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The Power of Dream I)-Introduction : The
idea of translating Moroccan short stories into English shone, at first, to
counterbalance the scarcity of Moroccan narrative texts written in or
translated into English. This sense of reconsideration, however, was not the
only urge to launch this initiative; there was also the need to contribute to
the new universal tendency to dialogue between human cultures throughout the
globe. Accordingly, the present literary project of translating Moroccan new
short stories into English will be prolonged to cover three volumes with
three central themes around which are weaved all the narrative texts: ‘‘The
Anthology of Moroccan Dream’’ Where the central theme will
be Dream in its broader aspects, ‘‘The
Anthology of Moroccan love’’ dealing basically with Love as
a source of emancipation and creation and ‘‘The
Anthology of Freedom’’ where Freedom is
the first and last preoccupation of all the texts within. II)- ‘‘Dream’’ In The
Anthology of Moroccan Dreaming short-story writers : ‘‘The
Anthology of Moroccan Dream’’ texts are organized
thematically from prophecy to ordinary dream, day-dreaming, hallucination,
nightmare and finally to madness as the most unacceptable aspect of all kinds
of dreams. Consequently,
short stories in ‘‘The Anthology of Moroccan Dream’’ graduate
from prophecy in Moustapha Laghtiri’s ‘‘Dream’’,
to ordinary dreams in Najib Kaaouachi’s
‘‘Me, Revealed to Myself’’, khadija
El Younoussi’s ‘‘Books and Apples’’, fatima Bouziane’s ‘‘Normal’’,
Zahra ramij’s ‘‘Dreams’’, Saïd Ahoubate’s ‘‘ The
Voice and the Hammer’’, Mohamed Saïd Raïhani’s ‘‘Open, Sesame !’’,
Noureddine Mhakkak’s ‘‘The
Interpretation of Dreams’’ and Mouna Ouafiq’s ‘‘ Grenade-Man’’… to
day-dreams in Abdennour Driss’s ‘‘Shehrayar’s Dream’’ , to hallucination and
illusion in malika Moustadraf’s ‘‘
A Space For An Impossible Dream’’ and Abdelouahid
Kafih’s ‘‘Bomb’’…to
nightmares in Faouzi Boukhriss’s ‘‘Nightmare’’,
Abdoullah Mouttaqi’s ‘‘Rebellious
Dreams’’ and Mouna Benhaddou’s ‘‘For
Everybody His Own Hell’’. The Dreaming Anthology will conclude its
journey with madness in Mohamed Zitoune’s ‘‘Castle Incense’’ regarding
that madness is the highest planes of all nightmares… III)-‘‘The Anthology of
Moroccan Dream’’reviewed : A)-Moustapha Laghtiri’s ‘‘Dream’’ : This
text is a pure attempt to grasp a runaway dream soon after waking up. It
starts from the conclusion taking hold of the remains of the dream that still
resound in memory, deepening the difficult journey backwards towards the
eventual beginnings of the dream/story facing many jerks and quakes until
remembering the heart of the runaway dream: The bird. It
is only then that the story finds its tempo and gathers its components,
delivering itself and emancipating the reader: « It
is only then that the world seemed to be in his own hands, that a happy event
is in the way to be achieved and that all he had to do is just to sit and
wait. » B)- Najib Kaaouachi’s
‘‘Me, Revealed to Myself’’: No
adventure could be as valuable as the adventure of scratching out one’s own
self buried under the daily hullabaloo and the taming habit… The greatest
achievement that a man can ever realize is not discovering the word around
him but exploring the word inside him. In
this context, ‘‘Me, Revealed to Myself’’ shows an unusual
obsession with this theme: Self-discovery. The narrator, all along the story,
keeps faithful to his will to chase that mysterious face which resists any
approach but only to make sure that all along the dream/pursuit, the narrator
was chasing nobody but himself: « The
luminous halo surrounding his face is slowly fading away until it disappeared
completely and I saw my own face within : I was that one
passing by myself all along the way indiscreetly, with no trace or shadow
behind… » C)- Khadija El Younoussi’s ‘‘Books
and Apples’’: If books
symbolize Knowledge and guarantee Its immortality, apples in religious
stories are linked to Immortality in Its broader sense. However, in the
absence of Adam and Eve, Eternity will remain incomplete. In ‘‘Books
and Apples’’, there is a fabulous combination between bodily
nourishment (=apples), intellectual nourishment (=books)
and spiritual nourishment (=love). This combination blossoms
better in the light of the duality of the severe established order where
destitution reigns and the dreamily ideal order where everything is within
reach: with the stranger becoming a lover, the expensive books spraying their
titles about in the air and apples, Heaven’s fruits, are close at hand… Being
aware of the severity of reality waiting ahead for her, the narrator clings
obstinately to the dream she is shaving, refusing to wake up, stretching out
her hand to silence the alarm-clock, hoping to live the beautiful dream to
eternity. D)- Fatima Bouzian’s ‘‘ ‘‘Normal’’ is a reversed
journey starting from the beautiful dream and ending with the
bitter reality destined to be the centre of life making despair ordinary,
depression ordinary, humiliation ordinary… ‘‘Normal’’ is focused on
love at first sight: « I
feel him a real copy of the ideal man’s image that I have been developing
deep inside me from all that I have admired in men since the very moment when
that hot hormonal flow run in my blood. » The
first sentences of the text evoke a transitional period of life, leaving an
old depression phase based on ‘‘ear culture’’ up to a new
flourishing phase based on ‘‘eye culture’’: « Today, I can hear
with my eyes ». However,
the dominance of Depression and the power of Habit do not allow any right in
Change, Joy and Love intervening at the right moment to pull down the whole
dream castle into a mere hopeless shatter in scattered poetic free verses
written by Arab Poet Saleh Harbi. E)- Zahra Ramij’s ‘‘ Dreams’’: ‘‘Dreams’’ is a compound of
four dreams around a week-end breakfast and narrated by four dreamy narrators
whose worlds and horizons are revealed through the subject-matter of their
dreams: § The child dreams of more
creative worlds. § The maid dreams of
Deliverance and Self- Respect. § The little girl dream of returning to the warmth of the motherly fœtus, very close to the heartbeat. § The mother dreams of
returning to the childhood making use of the same dreams that she used to
have in her childhood: Flying. «Freedom »,
in Its absolute innocence, is the principal engine operating the four dreams
in the mother text, “Dreams”: The child dreams of leaving
school programmes, flying away towards the spacious worlds of literature
where free-speech is the only power there is; the maid dreams of swimming
across the Mediterranean Sea hoping to restore her freedom and self-respect
in another land with other people; the little girl dreams of the greatest
freedom, ‘‘the freedom to choose her own fate and decide her own
destiny with her own hands’’; and the mother narrator dreams of
flying the way no-one in living memory has ever done. Zahra Ramij’s ‘‘Dreams’’ is a dream about
Freedom. F)- Saïd Ahoubate’s ‘‘The
Voice and the Hammer”: The title ‘‘The
Voice and the Hammer” is composed of two words: ‘‘voice’’ or ‘‘call’’ and ‘‘hammer’’ or ‘‘action”. The
text, therefore, is a ‘‘call for action’’. The emitter of this call is
a female prisoner moaning across the wall: ‘‘If you deliver me,
you will deliver yourself’’, a supplication showing
a universal yearn for Liberation and Freedom the first symbolic
barrier of which is ‘‘The Wall’’. ‘‘The Voice and the
Hammer” focuses on liberating the other or delivering the self reflected on the other, opening the door wide open
before a future society reserved exclusively for The Free,
giving new spaces for human lungs to breath
self-respect different horizons to dream of higher freedom : “Dear
fellows, we feel humiliation being so marginalized in this city, we
Vanguards. Our dangerous mission is to set new values on the ruins of this
sinful city and establish a newer regime… A regime that will set us free. So,
dear fellows, go on your sacred mission…” Here, ‘‘The Voice
and the Hammer” meets another narrative text in ‘‘The
Anthology of Moroccan Dream’’, ‘‘Open, sesame!’’ by
Mohamed Saïd Raïhani. G)- Mohamed Saïd Raïhani’s ‘‘Open,
Sesame!’’: The stream of consciousness
has made of ‘‘Open, Sesame!’’ an eternal opening on
different, renewed worlds within the dream/text, starting with worlds of
destitution and despotism and ending with worlds of propagandist poetry and
the countdown for the ultimate deluge that is gathering its energies to
purify the word, fertilize the fields and blow new spirits in the free,
honest, new human race… The text ends with the
dreaming narrator waking up to the rhythm of the knock on the door to see his
individual dream being adopted by far-away people and becoming already a
collective dream: « He knocks on the
door, waits for the answer, knocks
again, examines his registers, searches for insured mail and
leaned on the door again, calling: "Open, Sesame!" The
postman looks me persistently in the eyes. His features resist a strong smile
that he could not control any further. The smile overwhelms him at last and
he sets it free. » H)- Noureddine Mhakkak’s ‘‘
The Interpretation of Dreams’’ : The central theme in ‘‘The
Interpretation Of Dreams’’ is the alienation of the short-story
writer in a world where publishing is impossible reading and reception are
difficult: « I decided to gather
those foreigners, around there, to tell them my stories. However, those people
looked as if they were dead. They do not move nor do they speak or look or
hear. They looked as if they were bewitched into stone beings by some evil
witch. » Being a messenger, the
short-story writer should find a receptive public for his text. For this
reason, he keeps moving from world to world seeking interactive readers.
There were, first, the trees proud of having stories written on their leaves;
there was also that smart snake which never gets tired of listening to
stories and asking for more stories; there were equally birds coming from
afar to read their experiences immortalized in beautifully narrative texts…
But only the loving female remains the really good reader freeing herself
from her bad fate and setting free the short-story writer from his alienation. I)- Mouna Ouafiq’s ‘‘Grenade-Man’’: ‘‘Grenade-Man’’ is quite
different from the remaining texts of ‘‘The Dreaming Anthology’’.
It is totally reversed as the narrator ‘‘dreams’’ when
he ‘‘wakes up’’: « I woke up to dream an
astonishing dream ». The text chases the flow
of Life Force all along the text, making use of a very
functionally artistic device, ‘‘Re-incarnation’’,
making the dream/text returning eternally to the very beginning: The death of
the marginal character in that balcony between cats with a grenade
stamped on his neck is resurrected in this balcony in a new body
looking for a new band of cats to accompany him in a quite clear
message : Exclusion, seclusion and marginalisation never kill
the beautiful spirits yearning to live… J)-Abdennour Driss’s
‘‘Shehrayar’s Dream’’: ‘‘Shehrayar’s
Dream’’ is a poetic text, par excellence. Because of the
irrelevance of denotative language and the centrality of despair
which necessitates a language as ambiguous as the catastrophic fate of the
central character wandering all along the sequences of the text, dreaming of
having a baby boy to get him out of his existential labyrinth (his illusory,
labyrinthine virility and heroism) and set his wives from their maze (the
maze of absolute passivity and belonging to the ‘‘shameful’’ gender) : « Cursed is he
who gives birth to females! » K)-Malika Moustasaf’s ‘‘A Space
For An Impossible Dream’’ : When reality turns more
severe, dream becomes the only refuge to keep one’s mental and psychological
balance, however, when dream itself turns impossible, the impasse is worth
the title ‘‘A Space For An Impossible Dream’’. The text, ‘‘A
Space For An Impossible Dream’’, reflects the altered balance between
the ideal order and the established order where reigns unemployment, unfit
habitation, sexual deprivation and the impossibility of a better life in a
better place… The result is ‘‘the vicious circle’’ that
the text formally embodies beginning and ending with the same paragraph,
drawing a circular prison for all
the characters: « He went out , loudly
insulting everybody starting with his old parents who
were at the source of his existence in this wretched world
and ending with his sister who got married to an old French man
and travelled away with him…». L)- Abdelouahid Kafih’s
« Bomb » : « It is all over, now.
The faces that have dreamt for such a long time to change the world have
disappeared. The period of detention that he has counted minute after minute
and second after second is over now. » These are
the first sentences in Abdelouahid Kafih’s « Bomb » restricting
“the dream of changing the world” in the period of “Detention”
in the jail space and culture where Dream and Hope are important only to keep
alive. From the very beginning, the
ideal order was declared to be down, leaving space for the established order
to dominate the whole events of the text intensifying the feeling of
narrator’s alienation among bastards in his own home: «It’s all the same,
Rabbit. Whether present or absent, husbands are not necessary for their
wives’ pregnancy». L)- Faouzi Boukhris’s
«Nightmare» : «Nightmare» focuses on an
internal feeling of absolute boredom due to the fatal trivialities taking
place in the outside world. Thus, in the heart of the absolute banality and
the general boredom, no-one among the characters in the text can take the
lead and narrate the story. To fill the void, there must be an independent
narrator who would not only narrate the story but also to describe for either
characters or readers their own thoughts and feelings making use
of the second-person pronoun “you” as long as the
whole life is numb or dull in the realm of Boredom. The narrator makes use
of the second-person pronoun “you” to address himself
to either characters or readers whose senses have grown dull with deadly
repetitive routine in their daily lives
until they find it impossible to dream. Even at the doorstep of dream, the
narrator stands up to depict “for you” the “form”
of the dream, deliberately skipping its “content”: « Suddenly, you feel
something monstrously heavy lying on your chest paralyzing your entire being.
You cannot do the slightest movement. You feel suffocated. You gather all
your strengths and try to stand up and get rid of the monstrous body but in
vain… You fall down helpless. You breathe with great difficulty, feeling that
you are breathing the ultimate oxygen atom into your lungs... » M)- Abdoullah Al-Mouttaqi’s
« Rebellious Dreams » : Fiction narration with the
first-person pronoun “I” denies the reader his neutrality and
objectivity while using the third-person pronoun
“He/She/It” makes it possible to keep distance and judge the
course of things objectively. Since every narrative
pronoun (Be it first or second or third pronoun) has its own
communicative and narrative function, dream narration is better conveyed
through the use of the first-person pronoun “I”. However,
in his “Rebellious Dreams”, Abdoullah
Al-Mouttaqi opposes the tradition preferring
detached narration to intimate confession, making use of the
omniscient viewpoint (the third-person pronoun “He”) in
order to make the reader believe that the story is taking place for other characters
in other places in other times…
Before all reader’s convictions are reversed by the end of the text, all at
once: «The cock’s beak
did not find the laughing sun. The hen’s found nothing but white lice. The
chicks are still busy playing. The wife is hanging the washing on to dry
whereas the husband is … scribbling this short story. » Only at the end
of the text does the reader come to know that the whole text has been
narrated in the first-person pronoun “I” and that the
original narrator is no other than the central character, the cheated
husband, who is caught finally in the act of scribbling the very short story. N)- Mouna Ben Haddou’s
« For Everybody His Own Hell » : “For Everybody His Own Hell”, from the title,
shows a universal justice devoted to give, on equal terms, everybody his due
share of unhappiness. Considering that Hell is everybody’s ration, dream is
doomed to have its share of hell, too; so is sobriety in a way that makes the
whole existence seem a continuous nightmare… On this basis, “For
Everybody His Own Hell” has been weaved controlling the
progression of the story with two threads: the first one is concerned with
dreaming about a girlfriend getting ready to commit suicide; and the second
one hangs in the air where the suicidal act is definitely fulfilled: « Some tender
hands have shaken me out of my nightmare. I looked up to find my girlfriend’s
mother asking me about her daughter who had been sitting next to me watching
‘For Everybody His Own Hell!’, the film. I was so absorbed by
the events of the film that I did not notice her withdrawal. My eyes were
automatically directed to the door opening on the stair-cases swirling up to
Hell. The mother’s eyes followed my eyes’ movements and in no time she was
hysterically climbing up the stairs. » O)- Mohamed Zitoune’s « Castle
Incense » : In « Castle
Incense » , the last text in ‘‘The Moroccan
Dream: Anthology of Moroccan new short story”, incense as an
aesthetic device is wonderfully handled to match the overwhelming mystery in
the text in such a way that no-one can see across the intense incense and
have access to Truth for the sake of which the whole caravan in the story has
started its journey, making of the narrator the aim of the journey and the
centre of the text although he, himself, knows nothing about the events
around nor does he know the goal of the caravan nor even can he
distinguish his presence from his absence: « Whom are they
celebrating their rituals for while I am away. » Omission and poetry have
doubled the density of ambiguity encircling the nature and destiny of the
central character but the title of the caravan “Bouya Omar”, one of the traditional curing
centres in Morocco where lunatics are jailed and tamed, affirms the
narrator’s madness and expects from this journey his deliverance of his
hallucinations and nightmares in order to come back again to his group’s
culture and meet his relatives’ expectations. III)- Conclusion: “The Moroccan Dream” embodies
the plurality of the Moroccan narrative dream starting from vision to
day-dream to illusion to nightmare to madness. A plurality paralleled by a
diversity of viewpoints and narrative techniques used to conform to the
subject of the narrative message: prophecy, propaganda, alienation, despair,
madness… The common target of “The
Moroccan Dream” texts was the yearning to Unity:
the unity of Form and Content, Surface and Essence, outer
self and deeper self… The yearning to Deliverance,
which will remain forever the dream of all dreams: The greatest
dream of all. Mohamed Saїd Raїhani Contents THE PROMETHEAN PASSION FOR
IMPROVING THE RACE (A STUDY OF THE PROBLEM OF EQUALITY
IN SHAW'S MASTER-PIECE, "PYGMALION" ) (FIVE MOROCCAN SHORT-STORY
WRITERS REVEALING THEIR FIRST STEPS TOWARDS LITERATURE) THE POWER OF DREAM IN MODERN MOROCCAN SHORT STORY |
ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED
e-mail: mohamed_said_raihani@yahoo.com
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