(DOWNLOAD) "Arabic Literature, Sans Joy: Introduction: Mohammed Barrada and Psychic Mobility." by Studies in the Humanities * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Arabic Literature, Sans Joy: Introduction: Mohammed Barrada and Psychic Mobility.
- Author : Studies in the Humanities
- Release Date : January 01, 2003
- Genre: Reference,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 360 KB
Description
Mohammed Barrada's 1979 short story, "Life by Installments" (1979), follows a class of disaffected cultured men who have become "conscious of the same feeling of disintegration in our bones, also an even gloomier melancholy (ka'aba)" (133). The story' s portrayal of modern alienation draws heavily on Western depth psychology. Through the narrator's gloomy walk through a much-Westernized Moroccan city, the collective "we" (an unusual first-person plural point of view) notices the West everywhere, in the mixing of the sexes, in provocative advertising, in bottles of beer, cars, buses, and cinemas that have changed the public face of Morocco. The antidote appears to be a return to traditional Islamic values, such as found in a book mentioned by title, Mohammed ibn Mohammed ibn Abdullah al-Mu'aqqat's The Sword Unsheathed against Him Who Renounces the Prophet's Sunna. In trying to be a writer who is not a writer in "the European way," Barrada spoke for his generation. After the dreams died, he, like his narrator, felt the disillusionment that comes from the recognition that the West had penetrated far more deeply into the consciousness of the Moroccan than had been suspected. Tellingly, Barrada employs in his storytelling the very conventions of Western fiction that enable him to explore the depths of his joyless characters. The "doctor"--Sigmund Freud, whose "Mourning and Melancholy" is the modern classic on the subject--even makes an appearance in the psychic life of the narrator, as he does elsewhere in Barrada's fiction. Not surprisingly, the Western-educated author, professor, and sometime president of the Moroccan Writers Union, Barrada, is well aware of the subtle interconnections between Western depth psychology and the many alienated Muslims who try to connect with an earlier tradition. (48) The melancholia so pervasive in Barrada's story is more than a literary theme and it is a concern in Western literature much earlier than Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia." It is a cultural script that signaled an immense turn in Western thought from religious to psychological categories. The turn, evident already in Early Modern English literature, moved the West toward what sociologist Daniel Lerner called the "psychic mobility" of the Modern world and its expression in a distinctively modern form of fiction. This essay, prompted by the sudden appearance on American television of "suicide bombers," explores the transfer of this cultural script to a small sample of Arabic literature. The sample involves mainly North African, especially Moroccan literature seen against a background illustrated by ah obscure allegorical figure, a certain "Saracen knight" Edmund Spenser named "Sansjoy." The essay moves then toward a comment on the shaheed batal or "devout witnesses" so prominent in news from the Arab-Muslim world today.