Blood Feast by Malika Moustadraf is a collection of stories told from the perspectives of Moroccan people navigating largely unceremonious yet indelible moments of their lives. The stories are remarkably transparent, in the sense that each story captures the raw experience of living as a working-class person, a woman, or a queer individual in a world in which female sexuality is bounded and hidden, but ever-present to those, like Moustadraf, who know how to look. 

Published in 2022, Blood Feast contains all of Moustadraf’s writing that made it into the world prior to her untimely death in 2006. Translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie, the fifteen stunning stories that make up Blood Feast express the disconsolate energy and the enveloping warmth of Moustadraf’s writing. Moustadraf, and in turn Guthrie, engage dauntlessly with themes of female pleasure and intimacy that are too frequently prohibited for women writers who aim to speak candidly about their experiences and about womanhood itself.  

Throughout the collection, Moustadraf twines seemingly unrelated narratives together with the thread of authentic human experience. Her stories range from a woman having a cybersexual affair, to a mother fleeing her abusive home with her infant, to a man dying of liver failure in a state hospital. In spite of the collection’s variousness, each character’s desire to be free — and accepted — blends seamlessly into a whole traversed by feelings of curiosity and investment.

One story, “Raving,” follows a woman in the aftermath of a car crash as she dreams of her ex-lovers in a fitful, hallucinatory state in her hospital bed. As with the rest of her stories, Moustadraf does not dwell on a narrator’s background and context; instead she dives into her mind, weaving elements—in this case, anger and desire—from a previous story into the present narrator’s guiding sensations. Moustadraf embraces the sometimes carnal nature of intimacy: 

When Salah used to kiss me I wanted him to go on and on doing it, into infinity. I loved how his kisses tasted […] of cigarettes and cheap wine. When he quit smoking and drinking, I had no appetite for his kisses anymore. I would be sniffing him, searching for that smell I had grown addicted to, not finding it […] Desire slunk off to a safe distance and I slipped out from between his hands.

The honest indelicacy of her writing reproduces how it feels to want, but to reduce her viscerality to only an expression of yearning would be to minimize the artfulness of Moustadraf’s prose. Moustadraf grapples with the internal strife that emerges from social and cultural conflict. The title of the collection, as well as the names of each short story — such as “A Woman in Love, A Woman Defeated” and “Just Different” — speak to how female sexuality can be an enveloping, powerful force; the women in Moustadraf’s writing exist for more than the satisfaction of others. 

Though the characters in Blood Feast are compelling and multi-dimensional, they are not free of the weight of societal convention. They must endure their circumstances, and much of their liberatory expression is conveyed through unremarkable acts or clandestine thoughts. In “Just Different,” Moustadraf dissects the very core of resistance: action. The story details the experiences of a genderqueer protagonist facing ostracism from family, teachers, doctors, and strangers in public washrooms. Their resistance is neither active nor passive but existential, as they are faced with obstacles at every turn in response to the simple fact of their presence. The minutiae of their resistance is part of what makes their narrative so transfixing.

Blood Feast is a feminist manifesto, but not because any of its characters are activists, marching in the streets for change. Rather, their actions are connected by a wholehearted desire to do something for themselves that will result in a happier, easier, less troublesome life. Taken individually, these narratives could easily fade into being the stories of just another mother, husband, daughter, wife, person. Yet as a collection, their mundanity becomes a source of strength as they seek to live according to their own choices, no matter what they might be. 

In a note on the text, Guthrie remarks that Moustadraf struggled greatly, as an author and a woman, with constant speculation as to whether her writing was autobiographical. In a 2004 interview, Moustadraf asked, “Why can’t [other people] acknowledge that women,” like men, “also have a broad imagination?!” As Moustadraf puts so simply yet eloquently, women are encouraged to only create art that fulfills a socially acceptable purpose; our role as writers is often to express existing trauma, so that our own lives can be commercialized. What makes Blood Feast so beautifully distinct is that, regardless of what is and is not based on Moustadraf’s own life, the narratives as a whole give voice to the culture of Moroccan womanhood. Blood Feast is not the stories of fourteen individuals, but the spirit of any person who has felt fear, abuse, love, lust, and wanting, whether for another person or a life that feels perpetually out of reach.

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Malika Moustadraf (1969–2006) was a preeminent arabophone writer from Casablanca, Morocco. She died at just thirty-seven, leaving behind a novel and a collection of short stories. An exacting social critic, Moustadraf was admired for her distinctive and experimental style.

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Alice Guthrie is an independent translator, editor, and curator specializing in contemporary Arabic writing. Her work often focuses on subaltern voices and activist art. She is currently compiling the first-ever anthology of LGBTQIA+ Arabic writing, set to appear in parallel Arabic and English editions. She teaches literary translation at the University of Exeter and the University of Birmingham.

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Rebecca Biagas is a junior at Wellesley College, majoring in Women’s and Gender Studies and American Studies. She has a specific interest in transnational feminism, which she plans to explore while studying abroad, in Rabat, Morocco, in the spring. This is her first publication.