Independent Reading

I just started the book that I am reading independently last night, thanks to Amazon/UPS taking their sweet time to get it here, but so far it is very interesting. It is called Year of the Elephant: A Moroccan Woman's Journey Toward Independence and was written by Leila Abouzeid. It was first published in English in 1989. What makes it unique is not only that it is written from a woman's perspective, but it is one of the first books to be written in Arabic and translated into English to come out of Morocco. Most books that come from Morocco are written in French, due to the fact that Morocco was a French colony until the 1950's, and most elite schools still use French as the language that literature and writing are taught in. However, Abouzeid went to a school that taught both French and Arabic, and chose to write in Arabic for personal and political reasons. Year of the Elephant is actually the title of the novella which begins the book, but it also contains eight other short stories, ranging in themes from "A Vacation" to "Divorce". The entire book is less that 100 pages long, and I am sure I will tear through it as fast as I did Aunt Safiyya.