Daoudi’s El diablo de Yudis: Identity as Performance

Abstract

As early as 1994, only eight years after Spain entered the European Community and the commencement of the first wave of massive immigration of Maghrebian citizens to Spain, Ahmed Daoudi published his first novel El diablo de Yudis. The publication of Daoudi’s novel coincided with less successful attempts to voice the concerns of the Maghrebian, immigrant population using the testimonial genre: Rafael Torres’s Yo, Mohamed (1995), and Pasqual Moreno Torregrosa and Mohamed El Gheryb’s Dormir al raso (1994). Torres’s and Torregrosa and El Ghreyb’s recompilation of testimonials, as Daniela Flesler has indicated, attempted to give a voice to the immigrant without reflecting critically on the issues that speaking for others entail (Flesler Ch. 5). Although these works are interesting inasmuch as they may help us describe the role of the Maghrebian immigrant in the Spanish imaginary, they can hardly be considered to be a direct expression of Spanish, postcolonial identity. For that reason, I will concentrate on Daoudi’s novel in this chapter.