(Post)Modernism and Morocco: Narrating the Tanjawi in Hassan Najmi’s Gertrude How has the shared historical and political past of colonization, globalization and mass migration played out in its cultural context? How has it avoided mere imitation by the East or appropriation by the West, suggesting instead a more nuanced relationship and one that challenges hegemonic Othering? L’IMA’s 1999 “Le Maroc de Matisse” exhibition offered one possible way to present the relationship between France and Morocco, framing the show not as an Orientalist moment in Morocco’s history, nor a postcolonial refutation of Matisse’s Orientalism, but rather as moments of collaboration, making a strong, if implicit, case for (re)considering Matisse as a Moroccan artist. Hassan Najmi’s 2014 postmodern novel Gertrude (originally published ??????? in Arabic the same year) offers another way to envision this relationship. Its preface begins with an excerpt (in the original English) from Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in which she writes the following, “[w]e had taken on a guide, Mohammed, and he had taken a fancy to us.” The novel builds on this reference to a Moroccan guide in Tangier, constructing a romance between Gertrude and Mohammed that is framed by a contemporary story of the narrator and his own American girlfriend. Najmi imagines the voice of Mohammed (in a technique familiar to readers of Djebar and Mernissi) expanding his story to becoming an intimate in Stein’s life in Paris, and a friend of other Modernist writers such as Anaïs Nin. While Mohammed of the novel is a failed writer, too entangled in Stein’s art and life to create his own, his story is preserved in written form by the narrator of the novel, who helps the dying Mohammed by inscribing “the silent archive within him.” This paper will explore Mohammed’s silenced archive in which this non-elite voice formerly “robbed of agency” contributes to, disrupts and displaces elitist and Eurocentric narratives, using theoretical concepts of “history from below” (Subaltern Studies and Gramsci) as well as considering Najmi’s novel in the context of others such as Amin Maalouf’s 1983 The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (which challenges hegemonic Christian narratives, deconstructing and rewriting history) and Fatima Mernissi’s (1990) Forgotten Queens of Islam (which through an act of feminist recovery writes the stories of women whose voices have been silenced by patriarchal hegemonic narratives of the past), and if it suggests a non-binary and non-hegemonic shared cultural (his)story.