Event Structure in Memoir Narrative: Abdelkrim Ghallab’s Political Memoirs and Days Gone By: A Comparative Study

Abstract

The event in memoirs emerges as a parallel source to official history, as the study examines pivotal moments in Moroccan history, such as the death of King Mohammed V and the two attempted coups of the 1970s, with a boldness that sometimes goes beyond academic restraint by conveying the observations and accounts surrounding those events. The study analyzes the event in both its personal and historical dimensions through two different models. In the first, the writer, novelist, and former minister Abdelkrim Ghallab tends to exclude details of his private life, focusing instead on the struggle and political career of the editor of Morocco’s oldest newspaper, Al-Alam. In contrast, Mohamed Essadek Maâneninou, the former Secretary-General of the Ministry of Information, presents something resembling reality television through a detailed and comprehensive account of his professional and personal journey from his earliest moments, transforming individual memory into a life narrative in which the reader shares the events in their finest historical and personal details, through a spontaneous style characterized by confession, disclosure, and testimony. To examine the structure of the event in the two models, the study adopted the structural-narrative approach, distinguishing between events as they actually occurred (the story) and the manner in which they are narrated (the discourse). The study concludes that the event constitutes the backbone connecting the various elements of the narrative text, within a framework that seeks to convey truth through events as experienced by the writer and to employ those events in constructing a text that combines documentation with literary appeal, engaging the reader from the beginning to the end of the narrative. It also calls for commitment to the values of honesty and objectivity and avoidance of an inflated sense of self. Accordingly, the study recommends that writers and politicians who undertake the memoir genre avoid turning their memoirs into mere spaces for glorifying the “self” without grounding it in established and objective facts, and instead adhere to the values of historical and artistic truthfulness as a foundation for their implicit contract with the reader.