From the horse’s mouth
Through a close reading of Meryem Alaoui’s Goncourt-nominated debut novel, La Vérité sort de la bouche du cheval (2018), this article explores the performative and narrative expectations placed on Moroccan women writing in French, tracing multiple strategies of resistance to ‘origin’. A confessional...
Saved in:
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Liverpool University Press
2022-12-01
|
| Series: | Francosphères |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/franc.2022.13 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| Summary: | Through a close reading of Meryem Alaoui’s Goncourt-nominated debut novel, La Vérité sort de la bouche du cheval (2018), this article explores the performative and narrative expectations placed on Moroccan women writing in French, tracing multiple strategies of resistance to ‘origin’. A confessional monologue written from the perspective of a Casablanca sex worker recruited to make a film about ‘la vraie vie’, La Vérité clearly (perhaps even consciously) caters to the metropolitan market’s desire for ‘authentic’ narratives of Muslim women’s marginality. Nonetheless, through a persistent ambiguation of ‘origin’ both inside and outside the text, Alaoui shines a revealing light on the commodification of marginal voices in the postcolonial market, and on the complicated dynamics of literary representation in France. Ultimately, the article argues that it is Alaoui’s inability to divorce her work from her supposed marginal identity that makes La Vérité such a telling endeavour, for it is precisely in the margins that, in the words of Homi Bhabha, ‘the body and the book lose their representational authority’. In her doomed quest for unmarked authorship, Alaoui reveals the extraordinary demands that are placed not only on the author but also on literature, and in doing so stages the impossibility of literary ‘origin’. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 2046-3820 2046-3839 |