Ambivalent Resistance: The Moroccan Mother Trope Between Ideological Representation and Agency Negotiation in Abdellatif Laâbi’s The Bottom of the Jar

This article suggests a new gender-critical reading of Abdelatif Laâbi’s The Bottom of the Jar. Published in 2002 and translated into English in 2013, this memoir-style novel draws heavily from the author’s early life in Fez during the 1950s. As part of Laâbi’s project of littérature engagée, the author declares that his aim with The Bottom of the Jar is to give voice to those who cannot speak for themselves, particularly his mother, whose vibrant and outspoken personality marked him during his growing-up years. Drawing on Spivak’s theory of subaltern representation, this article argues that the author’s nationalism significantly shapes the representation of female characters in the novel. Focusing on Ghita, a character inspired by Laâbi’s own mother, this article argues that she is largely ambivalent. Though she seems frustrated by and disillusioned with her condition as a wife and mother in a patriarchal household, she is often seen participating in and reproducing the same gender norms that oppress her. Through her, the article attests that female characters in Moroccan postcolonial coming-of-age narratives are deeply enmeshed in feminist ambivalence, constantly oscillating between submission and resistance, bargaining with the patriarchy, and negotiating their agency through acts of covert resistance. By relocating agency beyond the Western binary of active/passive and resistant/subordinate to a more fluid model, this article contributes to postcolonial feminist scholarship through redefining Maghrebi mothers’ (and women’s) resistance as a continuous negotiation with the patriarchal social order as a determining condition within which they exist.