Fanciulle ribelli nell’opera di Malika Mokeddem

Abstract

In the novels of Malika Mokeddem, childhood is the archetype of betrayed innocence. The boy, and above all the girl, struggle from the very start for survival in much the same way that the adult struggles to establish a relationship with collectivity. The link between the individual and the group is, in any case, ambivalent: on the one hand the individual lives his individuality with a sense of torment while, at the same time, he exploits it as a necessary space in which to be free; on the other hand, he wants to recover the collective memory of which he feels himself to be the sole custodian in a degraded society. This entails, paradoxically, presenting individual dramas as a medium through which hope can be kindled for the future of everyone. In this way the image of childhood in Mokeddem acquires the symbolic function which it had in the works of the founding fathers: that of judging the present in order to hypothesize the future. Nevertheless, in the work of the contemporary Mokedddem, the boy, or, more precisely, the girl is the mirror of an attitude that has changed as regards the world and the role of literature: no longer the pre-figuration of a brave new world but the denunciation of the limits of the real world; the revision of a journey, an instrument whereby to confer a voice on silence.