

different parts of the country from outside Marrakech, seeking a better

alternate world, and often finding in this little universe, despite its simplicity

and marginalization, a universe of wonders and imagination.

Jomana, whose name is made up of the initial letters of her sisters‟

names (Jamila, Omnia, Maria, Assala, Nada, and Amani), narrates the story

of their existence, suffering, especially their ill-treatment at the hands of men.

All these women, like other female characters in the story, spend their time

struggling against a terrible curse, that of being a woman and being

connected with a man, a father, a husband, or a boss who is ignorant of their

human rights. Sometimes, this male counterpart is sick and, therefore, is too

heavy a burden on the woman to take care of. In the eyes of the community,

she is morally obliged to care for him although this gesture is hardly

reciprocated. These men in the novel seem to have a single mission in life,

that is to oppress their womenfolk. The presence of these women even

carries mythical representational dimensions; they seem to carry the

symbolic burden of all the women of the land and the Muslim culture.

The story is also that of their mother, Lalla Malika, who is an ideal

woman who takes care of her daughters and of her dying husband Haj El

Kebir. She does her house-chores with all sense of commitment and pride.

Lalla Malika‟s daughters, all except Amani, go through failed marriages and

relationships, and survive by doing odd temporary jobs: Jamila is an

occasional worker in olive farms, Omnia is a fortune-teller, Maria is a carpet

weaver-designer, Assala is a shopkeeper, Nada sells flowers, and Amani

escapes marriage and devotes her life to the cause of ill-treated women. She

becomes a social activist who joins an association with the hope of changing

the condition of women in the country.

The male characters constitute a world opposite to that of the women.

The men are the negation of the women. The men make the women suffer

and cause them all the ills of the world. The men are mostly husbands,

fathers, and male bosses who act as oppressors of these women. They keep

the women behind walls and consider them inferior creatures whose role in

life is to breed children, cook food and stay at home. But the world of these

men is a negative universe, whereas the world of the women is a positive and

fertile one. The latter offers much hope for a better future. All the women

struggle to fulfill their dream of liberation. The men are doomed to ultimate

total handicap and death – though they never get buried or forgotten in the

story. These men are just there, condemned to paralysis and a perpetual life

in suffering: they are like some sinners condemned to perpetual punishment

in a Dantean-like universe; they are neither dead no alive!

The setting of the novel is a cursed city called Marrakech, a city of

paradoxes where the ill-treatment of women is common practice. Though it is

protected by seven male saints (reference here is to Sab3atu Rijaal, the

Seven Saints buried in the medina), these saints do not seem to bother about

protecting the women of the city; though it is common practice that women

regularly pay visits to these saints and beg for their blessing. In Jomana, the

women inhabit the lowest social positions; being doomed to poverty, illiteracy,

and suffering. They lead Sisyphean lives. Another paradox is that the city of

Jomana is threatened with sterility although the majority of its inhabitants

(also the majority of the characters in the novel) are females. The men

cannot reproduce themselves. They cannot engender male heirs; they breed

mostly daughters. These daughters grow up, are courted, loved, and then

given away for marriage to men; but only to find themselves, shortly after,

imprisoned, tortured, rejected, and repudiated.

The reader is never told about the root-cause of this female condition; this

curse seems to have existed in the city since the beginning of history; like the

archetypal story of Adam and Eve. The causes of the curse are situated

outside history. The women are born to suffer; the men are born to torture

them. The men suffer too; they are hit with sickness. But even when these

men are sick or live in the margins, they maintain their power over the women

(Haj Kabbour, Haj El Kebir, Si Fares, etc…). The women are under the moral

obligation to look after them. The men are never abandoned by the women.

This curse seems to affect the whole universe of the characters. Even

the weather helps perpetuate this condition through its harshness, it presents

symbolic meaning in this forsaken universe. Nature is harsh; nipping cold.

Winter seems to be perpetual. The time of the story does not go beyond

December. Time itself seems to stand still, like that famous painting “Time”

by Salvador Dali. We get storms of rain from time to time, but spring never

arrives. Winter is the season that dominates the atmosphere of the novel.

The wind lashes at these emaciated staggering bodies that hardly resemble

humans. Harsh nature has no pity on them. Darkness does not take much

time to envelop the place of Jamaa Lafna; then the people have to hurry

away to their homes, but only to find that these homes are starved, inhabited

by sick men, battered women, or abandoned lunatics. Jamaa Lafna, as a

desolate place, becomes ironically the place of refuge, a shelter that provides

some hope of acknowledgement of a possible full humanity (at least

symbolically). The narrator explains:

During the storm, chaos reigned. Darkness overwhelmed the whole city and people moved like ghosts….the whole city seemed to drown in a deep and dark abyss. People were shouting and wandering aimlessly… the world seemed to come to a halt. Even breathing stopped. Air was lacking… (Jomana, 97).

In the same vein, the desolate Square Jamaa Lafna is described as the

symbol of this cursed universe that may fall beyond redumption:

The Square was dark. Faces could not be seen clearly in the dim light. Bodies were like shadows moving in a cave. This once lively part in the center of Marrakech seemed to toll the bell for a certain end. The hubbub of the day seemed to quieten. Storytellers, fortune-tellers, snake charmers, dancers, potato-boilers, juice makers… all went away. The place was empty, a hard shell of land, chilly and dry. The moon gaped widely at the Square, and its light cast shadows of moving bodies. There were homeless teenagers sleeping here and there on the thresholds of closed shops. At this time of night, Jamaa Lafna also became a home for the homeless, the drunk, the wanderer, the lost, the drop-out, the raped… In the Square, everyone could make the home he or she wanted or needed. The Square itself slept, to try and heal its daily injuries, and was quiet for a few hours, only to be wakened by the clinking of horses‟ hooves, a couchi, drawing a carriage and carrying people to a place where they were not wanted or to a work they could not find… . (26).

The moon resembles the eye of a helpless God watching over this

unprotected, desolate place. Paradoxically, the moon does not evoke fertility,

but sterility. It brings to mind classical images of Eliot‟s “waste land,”

Gatsby‟s “Valley of ashes,” overlooked by the billboard with huge moon-like

spectacles resembling a powerless god, and Godot‟s desolate scenes.

There is no sun in the Square to shed warmth and life. On page 88, the

narrator laments: “It was getting dark. The moon rose; the Square stopped

speaking. Strange shadows overcame the site. Ghost-like shadows were

moving to and fro. The dim light of that chilly winter got dimmer and dimmer

as the storm got stronger and stronger. The storm announced the

interruption of a dry winter. Suddenly, the sky darkened and the moon

disappeared…” The universe of the Square is structured by interruptions.

There are interruptions by the elements (nature, the cold, the storms, the

rain, darkness, etc…), or by human intervention (individuals intruding upon

each other); as Jomana interrupts Si Hammou, or the foreman interrupting

the work of the women in an act of sexual harassment. There seems to be an

absence of a legislator or regulator looking after the order of things in the

Square or outside it. With the seeming absence of a God, there is the

absence of order. No presence of a policeman or a symbol of authority to

impose order and respect for human rights. With the absence of women‟s

rights, chaos seems to reign supreme, enhanced by the violence of nature

and its elements.

Under the watchful eye of the moon, the individuals in Jamaa Lafna in

the novel are unhappy human beings. They move like lost souls. Only words

grant them meaning; they must seek words, stories, tales of the past and the

present, tales of utopia, in an attempt to prove their existence, both as story-

tellers and patient listeners. No sooner had they fixed themselves to a story,

settled to a meaningful (truthful) narrative, than they are hit with interruptions.

The story will be continued another time, or another story will be started

another time, they are told by the story teller. Signification is postponed till the

following day. They are told to be patient till the following session to

complete the narrative; to complete the meaning of their existence by

listening to the remaining part of the story, to complete identity, to put

together the fragments of a human self. The characters live perpetual

fragmentation and incompleteness; so they are condemned to spending their

lifetime seeking completeness of being and harmony of existence. This wish

is hardly fulfilled. Hence the tragic dimension of the novel.

Jomana is a novel with a clear bias; it is committed to the struggle of

women against men; and these women openly refuse to live the curse of

oppression and exploitation. Some of them have even developed a feminist

consciousness prematurely and without even having attended school long

enough to cultivate such a consciousness (especially, Lalla Malika, Jamila

and Assala). As the narrator says, “[g]irls were allowed to step out of their

father‟s house on only two occasions: for their wedding and for their funeral”

(p.21). The women are a commodity sold in transactions among males. The

houses they inhabit are prison-like. Jomana protests to Si Hammou about the

conditions of living that her father El Haj El Kbir had confined them to:

“Nobody, neither the seven daughters nor our mother, was allowed to step

out, to go to school, to have friends… we were not even allowed to look out

of the windows. Windows were thought to be the source of trouble; they

were thought to bring shame. Thick walls could do the job and we were like

corpses buried within high, thick, dark and grey walls…” (Jomana, 23)

Jamila is forced into a polygamous marriage with a man who is twenty

years older than her. And she is the third wife on top of it all (31). Her

wedding celebration resembles a funeral (30). Shockingly enough, she gets

divorced quickly after her wedding because she could not beget any children

(32). Maria is raped and loses her brains as a result (67). Nada‟s marriage

also turns her into a prisoner (92). She could free herself only by

relinquishing her ownership rights to her flower shop to her greedy husband.

Other crimes against women are reported to have taken place (95). Even

some women like Mama Ghoula participate in this practice of oppression and

exploitation of women. She helps in Maria‟s rape by Haj Kabbour (66). As a

result of this culture of oppression and exploitation, a feminist consciousness

develops among these women, culminating in Jomana‟s powerful symbolic

intervention to appropriate the Logos and the power of speech symbolized by

story telling from Si Hammou. This rise of feminist consciousness is

symbolized by Amani‟s strong personality and mobilization of women for their

cause. This consciousness is also nourished by the mother Lalla Malika, and

particularly their younger sister, Amani, who closes the novel. The latter

reaches university and militates in women‟s rights organizations with the aim

of changing the laws in favor of women‟s liberation. The state of oppression

that all these women suffer from is symbolized by the silence imposed on

them. Jomana breaks this silence on behalf of all the women. The narrator

explains:

She no longer wants to remain silent, to pass unseen. God gave her voice, the gift of speech. Now she has found that silence is the source of sickness… and all troubles! It is death. It is not her problem alone; it is ours as well! How long have we been silent? How long have we been paralyzed… He [Si Hammou] has kept us silent… Today, the woman has come to break this silence… (10).

However, although the seven saints of the city cannot change this

universe of injustice towards women, there is hope for a better future for

women. There prevails some kind of nemesis working on their behalf, a

retribution that befalls the men one by one as a kind of punishment. Haj

Kabbour gets paralyzed because he had raped Maria. Haj EL Kbir is

permanently sick in bed, and Si Fares is struck by madness; even Stitioua

who is more feminine than masculine is struck by madness for having

courted the she-devil Mama-Ghoula. The masculine world in Jomana is

doomed to perpetual sickness and stasis; this is a curse that cannot be

changed. The men try to appropriate everything feminine; both real and

symbolic. “The laws are made by and for men” the narrator says (102). The

men are driven by a will to control the women around them and to exploit

them; and the women fight back, driven by a mysterious force. Si Hammou,

the first male figure we encounter in the story and who symbolically looks

after the world of narration, history, and the logos, is a father figure who

does not allow the history of female oppression in the land to be narrated.

Jomana criticizes his bias and calls for a realist narration of history. She

literally pushes him outside the area of the logos and narration and starts

telling her story and the history of all the oppressed women in the land (10).

The majority of the men in the novel are representative of an old

patriarchal order. Their names are culturally loaded: they are Haj Kabbour,

Haj El Kbir, Haj Brahim, Si Fares. They all lack positivities, except Mr. Salim

and Dr. Said, the psychiatrist, who manages to cure Assala‟s husband from

his schizophrenia. Some of the men are portrayed as monsters: Jamila‟s

boss has “pig-like ears; he was so fat that he found it difficult to move

adequately and as he stared at her he seemed to devour her with his sly,

squinty and cunning eyes.” (29)

The male characters are three types: There is the traditional patriarchal

figure who ill-treats women (Haj El Kebir, Haj Kabbour, and Si Fares). Their

title of Haj is significant in the way they represent certain religious patriarchal

stereotypes in the Moroccan culture. This male category is also represented

by Si Hammou, the story-teller with whom Jomana wrestles (symbolically) to

take back the space of narration – the space of the logos – to re-instate

speech to female identity instead of silence as death, which has marked her

life until now. The second type of a male figure is a more positive one (who

appears towards the end of the novel) as a modern figure, who is educated

and is willing to help in the cause. This type is represented by Dr. Said and

Salim. The third type of the male figure is actually a victim, and he resembles

the female characters. He is a victim of the curse. He is also a victim of a

vengeful powerful female figure who takes revenge on men on behalf – so to

speak -- of the other women. This figure is represented by Stitou who goes

mad for having fallen in love with the hoof-footed Mama Ghoula (78-80), a

version of the mythical Aisha Qendisha.

Jomana as a Feminist Novel

Jomana is a feminist text par excellence and a critique of a particular

Islamic patriarchal order. As well, a number of cultural, historical, and

philosophical themes are weaved into the fabric of the novel. The Most

salient issue raised is that of women‟s rights in the Moroccan Muslim context.

There is a clear conflict between an old order and an emerging new one. The

old order is symbolized by the figures of Si Hammou, Haj Kabbour, Haj El

Kbir, and Mama Ghoula; whereas the new order is symbolized by Jomana,

her sisters, Dr. Said, and Salim.

For the female characters, there are three types: The innocent victims

(Jomana, her sisters, and her mother), the vengeful female (the Ogress

Mama Ghoula, who is a variation on the mythical figure of Aisha Qendisha),

and the third type, blessing female saints (namely Tiwalin, who is

metamorphosed in the saintly river, “the tears of tiwallin”, p.86). As noted

earlier, the female characters, even when they perform nasty acts against

men, are always carriers of positive values: they are always motivated by

positive drives, especially the liberation of women from bondage and

exploitation. “I have decided to break with the past, with silence and with

falsehood,” Jomana tells her audience (p.17); a past that considered women

as a “commodity that could be returned to the owner even after forty years!”

(21). Such a dream could not be fulfilled without the education of these

women and the changing of the law.

Jomana invites an interesting reading of the text in light of the Oedipal

myth. The conflict between the father and the son (the narrator) about the

mother‟s ill-treatment is clearly declared from the beginning. This

consciousness is expressed with much power in the dedication in which the

narrator reveals his affection for the dead mother and admits to having

fulfilled a moral obligation (a mission) to tell the real stories of these women.

We read in the dedication:

To the sweetest woman I have ever known… I still remember your big everlasting smile even on your death-bed… I understood your worries, but I think I have managed to fulfil one of your wishes… Now I borrow your sweet voice to express the aches and pains you did not and could not overcome. Rest in peace (p.3).

Although the addressee is not named as the mother, the tone of the passage

indicates this deduction.

In a sense, the stories of these sisters and other women in the novel

could be read as simple repetitions of the painful experience of the lost

mother. These repetitions serve the purpose of healing a psychological

wound, that of a primal loss, the loss of the mother. They also signify a

strong desire to reconnect with the mother through this gesture of doing

justice to the symbolic sisters of the mother. This is counterbalanced by a

rebellion against the father who has possessed and ill-treated the mother –

and maybe has indirectly caused her death. The father is unconsciously

made responsible for the suffering of the mother. Along the same line of

argument, nearly all the men in the story are also repetitions of the same

image-type of the unjust father. The men persecute, rape, or exploit their

women, and they seem to go unpunished.

The beginning of the novel as narrated by Si Hammou starts with the

story of three daughters and their rich father (an allusion to King Lear and his

three daughters); then he hesitates, and counts more daughters and stops at

six. Jomana takes over from him and narrates the story of seven daughters.

The novel closes also with reference to another set of seven women, this

time not connected through kinship. Their sisterhood is only symbolic; they

share in the life of ill-treatment and injustice they lead. Like Jomana‟s sisters,

these women‟s names also constitute the letters of the name Jomana: they

are Jmeaa, Omaima, Meriem, Asmaa, Nawal, and Amal (104). They are

seven.

Number seven takes up an emblematic significance. The reader keeps

wondering about this magic number that keeps recurring at different levels in

the novel. Here are some of the occurrences of this number: there are seven

sisters, seven seas, seven vegetables, and dragons with seven heads (38).

Seven volunteers to save the sick king, with seven medallions. There are

seven women in the painting on the cover page, and the king‟s recovery

takes seven seasons (39). Maria starts work at seven a.m. and goes on until

seven p.m. (57). The magic blue carpet that Maria designs is completed in

seven nights (63). Seven candles are lit for seven nights at the shrine of the

female saint Tiwallin in the mountains (86). The pilgrims to this shrine would

spend seven days and seven nights to seek a proper cure. There are seven

gardens in Maria‟s dream (64), as there are seven saints guarding the city of

Marrakech, etc… The number seven is so widely used that it acquires

enigmatic significance.

May be the author might help us in deciphering this enigma, although

psychoanalysis takes away that possibility when it delves into the world of the

unconscious. Actually the number seven has wide universal mythological and

cosmological references in different civilizations. It was considered magical

by the Greeks. In Old Egyptian myths, the goddess Isis was guarded by

seven scorpions, the god Osiris‟s body was cut off into 14 pieces and each

seven sent to upper and lower Egypt. A legendary famine lasted seven years.

In monotheistic mythologies, the Creation of the university took seven days,

there are seven days in the week, seven deadly sins, and seven ages in the

life of man (see. http://towerweb.net/alt_lib/seven.shtml). However, with

reference to Jomana, we may deduce that the magic number seven seems to

grant the female characters a kind of blessing and empowerment (cf. the

myth of Seven Souls) that helps them combat the curse of traditional

womanhood that haunts their existence. As in mythology, the number seven

creates a group of women who become powerful enough to defeat patriarchy

and win their freedom and autonomous existence. However, not unlike the

resolution of the Oedipus Complex, the philosophy of the group remains

lacking in radical action, and therefore liberation is never achieved in totality.

Indeed, the resolution of the oedipal complex in Jomana is not as violent

as it is described in its Greek origins. There are no sons to wage the battle!

There are only daughters; but they cannot fall in love with the Father figure!

The father in Jomana does not get killed; nor do any of the symbols of

patriarchy disappear. There are no Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester here. There

is no violent act committed by any of the women against the men who

oppress them. The women are meek and „effeminate‟. Their radicalism

remains quite symbolic. The women‟s actions are limited to words and the

act of narration. One wonders here about the extent to which the narrator (the

author) is unconsciously reconciliatory rather than desiring to eradicate

patriarchy completely. In fact, the surprise death of Lalla Malika (p. 98) who is

the most positive character in the story tends to defeat this anti-patriarchy

and feminist project. The reasons for deciding to kill this character in the end

and after all the success stories of the seven daughters remains a mystery. It

seems that the author wanted to grant her a mythical figuration, a martyr

figure, who has sacrificed herself for the sake of the female race. But there

is no textual or plot necessity for such an architectural move. The ending

remains problematic in the way it defeats the original feminist project;

especially when the death of the mother leads to the loss of Jomana‟s voice

(a symbolic castration and an abortion of a new identity project), thereby,

leading to the silencing of Jomana. This move allows for the return of the

father figure, Si Hammou, to his symbolic post – although we are told that he

has come back with a new vision and more realism. His metamorphosis has

also happened in the margins of the story.

Thus the Oedipal Complex in Jomana remains unfulfilled in its totality.

Neither the male narrator nor the heroine (Jomana), who plays the oedipal

figure, gathers enough courage to get rid of the father figure in order to

avenge the mother and bring justice to the Square and the City. The father is

made to suffer only physical loss, not death. For example, Si Hammou

suffers the loss of his position as the master of the logos in the Square, but

he is re-instated at the end of the story. Haj El Kbir who is crippled for life

weeps at the death of Lalla Malika, but it is she who dies not him. For Assala,

Si Fares is cured after his downfall resulting from having cheated on her and

leaving her for another woman who turned out to be the wrong one – Mama

Ghoula.

The implications of this failed oedipal resolution is that the feminist

project in Jomana remains limited in vision. It remains unconsciously

diminished by a strong patriarchal undercurrent. The return of Si Hammou at

the end and Jomana‟s loss of voice and the death of Lalla Malika (symbol of

female sacrifice) is a defeatist project and might indicate a view of the

Moroccan feminist project as a whole; i.e., being not radical enough to

propose a radical solution to the dominance of patriarchy and masculinity.

The Other Jamaa Lafna Square

Could we talk about “the Unsaid” of Jomana? One would wonder about

what is left out from this fantastic universe of Jamaa Lafna. The narrator

selects various images and representations of the culture of Jamaa Lafna,

but he neglects many other figures that those familiar with the history of the

Square would recall. Some striking scenes that one would remember from

the 70s and 80s, the time before food vendors, large cinema screens, and

stars like Nancy Ajram invaded the Square. One would remember the

Amazigh banjo singers, the Bedouin guenbri players, and the Gnawa bands.

Their imbrications in the narrative would have enriched the cultural coloring of

the novel. One would also recall famous figures of Jamaa Lafna, such as the

man with the pigeons who would tell stories of Devils and strange beings he

had encountered during his travels across the lands of Yajooj wa Majooj.

Also, the man with the white donkey who had trained his animal so well that

he could speak to it and make it perform, sleep and fake dying. At a certain

time, a large section of the Square was taken up by second hand bookstalls.

This activity has disappeared totally now. What is its significance? The larger

space has been taken up by food vendors catering to tourists (local and

international). Has the voice chased away the written word, as it were; a

return of an old order? The novel undoubtedly offers some historical

elements in the life of the Square, and a mixing of realism and fantastic

universes does not automatically produce corrupt art. Other scenes come to

mind, such as the behavior of the crowds: among the evening crowds, there

are usually weirdoes, veiled women recently arrived from remote villages in

the mountains or the countryside, all gaping at story tellers. There are

pickpockets, swindlers, sexual perverts, and foreigners trying to capture this

whole alien universe with their cameras. Then there are those who watch the

Square from the roof of a high rise, the Café CTM or Café de France.

Certainly, the historical time of the story is the time before Nancy Ajram

arrives in the Square and before huge cinema screens get pitched at the

heart of Jamaa Lafna. But the time was also a time of turmoil in schools,

lycées and universities not only in Marrakech but all around the Country.

There was a power struggle between the State and an emerging civil society.

Has the novel chosen to focus only on the case of women, a soft topic in

comparison with hotter issues? Let us listen to Abdallah Laaroui, in his

Khawatir AssabaaH (Morning Thoughts), talking about Jamaa Lafna of 1973:

In Jamaa Lafna, a story-steller shouts through a microphone: You all say that this Kuran is worth nothing, and I am telling you that it is everything. With it, Mohammed made the world under his feet. Then he would furnish his speech with French and often English expressions. This story teller is the symbol of the State and a large number of intellectuals, not only in the content of his words but also in his style and the way he would convey his ideas to the public…. (Khawatir AssabaaH, vol. I, p.193; trans. mine)

Could we read Jomana in light of Laaroui‟s statement? Does Jomana

represent the way late 20th.century Moroccan feminists related to their world,

culture, and politics? Along this line of reasoning, one would note that in

Jomana, there is a striking absence of mosques, of police stations, and the

symbols of the State. Is this a result of an unconscious fear or a search for a

utopian world, seeking harmony? The literature of memory has well

documented the powerful presence of the repressive State apparatus at the

The reading of the novel also invites a question about race in the novel.

Whiteness as an ethnic characteristic is very much privileged among the

women of the novel. For instance, Maria is “blond” (56). Jomana is described

as being like the moon: “she was tall, slim, with blond hair and her face was

as round as the moon...” (21). The saint woman Tiwallin has blue eyes,

which is the color of the sacred water that cures the sick (86). She has a

white face (87). Saintliness of women, as an ideal figure in this context, is

attributed to a white woman with blue eyes, not to a female version of Moulay

Bouazza (a well-known black Amazigh Saint). “Tiwallin‟s tears… The

luckiest… those who have the chance to see her in their dreams talk

endlessly about her rare beauty, her big-round beautiful eyes, her long,

smooth black hair, her round white face, her smile, her delicate movement.

She was a lovely creature” (87). This is a far cry from the celebration of the

beauty of black dolls (cf. Anta Diop, “Poupées Noires”?) or Senghor‟s

celebration of negritude. If we compare these portraits of women in the novel

to the oil painting (by Bruneau de Jarney) on the cover page of the novel, we

note that the latter is more race-conscious; there is a black woman in the

background whose features are totally blurred, as she seems to be the slave

among white women. They all seem to be stereotypes of the Moorish/oriental

harem quite common among European painters of the 19th. century. This

question of race brings to mind those third world writers (like Chinua Achebe,

Ngugi Wa Thiong‟o, and Tayeb Salih) who have been writing against a

Western trend of idealizing whiteness, etc…

We cannot offer a reading of Jomana without referring to the triumph of

technique: the narrative is highly conscious of magical realism, of textual

architecture, of myths, and classical texts, such as King Lear and the

betrayal of daughters, the Arabian Nights and Shahrazade's night stories,

Andalusian literary figures such as Wallada, and other Arabic figures like Ibn

Battouta, 'Antara, and Sindbad.

To conclude, and to evoke Roland Barthes here, the multi-layered reading

of a text is only a sign of its richness and the great pleasure it grants the reader;

one of the best yardstick of an author’s success. (Rabat, 2009)

"Jomana" and the Curse of Womanhood in Moroccan Muslim Culture: Reading Hassan Zrizi's novel

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