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ABSTRACT
Through a reading of Moroccan writer Abdelkrim Jouiti's 1999 short story "Medina Al-Nuhhas" (The City of Brass), this essay seeks to understand how imagined global cities of the past function as imprisoning architectures of memory and how narrative space can be cleared to creatively imagine a new future. The essay argues that in re-telling multiple stories of the City of Brass, Jouiti's text works to expose multiple layers of nostalgia in dominant discourses of modernity, memory and identity in order to critique the processes of industrialization, urbanization and the drive for modernity in contemporary Morocco. By unearthing and questioning intertextual literary traces, rumors and ruins from Arabic and modernist traditions, the text destabilizes the monumental and monolithic nature of cultural narratives that imagine the greatness of the past so as to dissimulate the lack and inequality of the present.
Cars zigzag and collide on the slippery streets of Casablanca at night. it is raining, and intoxicated men and women circle the peripheries of the city searching to prolong the evening high. As fog rolls in from the Atlantic, they lose sight of their destinations, and the city streets become the site of accidents and their accidentals: chance encounters, injuries, broken bodies, death. This is the modern Moroccan city as described in Mohamed zafzaf's 1999 short story "Une nuit à Casablanca" (A Night in Casablanca): during the day, its arteries open to social and economic mobility; at night, the avenues serve as vehicles of destitution for marginalized peoples seeking to escape reality. Human interaction and intimacy take the form of shared whisky, rolled joints, robberies and car crashes; no true or meaningful communication is possible. And thus for zafzaf, the city at night is where the drive for modernity takes a wrong turn, where history veers off-track.
In many respects this literary image of Casablanca as a spiritual wasteland corresponds to a general depiction of the city in late twentieth-century Arabic literature. As numerous scholars have shown, the Arabic novel's aesthetic response to the rapid transformation of reality is the figure of the city as a site of alienation, fragmentation, and conflict associated with modernization and capitalist urbanization of the region. Critics such as Hafez Sabry have argued that where the city was once...