Welcome to Moroccan poetry - May 2004
The rise of modern women’s poetry in Morocco has been spearheaded by the work of Moroccan feminists and women writers in general, such as Fatima Mernissi, Khonata Bennouna and others. These set the bold modern framework within which Moroccan women poets now easily operate.
The first modern Moroccan woman poet to emerge on the scene was Malika Assimi, who attempted to transgress the dominant ways in which men and women image themselves, each other, and the world. Wafa Lamrani, another woman poet, took the feminine poetic experience further, by treating the writing of poetry as an act of bodily ‘jouissance’. Other women poets followed, such as Touria Majdouline, Ibtissam Ashraoui, Widad Benmoussa, Sabah Eddoubi, Fatiha Morchid and others.
In the present issue, we focus on Fatiha Morchid as a representative Moroccan woman poet who embodies a new sensibility in feminine poetry. This new sensibility is characterized by simplicity on the level of diction and poetic style, and by a refusal to adapt to the mainstream obsession with modernist experimentation. Instead, it seeks the expression of the innermost fibres of the self, in a simple, unpretentious matter-of-course voice, a real woman’s voice.
