Memoricide in Radwa Ashur's Granada

Abstract

This article addresses the concept of memoricide in the Granada trilogy by the Egyptian novelist Radwa Āshur. In these pages the different phases of the memoricide perpetrated against the Moriscos in the Spain of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries is analyzed and correlated with the story of the characters in the novels. The article then shows how the author extrapolates that memory to the present-day Arab context, specifically the Palestinian case. The methodology used is comparative, since the aim of the study is to demonstrate that the trilogy by Radwa Ashur is a correlate of Palestinian history and that it is based on the subaltern subject. For this reason, in all the phases of the Moorish memoricide the echo of the Palestinian memoricide can be perceived. This memoricide also entails an ethnocide, as well as a transculturization that, in Palestine, is still being perpetrated. While in the case of the Moriscos historians unanimously recognize what happened, in the case of Palestine they do not. However, there is sufficient evidence to change this historical perspective, to which authors such Ilan Pappé can testify. Radwa Ashur's trilogy is a political work that denounces the Arab present by using the past as a mirror to reflect current injustices.