“Hostipitality” Put to the Test of Hunger: A Poetics of Encounter and the Aporias of Hospitality in Dounia Charaf’s La maison de Mama Ghoula

Abstract

This article examines the paradigms of encounter and hospitality in Dounia Charaf’s La maison de Mama Ghoula (2010). Set during the 1917 Moroccan famine, the novel deconstructs the idealization of traditional welcoming. Drawing on the ethics of alterity (Levinas), deconstruction (Derrida), and the anthropology of the gift (Mauss), we demonstrate that the bourgeois home operates as an architecture of “hostipitality”. The welcoming of rural girls is merely a simulacrum concealing an asymmetrical transaction: the gift of food demands the guest’s identity erasure through onomastic violence, bodily scrubbing, and sexual abuse, reducing alterity to the master’s Totality. However, the novel moves beyond this aporia. Through urban spatial marronage, the syncretic quest for a talisman, and the invention of a site of memory, the female protagonists forge a restorative ethics. Hospitality is reinvented outside the domestic walls, substituting predatory assimilation with a true poetics of Relation (Glissant). The study reveals the resilience of subjectivities when confronted with hegemonic enclosures.