“You left a void that we will never be able to fill”: The legacy of Edmond Amran El Maleh in a contemporary Moroccan novella

Abstract

The sudden depart of a large portion of the Moroccan Jewish population between 1948 and 1967 left a void in Moroccan society, to the extent that some scholars account for the existence of a “double trauma” – a trauma for both those who left for Israel and the Moroccan society at large. This profound social wound has never healed. The Moroccan Jewish intellectual Edmond Amran El Maleh (1917-2010) is the hero of the novella Aḥǧiyat Idmūn ʿAmrān al-Māliḥ (The riddle of Edmond Amran El Maleh, 2020) by Mohammed Said Hjiouij, which this article analyses. In this novella, Hjiouij stages the double trauma of Jewish and Muslim Moroccans by giving voice to the liminal character of El Maleh, a harsh critic of Zionism and French colonial ideology. A metaphor for the marginal writer and a symbol of collective trauma, the figure of El Maleh is re-employed and loaded with new functions and meanings in a contemporary work of fiction with a post-modern aesthetics.