In the novel "Cats of the Archipelago City" published by Dar Al-Mediterranean in 2020, which won the Morocco Book Prize for the year 2021 for the genre of the novel, the Moroccan novelist Ismail Ghazali continues his work on a kind of different fictional writing based on strangeness and transformations.
He does not chase after history, its ideologies and myths, but rather makes writing an aesthetic pleasure that starts from the subjective towards the unfamiliar, as the strangeness or the unreality of reality occupies an important place within his multiple fictional achievement, on the experimental, fantasy or postmodern approach.
In this novel, “Essaouira” or “Mogador” is presented as a strange imaginary city, as writing becomes like a chisel with which the novelist carves a different image of this city.
There is a nightmarish tendency in the writing act of the owner of “Snow Solitude”, as the effect of cats leads you to the details and protrusions of the underworld in an amazing way that makes the writer more like a magical guide to the process of cities, to the extent that these cats become a memory of the city and its dreams or a faithful witness to the fluctuations and contradictions of its tragic reality, so the equation becomes According to the words of the novelist Ismail Ghazali himself, “No novel is straightened without a maze, and no maze is straightened without cats.”
Ghazali has published many fictional texts and works, including “Honey Storks” (2011), “The Crossroads Game” (2011), “The Hornet Hunting Season” (2013), “Three Days in Casablanca” (2019), and Al Jazeera conducted We have this conversation with him.
Ismael Ghazali, what does the Morocco Book Award that you won in the novel category mean to you?
Pure appreciation and recognition of the novel first, and it has a special effect in view of it as the highest literary prize in Morocco, especially when it was unanimously awarded by a sober and impartial committee.
Do you think that such literary prizes are able to rid Moroccan literature of its marginality and highlight it as an important cultural component within Arabic literature?
Moroccan literature does not need to create or create prizes in order to be or impose its existence rather in the Arab world. Rather, it needs to be good Moroccan literature, and it is in all cases, and I do not see that it is marginal in Arab at all, rather it is different, qualitative and avant-garde.
But if you see prizes as a criterion for his virility and eloquence or not, then Moroccan literary titles are strongly present in all lists, long and short, and even attain coronation as well.
In my view, and this is my belief, what we must pay attention to is the aesthetic value of literature, because it is the only thing that can intercede for it, and not the clamor and clamor of prizes here and there, whether they are fair and they rarely do, or unfair, which they do most.
The novel "Cats of the Archipelago City" takes place in the magical cat capital Mogador or Essaouira (the island)
In addition to the novel, I wrote in the genre of the story, and you were issued with “Stork Honey”, “The Crossroads Game”, and “The Viking Tree’s Dreams”, but recently the reader feels that Ismail Ghazali has become obsessed with writing fiction, what is the real motive behind this choice?
Contrary to your observation, I combine writing between the short story and the novel, and I do not prefer between them. I certainly did not deny the short story, and its dangerous game still appeals to me. If I return to my fictional achievement, I will receive 6 short stories issued to me so far in exchange for 5 novels, and this means a steady balance To write in both of them together, there is no obsession with the first destroys the second, nor does the obsession with this rob the other.
However, this pairing is not at all subject to a predetermined program or plan in managing the work between them. Rather, the issue is subject to the same mood of writing.
More than that, I do not hide you that the next title - under publication - will be fiction, I will reveal it to you here "drunk on a bicycle".
You won the Morocco Prize for your novel “Cats of the Archipelago,” the work in which you celebrate the city of Essaouira and its cats, but you portray it in an exotic world despite the city’s realism and surrealism at times. How did you think about it in writing?
The strangeness of Essaouira (a Moroccan city overlooking the Atlantic Ocean) is irrefutable, and it is indeed a magical city, but my writing about it was not planned in advance, as my presence in it is a pure personal adventure, and one of the rewards of this adventure is that the novel “Cats of the Archipelago City” yielded, and whatever it was. Imagination of any novel fantasy or excessive deviation is based on subjective experience in a form of images.
This is the case of “The Archipelago City Cats,” which I wrote, unlike my previous novels, while I was still in this fascinating and cursed city at the same time. Ontological distance of what the work would have been.
But why cats in particular?
What are the implications for the city and its memory?
The choice of cats in the novel is not purely arbitrary, as figuratively speaking, cats identify or collude with foreign women who are lured by the protagonist to the studio in the “Meram” house, either through the generosity of coincidences or in cunning ways. No less shrewd and tragic.
In addition to this syndrome between cats and women, cats on the spectrum of their breeds and the forms of their ripples and reproduction in “Mogador” are remarkable, and give their labyrinth a fantasy effect, as the seagulls crowd out the fascinating and suspicious presence inside the city’s castle and with its people.
The issue is predicated on an aesthetic game in a way that is similar to police as well. The maze and the police curve coincide, or one feeds the other, while holding the thread of salvation here is nebulous, cats collude to be it at times, and other times it is played by the birds of "Awwa".
It is as if the cogito (principle) of this illusory game is referring to "No novel is straightened without a labyrinth, and no maze is straightened without cats."
History is present in the novel as a motive for narrative experimentation, not as a driver of events. Therefore, fiction writing seems to condemn this history by observing a defeated daily reality. To what extent can the novelist text weave strong ties with the past and history of space?
The history of the place is present with a symbolic force, but not as a unilateral strategy. Rather, it enters into the mosaic and the plurality of the novel. Rather, the condemned is the official history that undermines the city through the narrative of power. As for what the official history did not say or deliberately silent about, it means the imagination of fiction writing.
Based on this, the novelist text bets on the place in order to liberate it from the weight of the ordinary and the dominance of the ordinary and its folkloric stereotype, so that its new history becomes what is drawn or written by the fiction of the novel, by creating its own time and revealing invisible maps, and through them light up the dark areas of the real or infiltrate the areas of his strangeness and dream Thus, you will find the other meaning that escapes and lies behind the jungle of banal things of the day.
What are the artistic intersections at the level of writing and imagination between "City Cats of the Archipelago" and "Three Days in Casablanca"?
How can the novelist capture the essence of the city, its memory, and its reality through an unruly fictional text?
The subduing of cities is to write them imaginatively in a way that they become double cities, as I previously disclosed in a previous dialogue, as in the novel “Three Days in Casablanca” I tried to get out of the imagined orbit of the “Middle Atlas” in which I accumulated 6 works of fiction and 3 fiction texts into a new imagined orbit An emergency concerned with cities that are both fascinating and nightmarish, in which I have had tumultuous experiences through the momentum of disparate stays and successive travels alike, and the "City Cats of the Archipelago" multiply this risky trend.
The novel "Three Days in Casablanca" deals with events that the writer lived in a city he described as savage, with strange events and characters (Al-Jazeera)
There are labyrinthine intersections related to the secret mapping of cities in a dystopian (bitter) way, and fictional cities are not necessarily the same as real cities, in addition to that, the aesthetic and poetic relations in the two novels between cinema, plastic art and music, with an emphasis on the existence of a distance between the two novels, as “three days In Casablanca, despite the multiplicity or complexity of its topics, African Negroism remains its main obsession.
Add to that the bet to intensify the roaming and engulfed city forest in a period of 3 days through a narrative geometry that oscillates between the mental and the poetic, based on visually managing the narrative units through the development and use of a technique of sequences that lead one to the other through the succession of coincidences of ringing phone calls or playing its smart network.
The novel “Cats of the Archipelago City” is another game that monitors the lives of chronic homelessness in a magical city similar to a trap of cynical fates. In terms of its strangeness, the series of mysterious disappearances of some tourists creates a terrifying atmosphere for crime...etc.
The various textures of its subjects - human and animal - in what I think or claim, as well as its narrative and technical management displaced to another aesthetic area, and here I leave the matter of discovering its traps and investigating evidence of its clashes to the reader.