Leila Abouzeid

In The Last Chapter, there are only two girls in Aisha's classroom of 42 students. Out of those two, only Aisha graduated. The misogyny present in real life Morocco is mirrored through this book. In Morocco, women are not very well educated, and something like two women in a class was typical and accepted. Leila did very well in school because of the brain she was not expected to have. Men assumed women were born with no intelligence (which is contradicted by scientific evidence), but it is assumed this is because their education was stifled by the patriarchal government. In a study in 2009, literacy rates in Morocco were recorded at 39.6% for women, 65.7% for men, and only 10% for women from rural areas (DoS p. 2). In other words, women are barely educated, and a majority of them cannot even read, while most men are literate.

Her first book called Year of the Elephant was published in 1980, and was published in English in 1989 by Texas University. Her book was translated into French only in 2005. Year of the Elephant was named after a battle in Islamic history. The story of the battle is that during an early religious based battle, a flock of birds came and dropped stones on the enemy elephants, causing them to turn around. She compares this historic battle to the Moroccans battling for independence because they are mere birds compared to the gigantic global power of their French rulers.

Leila Abouzeid (Arabic: ليلة أبو زيد ‎) (born 1950, El Ksiba) is a Moroccan author. She writes in Arabic and is the first Moroccan woman writer of literature to have her works published in English-language translation.