Flash Fiction in Morocco: Pioneering Pens & Translated Samples

Abstract

Moroccan culture in the Precolonial era dedicated a very important part of its history to theology and military action. The medieval literature taught today at schools and universities in Morocco is absolutely not Moroccan Literature. Rather, it is an Andalusian one that migrated once to Medieval Morocco with the Arabo-Islamic legacy right after Andalusia had fallen down, by the end of the fifteenth century, in the hands of the Spaniards. Ever since, Morocco’s cultural complex was solved and great poets gradually emerged such as Abderrahman El Mejdoub (16^th century), Sidi Bahloul Shergui (17^th century), Sidi Kaddour El Alami (19^th century) and many others who specialised in mystic poetry, using dialectal Arabic as a linguistic tool. Yet, during the colonial era (1912-1955), Moroccans felt a civilisational shock. They saw how far behind the times they were and that they had to work on two fronts: to liberate their country from the Franco-Spanish colonisation and to take the best of the occidental civilisation as a foundation for their Moroccan project in the postcolonial era. Accordingly, so many spheres of knowledge were imported like real sciences. Some social and human sciences were either allowed despite the earlier censorship and friction with the authorities like philosophy, or revived but in a newer look like drama, or even launched for the first time like novel and short story. Sixty years later, Morocco became the capital of short story both in North Africa and the whole Arab world. This privilege, today, is reinforced with Morocco’s welcoming a new narrative text-type that is still unwelcome in other cultures: Flash Fiction.