Between Representing a Story of Migration and Re-Imagining a Tale of Exoticism in Abdelkader Benali’s De Langverwachte

What is it about?

In this article, I analyze the Moroccan-Dutch author Abdelkader Benali’s novel De Langverwachte (The Long-awaited, 2002), which narrates a story of migration from Morocco to the metropolitan city of Rotterdam. Through my close reading, I delve into the way the author employs exoticism as a particular practice of “cultural translation;” of seeing, speaking and thinking onto migrant people as exotic Others. The novel represents migrant characters through exoticist cultural codes, among which mystery, extraordinariness, strangeness, romantic fantasy and superstition. Its particular mode of narration testifies to both a fascination with and a fear from the culturally unfamiliar and different Other. The narrator’s speculative representation of migrants’ cultural and mental world, both in their homeland and in the host society, reinforces the other’s absolute difference, his unfamiliarity and strangeness. I argue, then, that the text represents a touching story of migration as if re-imagining a tale of exoticism.

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