Abstract
In my engagement and translation of contemporary Moroccan fiction, along with my ongoing interest in challenges to Standard Language ideologies and practices, I have found that Moroccan writers walk a fine line between using the vernacular while at the same time aiming their work toward broader audiences. This paper will offer a reading of Yassin Adnan’s novel Hot Maroc, which is essentially a tragi-comic homage to his home city of Marrakech. Displaying a dazzling knowledge of Moroccan literary and popular culture, the author deftly pivots between hyper-local events in Marrakech politics, Moroccan national scandals, high Arab literary culture, Muslim religious history, and the vulgar and adolescent rants of the novel’s young protagonists online and in person, all expressed in discourse-appropriate language registers. This novel grapples with the age-old tale of traditional culture and its valorization that is being forced to cede turf to a younger generation striving to find a fresh voice in protest and on the internet.
Not only was the novel quite successful in terms of sales (in Morocco and abroad), but it was also long-listed for the 2017 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. This paper will examine this groundbreaking multi-glossic novel about the internet, focusing specifically on how Adnan utilizes Moroccan darija – in narrative, dialogue, and online interactions – taking into consideration the role of the internet in widening the appeal of a Moroccan novel that focuses on hyper-local events and that uses the local vernacular to a broad, Arab reading public. In other words, I aim to read this novel that can be considered one of Morocco’s first novels about the internet through the prism of the internet’s role in the increasing use of vernacular language and its acceptance in writing across the Arab world.
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