Born into a family from the Middle Atlas, Nadia Chafik teaches French literature at Mohammed V University in Rabat. Her writing career began in the 1990s when Morocco witnessed the emergence of a women’s protest literature, encouraged by vibrant community life. Most of these authors have chosen French language to express women’s protests and demands in environments where the weight of tradition reinforced by oppressive religious orthodoxy is omnipresent. “Fille du vent” ([Girl of the Wind], 1995) is inspired by authentic events that the canvas novelist uses to weave her fiction. In “Le Secret des djinns” ([The Secret of the Djinn], 1998), the story takes place in Casablanca after the Allied bombing. Jabrane, after a forty-year imprisonment, which recalls the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, finds himself confronted with the cruelty of a new world where he manages to survive thanks only to the magic of words. “Dans l’ombre de Jugurtha” ([In the Shadow of Jugurtha], 2000) is located during the French colonisation in the Middle Atlas, presented as the land of the legendary Amazigh king. In these mountains, the author follows her character who left Paris to join a French lieutenant, but falls in love with a young and handsome Berber warrior: we thus witness the unexpected encounter of two cultures. In 2005, N. Chafik published a collection of short stories, “Nos jours aveugles” [Our Blind Days], in which she sketched portraits of women and men divided between tradition and modernity. In her depiction of Moroccan society, the author seeks to distinguish herself from the underlying points of view in colonial and orientalist literature in their representation of the Cherifian kingdom.
