Dresden Can wait: A Moroccan novel

De: Mois Benarroch

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

"The book unravels from one thread and, symptomatically, we pass through variations on a theme: the Moroccan as a stranger, who never truly manages to integrate and lives this estrangement as a visible scar for all to see: in his name, his accent, his economic failure, or his economic success, in every context he is the Moroccan. Benarrochdoes not decide whose story it is, until the point where he raises a possibility, through one of the heroes, perhaps himself, to propose a scenario for a telenovela about Moroccans in Israel. Except that here Benarroch reaches the impossibility of writing such a script, because he has no idea what the "typical" story is, he does not want to choose the typical story, and every Moroccan faction in Moroccan society – he actually maps out, by way of negation, a complete Moroccan map – demands to be "the typical Moroccan." This is also where the intra-communal quarrels over "the right of representation" begin. "The problem is that every text about Moroccans turns into an endless political journey of disputes and you can never reach the text, between the attacks of the supporters and the detractors and the attackers and the attacked. On the one hand, the question of representation; immediately, with every work, will come the claim of representation, the Moroccan, the minority must represent. But the hegemon does not have to represent, he is a private case, after all..." etc. Some of these problems, which Benarrochattributes to the Moroccan minority, are problems of the theory of prose and the theory of prose is, when all is said and done, the theory of our linguistic behaviors. Some of them are problems of colonial subjects, and the theory of prose of the subjects, in literature or in life, is summed up in the difficult question: how to tell themselves, without the mediation of the master, the white man. The answers depend, ostensibly, on the narrator's ability to escape the "taken-for-granted." In the case of the Moroccans in Israel, Benarroch believes that because of the absence of their own memory, they do not know the typical at all: for example, the linguistic wealth, the French and Spanish of the Moroccan Jews, contrary to the stereotype, which Benarroch does not like, as if Moroccan Jews are first and foremost Arabic speakers. The linguistic matter returns, again and again, as a symptom of estrangement, of not knowing, of alienation, and perhaps also, without Benarrochintending it, a claim of primacy: 'we are more cultured than you' (we have Spanish and French as mother tongues; you – as a foreign language, at best). Benarroch has an advantage, which is also a "disadvantage" in our cultural field. He was not born here and arrived relatively late. Therefore, he did not undergo the process of merging, the homogenization that produced the story of "absorption," "poverty," "ignorance," and "the good ones immigrated to France." He did not truly lose his memory, nor did he acquire another memory in its place. His knowledge regarding Moroccan Jewry is fascinating. And he is not dragged into slogans, (such as "Arab Jews") from the "leftist" side. His book, in its entirety, is concerned with the utter failure to write a novel about Moroccans in Israel. He returns to this question again and again and what emerges is a kind of essay from the mouths of various characters, three generations, men and women. The novel includes excellent insights on the condition of Moroccan Jews: Benarroch is dissatisfied with the ignorance concerning Moroccans, and through his own comprehensive knowledge, in languages and in religious matters – he essentially seeks to be the storytelling father of the other narrtive, the one that has not yet been told. Thus, he finds himself as one who refuses to be embodied in a single character and has no single father figure. Therefore, he understands the Moroccan story, both through the feminist story and through the Jewish story in the Diaspora." Yitzhak Laor, Haaretz