Sahara as Symbol in Later Twentieth-Century North African Literature: An Introductory Essay and Three Stories of the Desert

Abstract

The Sahara, with its harshness and apparent emptiness, is a place that even Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, harnessed symbol to describe. Images—or perhaps mirages—of seemingly endless wind-swept ergs, an oftentimes murderous sun, and vast stretches of rock-strewn hamada perversely tantalize the human imagination. The Great Desert is also, however, home to the indigenous Berbers and their camels, making this wilderness as much a sanctuary of the human spirit as a wasteland. The critical portion of this thesis, which is representative rather than exhaustive of the field, considers examples of symbolic desert descriptions made by later twentieth-century native and expatriate North African writers. Authentically representing the people of North Africa is a particular concern of this project and I am sensitive to the ways in which I describe the Amazighen tribesmen in my writing. To that end, I first situate my work within the context of Edward Said’s Orientalism before examining influential fiction writers. Ibrahim al-Koni (Libyan), Miral al-Tahawy (Egyptian), and Paul Bowles (American) all present the Sahara as wasteland, a place for human wander, and in the case of al-Koni and al-Tahawy, a setting appropriate to magical realism. Three original short stories form the second part of my thesis that collectively tell of the misadventures of a young American Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco who, like Bowles’s characters, is also a wanderer of the wasteland. With inspiration from al-Tahawy and al-Koni, I then explore both female characterization and magical realism to illuminate the portrait of a young Tamazight woman of the Atlas Mountains, moving the Peace Corps Volunteer from the center to the periphery of the work.