With Barthes and Derrida in ‘the Margins of a Funereal Song’: The Poetics of Maternal Mourning in the Work of Abdelkébir Khatibi

Abstract

In Par-dessus l’épaule [ Over the Shoulder] (1988), a composite work by Moroccan writer and intellectual Abdelkébir Khatibi, the section entitled ‘Cendres et reliques’ [Ashes and Relics] represents an attempt to come to terms with the grief for his mother through a fragmented and dynamic act of writing. By reading this section alongside Roland Barthes’s Journal de deuil [ Mourning Diary] and Jacques Derrida’s ‘Circonfession’ [Circumfession], this essay demonstrates that writing the loss of the mother leads Khatibi, following these two authors he knew very well and whose works paralleled and shared affinities with his own, to a quest for a form of writing anchored in the poetics of the fragment. More than a simple healing or overcoming of a personal trauma, Khatibi’s ‘Ashes and Relics’ uses transcription, translation and notation as a way to displace the writing of mourning towards the margins, where a counter-discourse opposes the doxa of mourning in its anticipation of loss, its refusal of melancholy and its rejection of narrative unity in favour of the open-ended shattering and regeneration of fragments.