Tahar Ben Jelloun, The Casablanca Lovers , translated from French by Tea Mijan.
WRITTEN BY: Ivana Golijanin
Casablanca Lovers is a novel that can be read as a chronicle of a relationship - with its ups and downs, dilemmas, emotions and bodily ecstasies, and which, in addition to an exhaustive social picture of the past and present, portrays marriage in its fullness and all the compromises we agree to or create ourselves in such a union. Tahar Ben Jelloun shows that social arrangements and cultural habits are mutable categories, but that emotions and desires forever remain the part that guides us through our lives.
Thanks to the translation by Tee Mijan for the publishing house Buybook, domestic readers have the opportunity to get acquainted with the latest novel by one of the most important Moroccan writers, Tahar Ben Jelloun, who has lived in France and writes in French since the 1970s. The novel The Lovers of Casablanca focuses on the intimate experience of adultery, and through this topic, it problematizes contemporary and traditional trends in Moroccan society, emphasizing primarily the emancipation of Moroccan women who have rediscovered their freedom, their bodies, and themselves.
In the novel, through seven chapters, we follow the story of pediatrician Nabil and pharmacist Lamija - from their meeting, first meeting, marriage, adultery, divorce and what came after. They lived in Casablanca, in a villa on the Anfa hill, in a bourgeois residential area. Life pampered them, they loved their jobs, read, traveled and had two children in marriage, and even adopted one. We were on a boat sailing a calm, pleasant river, with no surprises. The clouds appeared after the tenth wedding anniversary, at the moment when Lamija fell in love with Daniel, a womanizer with a bad reputation.
The lovers of Casablanca thus become a marriage drama interspersed with flashbacks that further clarify the nature of the relationship between Lamia and Nabil, and at the same time manage to bring the life of the high-ranking Moroccan middle class closer. TB Jelloun presents Casablanca as a city that wants to be modern, but cannot resist the power of tradition that is still deeply rooted in society and all its parts.
The presented tensions of these dichotomies are perhaps the most successful parts of the novel, which brings us scenes from (Moroccan) married life. Through the chapters in which Lamija is the narrator, one can see the growth and change in the life of a woman in today's Morocco. She proudly points out that, thanks to her work and her ambitions, she has profiled herself as a person who is neither a daughter nor a wife. Her modernity was reflected in the fact that she was recognized as an individual. Despite this, she was deeply defined by adultery because this freedom proved to be conditional until the moment she stepped out of her role as a perfect mother and wife. Tahar B. Jelloun devotes a significant part of the novel to freedom, limited by prejudice and hypocrisy, showing the difficulty of living between two worlds, two cultures, two languages, and two traditions. Opposing spousal focalization points simultaneously show us the different attitudes of Moroccan society regarding the role of men and women in the community. The semantics of the novel is also marked by the suggestive metaphor of the city of Casablanca, whose dynamics and contradictions remind us of the nature of the partnership between Lamiya and Nabil.
The analogies don't end there, because The Casablanca Lovers are connected to the television series "Scenes from Married Life" (1973) by Ingmar Bergman ̶ which Lamia and Nabil watch in a period of great love ̶ and in which the couple Marianne and Johan are also representatives of the upper middle class with a crisis in marriage, which as a whole represents a questioning of what is hidden behind the conventionality of marriage and the social life of spouses. As with Bergman, in The Lovers we witness spousal outbursts, ranges of different emotions and changing power dynamics in marriage.
Before us is not a tendentiously written novel, although in repeated readings I was bothered by the sometimes intrusive insistence on Lamia's passivity, Nabil's misogyny, or various religious digressions. The impression, reading The Lovers , is that the writer did not want to renounce all the instances that shaped both the two of them and the change of the city and those who lived and live in it, but that he could eventually be criticized for drawing too much attention to them.
Be that as it may, The Casablanca Lovers, apart from an exhaustive social picture of the past and present, is a novel that portrays marriage in its fullness and all the compromises we agree to or create ourselves in such a union. Tahar Ben Jelloun shows that social arrangements and cultural habits are mutable categories, but that emotions and desires forever remain the part that guides us through our lives. We can read the novel as a chronicle of a relationship - with its ups and downs, dilemmas, emotions and bodily ecstasies. Broadly conceived, relying on numerous cultural and intertextual references, universalities can be read in it, with which the author, with his proven storytelling skills, will certainly succeed in reaching the widest readership.