Abdelkebir Khatibi (Arabic: عبد الكبير الخطيبي) (11 February 1938 – 16 March 2009) was a prolific Moroccan literary critic, novelist, philosopher, playwright, poet, and sociologist. Affected in his late twenties by the rebellious spirit of 1960s counterculture, he challenged in his writings the social and political norms upon which the countries of the Maghreb region were constructed. His collection of essays Maghreb pluriel is one of his most notable works.
Career
Khatibi was born on 11 February 1938, in the Atlantic port city of El Jadida. By the age of 12, he began to write poems, in Arabic and French, which he sent to the radio and newspapers.[1] He studied in the French colonial school system, at Lycée Lyautey.[2] He earned his doctorate in sociology under the Tunisian intellectual Albert Memmi at the Sorbonne in 1965.[3][2] His dissertation, Le Roman maghrébin [The Maghribian Novel], which examines the question of how a novelist could avoid propagandizing in the context of a postrevolutionary society, and its follow-up, Bilan de la sociologie au Maroc [Assessment of Sociology Concerning Morocco] were both published shortly after the Paris Spring unrest of May 1968.
The “abstruse prose” employed by Abdelkebir Khatibi and the young generation of Maghribian authors reflects “the desire to refuse French culture by destroying and recreating the French language, thus attacking the heart of the culture from within, with what Khatibi calls a littérature sauvage”, according to Encyclopædia Britannica[4]. Two plays, La Mort des artistes (1964; “The Death of the Artists”) and Le Prophète voilé (1979; “The Veiled Prophet”), and a novel, Le Livre du sang (1979; “The Book of Blood”),“ demonstrate Abdelkebir Khatibi's theoretical approach to literature”.[5]
He taught at Mohammed V University in Rabat and worked as a director of the Institut de sociologie (Institute of Sociology) from 1966 until the institute's closure in 1970.[6][2] In 1968, Roland Barthes was in Rabat and befriended and was influenced by Khatibi.[7] His sociological studies include works on Moroccan social life such as Bilan de la sociologie au Maroc, 1968; Études sociologiques sur le Maroc, 1971; and La Blessure du nom propre, 1974.[8]
He was editor-in-chief of the journal Bulletin économique et social du Maroc; he renamed it Signes du présent in 1987.[2] His landmark collection of critical essays Maghreb pluriel was published in 1983.[2]
In his later years, Abdelkebir Khatibi had been suffering from a chronic cardiac condition which led to his death in the Moroccan capital, Rabat, five weeks after his 71st birthday. During the final stages of his illness, a measure of the high regard in which he was held was seen in the personal concern of King Mohammed VI who directed his transfer to Morocco's premier medical facility, Sheikh Zayed Hospital.
Khatibi is survived by his widow and their two children.
Bousta, Rachida Saigh (1996). Lecture des récits de Abdelkebir Khatibi: écriture, mémoire et imaginaire (in French). Casablanca: Afrique Orient. ISBN978-9981-25-057-4.
