Tattooed Memory (La Mémoire tatouée) is the first novel of the great Moroccan critic and novelist Abdelkébir Khatibi (1938-2009).
Only one other novels has been translated into English (
Love In Two Languages, 1991).
Khatibi belongs to the generation following the foundational generation of writers such as Driss Chraïbi.
For Khatibi's generation, French colonialism is a vibrant memory - but a memory from childhood.
Tattooed Memory is part bildungsroman, part anticolonial treatise, and part language experiment, and it takes us from earliest childhood memory to young adulthood.