Messaouda

by Abdelhak Serhane

Prostituée, initiatrice, sorcière, Messaouda est un personnage de légende. Elle fait l'unanimité des désirs, et chacun la vénère comme une sainte. Dans un monde hanté par ses terreurs, elle incarne la liberté et la vie. Après sa mort, Driss répudiera son épouse, abandonnera ses enfants, s'en ira à la recherche de sexes pubères ou incrédules. Il ne tardera pas à trouver des matrices ouvertes à ses obsessions. Quant à son fils - le narrateur -, il apprendra l'atroce vérité sur la médiocrité de son père qui fut mêlé aux événements sanglants de la colonisation. L'extraordinaire violence de ce récit jaillit des souvenirs, des rêves et des fantasmes d'un jeune Maghrébin. Messaouda dit l'angoisse terrible d'une solitude, parmi d'autres solitudes. C'est le roman d'un peuple oublié, tapi à l'ombre d'une histoire silencieuse.
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In this autobiographical first novel, a Moroccan boy grows up in a small town in the Atlas Mountains, hating his father, a philanderer and bully. The father deserts the family and repudiates his wife "to chase his dreams and madness" in a town famous for its prostitution. Village society, seen as pathologically patriarchal and morally bankrupt, likewise rejects the mother and children. The author uses the parents' tormented relationship to symbolize the decadence of Moroccan peasant culture and the baneful effects of French political and cultural domination. A literature professor in Morocco, Serhane has tried to draw from both Arabic and European literary traditions, but his writing is of ten repetitious and unpersuasive. Nevertheless, this book has power, which de rives from its unblinking description of a violent, sexually squalid way of life. (November 17
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Genres: Morocco, Fiction

224 pages, Pocket Book

First published January 1, 1983

Reviews

[Fata Morgana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strong and brutal. Ruthless. Sad. Touching. Yet powerful and beautiful, poetic language.

[Moushine Zahr · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first time I've read a book from Moroccan author Abdelhak Serhane. The author belongs to a generation of Moroccan authors, who wrote in French langage a semi-autobiography about their childhood. While most stories were set in the city of Fes, this story is set in the small city of Azrou during the 50's mostly.

Readers follow Abdelhak, born and raised in a poor family in Azrou during the last years of French occupation in the 1950's. His family is dominated by the father, always demonstrating violence to his children and wife whether physical violence against all, verbal violence against all or sexual violence against his wife within the comfort of the house. Outside the house, the father and all men alike are shown as hypocrite acting as sexual predators and behaving religious only when needed.

From the beginning, the author wrote a diatribe against society denouncing false strong adult men being violent all the time in several ways, angry at weak submissive women like his mother, and critical of religious men. The tone is similar from start to end: brutal, explicite, and dark.

It is a unique book compared to other books set in Fes. It is a traumatizing chilhood Abdelhak lived.

[Ouafae · Rating 4 out of 5]

La violence , le cruel, le brut désarçonnant d'un récit qui révèle à celui qui ose le franchir la plus délicieuse des offrandes: Une poésie écrite de sang, empreinte de rêve, au goût amère de la vie..
Un récit qui rappelle les milles et une nuit, où le Fou, le Fakir la Femme le Fils ,et d'autres,s'emboitent la parole, pour rompre l'omerta et dévoiler les inégalités et les injustices; pour raconter les histoires que personne n'ose raconter, pour dire la monstruosité des hommes, la misère des femmes, le calvaire des enfants et amorcer les travers de la colonisation..