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INTRODUCTION

Abdelkébir Khatibi (1938–2009) is considered one of the most prominent writers of postcolonial Francophone literature from North Africa. His list of works includes thirty-six separate titles, and during his lifetime he won literary and intellectual prizes in Morocco and France. Despite the fact that he was a trained sociologist, Khatibi described himself as a poet, saying, “I don’t consider myself a thinker or a philosopher or a critic, even if I often use this or that philosophical or scientific concept. For me, I strive in the direction of the ‘poem.’”¹

Khatibi grew up in several cities—first El Jadida, then Marrakech and Casablanca. He wrote about these years in his first major literary work, La mémoire tatouée (Tattooed Memory), an experimental autobiography.² He recalls the experience of having his father die when he was seven years old, and how he was subsequently trundled between his mother’s household and that of a loving aunt. It was during these years, he speculates, that he developed an intellectual sensibility that favored multiplicity, the intercultural, and a bearing toward the world and its diversity. In La mémoire tatouée, he wonders self-consciously, “The orphan of a father who had disappeared and two mothers, would I have a sort of toggle set inside me?”³ Later, in Le scribe et son ombre (The scribe and his shadow), a work published one year before his death, he declares: “This multipolar tendency … nourished in me a strong feeling of uncertainty that, by chance, orphaned me of any spiritual master who would have guided my education.”⁴ It would be hard to overemphasize the figure of the orphan in understanding Khatibi’s life and work as it provides him with the poetics that shaped much if not all of his literary production.

In 1959 Khatibi left Morocco for Paris to attend graduate school; he finished his PhD in sociology at the Sorbonne in 1965. His dissertation was devoted to a sociological reading of the Maghrebi novel in French, the first work to deal with the subject. The three men who sat on his thesis committee were Roland Barthes; René Etiemble, an important figure in the history of the discipline of comparative literature in France; and his principal advisor, Jacques Berque, a prominent sociologist of North Africa.

Khatibi traveled extensively during his time in Europe, then returned to live in Morocco in 1964. There he hoped to lead a new generation of postcolonial sociologists who could tackle the formidable task of describing Moroccan society on its own terms, outside of Orientalist paradigms. In 1966, he became the director of the Moroccan Institute of Sociology, a post he held until the institute dissolved four years later. Also in 1966, he took up editing a central periodical of Moroccan colonial and postcolonial intellectual life, the Bulletin économique et social du Maroc (The economic and social bulletin of Morocco), a responsibility that he held until 2004.⁵

He began his teaching career at Mohammed V University in Rabat in 1969, where he continued to work until his untimely death in 2009. Barthes taught there as well in 1969–70, when the two men lived across the street from each other. It was during this time that Barthes proposed a semiotic project on Moroccan traditional dress, which Khatibi declined “with regret”⁶ because he was in the throes of writing La mémoire tatouée.

In September 1974, Khatibi’s circle of important friends would expand again. That year he met Jacques Derrida at a café in front of Saint-Sulpice in Paris. They would exchange books—Derrida giving his new acquaintance Glas, and Khatibi returning the favor with La blessure du nom propre (The wound of identity) and Vomito blanco.⁷ The two would remain friends until Derrida’s death in 2004.⁸

While Khatibi admitted that Paris was his second home,⁹ the fact that he did not remain there is significant. Many intellectuals from the decolonizing world who travel to the colonial center do not resettle in their homeland. Khatibi’s reasons for returning to Morocco were professional, personal, and perhaps something more enigmatic. “This country has a real life to it,” he writes. “I owe it my birth, my name, my initial identity. How could I not love it with benevolence? A critical and vigilant benevolence. A homeland isn’t only the place where a person comes into the world, but a personal choice that gives a sense of belonging.”¹⁰

Morocco also provided him with a felicitous distance from the polarizing effects of Parisian intellectual life, with its constant backbiting and changes of allegiance, the hyperbole and caricature of its professional and literary coteries. Recalling the hotly contested debates over structuralism in the 1960s, Khatibi writes:

I lived in Morocco, out of the fray. While keeping up with the intense activity that was called “structuralism,” I didn’t feel involved in the back and forth play between the various positions. I observed at a distance these battles that raged on and off between the eminent spirits of Paris, each who wished to think better and faster than the others. My marginality protected me; it was an agreeable shelter.¹¹

In this passage, the word “distance” instructs us on how to read his work. We should not assume that Khatibi wished to participate in these debates as a sort of geographically, socially, and intellectually distant commentator. Khatibi never wanted that. Instead, his chosen position resembles that of a tinkerer—a bricoleur, in the lingo of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Derrida—a pragmatic itinerant with his rattlebag of tricks. Khatibi was a writer for whom allegiance to any particular intellectual path was not an overweening concern: “I read all philosophers out of school, out of their traditional context. I’m unaffiliated in this way.”¹² The ideas that circulated in the air of French intellectual life were certainly important to him, and he used them. But when we bear in mind the considerations that inform his life in Morocco, we can see his choice to live there as revealing of a fierce sense of independence.

Khatibi’s regard for Morocco was not without the critical sensibility that defines his life and work in general; even so, the land of his birth provided him with a commodious home. In 1990 he would marry Lalla Mina El Alaoui. They had two children, Ahmed and Chama.

A POET’S LEGACY AND THE POETICS OF THE ORPHAN

Khatibi’s work is held in high regard in Francophone circles and generally received with ignorance elsewhere. For a writer with such a large bibliography, friends of such celebrity, and an oeuvre that speaks to many of the central concerns of postcolonial and postmodern life, the fact that Khatibi isn’t better known outside of Francophone scholarship is curious.¹³ No doubt, part of that relative obscurity is due to his having lived in Morocco, as the simple fact remains that writers who reside in the sites of political and literary power are more often rewarded with greater visibility—and vice versa. But in the Anglophone context, and even in the French metropolitan context, Khatibi’s legacy has suffered from his association with writers who have achieved greater renown.

Edward Said, for example, infamously dismissed Khatibi. Speaking of him in a 1998 interview with Stephen Sheehi in the Los Angeles magazine Al-Jadid: A Review and Record of Arab Culture and Arts, Said observes, “Khatibi is a nice guy but peripheral. He is perceived as a kind of Moroccan equivalent of Derrida. But he doesn’t have the force or the presence of the place or the location inside French culture that Sartre or Foucault do or had.”¹⁴ Said’s disregard for Khatibi, a writer with concerns resembling his own, seems almost inexplicable. His remarks smack of condescension.

In hindsight, Said missed a chance to appreciate Khatibi for what he does best. Part of Khatibi’s difficulty in finding a more welcoming readership relates to the difficulty of his work, to his style and its tendency to defy categories. He challenges generic conventions and refuses to abide by the protocols of intellectual and academic disciplines. But placing Khatibi in a literary lineage is no less complicated than viewing him as a type of philosopher, as Said does. Khatibi acknowledges that he composed his first poems in Arabic and then in English under the “inescapable influence” of Baudelaire.¹⁵ He also writes of the early importance for him of Victor Segalen, whom he discovered in 1957 and credits with showing him how to “unify anthropology [ethnologie] and literature.”¹⁶ The citation of Segalen is revealing, not just because Segalen was virtually unknown when Khatibi read him, but also because another seminal postcolonial French-language literary-critical thinker, Edouard Glissant, has acknowledged Segalen’s importance as well. Segalen’s writings about world cultures—whether in Tahiti or China—stand as an underdeveloped narrative thread in Francophone literature.