Honor for Writer Anis Al-Rafii at the Higher School of Fine Arts in Casablanca
In line with its commitment to Moroccan creative experiences, the "Shahrzad Forum for Education and Culture" organized a literary meeting in partnership with the Higher School of Fine Arts in Casablanca, dedicated to honoring Moroccan writer Anis Al-Rafii on the occasion of the release of his new story collection "The Asylum of Masks."
This cultural gathering, held recently at the school, served as a significant opportunity to reflect on the unique literary journey of one of the most innovative figures in contemporary Moroccan storytelling. Al-Rafii’s writings are characterized by their experimental boldness and artistic and intellectual intersections that transcend traditional narrative forms.
The meeting was coordinated by art critic Abdullah Al-Sheikh and opened with a speech by the director of the hosting school, Said Kihiya, followed by an introductory paper presented by cultural activist and president of the organizing association, Tayeb Al-Ilmi Al-Adlouni. Afterward, eloquent critiques and literary readings were shared by a group of Moroccan researchers, including Abdullah Balabbas, Iman Al-Razi, Jamal Bendahman, Omar Al-Asri, and Said Muntasib.
This event provided a platform for a lively cultural dialogue between Al-Rafii’s new texts and a public of readers and enthusiasts, highlighting the aesthetic challenges and expressive adventures that his narrative project offers, making the story a space for reinventing language, style, and imagination.
In their critical and academic presentations, the speakers emphasized the distinctive nature of Al-Rafii’s narrative project, marked by stylistic experimentation. They collectively acknowledged that the honoree writes as an existential test and an aesthetic demolition. In an era where literary consumption is accelerating and depleting its aesthetic and existential effects, Anis Al-Rafii’s writings emerge as a form of narrative resistance, as alternative expressions that practice the act of writing not merely as textual production but as a cognitive and artistic stance that deliberately seeks tension, celebrates fragility, and bets on doubt as a postponed narrative certainty.
Al-Rafii does not confine himself to the available narrative forms; rather, he seeks to dismantle them from within, establishing his narrative in the spaces filled with questions of identity, expression, and language. His stories are not merely tales but explosive sentences, fragmented scenes, and mirrored reflections from which interpretations emerge. He does not present stereotypical characters or linear events; instead, he weaves complex texts that embed the act of writing itself, turning narration into a lab for experimenting with language and testing its limits.
In his texts, story meets poetry, theater meets delirium, and folk tales intersect with meta-narrative. The narrative discourse intertwines with philosophical analysis, and the visual merges with the linguistic in configurations that perplex the reader and incite them to engage in the act of reading as exploration, not mere reception. Al-Rafii restores the reader’s place as a creator of meaning, not merely a consumer.
What distinguishes his project is the audacity to overturn literary hierarchies and abandon the centrality of "the subject" in favor of a narrative architecture where senses, imagination, and temporal fragmentation intersect. His writing resides in the gray area between meaning and non-meaning, between beauty and anxiety, between pleasure and dread. It is a writing that questions itself, evades classification, and strives to remain open, elusive, and resistant to domestication or containment.
In everything he writes, Anis Al-Rafii asserts that the story is not just an artistic form but a continuous inquiry into the possibility of the tale itself, and about our capacity — we, the readers — to venture beyond the narrative towards the abyss opened by the word when spoken, not to be understood, but to shake the horizon of expectation.
Art critic Abdullah Al-Sheikh viewed Al-Rafii’s narrative project as reflecting a precise awareness of the aesthetic transformations and intellectual stakes inherent in his experience, emphasizing that writing is a counter-narrative space and a laboratory for deviation. He added that Al-Rafii’s experience does not treat narration as a closed template but as an aesthetic ascent that resists closure and bets on potential, opening the text to infinite interpretation. According to Al-Sheikh, Al-Rafii does not write to please the reader’s taste or entertain them but to provoke them aesthetically, urging them to become entangled in the labyrinth of the tale, in the Scheherazadean sense; that is, the tale as a perpetual opening to imagination, evasion, and displacement of meaning from its conventional borders.
Al-Rafii’s stories are not merely bizarre tales or fleeting stylistic experiments; they are "counter-narrative statements" that declare a break from the mainstream and propose a vision of writing as a skeptical act that undermines the obvious and reconstructs taste according to the logic of otherness. In a world dominated by uniformity and governed by mechanisms of consumption, his writing serves as a free exercise of consciousness and difference, celebrating evasion as a mode of existence.
As Al-Sheikh portrays him, Al-Rafii is a writer who does not seek the completion of meaning but its explosion, not the stability of significance but its destabilization. His texts resemble a steep slope or a box of mirrors that incessantly rearranges reflections; mirrors that confuse the receiver and lead them to realms of uncertainty, where literature is not consumed but contemplated. It is writing that occupies the margins, engages with fragility, and invites the reader to venture beyond what is stated and pondered, like a faint voice amid the clamor of the world, and a free internal act that probes the depths of non-meaning as another form of deferred meaning.
