The Picaresque, the Abject Body, and Masculinity in Mohamed Choukri’s Autobiography For Bread Alone

Abstract

This paper discusses the form of masculinity called picaresque masculinity and how it is textually constructed in the autobiography of Moroccan author Mohamed Choukri’ For Bread Alone (1973). It considers the intersection between picaresque themes and masculinity, focusing on how Choukri’s use of his physical body, the pains and the pleasures it gives him as a result of starvation, violence or lust, challenges the disembodied positions dominant in canonized Arabic tradition of autobiography.  The paper demonstrates how, by rendering the male body a visible element of masculine subjectivity, Choukri implements transgressive strategies of writing to problematize and destabilize the fixity of the male body. The article draws upon the Arab Islamic discourse of the body and the picaresque narrative theory to demonstrate how Choukri weaves his body into the picaresque to dramatize the abjection and violence he is subject to as well as to construct his masculine subjectivity.  Picaresque masculinity, it will be shown, is a self-conscious textual construction which exposes and inverts the hierarchies of the hegemonic and the subordinate.