"L'Homme Composite" and the Cultural Schizophrenic in Abdullah Laroui's "Al-Ghurba" and "Al-Yatim‪"‬

Moroccan society is composed of many conflicting and/or correlating modes of production. The subject, by virtue of inhabiting such a ‘composite’ society, is racked under the burdensomeness of modes of production. The inability to identify wholly with one pole of meaning production causes ‘l’homme composite de la société composite’ a certain split. Darius Shayegan calls such a split ‘cultural schizophrenia.’ This paper attempts to trace cultural schizophrenia and its consequences on ‘l’homme composite’ in two novels by Abdullah Laroui “Al-Ghurba” [Alienation] and “Al-Yatim” [The Orphan]. The study of modes of production in Moroccan society, as the two novels depict, will give the paper an important insight into characters’ schizophrenic behaviour.

This paper is anchored on the idea that some characters are schizophrenic in the sense that they exhibit certain schizophrenic behaviours.
I mean by cultural schizophrenia that the characters are ‘culturally’ schizophrenic; that is, they display manifold facets of modes of consciousness that go hand in hand with certain modes of social organization and cultural production. This state generates feelings of alienation. I believe this cultural schizophrenia is the consequence of the conflicting dualisms that characterize these people who inhabit ‘les sociétés composites.’