Veni, Pati, Scripsi: The Maghrebi Diaspora in Driss Chraïbi’s Les Boucs and Salah Methnani-Mario Fortunato’s Immigrato
Abstract
The empire knows how to write back even after it shrinks, but the formerly colonized who move to the metropolis write differently. Two Maghrebi diasporic novelists – Driss Chraïbi, a Moroccan living in France and Salah Methnani, a Tunisian who found shelter in Italy --, scan the territories of their adoptive countries, produce maps of tortured inner experience, and amalgamate the autobiographic with the fictional. They write in the respective languages of their adoptive countries: Chraïbi, at the very beginning of the Maghrebi diasporic literature in France, published Les Boucs in 1955 and Methnani (in collaboration with Mario Fortunato), published the first Maghrebi immigrant novel in Italian, Immigrato in 1990. In revealing the creativity and productive capacities of the Maghrebi diaspora, Les Boucs and Immigrato are ground-breaking novels of the diasporic experiences of Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians living in France and Italy. The analyses of Les Boucs and Immigrato and of their critical reception constitute the bulk of this dissertation. Drawing on Ato Quayson’s concept of the “diasporic imaginary” and Linda Hutcheon’s theory of “irony” and “parody,” the dissertation focuses on the constant intertwining of gravitas and levitas in the two novels. It claims that through the deployment of these literary devices, Les Boucs and Immigrato uniquely stress the grave, dramatic, and at times tragic dimensions of the Maghrebi condition in the diaspora. To this end, the subtle presence of the ironic and the parodic, along with instances of levity, challenges prevalent readings of Maghrebi diasporic literature as homogeneous. Shifting the critical attention from text and author to the reader, this study’s final chapter contends that Les Boucs and Immigrato invite the reader to play an active role in the production of meaning.