Driss Chraïbi

Driss Chraïbi was born on the fifteenth of July 1926 at Mazagan — subsequently El Jadida — on the Atlantic coast of central Morocco, the son of a prosperous tea merchant of Mazagan, who controlled at the time of his son’s birth a substantial portion of the inland Moroccan tea trade. He was raised in the prosperous urban-bourgeois Moroccan household of the late protectorate period.

He was placed at six at the Quranic school of Mazagan and at ten at the French colonial Lycée Lyautey at Casablanca, where he completed the baccalauréat in 1945. He went to Paris in October 1945 at nineteen on his father’s subvention to take the doctorat-ès-sciences in chemistry at the Faculté des sciences de Paris, completing the diplôme d’ingénieur chimiste in 1950.

He abandoned the chemistry vocation at the close of the diploma in 1950 and lived the following four years at Paris on the margins of the post-war Saint-Germain-des-Prés literary milieu — working occasional jobs at the Bibliothèque nationale and the Algerian-quarter cafés.

He published in 1954 the first novel Le Passé simple — the chronicle of the young Driss Ferdi’s revolt against his despotic father, the “Seigneur”, in late-protectorate-period Casablanca — at the Paris house Denoël. The novel was at the time of publication and is now widely recognised as the founding novel of the modern francophone Moroccan literature. The novel was banned in Morocco at independence in 1956 and remained banned until 1977.

He published in 1955 the novel Les Boucs (The Goats) — the chronicle of the North African immigrant shanty-towns of suburban Paris — and across the following fifty years a further fifteen novels, among them La Civilisation, ma mère!… (1972), Une enquête au pays (1981, the first of his Inspector Ali detective series), and L’Inspecteur Ali (1991).

He lived from 1959 to 1999 in France — predominantly at Crest in the Drôme — and worked between 1953 and 1991 as a producer of radio plays at the French national radio service of the ORTF and its successors. He served additionally between 1965 and 1971 as visiting professor of North African literature at the Université Laval at Québec.

He returned to settle in Morocco in 1999 at the village of Bouznika south of Rabat.

He died at Crest, France on the first of April 2007 of complications of stroke, at eighty.

He is honored here as the author of Le Passé simple.