Moors with letters on the coast

At the end of October this year 2024, the publishing house Diwan Mayrit of Madrid has published in its collection Moroccan Literature in Spanish an interesting book entitled: Moros con letras en la costa. Introducción a la literatura marroquí en lengua española. Its author is Mohamed Abrighach, currently president of the Moroccan Association of Iberian and Ibero-American Studies and professor of Spanish Literature and Literary Theory in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the Ibnou Zohr University of Agadir.

The book was subsidised by the Spanish Ministry of Culture in its 2024 call for publishing aid. Certainly, many articles, collective books and proceedings of colloquia on current Moroccan literature in the Spanish language have been published for decades, but the present book can be considered the first critical and individual essay devoted exclusively to a critical reading of this literature from Morocco. It is, in this sense, the second critical essay of this nature after a previous and pioneering book: ¡Hay moros en la costa! Literatura marroquí fronteriza en castellano y catalán (Madrid, Iberoamericana, 2014) by the Argentinian researcher Cristian Ricci of the University of California.

Moros con letras en la costa is not an informative manual on Moroccan literature in Spanish, nor is it an exhaustive study of both its semantic keys of an ideological, historical and social nature and its stylistic, structural, compositional and intertextual formal constants. According to the subtitle, it is a general introduction that aims to make a theoretical-critical incursion into this discourse with some general reflections, analysing some of its essential features and categories that are not yet definitive, expanding some, questioning others, refining others, in order to arrive at an initial taxonomic systematisation that will help to outline the identity of this literature and construct its canon.

This book is made up of six independent chapters that deal with different aspects related to the problem of the conceptual denomination of Moroccan literature in Spanish, the anthologies that have been made of it, its colonial or post-colonial genealogy, its nascent and incomplete nature in genre, creative accumulation and reception, its thematic-formal typology and its publishing and distribution system.

The first chapter makes a clearing of nomenclature and the names used to describe the literature we are dealing with, proposing as a possible objective, clear and realistic name: Moroccan literature in the Spanish language.

The second chapter analyses the anthologies that have been produced since 1996 both inside and outside Morocco, attempting to establish the poetics of this anthological practice, the objectives pursued, the selection criteria used and the nature of the texts selected, as well as the inconsistencies noted in their production.

The third chapter is limited to questioning the coloniality of the literature in question by affirming, first, its post-colonial nature through various arguments of an aesthetic, historical and political nature, and second, that only embryonic glimpses of this literature are to be found in a few and limited texts in the colonial period.

The fourth chapter is devoted to arguing that LMLE is a nascent literature in a continuous process of construction and self-definition, as well as an uncertain future. Although the latter is predicted by the deterioration of Spanish in Morocco in recent years, its nascent and budding nature is concretised by the incompleteness that informs it in three ways: the scarce existence of dramatic writing in a generic key, the lack of constancy and accumulation in terms of creation and imagination, and the breakdown in the circuit of communication in a receptive perspective.

The fifth chapter attempts a narrative typology by establishing some registers that can be noted in an individual author or in a group of authors, an expression, in the latter case, of a certain convergence in the way of referencing the country, its culture and its people. In this sense, six narrative modalities are highlighted which obey a certain textual and thematic poetics, the general peculiarities of which are presented and analysed.

The last chapter is devoted to the extra-literary phenomena of publishing and distribution. The non-conventional media used by authors, such as self-publishing, the press and magazines, are highlighted. It also notes an incipient tendency towards international projection and the optimisation of new technological means in both publishing and distribution.

Moros con letras en la costa is, in short, a preliminary essay, a mere systematic-taxonomic approach to current Moroccan literature in the Spanish language in matters of the utmost conceptual and theoretical as well as textual and critical importance. A modest contribution on the part of the author to the clarification and refinement of some of the problems of this Moroccan literary Hispanidad.

It is hoped that this introductory study will spark further critical debate among the scientific community interested in the subject because criticism is positive and necessary for this literature, that is, for its evolution, its understanding, its promotion and the creation of its canon.