Novel
الجنازة
Not translated into English
Ahmed El Madini · 1987
Synopsis
A first chapter in which prose gives way to poetry opens the book, before the narrative takes shape in the five that follow, all of which bear the title of the novel followed by a number. An omniscient narrator lets several generations be heard: that of the Resistance and the festivals of the Oulad Hriz, then that of independence, Saïd, Bachir, Abdallah, El Haouari, who drowns his disappointment in the bars of Casablanca, and finally the inhabitants of a shantytown, where El Mansouri reads a frowned-upon newspaper and where the arrival of engineers sets people talking of rehousing or a motorway.
Context
The novel was published in Rabat in 1987, by the printing house al-Maarif al-Jadida. Mohammed Berrada ranks it among the Moroccan novels which, after the seventies, take the transformations of society as material for imagination and irony and let several languages be heard, alongside books by Zefzaf, Laroui and Berrada himself. Mohamed Amansour, in Fikr wa Naqd, studies the share of writing and that of narrative in it, and the mixture of classical Arabic and Moroccan speech by which its author meant to renew the realist vein.
Who it is for
A novel in Arabic, of demanding construction, which mixes poetry, narrative and colloquial speech; no French translation has been identified.
Prizes and reception
Cited by Mohammed Berrada among the foundational texts of the Moroccan novel; studied by the journal Fikr wa Naqd.
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