Title : (05) Marginalité et enfermement social dans Le Mariage de plaisir de Tahar Ben Jelloun et Toiles d’araignée de Ibrahima Ly 

Authors : Alioune Willane, Raymond Bouré Ndong (Université Gaston Berger de Saint-Louis, Sénégal)

Abstract 

In Black Africa as in White Africa — particularly in the Maghreb — narratives emerging from the margins seem increasingly to be gaining traction, revealing deep-seated tensions within contemporary cultural experience. Essentialism is becoming more pronounced, while anti-dogmatism is turning into a defining marker — a discourse that exposes a civilization that has grown less compassionate and increasingly inclined toward social exclusion shaped by reductive cliches. This thematic study therefore examines the construction of marginality and social confinement. Above all, it explores the central figure that Lukács so aptly termed the ‘problematic hero.’ Through Toiles d’araignées by the Malian writer Ibrahima Ly and Le Mariage de plaisir by the Franco-Moroccan Goncourt laureate Tahar Ben Jelloun, the analysis seeks to identify the various modalities through which cultural subjects — whose presumed civilizational homogeneity is either no longer asserted or no longer operative — are relegated to the social periphery. It further investigates the weight of literary exoticism in the postcolonial context, and examines in particular the social confinement imposed on women, who are bound to roles shaped by a mythoïd construct of their production and by its Pan-African concretization. Such mechanisms leave them without any genuine capacity to speak for themselves or, when they do, ensure that their voices remain unheard. Social confinement, in this sense, imprisons not only the body but also the voice and the very horizon of possibility.

Keywords: confinement – culture – identity – marginality – violence

🚩Click on the title to download PDF format.