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Filmic and Novelistic “Returns” of the Moroccan Jews
Abstract
The filmic and novelistic re-emergence of local and cosmopolitan journeys of Moroccan Jews signals a desire to come to terms with a silenced portion of the Moroccan past. Aomar Boum and Oren Kosansky rightly inquire into the conditions which made the Jewish “themes, plots, and characters [appear] significantly in Moroccan cinema.” (The “Jewish Question,” 224)While Boum and Kosansky inscribe this filmic re-emergence of the Moroccan Jews within the political dynamics of a state that was making “efforts to refashion” its image (224), Valerie Orlando conceptualizes this un-covering of Moroccan Jewry within the truth and reconciliation process engaged by the Moroccan state since 1999 (Screening Morocco, 66-70). These three scholars seem to agree that the Moroccan state had a role to play in the process of filmic returns of the Jews; however, in this paper, I foreground individual initiatives, such as Kamal Hachkar’s provocative documentary Tinghir-Jerusalem (2011) in order to demonstrate their powerful effect on voicing memory of both familiar and unfamiliar parts of Moroccanness. Where film is concerned, Tinghir-Jerusalem’s testimonial approach to memory diverges from the artistic re-imaginings adopted in Adieu Mères (2008), Marock (2005) and Where Are You Going, Moshe? (2009)The testimonial power of Tinghir-Jerusalem, mediated in Moroccan Arabic and Amazigh, breaks spatio-temporal boundaries and brings the Muslim and the Jew together in the shared space of their common, social memory. On the novelistic side, Hebrew notes (1990s), Bāb al-sha‘ba (2011), Le Captif de Mabrouka (2010) and The Farmer of Forgetfulness (2003), among other titles, revisit themes of departure, exile and return of the Jews into the Moroccan public sphere. What are the implications of these “memorial” processes on the refiguration of the heteroglossic nature of Moroccanness and the place of the Jewish presence in the collective imagination? What does it mean to watch a Jew speak Berber or Moroccan Arabic and reminisce about his/her land of childhood from exile? Do these literary portrayals re-actualize the Jewishness of Morocco? Ultimately, the notion of “Jewish returns” proves to be inaccurate, since these works demonstrate that the Jew has never left the most dynamic, intimate part of the Moroccan people’s life: their memory.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Morocco
Sub Area
Comparative