Afterword

This anthology is intended as a tribute to one of Morocco’s greatest writers of narrative, Muhammad Zafzaf, a pioneer of the modern Moroccan short story. The present collection makes a significant contribution to a literary genre whose roots can be traced back to the Arabic oral tradition, a genre usually translated as “tale.” The Moroccan context for both tales and short stories is little known in the Western world. Nevertheless, in recent years a few useful attempts have been made through the translation of selected works into English by Roger Allen, Denys Johnson-Davis (Arabic Short Stories, 1983), Malcolm Williams and Kevin Waterson (An Anthology of Moroccan Short Stories, 1995), and Jilali El Koudia (Moroccan Short Stories, 1998). Otherwise, the Moroccan short story has barely managed to emerge from the narrow circle of academic research papers, newspaper articles, and magazines.

Muhammad Zafzaf was born in 1945 in Suq al-Arbi‘ah, a town in the province of Kenitra. After receiving his high school diploma in Kenitra he attended Mohammed V University in the capital city of Rabat, where he started a degree in philosophy but never finished. He then left for Casablanca, where he lived for the rest of his life, teaching high school. In 1968, he became a member of the Moroccan Writers’ Union.

Zafzaf’s work, which includes poetry, novels, translations, and short stories, encapsulates his long, fruitful experience with life. Writing was very difficult for him, involving four decades during which he strove to present the best of himself, reinventing his artistry several times.

According to Ahmed Bouzfour, a fellow Moroccan writer of short stories, Zafzaf’s career can be divided into three distinct phases: the Moroccanization of writing (“Al-Didan Allati Tanhan” [The Worms That Bend], 1970); the depiction of social misery (“Al-Aqwa” [The Strongest], 1978); and a concern with the more stylistic aspects of writing (“Al-Shajara al-Muqaddasa” [The Holy Tree], 1980.¹ At each stage his work manages to reflect both socio-cultural and political events taking place across the globe, and reactions to them. The essence of each era is mirrored in his story collections; the social, political, and cultural influences involved shaped, redefined, and enriched his narrative method.

As a writer, Zafzaf was considered a rebel, someone who never knew (or wanted to learn) how to play the game of the “court,” and whose work was labeled as “pejorative.” From early in his writing career, Zafzaf strove to establish his own particular craft and identity. Zafzaf’s writing possesses a particular essence that makes him unique among modern Moroccan writers, one that has earned him the respect of writers and critics, both local and international. His use of the older Arab tradition of oral tales, when colored with the tints of everyday Moroccan Arabic dialect, makes his storytelling style very simple (perhaps deceptively so), one that is easy to read and close to the expectations of the ordinary reader.

Like the stories of many Moroccan writers, Zafzaf’s are set within a variety of contexts. They portray a slice of life, a simple struggle for survival in a challenging world that is changing at a rapid pace. Narrative time is reduced to a single glimpse, full of irony, sarcasm, and sympathy. He covers all aspects of Moroccan life, from the most remote rural villages and “douars” (districts) to modern cities, and especially Casablanca, the city that he adored and had no desire to leave. It is the city of Casablanca that most influenced his decision to focus on the individual’s subjective experience, something that is clearly illustrated by his extraordinary sensitivity to the most mundane and trivial aspects of everyday life. Actions and situations, ranging from sheer human stupidity to extreme cruelty, naiveté, callous indifference, abject suffering, and tragedy, all are described in the richest detail. The innermost thoughts of Zafzaf’s characters are depicted with enormous precision, and his short stories thus become vehicles for searching criticism, expressions of wide social divisions and cultural nonconformity.

During his own lifetime, Zafzaf took upon himself the task of criticizing his society’s social norms and values. In order to represent them accurately, he selects a variety of characters, ranging from rebel to defeatist. He writes about the behavior and customs of people in his society, especially those from the lower and middle classes, and focuses his attention on relationships rather than on specific situations. Within such a framework he manages to present portraits that blend social misery and injustice, patriarchal society, and political questioning.

Throughout his career, Muhammad Zafzaf explored the various myths, beliefs, and traditions that operated within his culture, questioning them from a distance. He always insists on the storyteller’s involvement in, and shaping of, his surroundings; and, while he may utilize a neutral and distant narrator, he is still personally involved as a writer to such a degree that his work can almost serve as an anthropological adjunct to Moroccan social history.

As already noted, Zafzaf favors an easy, conversational style—what has become known as a Zafzafian style. All his short stories include either dialogues, internal monologues, or stream-of-consciousness. The series of sentences depend on each other as part of a whole, a connected and interlinked chain, constituting a sort of eruption: an almost frustrating narrative mode that makes it hard to separate the autobiographer from the writer of fiction. A degree of ambiguity persists between writer and dispassionate narrator. Zafzaf is continually more interested in how to write, rather than what; in how he narrates, and not what. Throughout his career as a writer of narratives, he managed to exert a huge influence on an entire generation of storytellers.

The stories in this collection were not chosen at random; they are intended to present a comprehensive picture of Muhammad Zafzaf’s work throughout his career. The collection is arranged in chronological order so as to demonstrate the various transformations that his writing technique underwent. We have to admit here that it was no easy task to select a sampling of his works from a plentiful corpus that is so valuable and diverse in nature, one that manages to provide its readers with an accurate artistic portrait of Moroccan culture, itself.

Most of Zafzaf’s work has been published in newspapers and magazines all over the Arab world, and his stories have been translated into many languages. One of his early short stories, “Al-Didan Allati Tanhan” [The Worms That Bend] (1970), immediately established him as a prominent short story writer, one who could be placed alongside such illustrious names as those of the Egyptians (Yahya Haqqi and Yusuf Idris, to name just two). Even before his death in Casablanca on July 23, 2001, the Ministry of Culture in Morocco had published his collected works, an unprecedented gesture and one that gave due recognition to his status as “the Tolstoy of Morocco.” It is from that collection of his complete works that the stories included in this anthology have been taken.

Why have we chosen examples of the short story genre in order to represent Zafzaf the writer? One reason is that he managed to elevate the Moroccan short story to the level of a self-conscious art. His contributions to this genre are generally regarded as the cornerstone of his journey toward creativity as an avant-gardist. The second reason is our admiration for a great master who was to have a major influence on a whole generation of Moroccan writers. This collection of his stories, translated into English, thus aspires to bring this important writer to the attention of a wider readership.

1. See Afaq [Horizons], vol. 61/62 (1999).