| Sumario: | This paper focuses on the double bind of the representation of Blackness in Tahar Ben Jelloun's Le Mariage de plaisir (The Pleasure Marriage), a novel in which the Moroccan author tackles the controversial yet pervasive issue that is anti-Blackness in his home country. Ben Jelloun does so through the telling of the decades-long aftermath of the passionate but scandalous interracial love story between Amir, a 'white' Fassi merchant, and Nabou, a young Peul woman from Senegal, in a Moroccan society not only crippled by its traditions, but also blinded by its intolerance, xenophobia, and biases against its dark-skinned community members. Yet, despite its clear anti-racist stance and effort at lifting up the veil on the reality of the Black condition in Morocco through the double prism of the legacy of slavery and the ongoing migrant crisis, I contend that the novel's focus on a Mut'a, a 'marriage of pleasure', causes its portrayal of its Black characters to remain problematic. Drawing from an interdisciplinary approach and a conceptual framework centred on the issues of representation, race, gender, racism, and Blackness, I demonstrate that the novel's overgeneralisation of the Black experience and systematic reliance on common racial and sexual stereotypes frequently conflates Blackness with Africanness, primitivism, hypersexuality, disempowerment, and ultimately with Otherness. Hence, I argue that Le Mariage de plaisir paradoxically reinforces the types of negative representations about people of African descent that continue to stigmatise them and to feed the collective imagination in the Maghreb, rather than challenge or subvert them.
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