Memory, City, and the Poetics of the Historical Novel: An Interview with Mohamed El Ftouh on Diwan Al-Ahali

This interview offers a sustained critical engagement with Mohamed El Ftouh’s debut novel Diwan Al-Ahali (2023), a 508-page historical narrative centered on the city of Tetouan and the collective memory of its people across several generations. Across a wide-ranging series of exchanges, El Ftouh articulates a poetics of historical fiction grounded in what he terms the “aesthetic wager” of the novel, namely its capacity to interpret and fill the silences of the historical archive without falsifying it. The conversation traverses key critical questions: the relationship between fiction and historiography, the city as novelistic character, the function of detail in narrative realism, the Andalusian-Morisco heritage as a structural rather than ornamental presence, the politics of memory in a post-colonial Moroccan context, and the ethics of representing the marginalized and the forgotten. The novelist reflects on the craft decisions that shaped his work, while resisting the reduction of the novel to either historical testimony or ideological statement. The interview contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations about the Moroccan novel, the literary cartography of the Moroccan north, and the narrative construction of urban and collective memory in contemporary Arabic fiction.