Lecturer revisits childhood in Africa

"On Clay Pots" highlights an intriguing chapter in English professor Mustapha Marrouchi's life. File photo.

Not everyone at UNLV can relate to a childhood spent in the mountains of northwest Africa. Fortunately, tonight’s University Forum lecture can take us one step closer to a distant time and place.

English professor Mustapha Marrouchi will share the coming of age story, “On Clay Pots” tonight, taking guests on a tour of the traditional Sufi environment he lived in as a Berber child.

Marrouchi, a professor of post-colonial literature, relates “a story of exile and a celebration of an irrecoverable part in [his] life.”

Marrouchi describes the lecture as “a record of where [he] was born and spent most of [his] childhood,” He said, “With this lecture I rediscover the lost Berber world of my early years in the High Atlas [Mountains].”

Much of Marrouchi’s story follows three sisters and a family helper named Abla, makers of clay pots in the small town of M’Rira, with a look into the rituals of town residents, all of whom provided Marrouchi with a new world full of language, food and attitudes – and Sufi rituals which observe the mysteries of sexuality.

“Underscoring all this is the confusion of identity the young Marrouchi experienced as he came to terms with the dissonance of a fragmented self and ultimately an outsider,” Marrouchi said. The lecture closes with a sad goodbye to Abla, who died while Marrouchi was attending school in France.

The many layers of the story reflect Marrouchi’s unique conceptual style, according to interim English department chair Douglas Unger.

“His lecture… is very typical of the way he thinks,” Unger said.  “[There is] the object that tells the story and the small story that tells the larger story and allows for the theoretical… to explain the mainstream.”

Tonight’s  lecture is another opportunity for Marrouchi to make the cultural connections that are typical of his written work and teaching style.

“His lectures are very unorthodox but he is very intelligent,” said Stephen Herndon, a student in Marrouchi’s post-colonial literature class.

According to Unger, Marrouchi is highly dedicated to studying misunderstandings of cultural concepts between the Arab world and the West and is one of the most actively publishing scholars on campus.

Marrouchi is working on a book he calls “Unspeakable Things Spoken at Last” and an essay that examines “The Clash of Ignorance between the East, the West and the Rest.”

“On Clay Pots” is just one way Marrouchi is bringing an unseen side of the world to UNLV students. Unger said, “The Department of English is very proud to have been able to hire him.”