Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah University

Faculty of letters and Humanities, Dhar Mehraz

Department of English Studies

Master Program: Cultural Studies

Boualloul Omar, 1513810900

Tradition, Modernity, Identity and the Status of Women in Laila
Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and Wafa Faith
Hallam’s The Road From Morocco.

Abstract:

It has been six decades since Morocco got its independence from France in 1956.
Yet the issues that were the center of controversy and that constituted the Moroccan
intellectual scene of the time are still relevant even today. Through several colonial
institutions and by means of the discourses it circulated within its protectorate, France
had been able to “modernize” the country. Reading through the literature that has
attempted to capture this modernization or modernity, one would be stunned to learn
that there were many faces of modernity in colonial and postcolonial Morocco, not
just in the works of Driss Chraibi, Taher Ben Jelloun and others but even
contemporary young writers seem to have a tremendous interest in that period and in
its influence on the present. This paper aims at exploring issues of identity,
modernity and hybridity as problematized and conceptualized in two novels of
Moroccan women writers namely Laila Lalami in her first work Hope and Other
Dangerous Pursuits and Wafa Faith Hallam in her memoire The road to Morocco.
The begins by paper laying down the theoretical framework and then illustrates how
the issues under consideration have been approached by the two writers. Being
female writers, Hallam and Lalami problematized and explored the status and
reception of women a great deal hence such issues will be attended to and explored
more than others in this paper.

Keywords: identity, colonialism, postcolonialism, , modernity, tradition, hybridity

Morocco torn between tradition and modernity:

Throughout its ancient and modern history, Morocco has been home to so many
different cultures, ethnicities, religions, and people from different backgrounds. In being
home for diversity and multiculturalism Morocco has been able to significantly
accumulate a set of experiences and gain tremendous strength and richness in terms of its
cultural repertoire. This diversity has given people the right and opportunity to be and to
choose. Today’s Morocco is, in fact, nothing but the fruit of this long tradition of
multiculturalism with all the styles of living, being, and thinking it introduced. This
multiculturalism is recognized and celebrated by the 2011 constitution as the identity of
the new Morocco. Which reinforces the idea that this tradition is to continue and for the
years and to come. Morocco’s continuous attachment to such values defines the country to
the entire world as a peaceful, tolerant, moderate, rich and powerful nation. The long
coexistence of Jews and Muslims in cities across the country is a testimony to the values
Morocco claims to hold and cultivate. It is not to affirm, however, that Morocco is a
country with no identity or specificity. It would be risky to say that these different cultures
have always existed in complete harmony. We cannot dismiss for example the violent
clash between European values disseminated by France during colonization and the
Moroccan ones. The dichotomy of tradition and modernity, as we shall be referring to it
throughout this paper, in the Moroccan context and indeed in the colonial and postcolonial
context, in general, is a complicated and complex phenomenon. For, it raises a couple of
related questions and issues such as the question of identity, cultural legacy, the
importance of the past and other fundamental issues. This violent struggle as we described
it was a struggle between the effects of colonialism and the indigenous culture. This
struggle stemmed from a strong patriotic determination to preserve the indigenous culture
and identity on the one hand and from a need to reform, change and develop on the other
hand. In Morocco, this issue of tradition and modernity had been a central intellectual
debate amongst scholars. This issue is still relevant even today with a bit more complexity
due to the new challenges of globalization.

Modernity or Modernization?
 The concept of modernity is certainly one of the most vague and illusive concepts
to deal with. The theorization of modernity has in fact been a core interest to so many
different disciplines such as sociology and political science, It has probably most been
problematized and insightfully discussed in postcolonialism and Marxism, with the
former focusing on the term as a “cultural dilemma”, and as a projection of a philosophy
or paradigm into societies other than the West. Hence, it often describes the process of
modernization as “Westernization”. Marxism approaches the term as related to capitalism
and suggests that the two are bound up with each other very strongly (Bartolovich, and
Lazarus). Barker argues that a modern way of life is, “organized along capitalist lines, a
mode of production premised on the private ownership of property and the pursuit of
profit.” (p. 125). Etymologically, “The term modern derives from the late Fifth-century
Latin term Modernus which was used to distinguish an officially Christian present from a
Roman, pagan past. Modern was used in the medieval period to distinguish the
contemporary from the ancient.” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin. p. 130). This definition
suggests that the term modernity is nothing but a mere distinction between the past and
the present. The term however, argue Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, has today come to
mean more than that and has gained tremendous political and ideological significance, “It
refers to modes of social organization that emerged in Europe from about the sixteenth
Century and extended their influence throughout the world in the wake of European
exploration and colonization” (p. 130). Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin also argue that
Europe’s experience of modernity could be traced back to Three momentous cultural
shifts that took place around the year 1500 AD, these three major shifts are, the discovery
of the “new world”, the Renaissance and the Reformation. (p. 130).

The emergence of modernity is also associated with the emergence and

development of industry and the industrial society. To modernize a society, therefore,
means first and foremost “to industrialize it”, not just in terms of its economy.
Modernization, in fact, is more than an economical paradigm; it is “a way of life
that encompasses profound economic, social, political, and cultural changes.” (Krishan.
“Modernization”). The idea or philosophy of modernity has always been contrasted with
the idea of tradition and conservatism. Looking at the history of Europe could reveal so
much about its complex experience with modernity. Modernity started as a reaction to the
Church which was prevailing and dominating all areas of life. The renaissance
philosophers, scientists and writers rebelled against the Church as an attempt to develop
alternative solid values, principles and discourses for Europe to adopt. They emphasized
reason and rationality, the priority of scientific inquiry over theology. They also sought to
understand Man and the universe by means of science instead of religion and mythology.
They marginalized religion and weakened the power, privileges and authority it enjoyed,
therefore, we can describe Europe’s experience of modernity as a secular one. It follows
then that a modern state should be a secular one.

European imperialism helped disseminate this discourse or idea into its colonies
across the African continent, claiming that such “modes of social organization” would
contribute to the development of these countries. European scholarship up until the
present time still insists that it is this strong attachment to tradition, or cultural legacy, and
that includes a range of cultural, political, intellectual ideas that make up these legacies, is
what prevents these countries from developing and being on the same line with the
Western, modern and developed block. Hence Europe or the west, with such an
experience, has been trying in various ways to project this modernity onto the rest of the
world. “As European power expanded, this sense of the superiority of the present over the
past became translated into a sense of superiority over the pre-modern societies and
cultures that were ‘locked’ in the past - primitive and uncivilized peoples” (Ashcroft,
Griffiths and Tiffin .p. 131). This is the very reason, besides imperial interests of course,
why Europe had to exercise its cultural hegemony over its colonies; to impose this model
on them. It is this difference in ways of life that pushed Europe and the west to try to
propagate their cultures and ways of life to other countries. Edward Said notes, “They
weren't like us and for that reason they deserved to be ruled” (Said, “Introduction”). This
highlights a crucial fact; the reason behind imperialism and colonization was not simply a
thirst for more land and power, but also a strong will to impose and “copy past” the
Western, European model onto the non-European and non western. We can therefore
decide that we should rather be considering modernization than modernity. The first is
forced and imposed, the second is a choice. The projection of such a model is not innocent
and does not aim at developing the underdeveloped as claimed, but it is a process amongst
others that facilitates and gives legitimacy to the colonial rule. The emergence of
modernity is largely associated with the emergence of Euro-centrism and the European
dominance of the world through imperial expansion. Europe as Said argues constructed
itself as modern, civilized and enlightened block, and simultaneously constructed the
“other”, or the non-European, as traditional, static, and pre-historic. Europe, in fact,
defines itself by setting the Orient as its opposing picture or idea. Whatever the Orient and
the Oriental(s) were the Occident and the Occidental(s) were not. Said elaborates:

The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and
richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural
contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the
Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West as its contrasting image, idea,
personality, experience.” (Said, Edward).

Modernity, after all, should not simply be perceived as an epoch but, as a discourse with
modern institutions that help cultivate and generate such discourse. That is why it is more
of a “modernization”, than of “modernity. Modernity implies and embodies a set of
“modern” ways and paradigms of thinking and living. It has always been associated with
words like rationality, civilized behavior, science, secularism, l’état modern [The modern
state] and the like. The “civilizing mission”, the motto of European imperialism, centered
on these terms and values. People who would not accept the model of modernity refused
the whole “Noble” values that modernity embodies. Others strived to maintain it. There
were so many scholars who after the colonizer departed, worked very hard to reproduce
and perpetuate the modernity discourse in the different institutions of society, believing
that such paradigm would help develop the economy, politics and also the people’s
consciousness and civil sense. In Morocco, for example, there has been up until the
present day huge debate amongst scholars, politicians and even ordinary people on this
dichotomy of tradition versus modernity. This has been a core issue for Morocco because
It has been related to and associated with a range of relevant issues like, the question
identity, the position of women in society, development, hybridity, cultural independence
and much else. Modernity is believed by orientalists to be able to rescue the orient and the
Orientals form strangeness and backwardness and set them free from the shuffles of
history and tradition. Edward Said states, “in short, having transported the orient into a
modernity, the orientalist would celebrate his method and his position, as that of a secular
creator, a man who made new worlds as God had once made the old” ‘(Said, W.
Edward.). The modernization/ westernization mission is a project and had been part and
parcel of the colonial agenda of Europe.

The possibility of an Arab/ Islamic modernity:

European Modernity is believed to have been inspired and vehicled by rationalism. It

came as a break with the traditional, superstitious, totalitarian and authoritarian rule of the
church which abused its status a great deal. The idea of secularism, the separation of state
and religion, was consequently a central idea to the European modernist movement(s).
Arab modernist and secular thinkers and activists today insist, following the western
experience, on secularism as a guarantee for more personal freedom and development. It
would be inappropriate to credit this emphasis on rationalism to Europe. They trace it
back to the Greek philosophy. But it should rather be traced back to Islamic philosophy;
Descartes rational philosophy and particularly his Cogito are credited to Abu Hamid Al-
Ghazali. Al-Jabri maintained that an Arab modernity should be crafted from within the
tradition which contains rationality, human rights democracy and the rule of law. Much
ink has been shed in illustrating this. The question of the possibility of a pure Arab
modernity is possible since the elements that make up a modernity are present namely, the
rational line of thought, that could be traced back to the Mu’tazilite school, to which
Averroes pertains. So, the immaterial potential that could carry out such a vision is
available. The only thing left to materialize such paradigm is an independent economy
and modern institutions.

Laila Lalami’s ‘Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits’: Faces of modernity and its clash
with tradition in the new Morocco.
 In her first and most celebrated novel Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Laila
Lalami proves to be very much interested in postcolonial Morocco and in demonstrating
how had French colonization, through various ways, been able to transform the country
from a conservative, traditional realm to a totally different one. Laila Lalami offers us
insights into this new Morocco that is torn between tradition and modernity. She also
capitalizes on the Islamist or conservative resistance to the styles of living and thinking
introduced by the French through acculturation and other neocolonial means. Larbi’s
family represents the new, nuclear, modern family that is lost between tradition and
modernity. This new family consist of parents and two children Noura and another son
studying engineering in Québec, Canada. Larbi keeps bear in his fridge. The family does
not seem to regard it to be strange. Salam, Larbi’s wife, who is a social activist, it was a
fashion at that time for rich women to engage in associations and NGO’s. adopts the
modern ways of life but does not refuse the legacy of the past, including Islam, altogether.
She rather offers new interpretations to Islam claiming that the latter should chime in with
the spirit of the age.

Within Larbi family we witness a clash between Noura, the daughter, and her
parents. Influenced by her friend and classmate Faten, Noura decides to put on the veil
and begins to recite the Qur’an which her parents do not approve of. Lalami depicts the
rise of the fashion of the veil which is part of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the
Islamist ideology. The university is a fertile ground for both the Islamists and the
communists to propagate their ideologies and circulate their discourses and materialize
their agenda. Since Noura went to a French lycée she was very much into the western
lifestyle: rock music, jeans with the names of rock brands on and so forth. It can be
assumed therefore that Noura had been influenced by the Islamists. Especially as she
harshly criticizes her secular parents. On the other side, we have Halima’s family. Halima
is often abused and beaten by her husband Maati. “If I don’t give him money for drinking,
she says, he steals it from me.” All the money Maati gains from driving a cab for a
business man, goes to the bar. Halima’s mother is very superstitious as she continuously
tries to persuade her daughter to do magic to her husband so that he would no longer beat
her. Kadija, another neighbor of Halima’s, is superstitious. She mistakes Farid for a saint
and asks him to help her son not to flunk his exams again. Halima does not find refuge in
the law as at that time it did not criminalize domestic violence. The husband beating his
wife was quite a normal thing both socially and legally. As a consequence of her poverty
and living conditions, Halima, decides to work as a janitor; a housemaid, and she often
sells embroidery to the neighbor for Fifty hundred Dirham and later sells baghrir at the
market and Millefeuille for students. Hadda, a neighbor of Halima’s was left by her
husband for another woman leaving her neither married nor divorced. Maati, Halima’s
husband, never apologized for or regretted his beating his wife and dehumanizing her in
all sorts of ways. All the money she received from her brother in France was given to the
judge to grant her her divorce. Maati asked his wife for money in return for his granting
her her divorce. He brings her divorce papers and spits on her. Lalami also proved to be
concerned with a set of social problems like poverty, the position of women, corruption,
unemployment and much else. These problems are what push people to immigrate putting
themselves to death on small lifeboats. Youth in the novel seem t be crazy about
immigrating to Europe and starting a new life there. In her second, more mature work;
Secret Son, Lalami engages with these issues and others in a more insightful and profound
manner. And in her Third novel The Moors Account she proves to be more concerned
with questions of identity, history, and culture.

The position of women and identity in Hallam’s ‘The Road From Morocco’

Wafa Faith Hallam’s family memoire ‘The Road from Morocco’ is also a
contemporary writer’s mediation and contemplation of both the past and the present. It is
a depiction of a country that is torn between:” two different worlds increasingly lived side
by side, a modern French society and a traditional Arab Moroccan culture”

The memoire opens with the story of Wafa’s mother where we are. are given a
glimpse of the pre-colonial and early colonial Morocco, which the writer did not explore
much, because she preferred to give more priority to addressing and tracing the different
faces and manifestations of modernity and development in her society rather than clinging
to the past. Hallam did not want to lock herself and her story in the past Like Chraibi,
Ben Jeloun and others. She deploys this past to contrast it with the present and to make us
contemplate how modern Morocco was. She wants us to look back at this past and draw
on it as a source of inspiration and enrichment not a source of shame and an impediment
to our development and progress. Reading through the memoire, one would be stunned to
see and experience Morocco where purely western ways prevail and that includes;
swimming pool parties, sexual freedom, jazz music, dancing, etc. Hallam regards
modernity as a kind of salvation and a refuge from the shuffles of patriarchy and tradition.
It is modernity and the modern ways that freed her mother and empowered her. At the
start, the mother lived a harem-like life where the only thing excepted of her was to serve
her husband and please him in anyway a man can be pleased and that includes first and
foremost giving up birth and where the husband-wife relationship is managed by a ‘boss’:
the husband’s mother. A woman is only validated and approved by her community when
she manages to perceived a child. If she does not she is outcaste and stigmatized. The
beginning of the novel dramatizes the status of women; who were forced into marriages
against their will, just like the mother. “It has to be done…It’s God’s will” Hallam’s
father said in the wedding night to his wife. We see that there is no distinction between
the religious and the cultural. The whole novel, I think, captures the transformation of
Morocco from an extremely patriarchal society to a moderate or less patriarchal one.
Women in this work are locked indoors; the public space is a man’s space. Hallam’s
mother rebels against this and frees herself from this tradition to explore new possibilities
and realize her dreams. She travelled aboard, worked, exercised, went to the beach, had
affairs and did all the things a woman was not expected to do. She lived life as it is
defined by western modernity: a life where people thirst after happiness and joy and meet
them in all possible means without attending to question of culture or value system.
Saadia is more free and independent when she divorces her husband who marries, Lalla
Badi’a, a woman of the Sufi tradition. This very act reinforces his inability to cope up
with the new/ modern life style, which he never approved of, and his attachment to the
past and to the traditional. Hallam’s mother was much fond of this western model. In the
memoire we read:

“My mother was going through an awakening of her own. Upon her arrival in Sidi
Kacem, she has noticed and applauded the way western women were free to interact with
men outside their homes; how they were educated enough to hold jobs as teachers,
doctors, nurses, secretaries and shopkeepers; how they seemed to be in control of their
lives in ways she could never imagine her sisters could control theirs. And so she
determined to change the course of her life.”

She embraced this lifestyle and saw that it would free her and make her more
independent and empowered, which it did. Hallam seems to affirm that women’s freedom
and independent could only be achieved through their material independence. The more
materially independent Saadia got: owning a car, villa, having money, the more free and
happy she felt. These material things foster her dreams and ambitions. Sadia’s rebellion
against the father is a rebellion against that which he stands for and the values he upholds.
“As our father vanished from our lives, so with him did everything that was seemingly
backward and old fashioned. We have once and for all chosen our mother’s camp, and it
was firmly set out on the grounds of modernity and French culture”. Among the two
models Saadia and Wafa chosed the western one as it helps them enjoy more freedom.
Sadia saw that this path would ultimately set her free from all the obstacles she faces:
“she was intent on following a path that was to lead her out of the course that had been
preordained for her by her gender”.

Identity politics in Hallam’s The Road From Morocco:

Being a diasporic writer, Wafa Faith Hallam is very interested in questions of

identity and home. She even entitles a chapter in her memoir “New identity” and this
proves how much she is concerned with the issue. She states that America is home and
felt no difference than Morocco. She even changed her entire name:
In October 1993, I legally sealed my cultural individuality by applying to the superior
court of New Jersey for a name change. I adopted “Faith” as middle-name and simplified
the French spelling of my first name from the clumsy“Ouafae” to “Wafa”. By December,
I was officially authorized to assume my new identity.
In an interview, and even in the book, she added that she changed her last name
from Ben Hallam to Hallam. The omission of Ben is an omission of origin; of her
relationship to her father and family. She also said that she got into problems with her
cousins because of it. Hallam is a hybrid person in that she does not turn down her origin,
religion, culture and so forth but she does not recognize them either. Once in America
Hallam does not aprove of the streotypes, maltreatment of Arabs and Muslims. Her
humanistic word view push her to sympathise with them and feel angry and fussy though
she cannot speak her anger and dissatisfaction out. The question of home is another
important issue in Hallams memoir. The notion of home is very ambigeous as he takes it
to stand for any place where there is comfort and happiness. In her stay in Paris she
described it as home: I felt at homewith the language, the culture, the food, and going
back home was the hardest thing I had to do.She also uses the same word for his mother’s
attitude of America:
Life in Morocco had become unbearable for her. She had broken up with Berto, the love
of her life, and she was deeply alienated from her society. She had visited us on a couple
of occasions in Florida and had fallen in love with America and the American Dream. I
believe she had already, albeit tacitly, made up her mind that this was the home she had
always longed for.

Wafa Faith Hallam is a humanist writer. She draws on other cultures as a source of
enrichment and does not regard them as a threat to her own. Identity for her is not a fixed
thing, it is subject to change and negotiation. It is a process of self-definition. A process
that is not limited to ones religion, homeland, people, traditions and so forth. Identity is an
amalgam of cultures. Such an identity, Hallam seems to affirm, empowers individuals and
offers them opportunities to be and to grow. both Wafa Faith Hallam and Laila Lalami
prove to be much concerned about the question of identity, the position of women and the
continuous clash between tradition and modernity. Reading through their outstanding
works gives us insights into these issues and raises many question and debates concerning
cultural relativity, eurocentrism, universalism, humanism, the relevance and importance of
the past and other issues that are worth exploring and discussing.
 Bibliography

Primary sources:

 Hallam, F. Wafa. The Road from Morocco. Ireland Books: 2011. Print.

 Lalami, Laila. Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. Algonquin Books, 2005.

Print.

Secondary sources:

 “Marxism Modernity and Postcolonial Studies”. edited by, Bartolovich, Crystal

and Lazarus Neil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.2004. Print.

 Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths Gareth and Tiffin Helen. “Post-colonial Studies: The Key

Concepts”. 2nd ed. New York: Rout ledge. 2007. Print.

 Kumar, Krishan. “Modernization”. Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia

Britannica, Inc. Mars 21, 2016. Accessed 14/2/109. Web.

 Said W Edward. “Culture and Imperialism” 1st Ed. New York: Vintage

Books.1994. Web.

 ___ “Orientalism” 1st Ed. New York: Vintage Books.. 1979. Print.