- Meryem Alaoui (?, Morocco) – La verité sort de la bouche du cheval (2018, English trans. Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, 2020). This novel tells the story of the thirty-four-year-old struggling Jmiaa, a prostitute who lives alone with her seven-year-old daughter in Casablanca, Morocco. She meets the young, aspiring Moroccan-Dutch film director Chadliaa, who wants to make a movie about the life in Jmiaa’s poor quarter of the city and needs an actrice. This provides Jmiaa the opportunity of a lifetime. The novel is a humorous account of day-to-day life in Casablanca in all its facets (also in L: Love, Lust, and Relationships: Lust and Sex: Prostitution).
- Laylā al-Aṭrash (1948-, Palestine / Jordan) – Tarānīm al-Ghawāyah (‘Hymns of temptation’, 2014). The documentary film producer Rāwiyah Abū Najmah returns to Jerusalem for the first time since 1967 (see 1967: al-Naksah), after she is granted permission to enter the city to take care of her aging aunt. Her mission is also, however, to make a film about the lives of the city’s inhabitants, and while doing so she discovers the forbidden love story that once existed between her aunt and the Padre. The novel reflects on the history of the city, especially its Christian identity, from the Ottoman time to the Israeli occupation and the relation between its inhabitants and its sacred status (reference) (also in C: Cities: 1948 Palestine: Jerusalem).
- Rachid Boudjedra (written elsewhere as Rashīd Būjdirah, 1941-, Algeria) – Les 1001 Années de la nostalgie (‘1001 years of nostalgia’, 1979). This novel is a satire of the imaginary Algerian Saharan village of Manama which is confronted with an American film company, symbolic for American cultural imperialism, wanting to make a film adaption of the One Thousand and One Nights. When the confrontation between the film-crew and the inhabitants erupts into violence, the scenes are used for the movie. The main protagonist of the novel is an only child in a family of nine sets of twins and spends much time looking for the house in Manama where historian Ibn Khaldun presumably wrote his important work (reference) (also in S: Social Issues and Societal Change: Globalization and Consumerism and L: Cultural and Literary Heritage: Folktales: A Thousand and One Nights).
- Moncef Mohamed Metoui (1943-, Tunisia) – Racisme, je te hais (‘Racism, I hate you’, 1973). In this novel, the author describes coming to the cinema in Paris as a starving student, and his experiences with other actors.
Refrences:
In order of appearance
- Sārah al-Qaḍāh. 2016. “Laylā al-Aṭrash: ‘Tarānīm al-Ghawāyah’ Riwāyah al-Maskūt ʿanhu fī Tārīkh al-Quds.” www.7iber.com, 8 February 2016, https://www.7iber.com/culture/interview-with-laila-alatrash/ (last accessed 3 May 2023)
- Mildred Mortimer. 1981. “Reviewd work: ‘Les 1001 Années de la nostalgie’ by Rachid Boudjedra.” The French Review 54(4): 617-618, p. 618