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“... a bass line, familiar ground. Echoing Kafka, the Moroccan writer and scholar of Arabic literature Abdelfattah Kilito declares ‘I speak all languages but in Arabic,’ in the title of his recent collection of essays. Kilito is a writer who reads (not all do) – and widely, in several languages. He’s an amphibian ...”

“... to Homi Bhabha’s elegant enquiry into ‘creative fetishism’ in Midnight’s Children; from Abdelfattah Kilito on Hamadhānī through Perry Anderson on Montesquieu and A.S. Byatt on Balzac to Simon Gikandi on Chinua Achebe. Moretti and his contributors have succeeded in making the study of the novel – if not the entire ‘literary ...”

“... visit from a friend, the proposed new dress – lay about us as wreckage.The Moroccan writer​ Abdelfattah Kilito points out in his witty and thoughtful book Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language that, while it is pretty much accepted that being able to communicate and be understood adds to the authority of the colonist, the way unintelligibility plays in ...”

“... an act of dialogue rather than an act of imperialistic plunder?’ The bilingual Moroccan scholar Abdelfattah Kilito considers this in Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language: he likes knowing that while he knows French, the French don’t know Arabic, and can’t understand him when he writes or speaks in his mother tongue. For colonised subjects (not only by ...”