From the title to the storyline and their characters, Moroccan writers seem to be obsessed with featuring animals in their novels.
The fascination can be traced far back into history – to the second century – when Afulay of Madauros, the philosopher and Maghrebi writer better known as Lucius Apuleius wrote the book 'The Golden Ass', also known as 'The Metamorphoses'.
This 11-book novel delves deep into the themes of curiosity, identity, and transformation. When visiting the city of Hypata, the protagonist, who Lucius named after himself, is eager to learn about the witchcraft of the sorceress Pamphile. He spends a few days in the house of her stingy husband Milo under the pretext that he has an official letter that commands him to stay there for a while.
Owl Ointment
Lucius strikes up a romantic relationship with the house maiden Photis and persuades her to show him the magic laboratory of Pamphile. Photis shows Lucius around the room and tells him amazing stories about Pamphile’s witchcraft, including how she once applied a magical ointment to her body that turned her into an owl.
Fascinated, Lucius asks Photis to hand him the ointment so he can undergo a similar metamorphosis, but Photis accidentally hands him the wrong oil, which turns Lucius into an ass instead of a bird. Thus begins Lucius’s arduous journey to regain his human form.
The Golden Asshas distinctive characteristics. Its catchy title bears the name of an interesting animal. Apuleis’ plot not only discusses his protagonist’s misery as a transformed donkey but also the misery that the donkey as an animal endures. And the author uses his protagonist’s half-donkey half-man form to narrate the events through this double lens.
Modern Moroccan novels have kept this tradition alive. Writers have moved animal characters from their fictitious roles in ancient literature to a new phase where they assume new roles and values that widen their literary functionality.
Here is a look at some of the most interesting, eye-catching and sometimes elusive animal-related books that make up Morocco’s menagerie of literature.
Muhammad Zafzaf’s Elusive Fox
When thinking of animal anthropomorphism, the first contemporary Moroccan novelist to spring to mind is Muhammad Zafzaf, especially his 1989 novel The Elusive Fox.
It tells the story of a teacher, Ali, who on a visit to Essaouira accidentally stumbles into the world of hippies who live in a constant trance brought about by hashish, sex, and music. With an absurdist eye, Ali embarks on a reckless journey of existential experiments.
He spends a raucous night in the region of Diabat with a group of primarily foreign naked hippies and offers them the hallucinating local herb “ghaytah”. The next morning, the hippies wake up seemingly struck by insanity. When he hears later that day that three foreign women were killed in the forest, he decides to flee to his native Casablanca on a truck.
The fox in Zafzaf’s novel is a metaphor for the cunning teacher himself, whose absurdist, sardonic, philosophical statements give him an air of eeriness. Like the fox, Ali is a master in survival, managing each time to wriggle out of any trouble he finds. He is also a master in elusiveness, knowing when to appear and when to hide.
The uncanny resemblance between Ali and the fox puts the novel on a path that teeters between reality and metaphor. But then comes a fantasy element with Ali’s periodic growth of a fox’s tail, merging the novel’s symbolic allusions with physical reality. Whether the tail is a hashish-induced hallucination or a real physical manifestation as Ali himself senses is left to the reader’s imagination.
Zafzaf, therefore, fuses Ali and the fox into one and the same, making a dual character. Most of the time, they are fully immersed in each other’s actions, except for the few moments when the fox fails to assist Ali during an embarrassing situation.
Mohammed Harradi’s cow, rabbit and rooster
Mohammed Harradi features more creatures in his work, with titles like 'Dreams of a Cow'(1988), 'Rooster of the North'(2001), 'Melody of the Rabbit'(2022), and his short story collection 'The Cat’s Tail'(1990).
Whereas the animal is evidently present in 'Dreams of a Cow', where the protagonist partially turns into a cow in the fashion of Apollo and Kafka, readers of 'The Melody of the Rabbit' rarely sense the physical presence of the rabbit throughout the story.
The rabbit is explicitly evoked when the narrator sees it jumping through the grass away from two girls, but vanishes towards the end of the novel, prompting the narrator to ask: where is the white rabbit?
Readers will inevitably have pondered the question themselves. After all, they will have tried in vain to look throughout the book for the animal after which it is titled. This deception of the readers echoes back to the tricky, rabbit-like rhythm of the novel, which elusively bounces from one thing to another.
The protagonist Idris, who is fond of modern Russian history, researches the Russian families that fled to Rabat following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and supported the Russian White Army, hence the whiteness of Harradi’s rabbit.
Another parallel with the rabbit is that Idris spends his time stuck in the rabbit-hole gloomy basement archive where he works, which harks back to Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Franz Kafka’s 'Animal'.
