Satirizing Education in Crisis

The fifth chapter analyzes the use of parody and satire to depict education in Mohamed Nedali’s Grâce à Jean de la Fontaine! (Thanks to Jean de la Fontaine!) and Yacine Adnan’s Hūt Marūk (Hot Maroc). Nedali’s novel describes the satiric misadventures of a teacher-in-training who, upon finding himself surrounded by incompetency at the school where he works, learns to play along with absurdity rather than fight it. Hūt Marūk, in a similarly satiric tone, describes a young man who embodies the new kind of author produced by a failing education system: a comments section troll on an online blog. These novels offer a dramatic departure from the earnest striving heroes examined in the fourth chapter. They poke fun at education, exaggerating the foibles of incompetent administrators, skewering teachers who know nothing about their subject, and presenting the classroom as a space of meaningless failed communication. These narratives do more than point a literary finger at current political controversies and educational failings. They bring the entire educational institution into question through their clear refusal to ever be taught to future generations in the classroom

Resistance in a Minority Language

The fourth chapter examines the role of marginalized characters in Moroccan novels about education. Leila Abouzeid’s Al Fasl al-akhir (The Last Chapter) and Brick Oussaïd’s Les coquelicots de l’Oriental (published in English as The Mountains Forgotten by God) feature protagonists who position themselves as “spokespeople” for individuals who did not fit the vision of the classroom as a male and Arab space. Leila Abouzeid’s work features women’s voices in dialect, privileging both speakers and linguistic registers excluded from Arabized education. Brick Oussaïd’s work depicts an Amazigh protagonist who does not see his community reflected in school curricula. The chapter explores the problems inherent in “teaching” readers about the experiences of others through literature. Yet it also discusses the important potential for authors to write narratives from perspectives that are not often heard in the classroom, and make them heard there as these texts have the chance to become part of the classroom canon.

Troubling Memories of Colonialism

This chapter considers a transformational moment in Algerian history: the first days of the independent school, when students could look forward to studying their own national history and literature. One of the primary preoccupations of novels in French and Arabic that depict this moment was how the school would contend with the memory of the most controversial and taboo aspects of colonialism. Official governmental discourse depicted the Arabized school as a “clean slate” that would fully reject French influence, yet many novels argue for the classroom as a space to renegotiate, rather than erase, the history of French education in Algeria. Maïssa Bey’s Bleu blanc vert (Blue white green) describes the deleterious effects of memory erasure on a generation of young French-educated students, while Abdelhamid Benhedouga’s Nihayat al-ams (The End of Yesterday) features the debate over harkis (Algerians who collaborated with the French) and their place in the classroom. The discussion of memory in these novels forms part of a larger debate about the role of literature in preserving the memories suppressed by the school.

Conclusion

The five chapters of Contesting the Classroom show how authors have reimagined and renegotiated literature’s place within the schools that create future generations of readers. In many cases, these reimaginations are suffused with palpable anxiety over the state of education. Yet they also creatively rethink the educational endeavor, and literature’s relationship to it. Indeed, a common thread in the novels examined in this work is the idea that literature's pedagogical potential does not stop at the doors of the classroom, nor is it limited by traditional classroom definitions of pedagogy. Accordingly, the conclusion of this work poses a series of questions in the spirit of these texts, that open themselves up to other spaces of encounter besides the public school classroom, and other forms of pedagogical writing besides linear narrative prose. In what spaces outside of the classroom do students encounter local literature? And what are the unexpected genres and styles, beyond the print narrative, that engage with education? New locations of pedagogical encounter discussed include small publishers, book fairs, and online spaces; other genres include photography and song.

Education and Violence in the Black Decade

This chapter asks how literature portrays classroom scenes during times of trauma and political crisis, and whether literary depictions of historical moments of trauma can, themselves, be pedagogical. It focuses in particular of literary portraits of the Black Decade of the 1990s. a time when students and teachers inside classrooms were targets of violence. The literary classroom depicting this time became a vacant or fractured space, replaced by direct encounters outside the school between teachers and students, writers and readers. Novels depicting the 1990s feature teachers and students meeting in bars and cafés, young girls who read and teach each other at home, and former teachers writing to their students from exile. Along with two central novels, Wahiba Khiari’s Nos silences (Our silences) and Bashir Mefti’s Ghurfat al thikrayat (The room of memories), this chapter discusses Nacira Belloula’s Visa pour la haine (Visa for hatred), Boualem Sansal’s Le serment des barbares (The barbarians’ oath), and Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Al aswad yaliq bik (Black becomes you). The portraits of education in these works are applicable beyond the context of the Black Decade, as they show how novels bear witness to and reach readers in a hostile political and educational environment.

Decolonizing the Classroom

The second chapter examines novels that cast Arabization as a new colonialism: both by arguing that Standard Arabic was a “foreign” language in Algeria, and by discussing foreign teachers as a colonizing force bent on shaping a multilingual Algerian people into an “Arab” nation. Karima Berger’s l’Enfant des deux mondes (The child of two worlds) argues that studying Arabic after independence made her French-educated protagonist feel like a colonial subject in her own country. Haydar Haydar’s Walimah li-aʻshaab al-bahr (A banquet for seaweed), written by a Syrian who taught in Algeria in the 1970s, tells the story of a young Iraqi teacher who falls in love with an Algerian student, and must fight society’s impression that he is a sexually “colonizing” threat. Despite different approaches, both novels use colonialism as a metaphor to understand Algeria’s assumed “otherness” to the Arab world. This otherness is reflected, and indeed reproduced, in official textbooks, which often present modern Algerian literature as the lesser other of metropolitan French or Middle Eastern canons. This chapter explores the problems and limits of the colonial as metaphor, along with pedagogical theories of “decolonizing the classroom.”

Introduction

The introduction presents central debates about postcolonial education policy in Morocco and Algeria. It focuses, in particular, on the transition to using Arabic after years of French colonial domination. Arabizing education was considered a fundamental act of decolonization, yet it also rendered education a flashpoint for bitter controversy, and left many questions open for debate. What elements of historical memory would be sacrificed in order to shape a new national identity? Should education systems reflect the linguistic and cultural diversity of students, or work to shape a unified nation? The Introduction lays out a methodological approach to examining these questions both through the literary depiction of the school, and the teaching of literature in the classroom, seeing novels as not only objects of literary analysis, but also as products of an education system and materials that could, eventually, form a part of that system’s curriculum.