Issue N° 37 – October-December 2015 Journal of the Department of English

Sultan Moulay Slimane Univ., Faculty of Arts & Humanities, Beni Mellal, Morocco.

Editor: Khalid Chaouch.

INSIDE THIS ISSUE Editorial: Dependence Mentality and Initiative Spirit ... 02 The Poet’s Corner: “The Compulsory Reasons” by Mohammed AL-MAGHOUT … 03 “The Poet and the Fool” and “Great Gaza Goes” by Rachid ACIM … 04 “The Arabian Nights and World Literature: A Tentative Short Survey” by Elhoussaine AAMMARI … 06 Pen Circle Prize (2015/2016) … 09 Middle Ground, Journal of the Research Laboratory on Culture and Communication (Issue N° 6): „Occidentalism vs. Orientalism.' 10 RLCC International Conference on “Shakespeares: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (Call for Papers)… 12 Pungent Quotations on Fools, Insanity and Madness … 14 Clues to “Crosswords” N° 36 ... 14 Crosswords N° 37 ... 15 Courses Framework of the Fall Semesters (1, 3, and 5) … 16

Pen Circle Sultan Moulay Slimane University

Faculty of Letters and Humanities, Department of English

BP. 524, Beni Mellal, Morocco.

Fax: 212 (0) 5 23 48 17 69

Email: pencircle@gmail.com

Pen Circle is also available at www.flshbm.ma Publications

Editorial Board

Mly. Lmustapha MAMAOUI, Mohamed RAKII, Redouan SAÏDI.

Sermo in circulis

est liberior.

دائرة القلم

Pen Circle n° 37 - 2 -

EDITORIAL

Dependence Mentality and

Initiative Spirit

In our daily life as well as in many of our institutions, it is

crystal clear that, in many cases, things work this way: Everybody,

from the simple clerk to the supposed responsible, shakes off

responsibility, because nobody feels or wants to feel that they are the

responsible. Following from this, no one should ever boast of being

responsible.

Fortunately, this is not always the case, and such a state of mind

should never be seen as an inevitable fate. There are certainly some

orders and a general policy to be followed. But this fact should not

become a tether to the creative genius, especially to those endowed

with an INITIATIVE SPIRIT. Why should everyone always wait for

someone else to tell them what to do and what not to do? This

waiting spirit has undoubtedly generated a dependence mentality. That is,

the person on the ground (in any field) has become – in many cases –

dependent on officials of higher rank as regards plans, ideas, and

even details of how to implement the practical side of one‟s own

task.

The prevalence of this mentality never provides the fertile ground for

the emergence of enterprising, dynamic and inventive persons in all

our institutions: administration, companies, factories, universities,

schools, and even Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs).

In this situation, only people who have the “head on (not between)

the shoulders” could really take initiatives and make decisions. We

need them… and badly.

Khalid CHAOUCH

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The Poet’s Corner This corner is devoted both to prominent figures in poetry and to ambitious students who dare to embark on the process of creative writing. Students‟ attempts should be sent by email or presented in legible handwriting, and submitted to a member of Pen Circle Editorial Board.

The Compulsory Reasons1

by Mohammed Al-Maghout

Whenever freedom rained down anywhere in the world, Arab regimes rush out to cover their people with umbrellas, fearing that they would “catch cold.”

Why would the Arabs appear to cling to everything and anything? Are they about to drown?

Everything around us is cracking and collapsing. Where are the ruins? Did they sell them already?

All are collapsing, and all want to shore up each other.

Whenever two Arabs meet, intelligence services make a third.

With your hands trembling, you cannot hit any target.

Whatever sky they circle, the Arab clouds and the Arab planes war with each other and their surroundings, like all Arab communities on earth.

Martyrs fall on the sidewalks, while the despots march in the roads

And any Arab unity lies in the mass graves.

When the people have nearly ceased to believe in anything, their leaders have become the pious faithful!!

Mohammed Al-Maghout (1934-2006), a Syrian poet and playwright, is regarded as the father of the Arabic free verse poetry. He wrote for theater, TV and cinema. With a sarcastic tone and dreary outlook, Maghout combined satire with descriptions of social misery and malaise, illustrating what he viewed as an ethical decline among rulers in the region. Some of his themes included the problems of injustice and totalitarian governments. Most of his renowned poems are: Sadness in the Moon Light (“Huzn fi daw elqamar”, 1959), A Room with Millions of Walls (“Gurfa bi malayin al-judrán”, 1964), Joy is not my Profession (“Al-farah laysa mihnati”, 1970) and The Flower Cutter (“Sayaf al-zohour”, 2001).

Suggested by Elhoussaine AAMMARI

1

“The Compulsory Reasons” is an excerpt from a longer poem by Mohammed Al- Maghout in “Sayyaf al-Zuhur” (Flower Cutter), published by Dar al-Mada, Damascus, 2001. This poem is translated from Arabic by Noel Abdulahad.

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The Poet and the Fool

A poet is like a fool

The first dances his verse

The second screams his universe

But folly and poetry have a wisdom

Not found in this earthly kingdom

Both meanings differ in sight

But the two persons share the same light

The poet depends on his muse

The fool follows his crazy rules

Each tries to solve an enigma

One in folly,

The other in critical dogma.

۞ ۞ ۞ ۞ ۞ ۞

Great Gaza Goes

Great Gaza goes by me

She cries valleys of blood

Down the bloody hills

Singing a deep sorrow.

“Why this happens to me?”

She asks in her pain.

Maybe, it‟s destiny‟s work

A voice from the unseen world replies.

Killing cowards, who knows?

So conspiring against me

Me,

Moaning

Sweet

Beloved mother!

All wronged me

But my children!

Whom I trust fondly and love.

Hello! This is me again, Gaza.

Can you hear me?

This is my (Hi)story:

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A monster lands down on my land

All of a sudden, starts stabbing me

Ravaging me

Raping me

Rocketing me

Torturing me.

Neither she nor I

Could visualize this massive monster

He is too fierce to imagine

Too savage to talk to

Too stupid to castigate

Too sadistic to accept

So satanic!

Like King Lucifer.

“Why this happens to me?” She mourns.

Me, the moaning mother of all these children

O sister Syria

Tearful Tunisia

You‟re not like me

Soon, you shall recover

From this temperamental illness.

Ramadan speaks to Gaza

She feels blessed and bashful

He bestows on her a sweet rhapsody

Drying despair from her glistening eyes

By his nightly prayers to God

And she finds shelter somewhere

Away from these triple-faced folks

Where she‟s with him, alone!

And God their third

The three now delight in Ramadan.

Dr. Rachid ACIM

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The Arabian Nights and World Literature: A Tentative Short Survey

It is quintessentially incontrovertible that the Arabic tales known as

Alf layla wa layla (Thousand and one Nights) have changed the world

literature in a scale that is unprecedented since the eighteenth century

and the translation of Antoine Galland. Fusing the ordinary with the

extraordinary, the supernatural with the mundane, humans with

genies, the Nights represent a wide range of tales deriving from

Baghdad in the mid-eighth century, Persia in the ninth century, and

Cairo in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. More recently, the Iraqi

scholar Muhsin Mahdi mustered considerable textual evidence to

argue that the oldest extant Arabic text of the Nights is the three-

volume Syrian manuscript - now held in the Bibliothèque nationale in

Paris - that would be used by Antoine Galland as the basis of his early

eighteenth-century French translation. This manuscript is considered

as the oldest surviving version of the introductory pages of The

Arabian Nights (Robert Irwin 7). Mahdi‟s English translator, Husain

Haddawy, affirms that this Syrian manuscript is “of all existing

manuscripts the oldest and closest to the original (xii, emphasis

added)”. Endlessly repeated, modified, and rewoven, they derive from

various sources, including almost certainly oral transmission. Indeed,

transmitted orally and collectively, these Arabic tales first introduced

to the European public and transcribed by the French Orientalist,

Antoine Galland into French as Les Mille et une Nuits between 1703-

1814. Ever since 1706, when Galland‟s French version of a

manuscript collection of mainly Persian stories began to appear in

English translation, The Thousand and One Nights had been filtering

through British culture.

Since the first edition at the outset of the eighteenth century, the

ensemble of the editions of the Arabian Nights has been tethered with

illustrations; there are some stories in the collection of the Arabian

Nights which didn‟t figure in pre-Galland Arabic manuscripts. These

stories such as “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” and “Aladdin,” the

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adventures of the Caliph Haroun Al-Rashid, are rendered as “orphan

stories”, to use Mia A. Gerhardt‟s own expression (12-14). These

stories owe much of their particular characteristics to the individual

influence of the ostensible translator. The latter does not only

undertake the task of rendering these manuscripts into the target

language, but he also laces these translations with certain illustrations

that just evoke the translator‟s individual perspective about the tales

being translated. For Mahdi, Galland “felt free to abridge, omit, and

change with impunity; remove repetitions at will; amplify the text or

add explanations where he felt readers could benefit; and link the

elements of a story and make it look more logical in the way it moved

from one episode to another” (34).

The Arabian Nights has been present in the literature of the West

since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Irwin maintains that the

world literature is saturated with the Nights imagery, manifesting that

“instead of listing European writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries that were in some way or other influenced by the Nights, it

would be easier to list those that were not” (290). A tremendous

inspiration was conjured up in various areas of creative imagination,

including novel, drama, pantomime, opera, ballet, puppet show,

shadow play, music and painting. Critics have identified its stories in

the work of a wide variety of Western romantic poets and Victorian

novelists, poets, travellers by subsuming it in their works and wrote

about their experiences in reading it, most notably, William Beckford,

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, Alfred

Tennyson, W. M. Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell,

Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Goethe, Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis

Stevenson and Oscar Wild, just to name but a handful. It also

continued to be praised and admired in the twenty-century by

novelists, playwrights and poets such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce,

W.B. Yeats, Jean Rhys and Angela Carter. More recently, the Nights

has become one of the world‟s great travelling texts, inspiring writers

from Jorge Louis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Salman Rushdie.

Besides, there are some Orientalists and travel writers who write their

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stories in the same manner as those of the Arabian Nights such as

Edward William Lane, the English translator of The Nights (1839-

1841) and Richard Burton (1885-1888). Most of the British travel

writers that I have perused and who sojourned into Morocco made

their accounts abound with some tropes and allusions to the Arabian

Nights, especially belated travellers who travelled to the Land of the

Sunset at the turn of the nineteenth century, searching for the exotic,

the pristine and the atavistic, in an epoch that coincided with the fin de

siècle malaise, the emergence of modernism and the decline of the

exotic.

The reception of the Arabian Nights in the post-Mahfoudian Arabic

nouveau roman has also sparked off the literary imaginations of many

writers in the Arab world. Contemporary Arab novelists draw on the

Nights both from within and from without as these tales returned to

the Arab world, having been absorbed by and repackaged in a new

European form: the novel. These tales have a great influence on a

generation of Arab novelists such as the Palestinian novelist Emile

Habibi, the Lebanese novelists Elias Khoury and Rashid Daif, the

Algerian novelist Rashid Boudjedra, and the Saudi novelist

Abdelrahman Munif, and many others besides.

References

Gerhardt, Mia A. The Art of Story-telling: A Literary Study of the

Thousand and One Nights. Leiden: Brill, 1963.

Haddawy, Husain. The Arabian Nights: Based on the Text of the

Fourteenth Century Syrian Manuscript. Ed. Muhsin Mahdi. New

York: Norton, 1990.

Irwin, Robert. The Arabian Nights: A Companion. London: Tauris

Parke, 2004.

Mahdi, Muhsin, ed. The Thousand and One Nights (Alf layla wa-

layla) from the Earliest Known Sources, 2 vols. Leiden: E. J. Brill,

1984.

Elhoussaine AAMMARI

Pen Circle n° 37 - 9 -

Pen Circle Prize

for Mellali Writers in English

(2015/2016)

Pen Circle opens the annual competition in creative

writing for all students of the Department of English. This

aims at encouraging students to express themselves in

English.

The students who would like to participate in this

competition are required to write an original piece of

writing not exceeding two pages: a short story, an essay, or

any form of creative writing. Participants are kindly

requested to send their attempts to the Journal‟s email

address (pencircle@gmail.com) before January 31,

2016. As it is the case each year, the jury members of this

competition take into consideration the levels (Semesters)

of the candidates so as to give equal chances to all.

Four awards will be given to the winners, each

assigned to a Semester (Semesters 1, 3, and 5, in addition

to a winner chosen among Master Studies‟ students.) The

winners will receive the awards and will have their works

published in the next issue of Pen Circle (N° 38).

Good luck to all!

Pen Circle n° 37 - 10 -

Middle Ground, N° 6 (2014)

Issue N6 (2014) of Middle Ground, International Journal of

Literary and Cultural Encounters has been released by the Research

Laboratory on Culture and Communication. The papers of this issue

deal with the theme of „Occidentalism vs. Orientalism.' The authors

belong to different universities from Morocco, France, Japan, New

Zealand, Poland and Serbia. Below is the list of papers:

From Occidentalism to Orientalism and Beyond

Ian FOOKES

(University of Auckland, New Zealand):

Victor Segalen‟s Exoticism: Beyond Occidentalism and Orientalism.

Michal Moch

(Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland):

Contemporary Polish Discussion on Orientalism and Occidentalism.

Terminology, Main Themes and Controversies

Jacqueline JONDOT

(Université de Toulouse le Mirail, Toulouse, France):

From worship to disappointment: Arab writers in the English

Language and Occidentalism

Barnaby RALPH (Tokyo Jeshi Daigak University, Japan):

“The Good Old America”: Authenticity, Occidentalism and the Les

Paul in Japan

Occidentalism/Orientalism and the Question of Otherness

Biljana DJORIC FRANCUSKI (Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, Serbia):

Reversed Roles of the Self and the Other in Occidentalism and

Orientalism

Mohamed RAKII (Sultan Moulay Slimane University, Beni Mellal – Morocco):

Representing the Christian Occident: A Study of Ahmed Ben Qasim‟s

Kitab Nasir al-Din ala al Qawm al-Kafirin

Pen Circle n° 37 - 11 -

Samira KHEMKHEM

(University of Strasbourg, France):

“Americans in Egyptian Cinema and Cartoons”

Khalid CHAOUCH

(Sultan Moulay Slimane University, Beni Mellal, Morocco):

Claiming Estevanico de Azamor in the Labyrinth of Oriental/Western

Identities

David EWICK

(Tokyo Woman‟s Christian University, Japan)

and Kanae SHIRAISHI

(Hitutsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan):

A Case Study of Self-Orientalism and Self-Occidentalism:

Performative Constructions of Self and Other in Japanese Travel

Guides to Sri Lanka

Moulay Lmustapha MAMAOUI

(Sultan Moulay Slimane University, Beni Mellal – Morocco):

Process of Identification of Alterity in Wyndham Lewis‟s Journey

into Barbary

Middle Ground is an annual and a peer-reviewed international

journal, devoted to researches and studies in literary and cultural

fields. Its scope is open to all periods and genres.

To order a copy of this issue or of previous issues, please contact:

Sultan Moulay Slimane University

Faculty of Arts and Humanities

Department of English

Avenue Ibn Khaldoun, Ouled Hamdane,

B.P 524, 23000, Beni Mellal, Morocco

Fax : 212 0523 48 17 69

E-mail: m_ground@yahoo.com

URL: http://www.flshbm.ma

Pen Circle n° 37 - 12 -

The Research Laboratory on Culture and Communication (RLCC)

Sultan Moulay Slimane University, Faculty of Arts and Humanities

Department of English Studies, Beni Mellal, Morocco

Call For Papers

Shakespeares: Critical Perspectives Past and Present

RLCC Annual International Conference

29-30 March 2016, Beni Mellal, Morocco

On the occasion of the 400th

anniversary of Shakespeare’s death,

the Research Laboratory on Culture and Communication is

devoting its annual international conference to “Shakespeares:

Critical Perspectives Past and Present.” Proposals for 20-minute

papers addressing any aspect of Shakespeare’s oeuvre are invited.

The conference topics include (but are not limited to):

- Popular Culture and Shakespeare

- Multicultural/Global Shakespeare

- Shakespeare in the Arab World

- Postmodern Shakespeare(s)

- Performing/Staging Shakespeare

- Screening Shakespeare

- Cross-gender Shakespeare

- Feminist Shakespeare

- Antiquity in Shakespeare

- Black Shakespeare

- Animals in Shakespeare

- Food Aesthetics in Shakespeare

- Digital Shakespeare(s)

- Popular Music and Shakespeare

- Painting Shakespeare

- The Art of Shakespeare’s Poetry

A selection of papers will be published in the RLCC peer-

reviewed Journal Middle Ground after the conference.

Pen Circle n° 37 - 13 -

Please send proposals of up to 500 words and a short biographical

résumé via e-mail (as Word 1997-2003 attachments) to the

following e-addresses on behalf of the organizing committee:

Khalid Chaouch chaouch63@yahoo.com

Mohamed Sghir Syad syadmohamed1@gmail.com

The deadline for sending proposals is 31st December, 2015.

Acceptance of proposals will be sent on 15th

January, 2016.

Conference Fees:

The conference fee is € 50 EUR. / $ 57 USD. / DH 550 MAD. It

includes:

Conference pack

Coffee break refreshment

Farewell dinner

Accommodation:

Hotel El Bassatine***A (within walking distance of the University)

(€50/ $ 57/ MAD550 full board per single person/per night)

Telephone +212 (0) 523 482 247

For more information, please follow the links:

https://www.hotelsclick.com/auberges/maroc/beni-mellal/48438/hotel-

al-bassatine.html

http://en.directrooms.com/hotels/subregion/4-68-3494/

Airports

Menara Marrakesh Airport (3hours drive/taxi ride to the Hotel in Beni

Mellal)

Mohamed V Casablanca Airport (3hours drive/taxi ride to the Hotel in

Beni Mellal)

Hotel reservations and rides from airport to Beni Mellal can be made

by the organizers upon request.

The Organising Committee:

Khalid Chaouch

Cherki Karkaba

Moulay Mustapha Mamaoui

Mohamed Rakii

Mohamed Sghir Syad

Pen Circle n° 37 - 14 -

Pungent Quotations on Fools, Insanity and Madness

"There comes a moment in everybody‟s life when he must decide whether he‟ll live among human beings or not – a fool among fools or a fool alone."

Thornton Wilder, The Matchmaker. “A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation.”

Max Gluckman, Politics, Law and Ritual. "Insanity is a kind of innocence."

Graham Greene, The Quiet American "If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise."

William Blake "The silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool."

Rudyard Kipling, Plain Tales from the Hills. "The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool."

Ralph Waldo Emerson. "There a pleasure sure In being mad, which none but mad men know."

Dryden, The Spanish Friar. "As soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious."

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way. “Party is the madness of many for the gain of a few.”

Jonathan Swift, Thoughts on Various Subjects “What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.”

Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

Clues to ‘CROSSWORDS’ N° 36

A B C D E F G H I J K

1 A M A T E U R I S H

2 B E M O A N B E E P

3 O N O R I E N T A L

4 R A N T V A V A

5 T G H E V E Y N

6 E C B R E A D T

7 P R O C E S S O M

8 S I M P L E T N I M

9 Y E P L H A S A

10 C O S H U T T E R

11 H S A E R R O R S

12 E L E M E N T A R Y

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CROSSWORDS (N° 37)

1- Natives of Britain – To make or become a unity. 2- To give a

name once again – An indefinite article. 3- Establishment or

Foundation. 4- Object, animal, or plant symbolizing a tribe or a clan,

often having ritual associations (Reversed) – A vegetable often used

with tomato in Moroccan salad. 5- To draft or compose (past form) –

An indefinite article – Spanish TV Channel. 6- The sensation that

precedes vomiting – A person who often states falsehoods. 7- The

rudiments of a subject or an alphabetical guide – To build castles in

Spain – A Spanish greeting. 8- Very Large Telescope – Fibre or

thread used in weaving or knitting. 9- Find it in „faery’ – A castrated

male of domesticated cattle used for work and meat – A Chinese name

– Egoistic objective pronoun. 10- Momentous, significant, notable.

A- The upper rim of a vessel or a cup – Relating to a navy. B-

Something that can be renewed. C- To teach. D- Design made on the

skin by inking (pl.) – Football team of Marseilles. E- Excluded,

eliminated – Extreme programming. F- Network or web – Aural

organs. G- An international organization – Coordinating conjunction

that joins two or more alternatives. H- Preposition used to indicate

position – An adverb meaning „from here‟ or „from home‟. I- The “…

Jack” is the national flag of GB – Language of the Maya people. J-

Preposition – To leg it. K- The process of igniting the fuel in an

engine. L- Having the shape of an ellipse. M- Absolved or relieved

from an obligation.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Pen Circle n° 37 - 16 -

Semester

1

M1 M2 M3 M4 M5 M6 M7

Reading

Comprehension

and Précis 1

Paragraph

Writing

Grammar

1

Spoken

English

Guided

Reading

Study

Skills

Languages I:

French

Sultan Moulay Slimane University

Faculty of Letters and Humanities

Department of English

Filière of English Studies Beni Mellal - Morocco

Semester

3

M15

M16

M17

M18

M19

M20

Extensive

Reading

Composition 2

Grammar

3

Public

Speaking

and

Debating

British

Culture

and Society

/ Culture

and Society

in the US

Initiation

to

Translation

Semester

5

Literary

&

Cultural

Studies

Stream

M27

M28

M29

M30

M31

M32

Novel 1

Drama

Media

Studies

Applied

Linguistics

Travel

Narrative

Translation &

Interpretation

Semester

5

Linguistics

Stream

M27

M28

M29

M30

M31

M32

Novel

Phonetics &

Phonology

Morpho-

Syntax 1

Applied

Linguistics

Sociolinguistics

Translation &

Interpretation