This paper will address the marginal geographic and narrative spaces inhabited by the central characters of Zafzaf's first two novels, "The Woman and the Rose," (1972) and "Sidewalks and Walls" (1974). Both novels present the plight of the intellectual in the postcolonial Moroccan state by depicting the narrator as stuck in liminal zones from which there is no significant contact with the mainstream world. The first novel does this more literally by having the narrator drifting through the Spanish beach resort town of Torremolinos, while the second novel's depiction is figurative: it transforms the coffeehouses and apartments of Moroccan cities into a wasteland of exiles. "The Woman and the Rose" treats the plight of the intellectual as essentially structural: there simply is no meaningful way for the intellectual to engage with the modern state. In "Sidewalks and Walls," this situation is somewhat more tragic, as the narrator is unable, or refuses, to see the opportunities in front of him. The paper will situate Zafzaf's work in the context of postcolonial Arabic-language Moroccan fiction before moving on to close readings of each work. These close readings will be used to derive the thematic concerns of each novel and to demonstrate how each work uses its narrator's blind spot to depict the plight of the intellectual in early 1970s Morocco.