Raised and educated in French and Arabic in
Rabat, Layla Abu Zeid (or Leila Abouzeid) was working as a radio and television
journalist and presenter when she began to publish short stories. She followed
these with a novel, Am al-fil (1983; Year of the Elephant), which
received critical acclaim and was the first Arabic-language novel by a Moroccan
woman to be translated into English. It treats the coming of age and adult
struggle of an abandoned Moroccan woman in the context of the fight for national
independence. This themes is echoed in her 1993 memoir of childhood, Ruju
ila al-tufula (1993; Return to Childhood) and in her more subsequent
fiction, in which she experiments with multiple viewpoints and narrative
voices. Her works offer a subtle commentary on nationalist and misogynist
misappropriations of Islam and especially of shariʿa.
Daughter of a prominent opponent of the
colonial regime who was imprisoned for his activism, Abu Zeid grew up with a
consciousness of the relationship between language and power. Even as a child,
Abu Zeid has said, she resisted reading and writing in French, the language of
the colonial administration in the Morocco of her earliest childhood. This
resistant stance ensured that she would choose Arabic as her language of
literary expression, she notes, rather than being one of many fran-cophone
writers in her country.
Bibliography
Abouzeid, Leila. The Last Chapter: A
Novel, translated by Leila Abouzeid and John Liechety. New York and Cairo:
American University in Cairo Press, 2000.
Abouzeid, Leila. Return to Childhood: The
Memoir of a Modern Moroccan Woman, translated by Leila Abouzeid and Heather
Logan Taylor. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.
Abouzeid, Leila. Year of the Elephant: A
Moroccan Woman's Journey Toward Independence, and Other Stories, translated
by Barbara Parmenter. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989.