Tense Eruptions in Driss Chraïbi’s Le passé simple

Chapter 5 analyzes Driss Chraïbi’s (1926–2007) controversial 1954 novel Le passé simple [the Simple Past], which traces the rebellion of nineteen-year-old Driss Ferdi against his seemingly pious wealthy father Haj Ferdi. Readings of the novel as an orientalist portrayal of Moroccan culture and a heretical attack on Islam resulted in a decades-long controversy known as l’affaire Chraïbi, as well as a government ban until 1977. The novel stages a double-critique against colonial and nationalist teleologies—a tension that emerges most explicitly in its engagement with the Qurʾan. The chapter investigates the novel’s critique of imbricated modes of genealogical historical inscription under Protectorate Morocco: French imperial discourses of civil society and the Moroccan monarchy’s, and Hajj Ferdi’s, filiation with the Prophet Muhammad. It argues that Chraïbi offers an alternative mode of ethical agency in the recurring image of la ligne mince [the thin line]: a hallucinatory apparition with Qurʾanic and Sufi valences that haunts the narrator throughout the novel.