Summary: "Writing this book... Its title has been with me for more than twenty-five years... Talking about this city of the world, Casablanca, its upsides and downsides, the places where it goes beyond the boundaries that have always been assigned to it, those of the colonists, those of the wealthy, those of the businessmen, and those of women and men of good will. Casablanca is the main character of this novel, because it is more than just a city: it is a powerful matrix in which all those that it contains ferment and germinate, coming and going in a tidal movement as irresistible as the ocean that does not limit it. Between El Bahriyine karyane - the shanty town clinging to the top of the cliff not far from the mythical El Hank lighthouse, where families are settled, bundles of this vulnerable and fraternal humanity, struggling in a precariousness that organises a recognition of resources, a reading of the world - and the prestigious district of Anfa, the hill where luxurious mansions shelter the ambivalences of Casablancans from another society but also from another city: This text explores all the contradictions of the city, between predation and solidarity, violence and humanity, greed and sharing.
It also tells the story of a couple's return home to the south of the world after years of training in the West, the inevitable confrontation of models, the crumbling of illusions, the revelation of contradictions and schisms in the light of lived reality, the fault lines that organise the constructions of masculine and feminine. Giving voice to what is written differently, in an interweaving of narratives, organising at the heart of the text the gestation of another perspective through May's pregnancy notebooks.
Casablanca Circus is a love song to those who resist, because always, on the horizon of the stakes and projections, stands this scrambled and agile, vulnerable and generous, living humanity, which is the beating heart of the world".
Born in 1966 in Casablanca, Yasmine Chami studied at the Lycée Louis le Grand in Paris, before going on to study philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure Ulm. She also holds an agrégation in social sciences. She then turned to anthropology and worked on the lineages of migrant women, tracing genealogies and histories from France to Morocco, in an attempt to elucidate the consequences of migration on representations of motherhood and filiation. Her first novel, Cérémonie, was published by Actes Sud in 1999. When her sons were born in New York in 2001, she decided to return to Morocco, where she ran the Villa des Arts in Casablanca before founding and running an audio-visual production company for 10 years, which, through social programmes broadcast on Moroccan television, offers an understanding of the issues at stake in the changes taking place in Moroccan society as a result of urbanisation. Her programmes tackle issues such as patriarchy, education, the place of women, money, sexuality and religious transmission, always questioning the relationship between norms and reality. Since 2011, she has devoted herself to teaching. "Casablanca Circus is her fifth novel.