Cultural Accommodation and Self-Translation in the Work of Layla Abu Zayd

This contribution investigates Moroccan writer Layla Abū Zayd’s strategies of identity shaping and cultural accommodation (Vagelpohl 2010; Esplin 2016) through self-translation. In her autobiography and novels, Layla Abū Zayd explored the Moroccan anti-colonial struggle, restoring women’s historical role in it. At the same time, she interpreted the social contradictions and women’s disappointment in the post-independence age. ‛Ām al-Fīl (“The Year of the Elephant”) her debut novel, was the first novel by a Moroccan woman writer to be translated into English in 1989. That happened despite the fact that Abū Zayd was not yet a renowned author in her own country. Afterwards, she contributed firsthand to the translations of her manuscripts in order to increase the international reception of her work. The article argues that Abū Zayd’s self-translating actions are articulated onto two levels. One way to improve the reception throughout the Arab-speaking world is to employ the paratext (Genette 1987) for translational purposes to clarify some francophone references and Moroccan colloquial expressions. On the other hand, in her autobiographical self-translation, Abū Zayd performed an identity reassessment that helped her in successfully approaching the American readership. This entailed syntactical reformulation as well as a greater spatial-temporal contextualization. Drawing on the idea of “migrant text” (Abdo 2009), the article illustrates how Abū Zayd’s production conformed to some expectations of the specific target audience. This strategy, I argue, was used to successfully challenge some entrenched gender stereotypes and to persuasively convey a multifaceted image of Moroccan women in both intimate and public spaces.