During this meeting organized as part of the 6th edition of the “Itinerant Literature” festival, the participants shed light on individual and collective memories, evoking their ability to illustrate historical facts that History itself is often incapable of. to design and transmit entirely.
On this occasion, the Moroccan novelist Abdelfattah Kilito highlighted these two types of memory, affirming that literature has succeeded in shining the spotlight on events, situations and characters in a way that is little or nothing different from what we found in history books.
Literature, he said, recalls stages of life other than “those we have retained in our minds from the titles of history books”, thus offering a mythical perception of the facts.
For his part, the Moroccan poet and novelist Mohammed Achaari noted a “confused and mischievous” relationship between memory and literature.
According to him, memory is content to report what actually happened in reality, while literature tells “what will happen” and what “could have happened”.
“We are inclined to believe that literature must perpetuate individual and collective memory and that it is supposed to report events and facts or be a witness to the times,” said Achaari, noting that it is writing literary which will allow Man to reach his essence and find absent details, despite his oscillation between memorization and forgetting.
For Ashraf Al-Ashmawy, Egyptian novelist, a man of letters seeks truth and the human aspect, while the historian sticks to documents and transmits an image that is “dry and devoid of feeling.”
Mr. Al-Ashmawy said that literature has taken its rightful place in the preservation and transmission of memory, specifying that it has evolved significantly over the last 50 or 60 years.
As for Jokha Alharthi, Omani writer and academic winner of the Man Booker International Prize for her novel “Ladies of the Moon”, she noted that the writer conveys an adapted and different account of what happened in after the collective imagination, believing that there is a common thread between collective memory and individual memory.
Individual memory plays an increasingly important role in constructing a persuasive narrative in literary production, which proves to be a difficult challenge to overcome due to the presence of events and facts in memory.
Organized under the High Patronage of His Majesty King Mohammed VI, this event sees the participation of around forty Moroccan and foreign writers and offers the public the opportunity to meet these men and women of letters to exchange and debate their works. , indicate the organizers.
The program also includes a short story competition for young people aged 18 to 30, in order to encourage literary creativity among this category.
2024-10-06 17:45:46