La topographie des identités : lecture culturelle de Partir de Tahar Ben Jelloun

Abstract

The city of Tangier, the focus of the present paper, has been at the intersection of the Greek and Berber cultures from the very beginning. The geographical position of the city at the crossroads of an ocean, a sea and two continents has given it a unique fate: the starting and ending point for travellers. First of all, this study endeavours to reveal the imaginative and poetic space that created the metonymic relationship between Tangier and the poetic language that describes it. Secondly, the study will analyse the topography that was set up in the novel Partir by the Moroccan writer, Tahar Ben Jelloun, in which each chapter is named (by the first indicator of identity) after a character and takes place in a specific location. According to our hypothesis, the characters, marked not only by their Maghreb and Moroccan identities but also by Tangier, while trying to get rid of their destabilizing identity linked to the city on the edge of the world, are on the quest for an ideal identity that could give them a psychological and moral integrity.