Jason Busic (Denison University)
Shaghmūm's "The Burning of the Boats" appears in the Spanish-Arabic Stories from the Two Shores (2001). This collection by authors from Spain and Morocco explores the complex relationship of these neighbors. “The Burning of the Boats” engages this theme through narrating emigration, an emigration old and new. This presentation argues that the story re-centers concepts of belonging by blurring boundaries between orality and writing, individual and community, original and traditional. It asserts that Shaghmūm's use of moroccan folk narrative in the privileged space of literature brings marginalized ways of interpreting experience, of understanding emigration, into the center.
Part of 09-10 Place and Memory, Saturday, October 15, 2:30 pm–4:30 pm