(Re)Locating space in Hakim Belabbas’s khayṭ al-rūḥ and Farida Belyazid’s bāb smā maftūḥ

This article is a re-reading of both Hakim Belabbas’s khayṭ al-rūḥ and Farida Belyazid’s bāb smā maftūḥ from a postcolonially inflected concern. It attempts to consider how khayṭ al-rūḥ (‘Threads’, 2003), and bāb smā maftūḥ (‘A Door to the Sky’, 1988), focus excessively on the aesthetics and poetics of the city space, respectively, Abū al-ja’d and Fez, as a powerful structuring force that is twistingly manipulated to become a homogenizing icon of Moroccan identity. Such heavy concentration on spatial configurations of the city locales as sites of contestation over the construction of Moroccan identity results in counter-effects. The article argues that the filmic aestheticization of locality shifts into the creation of a set of anxieties and a knot of ambivalences that render the film directors’ attempt to foreground a new version of the native’s space vulnerable to the conventional orientalist tradition of the Other’s space representation. Both Belabbas’s and Belyazid’s works become complicit with the dynamics of folkloric space and with the orientalist tradition characteristic of colonial cinema set in Morocco during precolonial and colonial periods.