What is it about?

A review of the English translations of Youssef Fadel's novels A Beautiful White Cat Walks With Me and A Rare Blue Bird Flies With Me. In addition to being a book review, this is also an essay about the themes of Fadel's novels and the significance of their re-imagination of Moroccan testimonial writings.

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Why is it important?

Fadel's novels have inaugurated a "second wave" in Moroccan testimonial literature that deals with the "years of lead." Additionally, these novels complicate the relationship between testimony, memory and fictionalization and present new challenges to scholars of memory and testimony.

Perspectives

It will be very helpful to students in Middle Eastern and Maghrebi literature classes. I also also suggest various ways of putting Fadel's novels in dialogue with other works that are tightly or tangentially related to Tazmamart disappearance camp in order to maximize the investigation of their intertextual connections.

Brahim El Guabli
Williams College

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This page is a summary of: Youssef Fadel’s re-imagination(s) of Moroccan testimonial literature: a book review essay, The Journal of North African Studies, August 2017, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/13629387.2017.1366290.
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