Twentieth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This paper analyses Mohamed Berrada’s novel Luʿbat al-nisyān (1987, The Game of Forgetting, 1996), focusing on the book’s unorthodox narrative design, where multiplicity, metafiction, and fragmentation are strategic tools that bring to light the author’s vision of (post)modernist literature in a postcolonial nation. The paper examines how the novel’s compelling experimental quality and efficacious engagement of cultural and socio-political issues are at work, highlighting thereby the text’s commitment overtones. I argue that the novel’s well-crafted narrative multiplicity is an allegory of the idea of “accountability.” By putting the accounts of various narrators under scrutiny, the text seeks to hold them accountable, corroborating thereby Berrada’s vision of narrative transparency at the textual level and his commitment to socio-political transparency at the extra-textual level. Indeed, Berrada has created a novelistic world that serves as a microcosm of his native Morocco, where flawed characters are reflections of the social and political ills besetting the country post-Independence. The novel’s maneuvering at the technical level ultimately serves the goal of achieving transparency and integrity in addition to demonstrating, aesthetically, that truth is relative and that doubt is a vital element in how people should perceive themselves, others, and the world at large. Additionally, the novel’s inclusion of characters with contradictory behaviors, attitudes, and traits is in concert with its investment in Freudian concepts regarding the idea of a fractured/fragmented subjectivity. The novel’s forays—albeit in a measured fashion—into taboo topics, such as sexuality and homosexuality, demonstrate its commitment to the question of free speech.