Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Love in Two Languages

Abstract

The Moroccan writer Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Love in Two Languages (1983; Amour bilingue) uses the vehicular restriction of French to represent a polylingual reality and moment of indecision between French and Arabic languages and cultures as it plays itself out in the mind of the Maghrebine protagonist/narrator of this transmesis. Of the several texts considered in this book, Khatibi’s supplies the most explicit links between the act of translation and the situation of the “postcolonial subject.” I read this transmesis as a companion piece especially to Khatibi’s critical work published in the same year, Maghreb pluriel, but also to his art and literary criticism. In Maghreb pluriel, Khatibi characterizes Orientalism as an immense translation project that seeks to transfer univocality and that therefore cannot tolerate the untranslatable. The untranslatable, in defiance, becomes the hero of Amour bilingue.

Maghrebi writers must begin with the fact that they are not French and… need to forge new instruments that will allow them to say what they want to say, what they mean, rather than merely what they can say, are able to say, in the language of the former colonizing power; in other words, they need to find a way to escape from the prison house of (colonial) language. This is a problem of translation if ever there was one, and Khatibi has greatly contributed to its painstaking elucidation, stamping it with his immense talents as writer and poet.

—Réda Bensmaïa, Experimental Nations 102