Layla Abu Zeid

 
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.