Narrating the Margins

This talk explores Mohamed Choukri’s short stories Majnūn al-Ward and al-Khayma through Zola’s “experimental novel,” showing how Choukri uses naturalism to depict how Tangier’s environment shapes human behavior. Unlike his memoir For Bread Alone, these stories feature diverse narrators and offer raw, realist portrayals of marginalized lives. Elbousty, a Yale scholar and award-winning educator, specializes in Maghrebi literature and cultural studies.