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Touria Oulehri (born 1962) is a Moroccan novelist and academic. Her novels focus on the experiences and challenges faced by Moroccan women.
Touria Oulehri | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1962 (age 61–62) Assoul, Morocco |
| Occupation |
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Oulehri was born in the village of Assoul, Morocco.[1] She attended secondary school in Meknès, followed by higher education in Fez and France.[1] She holds a degree in public law and a doctorate in French literature.[2]
She has worked as a teacher at the École Normale Supérieure in Meknès,[3] and as an academic of French literature.[2] She has published articles on the subject of literary criticism and authors of the 16th century.[2] She is one of a group of Francophone Moroccan women writers who began writing in the 1980s and 1990s, despite Moroccan literature having traditionally been a masculine field, and whose work is characterised by themes of feminism and socio-political concerns.[4][5]
Oulehri's first novel, La répudiée was published in 2001.[3] It is about an upper-class and cultured Moroccan woman unable to have children; her husband first encourages her to agree to a polygamous marriage and then abandons her when she refuses consent.[4][6] Oulehri draws comparisons between the destruction of the main character's life and the 1960 Agadir earthquake, yet the events also provide her with an opportunity to rebuild a better life.[4][7] The novel caused some controversy in Morocco for its depiction of a woman who seeks fulfilment from life without motherhood or a male partner.[8]
Feminist themes and women's experiences have continued to be features of her later novels;[9] for example, in Les Conspirateurs sont parmi nous (2006), the young main character has received no education about her body and is unsettled by menstruation as a result.[10] In 2019 her novel Aime-moi et je te tue was presented at the Casablanca International Book Fair.[1]
In a 2007 interview, Oulehri was asked for whom she and other Moroccan authors write, given low levels of literacy in the country. She responded, "nous écrivons pour nous-mêmes et personne d'autre" (we write for ourselves and no one else).[11]
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