Novel
حشيش
Not translated into English
Youssef Fadel · 2000
Synopsis
Young people whose future is closed to them dream of the clandestine crossing to the “paradise” on the other shore, in a world of drugs and corruption, moral as much as administrative. According to Mahmoud Rahbi, the novel starts from the exploitation by Spaniards of the poverty of poor Moroccans: a young girl lets herself be seduced by them with the mirage of a passage to the other world. The characters come from the margins, small-time traffickers and the left-behind, and the language brings Moroccan speech into the heart of classical Arabic.
Context
The novel was published in Casablanca by Le Fennec in 2000 and received the Grand Atlas prize, in 2000 (in 2001 according to the Katara prize). Zhour Karam ranks it among the first books in which its author makes political Morocco into an imaginary biography centred on the marginalised and the excluded, before his novels of the years of lead. Mahmoud Rahbi suggests reading it in the light of postcolonial studies. Asharq al-Awsat links the book to a body of work that explores the worlds of the homeless and of traffickers.
Who it is for
A novel of about three hundred pages in Arabic, mixed with Moroccan dialect; no French translation identified.
Prizes and reception
Grand Atlas Prize, awarded by the French embassy in Morocco, in the category of the Arabic-language book.
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The pages consulted to check this page.