Morocco, Latin America, and the Problem of Reading

This article analyzes three short stories by Muammad Zafzāf, the late Moroccan author, exploring Hispanophone roles in Moroccan literary culture. The analysis finds that Zafzāf writes an Arabic metatext about Spanish language, and speaks about Latin Americanness as a cultural referent, all in order to probe the limits of Arabic. Where Arabic fails to be intelligible—a failure represented in fictional Arabic speakers’ frustrated encounters with European languages and societies—Zafzāfʹs fiction looks not northward but westward, seeking an explanation in a Latin American exotic. The article places this ethnographic fiction in the context of the modern Arab literary field, where Moroccan literature holds an acutely contested position. Zafzāf renders Moroccan fiction legible to his Mashriqi readership—which makes up a large portion of his audience overall—defining Moroccan identity against a Hispanophone other. This foreign figureʹs specifically Latin American characteristics change, and challenge, the postcolonial cultural oppositions Arabic literature has historically employed.