Edmond Amran El Maleh was born in 1917 in the town of Safi into a merchant family originally from Essaouira. His mother tongue is Moroccan Arabic, but he writes in French. El Maleh began his career as a journalist and a pro-independence activist in the then-clandestine Moroccan Communist Party. In 1955 after King Hassan II was reinstated and Morocco became independent, he moved to France, where he ceased his political activities and instead became a cultural critic and professor. In 1999, after the death of his wife, Marie-Cecile Dufour El Maleh, a French scholar of the works of W…