Conference Abstracts
33. Lebbady, Hasna; Faculty of Letters Rabat:
"Narrative Generations From the Pre-Colonial Folktale "Aicha
Jama" to the Postcolonial Film"Douiba"
One difference between the pre-colonial and the postcolonial
city can be illustrated by the difference between Tetouan and Casablanca
as commented on by a woman who lived in Tetouan in the first half
of the twentieth century and who had the opportunity to accompany
the household of a judge to Casablanca. A few years later, when
she returned to Tetouan, some of the women asked her what Casablanca
was like. After thinking about it for a while she announced: ‘A
Sidi Beliot, Dar Beida bla hiot.’ Beginning by invoking Casablanca’s
patron saint, Sidi Beliot, she then went on to pronounce the most
outstanding feature for her of the city itself; that it had no walls
or that it had spilled out well beyond any attempt to impose a confining
definition on it.
Walls of every kind are what the protagonists of Moroccan women’s
tales are often presented as having to contend with. Aicha, the
protagonist of so many women’s tales in Morocco, is the one
who seeks to transgress both the confines of her father’s
house and those of the metmoura or underground silo within which
the sultan’s son places her once they get married, through
her ability to manipulate words and to outwit the men in her life.
It is this ability which distinguishes the heroines of these tales,
more so even than their physical beauty. Texts, such as Aicha’s
tale, can best be understood if one takes into consideration the
context within which they were told by the communities of women
within the households of the walled-in medinas, for whom the tales
involved a dialogic process enabling them to come to terms with
their position within that society. Such a context, like the walls
of the medina, served to both confine them and also to enable them
to define themselves. By bringing the tales outside the walled-in
medina and placing them within the context of the postcolonial city,
which refuses to be confined or defined so conveniently, isn’t
one decontextualizing them and subjecting them to misinterpretation?
This paper will discuss some of the degradations involved in transforming
the pre-colonial folktale: “Aicha Jarma” into the postcolonial
film: “Douiba”, focusing on the transformation involved
and paying particular attention to the different audiences concerned.
Within the old houses of the walled-in medinas the basic unit was
the community of women, who depended on such protective and confining
notions as city walls to both come to terms with their identities
and also transgress those imposed on them, through the effective
manipulation of words. By uprooting the tale from such a context
and forcing it to inhabit a different form—more suited to
the mass media associated with the postcolonial city—the dialogic
relationship between the audience and the tales has necessarily
been lost. In the process, the tale has been condensed, reinterpreted,
and considerably transformed, thus undermining the themes which
it had originally gone to some length to convey. It can even be
argued that the tale has been altered to conform to an Orientalist
view of Moroccan culture.
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