“Writings, context and societies” is the first conference in the CCME’s “Women’s writing in Morocco and immigration” programme at the Rabat international Bookfair. French-Moroccan novelist Samira El Ayachi, Belgian-Moroccan writer and politician Fatiha Saidi and French-Moroccan writer and poet Rim Battal answered questions from Younès Ajarrai, a cultural player and curator of several exhibitions and festivals, including the African Book Festival in Marrakech.
In their presentations, the authors explained that writing is more than just a means for expressing themselves or giving their thoughts a structure; it can also be a way of healing the wounds of the past, speaking out against injustice, asserting themselves in society, or drawing on the past to get to know themselves better and make themselves known.
Speaking about the reasons that led her to write, Fatiha Saidi said that after she left politics, she felt leaving the political scene, she felt an “urgency” to write in the context of migration, changing her position from writing object to writing actor, writing about herself and telling her own story.
Writing has been a therapy enabling her to share her emotions on traumatic subjects, whether it be the expulsion of Moroccans from Algeria, as she herself comes from a family expelled from Algeria in the 1970s, or the issue of forced marriage, of which she was a victim at the age of eighteen.
In her book “Échos de la mémoire sur les montagnes du Rif”, translated into Arabic last year and published by the CCME, in which she recounts the lives of women from the Rif whom she met during the Al Hoceima earthquake, or her book J’ai deux amants, published this year, in which she chose to honour Moroccan writers in Belgium, she explains that her aim has always been to pass on the memory to new generations, with a view to preserving it, especially in a context of migration.
For Rim Battal, writing conveys the struggle to reject the social and family pressures that can be so destructive for women, which leave deep wounds in their minds and memories.
The main character of her new novel, “Je me regarderai dans les yeux”, is a teenager who has been asked to produce a certificate of virginity simply because she was seen smoking a cigarette. She used this story to analyse the mechanisms of the patriarchal system, which uses customs and practices to impose its hold on society. In this novel, the author says she wants to highlight the suffering of all women who have suffered domestic violence, which is becoming an extension of violence within society.
For her part, Nesrine Slaoui says that writing is above all a political decision for women, particularly in the context of migration, which helps them to tell their story and talk about certain taboos that cannot be addressed in a family or societal context.
It also allows them to feel safe because ‘there are stereotypes and racist prejudices that prevent us from expressing the truth of what we experience as women, and writing allows us to come out of this “invisibility” and enter the feminist narrative’, she explains.
Samira El Ayachi, for her part,spoke about the need for context in every creative process. Growing up in a cold area of Northern France, the town library was her only shelter, which influenced her writing experience in an unconscious way.
In her works, she wrote in response to questions that preoccupied her. In Quarante jours après ma mort (éditions de l’Aube, 2013), Samira Ayachi attempted to answer the question “Who are you?” and explore the complexities and contradictions of identity, particularly for generations of immigrants.
Her novel, Le ventre des hommes (published by Editions de l’Aube in 2013), traces the journey of her family, who came from a remote region of southern Morocco to work in the coal mines of northern France. She tells her father’s story, which he never told her, and which embodies the suffering of 70,000 Moroccan coal miners working without legal status and without equal rights with other nationalities.
‘What inspired me in this story is that the workers used every means of expression, in a context of repression, to reject the discrimination they suffered and demand their rights’, explains Ayachi. ‘’The idea that inspired me in my story was that the workers used all means of expression, in an environment of economic pressure, at the same time rejecting the discrimination they faced and reclaiming their rights,‘’ explains Ayachi.
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