Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Sermo in circulis
القلم
est liberior.
Issue n° 40 – March-May 2017
Journal of the Department of English
Sultan Moulay Slimane University, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Beni Mellal, Morocco.
Editor: Dr. Khalid Chaouch.
INSIDE THIS ISSUE
Editorial: On the Occasion of the 40th Issue of Pen Circle (1998-2017) ... 02
The Poet’s Corner:
“Remember Me” by Ayman ABU-SHOMAR … 03
“Some Poetic Lines as Questions” by Pablo NERUDA … 04
“Darkness, I fear” and “You Will Never Know”
by Mohamed LOUZA … 05
Pen Circle Prize Winners (2016/2017)… 06
“Slave of a Kind”” by Mohamed NEJJAR, Semester 3 … 07
“My Pen… My Weapon” by Youssef BENDADEZE, Semester 5… 07
“A Walk by the Lake” by Ayoub FAHMI, Semester 5… 09
“A Letter to Time” by Yassine DEAI, Semester 5…
Lahoucine AAMMARI, “Europe in Moroccan Travel Accounts:
Historical Overview and Themes” … 10
“An Arab Cordóba Hospital in the 10th Century”… 12
Proverbs of the Moment: On Proverbs and Maxims… 13
Publish or Perish… 14
Crosswords N° 40... 18
Clues to Crosswords N° 39… 19
Courses Framework of the Spring Term (Semesters 2, 4, and 6)… 20
Pen Circle
Sultan Moulay Slimane University
Faculty of Letters and Humanities, Department of English
BP. 524, Beni Mellal, Morocco.
pencircle@gmail.com
https://sites.google.com/a/usms.ma/pen-circle/
Pen Circle is also available at www.flshbm.ma Publications
Editorial Board
Dr. Mly. Lmustapha MAMAOUI, Dr. Mohamed RAKII, Dr. Redouan SAÏDI.
Pen Circle n° 40 -2-
Editorial
On the Occasion of the 40th Issue of Pen Circle
(1998-2017)
After 40 issues spanning over an academic period of 19 years
(from 1998 to 2017), we have the right to ask the following
question: has Pen Circle come to full circle?
On this occasion… we are very much satisfied for we have
been able to endow our Department with a small „circle‟ for
creative writings, a springboard for the burgeoning talents and
geniuses, and a forum for creative dialogue.
On this occasion … we remember with delight how Pen
Circle was first launched as a humble project intended to give the
opportunity for each student to write in different fields of English
literature and culture and to experiment in all sorts of creative
writing. A further impetus has been the regular organizing of
“Pen Circle Prize for Mellali Writers in English.” The
importance of this endeavor increased with the online hosting of
this journal, thus giving to the winners of this prize the golden
opportunity to be read and known by the global community.
On this occasion… we gratefully acknowledge the great
support of the members of the Editorial Board. The whole
enterprise could not have been possible without the kind help of
these colleagues who spared no effort in this regard. The
encouragements we received from other colleagues all over the
country have also played a greater role in giving a boost to the
Journal‟s continuity, especially in tight conditions.
On this occasion… Pen Circle has now to reconsider its
editorial line, both at the levels of rubrics and content and at the
levels of layout and form… It is up to other colleagues and
students to take the lead and endow Mellali academia with a
Journal that would be capable of meeting the rising demands of
the new digital environment.
And on this occasion of the 40th issue of Pen Circle … call it
a full circle!
Khalid CHAOUCH
Pen Circle n° 40 -3-
Remember Me
I wish I can re-colour their faces
I wish I can re-name them,
I wish I can re-dress their little bodies,
If this would give them more time.
Just for my colour, you kill me?
For my name?
Or, my dress?
I've gone, and you are still here.
I met the angels who asked me:
Is there guilt?
They know the answer.
But, one day,
You will also go.
Don't you know that we will all go?
Ten, twenty, maybe fifty?
You will live after me, and retire, and grow old, and forget me
But – dear killer – you will remember.
I will ask you to remember.
My face, little age, and small hands
Will ask you to remember.
And ask:
You didn't allow my hands to grow,
You left my chair in the school empty,
You made me just a sad memory to my beloved,
You
Will remember.
Will you?
When your hands become too weak to carry a repentance Book,
Or when you become a headline in a newspaper
…/…
Pen Circle n° 40 -4-
With black strip next to your name,
You and the world will no longer remember your triumph.
What remains – my killer – is me,
Only me.
Remember me.
Ayman Abu-Shomar
Ayman Abu-Shomar is assistant professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies,
King Saud University, KSA. This poem is taken from his collection When the Other
Speaks, whose main fulcrum is to depict the voice of the voiceless, the oppressed and
the marginalized in this world.
Source: Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2013.
Suggested by Lahoucine AAMMARI
Some Poetic Lines as Questions
by Pablo Neruda
Do you know that in Patagonia
at midday, mist is green?
Who sings in the deepest water
in the abandoned lagoon?
At what does watermelon laugh
when it‟s murdered?
Isn‟t it better never than late?
Where is the centre of the sea?
Why do waves never go there?
Why don‟t the poor understand
as soon as they stop being poor?
Where can you find a bell
that will ring in your dreams?
Who wakes up the sun when it falls asleep
on its burning bed?
Is it true that sadness is thick
and melancholy thin?
Selected from: Pablo Neruda, Libro de las preguntas. (The Book of Questions.) Trans.
by William O'Daly. (1974) Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 1991.
Suggested by Mohamed LOUZA
Pen Circle n° 40 -5-
Publish or Perish
Mohamed Louza. Toni Morrison and Childhood. The of the
Unspoken. Germany: Noor Publishing, 2017, 124 p.
Publish or Perish
Aammari, Lahoucine. The Image of Morocco in British Travel
Accounts. Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing (LAP), 2017, 264
p.
Book Summary
The Image of Morocco in British Travel Accounts brings some British
travellers and their accounts into sharper focus. These Travellers made
their peregrinations in Western Barbary as a toponym in the era of
imperial ebullience in the late nineteenth century and the outset of the
twentieth. These travellers bolster the empire, its grandiloquence and its
complex discursive paraphernalia. These travellers regard European
civilisation as standing at the centre of universe while darkness,
barbarism and primitivism sprawled on the periphery, pitting hence the
centre against the periphery. Their narratives enact a form of imperial
structure and hegemony through narrator‟s omniscience and
omnipresence in the narrative. Expressing their Orientalist desire to
know Moroccans as Others, these British travellers claim an
epistemological mastery and narrative omniscience and invasion over
the field of their observation, which in turn grants them the power and
Pen Circle n° 40 - 16 -
the authority to portray the Other. Still, these travellers are caught
between a narrative mastery and a fantasy of Western Barbary where
their different desires can be substantiated and an image of Moroccan
society as an unattainable, concealed domain of inaccessibility and total
invisibility. These paradoxical standpoints disclose certain discursive
„heterogeneities, inconsistencies and slippages‟ of colonial authority.
These tomes raised certain issues which have become strikingly
relevant to our time. The points they expressed in these travelogues
regarding Moroccan religious and cultural practices are ineradicably
seated in the minds of a lot of British and other European peoples, and
these mindsets have been imparted from one generation to another up
till the present time.
Biography� �� ������� ����� �������� ������
Lahoucine AAMMARI is a High School teacher and a PhD student.
He is affiliated with the Doctoral program: Interactions in Literature,
Culture and Society, University of Sultan Moulay Slimane, Beni-
Mellal, Morocco. His primary academic research interests focus on
novel, cultural studies, colonial discourse analysis, postcolonial theory
and travel narrative.
Pen Circle Prize Winners
A Letter to Time
Dear Time,
I'm addressing to you this unusual letter. It contains a bunch
of words and expressions mixed with my opinions and feelings
towards you, hoping that one i will get answers that could fill in the
blanks in my understanding of you; answers with which i can
finally understand how you work, and why you work the way you
do. Einstein almost got it when he said (and i quote): ''Time is an
illusion''. I couldn't agree more considering the fantastic journey he
had with you during his life time, trying to understand you. He
even took our understanding of you as normal people to a whole
new level, especially when he explained that there is a possibility
of traveling to the future or the past (pending on our choice). But i
don't see if that is going to happen, because so far i haven‟t met
Pen Circle n° 40 - 17 -
anyone from the future to tell me that he actually made the trip
from the future to the present time. Before i heard all about
Einstein and his theories, my vision towards you was nothing more
of the clock in our living room.
Enough with the heavy talk of science. Anyway, i might be a
regular young man from the Atlas Mountains, but still i have the
right to demand answers. Why do you work the way you do? How
come you're passing by quickly during times of joy and happy
occasions? I mean, ask a worker about his weekend, ask a bride
about her special wedding day, or just ask an old man about his
twenties, and i bet you will get the same answer: ''It passed in the
blink of an eye''. On the other side, and by that i mean during times
of misery and pain, we find that you and turtles actually have
certain things in common: which are slowness and sluggishness.
On this point, we don't have to ask a prisoner about his opinion
about you, and how long is a day inside a prison because we all
know that feeling considering how much we hate to wait. You
might consider my questions rhetorical ones, but be sure that i will
wait for answers.
My dearest Time! You stole things from me, and for that i can't
stand you sometimes. You have taken memories i like, people i
love ..., there isn't a day you go by without taking something from
me, no matter how big or small it is.
To finish my letter, as to be objective towards you, i must not
ignore the things you gave me. From the lessons i learned from my
mistakes to the experience i took from the life i'm living, it is the
side of you that makes me go on and for that i'm thankful. In the
new chapter of my life, every day counts, every hour matters, every
minutes makes the difference, and every second is a gift. After all
we are all just borrowing from you.
Thank you for the days you have given me, and thank you for those
to come.
Your student Yassine !
Deai Yassine, Semester 5 (2016-2017)
Pen Circle n° 40 - 18 -
Semester
Introduction Advanced Introduction Introduction Introduction Translation
4 to Composition to to Media to Cultural Ar./Eng./Ar.
Literature Linguistics Studies Studies