Mohamed Saïd Raïhani

Magically Yours! (A Collection of Short Stories) 0

Magically Yours! (Collection of short Stories) Mohamed Saïd Raïhani 1st Edition, 2017 All Rights Reserved

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Contents

A Free Word ….. ………..…………………..…………….……….…... 4 One Man, Two Lives ………………………...…………………………14 Looking for a Forty-Double Man. ..……….…………………………30 Magically yours! ……………………….……….………..….…………52 An Exceptional Dreamer….…………………….………....………….68 Giants and Butterflies ….………………….…………..………………82

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A Free Word

By Mohamed Saïd Raïhani

My story with fiction writing developed at three different ages with three different languages: Arabic, French and English. The first try started at the age of fifteen with the project of an early autobiography which I worked on under the influence of the Arab autobiographies I read with great pleasure, then: Taha Hussein’s The Days, Abdelmajid Benjelloune’s In My Childhood and Mohamed Choukri’s For Bread Alone. At the age of sixteen years old, I had to strengthen my French to get better marks at school. So, I started writing my diaries in Jaber Ibn Hayyan boardingschool in Tetouan (Morocco). The main target of that embryonic project was to develop my linguistic skills. The project worked well and the results were satisfying on all levels.

Having got my Baccalaureate degree (General Certificate of Secondary Education), I joined Abdelmalek Saadi University in Tetouan where I got acquainted, in the first academic year, with the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw’s works. Right away, I began writing short plays in English. I sent some of them to Horizons, a magazine launched by the English Department in the university at that time which was well-known to students for its exaggerated self-censorship. Of course, none of my plays were published and I had to shift to short story writing. This shift was due to two factors: the need of readers as I could not carry on writing plays for the sake of writing and the feeling of a growing admiration for American novelist and short-story writer Ernest Hemingway.

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When I had to decide which literary genre to work on in my B.A. monograph, I hesitated for a while before choosing to work on Shavian drama. However, the kindle of fiction within me remained aflame as I always kept a private notebook within reach. That notebook was the bridge that linked my early readings with my forthcoming writings and I still keep it as a source of inspiration when the latter fails me.

Right after my university studies, I joined the sector of National Education as a teacher and I shifted right away from writing in English, the language of my studies, into writing in Arabic, the language of my daily life and nightly dreams. I also changed the literary genre which I had been working on, moving from drama to short story in memory of a love that dated back to the eternal years of childhood when a lady, who was a friend of my mother’s, used to visit us every afternoon to tell us wonderful stories that were nothing but the One Thousand and One Nights, the Arabian Nights.

This aspect of storytelling to which I got used to in the afternoons of the twentieth-century seventies was accompanied, at night, by the broadcast of a flow of TV series adapted from world-wide masterpieces such as Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, which left a strong impact on the child that I was. It was this TV series that made me move onto the third step: reading. I was, by that time, a thirteen-year-old child. I liked that series so much that when it was over, I ordered my hard copy of the novel and read it in two versions, Arabic and French. The pleasure was twofold and the impact was everlasting particularly on the level of the theme tackled, Freedom, which became central in all my forthcoming literary works.

Freedom was the first theme that I have met during my early literary readings. Freedom was, consequently, my first key to unlock the doors of literature during my first acquaintance with nineteenth-century fiction. Still, I have to confess that, after reading Victor Hugo's other works, a long list of twentieth-century French writers came along to reinforce, in my mind, the growing belief in the importance of freedom in literature in general and fiction in particular. Among those prominent French writers, I can cite Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.

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The second theme I have ever met in my early readings was that of Love. That was the fruit of my first encounter with women’s literature throughout history (Jane Austen, The Brontë sisters, Virginia Woolf, Isabel Allende, Margaret Mitchell and Ghada Al-Samman). In women’s writing, Love, as a theme, is central. Likewise, gender presence is guaranteed since men and women are both characterised, contrary to many men's fictive works that appear, sometimes, to be exclusively masculine, with no room or roles for women at all as in Ernest Hemingway's, Joseph Conrad’s and many other writers' works. The first short story I have ever written was entitled In Love and I wanted it to be a reaction to this undesirable masculine tradition in fictive literature. Since 1991, year of writing In Love, the theme of Love has become my second key to unlock the doors of creative works, both as a reader and as a writer.

The third theme encountered in my reading/writing journey was that of Dream. In fact, I got this key from that thing I used to keep under my pillow: my individual diary in which I used to write down and interpret my dreams as soon as I woke up. The second short story that I wrote at the age of twenty-three belonged to that diary. It was entitled Open, Sesame! I still remember those unforgettable moments I used to feel while going to bed, knowing in advance that a new material for a new story was awaiting me, there, in a new dream. Likewise, every new morning became a chance to write new stories. That made my mornings sources of unbelievable happiness for such a long time.

In this way, I have been writing short stories in Arabic since the nineties of the twentieth century. My target was twofold. From one hand, I was a great fan of French critic Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author and I wanted to retreat, as an author, from the story written long before it was over: my style and my presence within the story were not my priority. What mattered for me was building a story that is both coherent and cohesive. Stylistically speaking, my writing techniques changed from story to story in order to match the essence of the story narrated. I was not interested in keeping one standard style to introduce me to my readers, serving as a kind of visiting card. Rather, I was continuously renewing my style to match the novelty of the themes approached. This way, I was never central in my writings. The central interest was interchangeable between the theme tackled and the form in which it was represented.

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From the other hand, my second target was to produce stories that can match their own literary forms: stories that can show graphically what they tell linguistically. I think that I was there, echoing the experience of such poets as Guillaume Apollinaire and e.e. cumming who so freely used to draw their poems to show what the poem was about and I wished to follow the same track in short-story writing but the rectangular graphic form of short story was a real obstacle and did not allow calligrammes and the likes.

To make the writing challenge successful, I relied on the help of narrative structures. Sincerely, the project showed some success but at my own expense as I turned out to have no distinctive style: a style-less writer. Anybody who would read any of my early pieces would find that from the very first sight. All I had was stories dominated by the theme within. All those collections of short stories belonging to my early stage had a centre of focus, a theme that joined all the disparate stories in one collection.

In Waiting for the Morning, my first collection published in Arabic in 2003, the dominant theme was waiting and all of the fourteenth stories included dealt with the possible faces of waiting: waiting for the truth to be revealed, waiting for the feast to come, waiting for the dream to come true, waiting for redemption... In The Season of Migration to Anywhere, my second collection published in Arabic in 2005, all the stories dealt with migration: sixteen short stories dealing with sixteen aspects of migration. The same for Death of the Author, my third collection published in Arabic in 2010, where all the ten stories dealt with ten faces of death: murder, execution, suicide, poisoning, natural death...

All in all, in my former literary project, my writing philosophy had a thematic reference. All my early short stories relied on their central theme to introduce them, not on my style. That was the reason why my former stories bore none of my fingerprints as my focus has never been to fingerprint my presence in my stories. Rather, my real focus was on setting my stories free from me, my style and my presence.

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Now that my former project convinced nobody among my Arab and English fellow writers, I feel a strong need to give it up and join the literary genre that might help me save much of my energy and fly with the birds of my feather: Realism. With such a move, I will be leaving what I have believed, for such a long time, to be my literary choices. I will also be writing with my third language, English, instead of my mother tongue, Arabic. This way, I will not only be shifting from one language to another but, also, moving from a writing philosophy into another, from an experimental writing into a realist one and from shattering narrative texts into building realist short stories…

At first, I was confused. How to depict reality? Did I have to describe visible things and concrete events or focus on what was lived and experienced? The first problem that I encountered was the definition of reality: What is reality? Reality differs from one culture to another. Reality in Lancaster may seem science fiction to the equatorial jungle tribes. On the counterpart, reality in Amazonia may seem an exotic story to Japanese readers. The adjective ‘real’ varies from culture to culture, following the concept of reality followed. Still, reality and truth remain miles apart. Reality is an experience but truth is a value.

In literature, a movement emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, probably led by French novelist Stendhal, author of The Red & The Black. It advocates ‘realist’ writing and coined for the first time the word Realism for a philosophy made to maintain truth in life and protect life from lies and hypocrisy. Realism blossomed with the rise of industrialism and positivism. It is, then, the legitimate heir of Materialism. After around two centuries of existence, Realism is still the greatest artistic/literary movement alive but with many labels and facets: Social realism, socialist realism, fantastic realism and magic realism. Yet, the common feature was the fact that:

As a philosophy, I felt attracted to realism after a long hesitation. My first try was a long short story entitled The Chess Player and the Pawn (about six thousand words). Then, there was the second and last social realist short story entitled Serving the World (about seven thousand words). In that embryonic project, I came to know social realism from very near.

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In my point of view, realism, in literature, is the elevation of the five senses, mainly the sense of sight. The more the senses are present in a creative work, the more realistic the work is. Written creative works usually target the sense of sight and oral works target that of hearing. The former produces novels and short stories and the latter produces tales. To achieve that, social realists often work on the alternation between dialogue, narration and description, backing up actions against preaching. They describe what is done more than what is thought of. They present reality as it is with no decoration or hyperbole, dealing with real themes and real people in real settings according to real circumstances. In my point of view, social realist prose literature has some characteristics of its own. At the level of titles, there may be a direct reference to the protagonists, the setting or the theme. Titles are coined denotatively, keeping a respectable distance from any symbolic allusions. As far as themes are concerned, they may be issues related to everyday life or to marginal people as in Naguib Mahfouz’s A story without a beginning or an ending and Love above the Pyramid Plateau… Characters, in a social

realist

work,

are

normally common

people motivated

by common

interests. Such choices are usually consolidated by giving characters vulgar names, low professions… the same for setting, language and style. A social realist setting is any ordinary place where common people can meet, work or live. Equally, a realist style keeps away from any peculiar search of superfluous rhetoric or strained structures as average language usually is favoured to the refined one: a sensorial language that appeals remarkably to the five senses. Concerning point of view, Omniscience and limited Omniscience are very common in realist short story writing while, on the level of plot, the basic goal is that it should reflect the commitment of the creative work to the spirit of realism. That is, a realist plot should be simple, logic and actuated by cause-and-effect. Causality is the generator of a realistic story line.

Most of these features still figure in my realist writings but, as an Arab writer influenced by a long fable-like tradition, I found social realism too narrow to accommodate my endless aspiration. So, I shifted to a much freer genre, Magic Realism: a movement generated by the urge to revisit the neglected possibilities of realism. The genre originated from Latin America where the mainstream belief is that anything can happen and where magic is part of the local culture through miracles and

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other inexplicable phenomena. It is associated particularly with the iconic Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Luis Borges, Vargas Llosa and many more writers from all around the world who have joined the genre and adopted it as the style of all their writings like Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison and Haruki Murakami. The common points between most of the afore-mentioned writers are philosophic and stylistic.

On the philosophical level, most of them use magical realism to disclose oppressive regimes: slavery, colonialism, despotism, exclusion and the feeling of loss. On the stylistic level, magic realism is a different style of writing which depicts fantastic and imaginary scenes or events in a realistic way. It is a style of converting imaginative fantasies into possibly everyday lives, treating it as a matter-of-fact representation. It is, then, a combination of the fantastic event and the naturalistic approach. Therefore, surreal life, psychic powers and para-psychological facts are what characterises magical realism as a literary genre, blending magical elements such as legends and myths with natural elements like historical events or personal experiences in a dream-like fantasy. However, Magic realism is not only a mode of expression, it is also a background, a philosophy categorised as a postmodern one.

The dominant mode of writing nowadays is a postmodernist one, under the influence of the world real uneasiness, technological change and ideological uncertainties; Postmodernism has influenced all the literary forms, disrupting the past, corrupting the present and the linear coherence of narrative in disorder. Temporal disorder, involuntary impersonation of other voices, fragmentation, looseness of association, paranoia and the creation of vicious circles are symptoms of the language disorders of schizophrenia as well as features of postmodernist fiction. It is in this alignment, the primary contrast between the modernists and postmodernists can be found.

My latest collection of short stories, Giants and Butterflies, belongs to Postmodernism and Magic Realism. It has been written during a couple of years, between 2015 and 2016. It consists of five short stories varying in length between 4000 and 6000 words: One Man, Two Lives, Looking for a Forty-Double Man, An Exceptional Dreamer, Magically yours!, Giants and Butterflies. In these short stories, 9

reality has more than one dimension and more than one logic: in An Exceptional Dreamer, the pale rider is himself the protector and the devil; in Looking for a FortyDouble Man, the accuser is himself the accused…

My stories are concerned, first and foremost, with the concept of reality itself. Reality is the subject-matter of all my stories: a reality that is, sometimes, in reconciliation with itself and, some other times, in contradiction with it. That is, reality is too complex to be summarised or reduced to visibility and rationality. In my magic realist short stories, reality presents itself through five major aspects: reality as an indivisible entity, reality as an amalgam of minor realities, reality as a continuity of dreams, reality as a choice (not only as a fate), reality as a manifestation of all the histories.

The first story, One Man, Two Lives, is actuated by two characters: the one who sticks to visible reality (Simou) and the other who lives surreality (Abdou), the one who will feel compatible with the place and the norms dealt with (Simou) and the one who will leave both the place the concept of reality adopted there (Abdou). Reality, in this short story, contains the thing and its opposite: what is told versus what is untold, what is convincing versus what is unconvincing, what is real versus what is unreal… Reality is an indivisible entity.

One Man, Two Lives is a short story about the clash of perspectives that ends with a clash of beliefs. The story states first a preliminary perspective: how one sees oneself and how one is seen by others. How Abdou sees himself and how he is seen by others. Then, a broader view is generated where all the perspectives turn out to be true and real against all fanaticism and bigotry.

The second story, Looking for a Forty-Double Man, presents reality as an amalgam of colours, shapes, sizes, matters and identities. In this story, characters are fiercely fighting to be unique, to be gods with no doubles alive to compete with them. However, in the police station, characters will find themselves both the accuser and the accused: having the same date of birth, the same face and the same fate.

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Looking for a Forty-Double Man is a story about a man who feels uneasy to find out that a couple of look-alikes live near him in his own town. He tries to fake an offence that may enable him go to the court, exile them to the darkest prisons of the country and get rid of their rivalry. However, when he did it, he found himself not surrounded by two look-alikes but by forty!

Characters in Looking for a Forty-Double Man are blank-faced. They have nothing that distinguishes them and are, consequently, doing their best to defend the last thing that could give them not only their image but also the power related to it by being the only proprietor of the image they are born with.

Looking for a Forty-Double Man is a story about the human will of monopolizing what cannot be monopolized and keeping to oneself what is, by nature, shared between people. It’s a magic realist short story with a post-modernist background, like all my other stories, depicting life beyond human control and showing characters helpless, unable neither to control their fates nor to interpret their lives. The complexity of the subject raised made simplicity a real challenge. Simplicity is solicited to counterbalance the complexity of the theme approached. My choice, then, was to adopt a simple style without the least tendency to simplification. It is simplicity of style that is needed not simplification of ideas.

The third story, An Exceptional Dreamer, was first entitled Confusion since confusion was the distinctive feature of the story. Then, I opted for a second title, Telepathy since characters were communicating using inexplicable means. Then, there was a third title, The Pale Rider behind which referred to that character left mysterious but who is omnipresent in the story. In the end, I decided that An Exceptional dreamer be the final choice.

An Exceptional dreamer depicts reality as a space where everything is possible and where no boundaries are set between reality and dream as the protagonist does not contend himself with dreaming in his sleep since he lives his dreams in reality. Reality, in this story, is not only a fate; it is also a prophecy. Telepathy is used as a means of communication between people. Telepathy in the story is presented by the two main characters either when dreaming of each other or sharing each other’s 11

dreams. The use of confusion as a creative tool in building this story imposed establishing absolute clarity and simplicity, first.

The world we live in and the life we are leading are too far from being a pure present in a purely visible reality. That is the reason why, in An Exceptional dreamer, my goal is to blend past and present, dream and reality, realism and fantasy... In order to draw the real world we live in and the real world I want the present story to convey.

The fourth story, Magically Yours!, is about a young lady, Mary, who asked her lover, Chris, to bring her a symbolic gift in her birthday party. She suggested that it could be a written literary work like a summary of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Chris thought it would be a sign of love if he altered the form of the gift and made the metamorphosis embodied in him, personally.

The first title of the present short story was Metamorphosis, referring to the central story and the change that the protagonist underwent. Afterwards, for reasons related to avoiding any friction with Kafka’s work, the story was assigned a new title: Magically Yours! The story sounds a great deal like Giants and Butterflies. Both stories deal with metamorphosis in birthday parties. Metamorphosis, however, in Magically yours! feels deliberate and enthusiastic while in Giants and butterflies, it sounds fatalistic. Yet, the two stories follow the same trend: Exotic diseases.

The fifth and last piece of work, Giants and Butterflies, is a short story about two young ladies, Lakbeera and Aliaa, who experience a hormonal disorder that will lead to a gradual change starting from their physical shape, passing by their mental health and ending with their behaviour. Gigantism is approached in this story on two levels: Lakbeera, from the very start, is not satisfied with her name that refers to oversize tallness; then, there comes her bodily gigantism to make her dilemma worse.

Between my first stories written in the early nineties of the twentieth century (stories collected in Waiting for the Morning) and the latest ones written in the second decade of the twenty-first century (stories collected in Magically yours!), visible changes can be spotted, at all levels: style, perspective, breath and approach. 12

However, the greatest change may be that shift from writing to oneself (in the experimental period) into writing to the world (in the realist one), from local aspirations into universal ones, from theorising to be understood into been understood without theorising.

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Contents

A Free Word ….. ………..…………………..…………….……….…... 4 One Man, Two Lives ………………………...…………………………14 Looking for a Forty-Double Man. ..……….…………………………30 Magically yours! ……………………….……….………..….…………52 An Exceptional Dreamer….…………………….………....………….68 Giants and Butterflies ….………………….…………..………………82

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MOHAMED SAID RAIHANI

Mohamed Saïd Raïhani is a Moroccan writer born on December 23rd 1968. Author of many works in fields of literary fiction, criticism and Journalism. He is member of Moroccan Writers’ Union. He is holder of M.A. in Translation, Communication & Journalism from King Fahd Advanced School of Translation in Tangier/Morocco and a second M.A. in Creative Writing (English Literature) from Lancaster University (United Kingdom).

Literary Works in Arabic • • • • • • • •

Waiting for the Morning (Short Stories) in 2003 The Season of Migration to Anywhere (Short Stories) in 2006 Death of the Author (Short Stories) in 2010 A Dialogue between Two Generations (Short Stories) in 2011 (A collection of short stories co-authored with Driss seghir) The Enemy of the Sun, the Clown Who turned Out To Be A Monster (Novel) in 2012 Behind Every Great Man, There Are Dwarfs (Short Stories) in 2012 No to Violence (Short Stories) in 2014 Fifty Short-Shorts: Theme of Freedom (Short-Short Stories) in 2015

Critical Works in Arabic • • •

The Three Keys: An Anthology of Moroccan New Short Story (Vol. 1: The Key to Dream), 2006 The Three Keys: An Anthology of Moroccan New Short Story (Vol. 2: The Key to Love), 2007 The Three Keys: An Anthology of Moroccan New Short Story (Vol. 3: The Key to Freedom), 2008

Journalistic Reseaches & Investigations in Arabic • •

•

The History of Manipulating Professional Contests in Morocco (Journalistic Investigation) Vol. 1, 2009. The History of Manipulating Professional Contests in Morocco (or Letters to the Minister of Education in Morocco) (Journalistic Investigation) Vol. 2, 2011. Authenticity of Arab Media Slogan Through the Making of Press Image (Case of Aljazeera Slogan, The Opinion & the Other Opinion), 2015.

Onomastic Researches in Arabic •

The Singularity Will (A Study on Moroccan First-names) in 2001

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Works Translated into English •

Waiting for the Morning (Short Stories), Bloomington (Indiana/USA): Xlibris, 2013.

Works Written Originally in English •

Magically Yours! (Short Stories).

Interviews Collected in Published Books • •

Anas Filali, "Raïhanyat" (Forty Interviews with Mohamed Saïd Raïhani), Amman/Jordan: Sayel Publishing Co, 1st Ed., 2012. Collective Work, "With Raïhani in His Shrine" (Thirty Interviews on Culture, Art & Literature with Mohamed Saïd Raïhani), Tetouan/Morocco: Maktabat Salma Al-Thaqafiah, 1st Ed., 2016.

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