The Occupied Marginal Space and Rebuilding Memory in the North Moroccan Novels

Abstract

This article aims to explore the patterns marking the occupied marginal space in Mohamed Ankar’s novel “Barrio Málaga” from an aesthetic and artistic perspective that tracks the role of memory in shaping the occupied marginal space and reveals its realistic connotations and its sociological and ideological dimensions without digging deep into the historical aspects of the Spanish colonial period in the North of Morocco. Furthermore, the article seeks to highlight the historical dimensions of the novel from an interpretive perspective that considers the novel as a mirror reflecting another untold history, which is the history of the margin and its people as shaped in the memory, which is a mechanism for storing and rereading perspectives and attitudes according to a perceptual process that goes beyond the obsession of laying emphasis on the colonizer and the forms of resistance to its occupation and aims at highlighting the roles of this space in exposing the aspects of authoritarianism, oppression and injustice of the colonizer. Accordingly, the research findings reaffirm that both identifying the aspects of the marginal space in this novel and highlighting its working mechanisms and role in providing an imaginary portrayal of this space are likely to contribute to rebuilding the memory and identifying the aspects of correlation between the realistic and the imaginary to identify the symbolic and cultural connotations behind taking the margin as a framework for building an indicative process based on the space, which is not separate from the other narrative elements marking the narrative discourse.