From History to stories in Fouad Laroui's work

Before being a novelist and short story writer, Fouad Laroui is an engineer by training and an essayist fond of history and philosophy. From Azemmour, the city of origin, to Amsterdam, Laroui's journey largely inspires that of his heroes, who are all in between, border beings in search of meaning and identity. To realize himself as a modern individual, Laroui's hero feels the need to find and claim a place in History. Mentally rooted in his original East, he needs to know who he is, and to reconcile himself with the history of his ancestors, without sacrificing the culture of his adopted country. This reconciliation is vital, especially in an international context where the Arab immigrant, often the victim of historical alienation, at least as he believes, risks listening to the sirens of destructive radicalism. Living in a West that is barricading itself in its national novel, the character of Laroui seeks roots in the political and cultural history of his country of origin without, however, expressing the desire to abandon the Western and universal heritage from which he has drawn his inspiration. From this comes the slightly utopian temptation of the "meta-narrative". This journey leads us to establish the relationship between fiction and History, to question Fouad Laroui's novels, and to see how, although they are based on fiction, they manage to put the imagination at the service of a rediscovery and re-reading of the common history of the Arab East and the West.