First, read the stories. Unsettling, allow them to assault your senses. Enter a world marred by poverty and illness, poisoned by the values of traditional patriarchal society, infused with everyday magic and superstition where women and men are trapped in roles defined by factors beyond their immediate control. This is the Casablanca of Malika Moustadraf’s fictional landscape, the space in which she ignites fires, large and small, and lets them burn. Finally, turn to the Translator’s Note and realize just how important and tragically small this remarkable work truly is.
Blood Feast (published in the UK as Something Strange Like Hunger) is a slender volume containing all of the stories the Moroccan Arabic-language writer wrote during her short life—fourteen tales, some only a few pages long. Together with one novel (Wounds of the Soul and Body) self-published in 1999, they form the sum total of her literary output. During her lifetime she was, through her writing, an out-spoken activist, with a style and thematic focus on gender, sexuality and class under patriarchy that challenged what was acceptable for turn of the twenty-first century female writers in her home country. Yet, until recently all of this work had long been out of print in Arabic and none was available in translation. Today she is recognized and celebrated as a feminist icon.
But, again let’s have a look at the stories. The first ten pieces were published in Arabic in 2004 as Trente-six, a project supported by the Moroccan Short Story Research Group. Her settings tend to be squalid, pungent and unpleasant. As are the people that inhabit them. Slang, harsh language, and cultural references abound. Her female narrators, are typically facing the consequences of severe gendered oppression, propagated by callous fathers, abusive partners, or the demands of unreasonable, outdated social norms. Her male narrators often echo the sexist attitudes of the system they were raised in, unable or unwilling to rise above it. And yet there is a defiance, a resilience, and a conscious weighing of the odds motivating many of her protagonists’ actions—even those that are unlikely to improve their situations. The narrator of “A Woman in Love, A Woman Defeated,” for example, visits a seer to find out how to make her husband return even though she herself wonders why she even wants him back. Looking out at her very pregnant cat, she says:
She left home a while back, chasing after a scabby tom who had seduced her, and then later she came back, rubbing herself up against me like nothing had happened. I did the same thing, left everyone behind and followed him. He wasn’t handsome. He looked like a little bald bear with a saggy paunch hanging down past his genitals, and he had a huge ass and a round face. I always hated men with huge asses and round faces. So how did I fall in love with him? Love is like that, it always shows up without an appointment. Love is like death, like illness, always arriving when we least expect it, at the most peculiar times and places. Love makes us behave like irrational children. Why can’t they just invent a vaccine against it?
Within the tight scope of her characteristically brief stories Moustadraf was able to paint claustrophobic portraits that often explored territory that was extraordinarily progressive, given the time when she was writing. The narrator of “Just Different,” for instance, is a gender non-conforming prostitute whose identity is never clearly defined. Perhaps an effeminate gay man or a transfemale or even intersexed person—that which is undefined leaves possibilities open— reflecting, on a quiet night working the street, back on childhood and their father’s brutal hostility toward any hint of feminine mannerisms. Later in this collection, among the four stories completed following the publication of Trente-six (three of which were published after her death), her protagonists appear to have somewhat more agency, and two even engage in online flirtation—probably, as the translator suggests, “the first ever published literary depictions of cybersex in Arabic.” One can only wonder what she might have produced if her health and economic situation had not conspired against her.
As it was, she died in 2006 at the age of thirty-seven, from the complications of chronic kidney disease and her inability to obtain the life-saving surgery she needed. The exact biographical details of her life are not well known but she seems to have been diagnosed with kidney disease and started on dialysis in her teens. She famously resented the fact that women writers were assumed to be only capable of writing autobiographical fiction, denying that they, like men, could have access to a robust imagination. However, the title story of the present collection, “Blood Feast,” can be read as a powerful exception to her rejection of autobiographically inspired themes. In this story, dedicated to her sister Karima from whom she received an unsuccessful transplant, the male narrator is struck with kidney disease shortly after his wedding. The bride is blamed, alternate understandings are sought, and the proclamation of the female doctor is met with distrust. But when he finds himself flat on his back in a putrid hospital, he becomes the unwillingly captive audience of his smoking fellow patient who imparts his wisdom about navigating the almost hopeless process of applying for financial assistance for the necessary treatments in a corroded semi-privatized system, a reality the author knew only too well.
Moustadraf faced her own host of impossible barriers in her journey, yet as her illness progressed, her literary spirit only burned brighter. Writing was her way of coping, one that paradoxically weakened her health when she had to go without medications to be able to afford to self-publish her novel. The challenges she faced, physically and artistically, to bring her work to light adds an important context and power to her bold voice, amplifying it far beyond her relatively small oeuvre. And at last she is getting her due, in no small part, thanks to the dedication of her translator Alice Guthrie who literally fell in love with her work when first invited to translate a piece for the online journal Words Without Borders several years ago. She has ensured that Malika Moustadraf is no longer forgotten.
Blood Feast by Malika Moustadraf is translated by Alice Guthrie and published in North America by Feminist Press. In the UK, this same collection was published by Saqi Books under the title Something Strange Like Hunger.
roughghosts 