Reflections on “Translating Morocco: Fouad Laroui, Emma Ramadan and Adam Shatz”
March 22, 2016
From Casey Henry:
Moderator Adam
Shatz framed the night’s discussion by bringing up what he thought was a
central component of Fouad’s writing: liminality. Fouad’s uniqueness
was not only in presenting and toying with the boundaries between
cultural and linguistic identities, but investing a humor and robustness
into the depictions of “liminality.”
Responding to how
he negotiates certain loaded identity categories, Fouad described, by
way of parallel example, how he spends his time at home. In the 80% of
his life he spends in domesticity, he is — like a particle ignored in a
physics experiment — nearly non-existent, abstracted into “pure
consciousness.” The other 20% out in the world presented glancing and
contrasting forces of presumed identity categories. Yet, these are
deceptive, and one often finds themselves fumbling through a series of
presumptions–and subverting these presumptions for aesthetic or
political effect.
The question, and
quality, of “arbitrariness,” was raised by Shatz. Fouad claims that
Americans can’t fully appreciate “arbitrariness,” as they have never
lived in a tyranny, and hence experienced seemingly surreal occurrences
as a product of tyrannical governments (he recounted being stopped
multiple times in Kafka-esque fashion by police in Morocco for the same
imagined offenses). Adam Shatz discussed this in relation to Fouad’s
story “Born Nowhere,” about a character who realizes his birth
certificate lists a town that is seemingly non-existent. Fouad gently
outlined a over-arching moral in the piece relating to how, he thinks,
we are better of without a nostalgia for tangible “roots,” and should
rather embrace a productive confusion and sense of dislocation. This
sense of production dislocation was one employed fruitfully by the
translator of Fouad’s works, Emma Ramadan, who claimed she was able to
float skillfully between the particular, in this case masculine,
positions of Fouad’s works by embracing her own sense of estrangement in
Morocco.
Fouad’s comments
appeared to use his own work as evidence for the a new kind of
heterogeneous, irreverent, polyglot aesthetic, used as a political and
personal force.