Leila Abouzeid

Leila Abouzeid (Arabic: ليلة أبو زيد‎‎) (born 1950, El Ksiba) is a Moroccan author. She writes in Arabic and is the first Moroccan woman writer of literature to have her works published in English-language translation.

Leila's radio show was unique because it was spoken in Arabic, as opposed to French. Almost every radio broadcast was done in French because the radio was a business, and French was used in business. As part of her program, she translated movie scripts into Arabic and did dramatic readings. One of these was the famous autobiography of Malcolm X. She translated this script into Arabic and read it theatrically over the air.

Reading other people's books may have led her to make her own work instead. She still to this day refuses to use French because it is the language of their foreign invaders, and Arabic is both Morocco's true language and Islam's language. Speaking Arabic, English and French, Abouzeid still uses primarily Arabic because she does not want to conform to the foreign culture that has taken over her country. She does not want to stand for a culture that she is not a part of. To Leila, the use of the French language is being submissive to invaders that are not even present anymore. In The Last Chapter Leila explains her opinion on the use of French in her school years in her closing chapter called Afterword: by the author:

"I was in a private school in Rabat where Arabic and French were the languages of instruction. I loathed reading in French and developed an aversion to using it outside the classroom. This early position against the language of the colonialist proved fortunate, as it kept me from becoming one of the post-colonial Maghrebi [North African] writers producing a national literature in a foreign language. My intense aversion toward French may explain why I turned to English as my means of communication with the West" (Abouzeid,The Last Chapter 153).

Leila expresses her contempt for the French and their language, and even while she was young and in school she hated French. Again in the novel she mentions her hatred for French schooling, "I feel bad for ademoiselle Doze, even if she was French" (Abouzeid, 6). Leila also has reasons to hate the French that are very personal. The French had arrested and tortured her father for being, and had forced the language upon her. This made her hate the French from a very young age. She does not show any hate for other foreign languages like the English language because they have not personally caused harm to her.

Her first book called Year of the Elephant was published in 1980, and was published in English in 1989 by Texas University. Her book was not translated into French at any point. Year of the Elephant was named after a battle in Islamic history. The story of the battle is that during an early religious based battle, a flock of birds came and dropped stones on the enemy elephants, causing them to turn around. She compares this historic battle to the Moroccans battling for independence because they are mere birds compared to the gigantic global power of their French rulers.

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