Novel
جنوب الروح
Not translated into English
Mohammed al-Achaari · 1996
Synopsis
Fleeing the years of drought and a vendetta that has taken almost all his family, the Fersioui leaves the Rif with his brother's children, the eldest of whom is Salam. For six months and six days he crosses forests, fields and villages, sleeps in mosques, lives on alms, until the domes of Fez come into view, then takes the road to Zerhoun, where the lineage takes root. The novel follows his descendants, whose family record book keeps the desire to return to the land they left; the strange mingles with the legendary there, and death holds a central place.
Context
The novel appeared in Casablanca in 1996, from the Rabita publishing house, after five poetry collections and a book of short stories: it is its author's first. The study by the Arab Thought Foundation sees in it the core novel of a body of work built on the pairing of uprooting and exile, which the next novel will extend to three generations. Mohamed Aslim, in the journal Nizwa in 1998, read in it material that was at once psychoanalytic and ethnological. Le voyage du Fersioui is studied in the third year of middle school in Morocco.
Who it is for
A novel of 173 pages in Arabic, in an ample prose nourished by legend; no French translation identified.
Prizes and reception
First novel by an author whom the “Arab Booker” will crown fifteen years later; an extract from it is read in middle school.
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