Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Labyrinthe des sentiments: Literary Strategies in Contemporary Moroccan Travel Writing

Abstract

Atypical of conventional travel writing that portrays the exotic, Tahar Ben Jelloun reverses his traveler’s gaze in his Labyrinthe des sentiments, focusing on the Moroccan Diaspora in the Italian city of Naples. The reversal of gaze engenders the mediation of imagination as the writer negotiates between literary borders of facts and fiction, thereby deploying literary strategies that transgress the conventional to embrace the contemporary. This study considers these literary strategies that make Labyrinthe des sentiments a Moroccan archetype of contemporary travel writing and enable Ben Jelloun to deconstruct space, to question history and to reconstruct identities. Ben Jelloun’s work is a good example of highly politicized forms of travel writing, a kind of countertravel writing that pits itself against the dominant Eurocentric model of Euro-American fantasy. It can be described as “the returned look of the colonized”, a gaze that reminds the colonizer that the colonized can be a subject as well as an object.