Brittany LandorfHomeScholarshipTeachingWritingCVMapping Female Sainthood

Writing

To narrate a tale, rawiyā, is also to bring water, to irrigate the earth. In Moroccan folk tales, a good narrative is like water, moving from one place to another yet always enriching those it departs, continuing on in them. The ending is an invitation and a hope, a wish that the story, like water will continue to circulate, change, and bless:

“And my story went from a river to another, and I stayed with the good people.”

خرافتي مشات مع الواد وأنا بقيت مع الجواد

Look at me! -- adorned in tattered clothing;

         Your eyes express your loathing.

Yet I am like an authored book, overflowing;

         The people’s gossip, notwithstanding.

Do not worry over the future, fretting and planning;

         Don’t carry your concerns, as if they are everything.

Worldly life is bittersweet-- its fruits passing;

         It is not the world which lasts, never ending.

Oh companion! Patience!

Patience for what comes to you.

In the trailer for Kadib Abyad or The Mother of All Lies, a small figurine appears bathed in a reddish-purple haze. An old woman raises a miniature cane as her hooded eyes glare suspiciously. Her looming gaze is juxtaposed by the faint glitter of her rhinestone hijab and pale floral jellaba. As the light flickers and mellows to soft blues, a voice laments from above: “Ahh, they’ve deformed me! Look — they’ve deformed me — ‘awjawnī!” The camera shifts, peering behind the shoulder of an old woman examining the miniature likeness in her hand using a magnifying glass. The old woman continues to cry out: “They’ve deformed me —‘awjawnī, see how they’ve deformed me!”

When I was younger, I used to weave fantasies about what it might be like to be a writer when I grew up. I read voraciously at the time, with no discerning taste. My writing was similarly haphazard. I drew from the styles of authors I fell in love with. First Tamora Pierce and J.D. Salinger in elementary and middle school, then a brief infatuation with a variety of British notables—Bronte, Lawrence, and Joyce, and finally ending in the recursive imaginaries of Marquez, Mahfouz, Rushdie. This mish-mash of writing styles ironed out gradually in college. I learned to eliminate prepositional phrases, profess allegiance to active verbs, and follow a clear organizational logic. However, in the process of becoming a good “academic” writer, I lost what I knew about storytelling.

Of late, I have been thinking about mapping. Or, more specifically, I have been in the process of mapping.

To “map” is to make a representation of a place, of a space. It is to delineate and to demarcate space, to establish borders, and to trace relationships. Maps contribute to the making of realities; they generate what Roland Barthes has observed in literary depictions as “the reality effect” (1969).