Introduction Summary and Analysis

Elizabeth Fernea provides the introduction. She praises The Year of the Elephant as "an event in cross-cultural literary history." It was the first novel written by a Moroccan woman in Arabic to be translated into English. There have been other acclaimed pieces of Moroccan literature, the vast majority by men, but The Year of the Elephant was different. Though it also dealt with Moroccan struggles for independence from the French, like other literature, it adopted the perspective of a working-class woman. Though Abouzeid was trilingual, she chose to write in Arabic for personal and political reasons.

Abouzeid was born in 1950 to a middle-class family in the village of El Ksiba. She was six when in 1956 Morocco attained its independence from France. Her father was involved in the Moroccan resistance efforts. She attended journalism school, and later worked as a journalist, the...