Poet-translators Pierre Joris and Habib Tengour have recently assembled a new anthology: Poems for the Millennium, Volume Four: The University of California Book of North African Literature (2013).* We exchanged emails with Pierre Joris about how it came together:

ArabLit: Although the title is “poems,” you include a broad range of materials. What was your primary criterion: giving a “full view” of the literary picture at any given time/place, or the aesthetic qualities of each individual submission, or…?

Pierre Joris: I don’t think those two views are exclusive, or necessarily contradict each other. How do we judge the aesthetic qualities? Especially when we are dealing with works from a different culture often far removed in space and time? And in translation, in a situation in which it is notoriously difficult to render the original aesthetic qualities — i.e. Arab poetry, for example, has always been closely allied to oral & musical traditions, with very complex formal elements in terms of verse forms, rhyme schemes, etc. which it is impossible to bring over at this point into English as imitation of strict measures & rhyme schemes would make for doggerel.

So, beyond simply ferrying over some “general meaning” (if a poem can in truth be said to possess such a thing — well, a “general meaning” shouldn’t be called a “thing” it’s much too vague a floating non-signifier for that) and some specific images, the translation has to also translate the original aesthetics and vision of the artist into a contemporary equivalent, and explain, via specific commentaries, but also through the inclusion of other types of materials (the “adab” sections, for example, and other proses distributed throughout the book), what the context for such work was, what is lost in translation, and why it is still relevant today.

When Jerome Rothenberg & I started the Poems for the Millennium series, our idea was to create anthologies that gathered work that in some way or other, formally or content wise or in some other way, “made it new,” i.e. widened the possibilities of poetry, invented new ways of saying, of singing things, more accurate to the world we’re in. Call it experimental, or avant-garde, post-avant, innovative, whatever, that was the idea both in terms of the work gathered and in terms of the conceptual and formal framework of the anthology itself — as against the traditional anthology that aligns work (either alphabetically by author or numerically by author’s date of birth) that by general critical applaud was called “the best” or the most “beautiful,” or “influential,” whatever, because it came closest to some sense of a “masterpiece.” Habib & I have tried to keep that sense of “making it new” alive in this book too, although as it covers 2 millennia and not the very period that saw the emergence of the concept of the avant-garde, it is more complex. But experiment and avant-garde are endemic to all good art — and I very much agree with Adonis when he says that what in the West is given as the origin of the modern, the avant-garde, namely the moment of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Whitman & Co. in the late 19C, had happened in Arab literature a thousand years earlier with the great Baghdadi poets who similarly invented new forms and contents, singing city-life, boy-love, wine, etc. — all supposedly the topoi of Euro-American modernism.

Just one example from the anthology: the muwashshaha poems of al-Andalus were a new form that arose in the new environment of Spain and that broke with the traditional Arabic ghazal & experimented with meter and rhyme — plus, they added those multilingual closing stanzas, the kharjas,  which could be in Arabic, Hebrew or Romance, in contrast to the language of the rest of the poem — a totally new form and one totally accurate to the cultural shape of al-Andalus. It is, by the way, these muwashshaha that, imported into southern France, will give rise the poetry of the troubadours.

So to get back to the first sentence of your question: our criterion was the new, the fresh, the unheard of — & this could be the work of individual poets conscious of the traditions they came from & needed for some reason — cultural artistic or political reasons — to alter, to expand or change, or it could also be the work of a community inventing a world, a cosmology in their tales, as in the oral traditions of the Amazigh peoples, or it could be what Ezra Pound called “the tale of the tribe,” and in our case, for example, the still active tradition of the oral epic of the Beni Hillal, the tale of this nomad tribe moving toward the end of the first millennium from Yemen into the Maghreb — tales still told today with local variations created by individual singers in Tunisia or on the Algerian high plateaus.

AL: For instance, you choose a poem of Khaled Mattawa’s, and it’s “East of Carthage: An Idyll.” Of course Khaled Mattawa, but why that work among his works?

Pierre Joris

PJ: Not easy to recall exactly why we picked that poem of Mattawa’s, though I can remember for my part several reasons: first off, it’s a solid, strong poem of considerable skill & lyrical sweep — that’s a good reason to begin with. If you read it carefully, you’ll notice that we have only picked some sections, which make sit obvious that this is a long work, in fact a book-length poem — with some heft, and not just a a good pleasant lyric. It is  a poem that speaks to the history & identity of the Maghreb, detailing the locale and the local, while having a near-epic sweep, in the way Pound spoke of the epic as a “poem that includes history.” This too is important qua choice, in that beyond its own intrinsic qualities qua poem, it adds context to the anthology, fleshing out the multicultural thinking that underlines the region and that we try to reproduce.

AL: Where did you search for the poems and texts you wanted? 

PJ: Everywhere — I’d say, if I wanted to be glib, though that wouldn’t even be an inaccurate statement. We literally searched everywhere in the libraries and bookstores of the Maghreb & the old colonial power France, at the 42nd Street Library here in New York & various US University libraries, at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, scouring the internet, calling people up, etc.
The contemporary work was the easiest to find: both Habib and I have collected, bought, been given, whatever, considerable amounts of contemporary poetry from the Maghreb. I started buying books even before I moved to Algeria in 1976, after I roomed at Shakespeare and Co. in Paris in 1966 with the Moroccan poet Mohammed Khair-Eddine who introduced me to maghrebi literature. And I have continued to do so ever since. We both are also in touch with a wide range of poets and scholars throughout the Maghreb & Europe, go to many poetry festivals, hang out with poets, publishers and translators, and so on. The only problem has been with Berber poetry, as it is more difficult to locate and to translate. But there is a wide community of poets and writers both in North Africa and in Europe that we are in touch with and were able to draw on.

AL: You note in your introduction that many of North Africa’s cultural achievements have been “disappeared” from the historical record, cut off from our contemporary understanding of N. Africa. One of your central goals is to re-appear some of this material…but also is it to create a continuous chain, by linking classical and contemporary poets in one volume?

PJ: Yes, indeed — that is one of the aims. I don’t know how well we managed to do this with our smallish means and inside the compass of one limited book. So we hope that  rather than be put down or criticized for what is not in the book, or for imperfections, areas not well enough covered, or whatever errors congenital to the genre of the anthology we are guilty of, readers will be energized by what’s in the book and spurned on by its lacunae to fill these out by bringing forward, editing, translating, publishing, in one word, by adding to a growing corpus of work from the Maghreb.

You propose “a continuous chain” — I’m not worried about continuity, like any culture only even more so, the Maghrebian space and time is a discontinuum,  i.e. there is no such thing as a homogenous culture, and North Africa’s richness lies exactly in those ruptures, discontinuities, those multilevel, mille-feuille layers of languages & provenances. The current danger, very visible if you follow the news is exactly the desire of fanatic religious groupings (with imported Salafist ideologies) to reduce this richness to a puritanical unreal and impossible fiction that only leads to killings of peoples and their vibrant cultures — look at Timbuktu and what happened there recently — or look back at Algeria in the nineties and the great blood-letting of that decade.

AL: Sometimes you use triangulated translations (trans. from the French, which was trans. from the Arabic). Why that vs. going back to the Arabic? What were you primarily looking for in the translations…a more academic “fidelity” or a poetic one?

PJ: Our Diwan Ifrikiya  is a collection of very varied texts, poems, proses, historical narratives, travel descriptions, philosophical treatises. Whenever there were good extant translations, we would use those; old 18th or 19th century translations we would update to make the texts more readable today. A range of materials, especially in the oral sections, but in other diwans and books as well, are at this point only available in French versions, usually done by anthropologists or ethnographers in the 19 or early 20C. Having a sense of the originals, we would retranslate those versions to bring them into the present — certainly my collaboration over the years with Jerome Rothenberg, and my study since the late sixties of his approach to translating such materials, as masterfully proposed in Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin and other anthologies, has informed my own ethnopoetics approach to this matter. Most authors and texts are accompanied by a commentary, which should help in providing context for a more informed reading of the translations.

I don’t think there is a question of a difference between what you call “academic” or “poetic” fidelity to a text, because to translate a poem and make it a poem in the new language, which is the aim, one has to know as much as possible about it, and that involves also all the so-called and very varied “academic” knowledges, that some may posit would harm the “poetic” side of a translation, just as one has to be cognizant of what contemporary poetry is doing at its finest and most experimental edge, so as to be aware of the great range of formal possibilities open to the translator.

I have been involved with literary translation for close to half a century now, and also know from experience that translation is always contingent, time-bound undertaking. I am right now revising translations in another area of poetry that I first made in the late sixties, had revised already several times for different publications, and review today again.

AL: These sorts of anthologies sometimes strike me as overwhelming. With a collection of an author’s work, I feel I can get myself around it, can get it inside me, but with this I’m afraid it might take a lifetime. But perhaps it is like speed dating, meant to introduce me to many different poets, make connections…

PJ: Well, they are indeed overwhelming if you think of poetry as slim elegant volumes of smallish lyrical pieces. but that is only one possibility for poetry, and in my mind, not the most interesting of lively one. Yes, this anthology, like the other ones in the series, is big and might feel overwhelming, but these volumes are meant to be read over time, explored, savored, dipped into or studied intensely in certain parts at certain times, depending on what the reader needs or wants. The important thing being that this kind of book be there, exists, be available — so, no more excuse for ignorance about the cultures of that part of the world.  And the hope is of course that readers, with translators and publishers and other actively interested parties among them, will want to look more closely at authors that interest them particularly, translate more, eventually publish individual books by these authors, and so on.

AL: As I read your intro, I thought it might be interesting to create an anthology that binds North African and European poetic traditions, with metaphorical if not scholarly links. Do you know of any such project?

PJ: Our book does some of that, and in a rather radical way, I would like to suggest. Remember that the whole poetry and literature of al-Andalus, one of the opening sections of the anthology, is work done in Europe, i.e. Spain. As we make clear —against canonical conservative and still mainstream European scholarship, it is the Muwashshaha poems and the Andalusian Arab tarab, i.e. song tradition, that lie at the origins of the troubadour poetry of Occitan France, which, as Pound showed long ago, was the beginning of the European tradition of the lyric, from Provenza (the term used by Paul Blackburn as title for his troubadour translations) over to Italy, Dante, etc. And certainly the contemporary Maghrebi poets are not simply influenced by the avant-garde traditions of European literature in the 20c, but have also been very active in advancing & enriching & giving new life to these lines of experimentation — I have for a long time maintained that the most interesting, most inventive & innovative writing in that old European language called French has been happening in the areas of the ex-colonial empire, be that the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa or, and I believe most intensely & richly so, the Maghreb.

*An earlier title referred to the Maghreb, as the collection is indeed Maghrebi and does not include Egypt and/or North Sudan.

Pierre Joris is a Professor of English at SUNY, Albany and an acclaimed translator and editor. as well as the author of many books of poetry. He is coeditor of UC Press’s highly successful first two volumes in the Poems for the Millennium series.

You can read an excerpt from the anthology on the publisher’s site.

On Monday, Feb. 18, author Adbellatif Laâbi and translator André Naffis-Sahely launched the dual-language chapbook Poems/Poèmes at Free Word. French-English translator Roland Glasser was there.

By Roland Glasser

‘I am the poem tree. They have tried to manipulate me, but their efforts came to naught; I’m intractable, the master of my own mutations’^[1]

Photo credit: Roland Glasser.

Abdellatif Laâbi is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, yet is considered by many to be not only Morocco’s foremost contemporary poet, but one of the most important poets writing today. Just three years ago, he was awarded the Goncourt Prize for Poetry, France’s highest literary award. When Lawrence Ferlinghetti visited Paul Bowles in Morocco in search of poetry talent for his City Lights press and bookshop, the expatriate composer, author, translator and long-time Tangier resident told him to look up Abdellatif Laâbi.

Now, English readers can get a mouth-watering taste of his poetry in a new dual-language chapbook published by the Poetry Translation Centre.

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The atmosphere is heavy in the auditorium, gloomy even despite the bright lighting. Must be the weather. It’s barely above zero outside. The audience file in, cheeks red from the cold.

Abdellatif Laâbi sits patiently, dignified, his fine silvery grey moustache gently bristling, eyes a-twinkle behind the small round wire-frame spectacles.

We begin.

André Naffis-Sahely, translator of the poems in this chapbook, leans forward to speak, his face a blend of Mediterranean and Persian origins, dark hair swept back behind one ear. He talks about the way so many poets have been jailed in the 20^th century, from Osip Mandelstam in pre-war Stalinist Russia to Ivan Martin Jirous in communist Czechoslovakia 40 years later.

Abdellatif Laâbi found himself on this long dark list of glorious names for most of the 1970s.

‘I was in the cave
where convicts read in the dark
and painted the bestiary of the future on the walls’[2]

The translator reads the first poem in English, followed by the poet in French, a pas de deux they will gently dance for the rest of the evening.

Abdellatif Laâbi has a wonderful low voice, sonorous, light, delicately posed, with just an edgy hint of a Maghreb accent. It’s a real joy to hear a poet read their own work, and I muse on how lucky I am to understand both the original and translated versions perfectly. It’s almost like watching one of those split screen films where the same scene is played out simultaneously from different angles.

Photo Credit: Roland Glasser

The innocuous rumble of a passing Tube train is amplified by microphone feedback into something more ominous as André Naffis-Sahely reads “The Earth Opens and Welcomes You,” a poem written on the day of the burial of Tahar Djaout, an Algerian writer killed by fanatics in Algiers in 1993:

‘Sleep well my friend
Sleep the sleep of the righteous
Rest well
even from your dreams
Let us shoulder the burden a little’[3]

Next, an interloper in the form of “The Word Gulag,” a poem that although it doesn’t appear in this chapbook, is a product of the marvellous initiative behind it. I am talking about the fortnightly Poetry Translation Workshops started by the dynamic poet Sarah Maguire ten years ago. I have participated in several of these intimate gatherings, at which a small group of more or less multilingual scribblers bash a literal translation into pretty decent English shape over tea and biscuits, before Sarah takes it home for a final buff and polish. My first foray just happened to be one focusing on Abdellatif Laâbi’s work, with literals courtesy of André Naffis-Sahely, so I was pleased to hear him recite a text that I, in some small way, had a hand in shaping:

‘The words file one by one out of a little door and stand in front of us on the other side of the wire. Pale. Trembling. Haggard. Shattered.’^[4]

In the short Q&A that follows, Abdellatif Laâbi is asked why he writes in French, a colonial language.

His reply is discreetly eloquent:

“Every mother tongue is imposed, just like every colonial language, so why not write in whatever language you wish? […] It’s no bad thing to find yourself between two or three cultures. Count yourself fortunate to be an agent of dialogue between these cultures.”^[5]

The poet smiles, folds his spectacles back into their little case, and leans back in his chair as we applaud.

‘I am the poem tree. I chuckle at all things ephemeral and eternal.
I am alive.’[6]

Recently, Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi was at London’s Mosaic Rooms and Free Word Centre, celebrating the release of his Bottom of the Jar and a new chapbook of his poems. Roland Glasser earlier reported on the launch; now Yasmine Seale reflects on Laâbi’s poetry and the world map of literary translations. 

By Yasmine Seale

Let’s imagine a map of ‘world literature’ as the anglophone reader knows it today. All maps are by nature documents of distortion, but I suspect this one would be particularly skewed: similar, perhaps, to a conquistador’s crude atlas, one of those quaintly fanciful affairs where misshapen bodies of land, stretched or shrunk beyond recognition, jostle for space on the page, where monsters crowd the seas and continents curve to fit the edges of the frame. A handful of writers would loom unduly large on this world map, dwarfing their arguably greater, but less anthologized compatriots.

Every port, peak and tributary in Europe would be lovingly charted, though elsewhere major landmarks would go missing. Just as Jerusalem sat squarely at the center of the world on those early maps, so the English-speaking author would dominate this one, leaving other languages to throng the margins with their babble. Whatever Goethe meant when he dreamed of a Weltliteratur, this isn’t it. Instead, we have its anamorphic shadow: a top-heavy world with a bulging center and many unexplored peripheries.

This map would also have to be in perpetual flux, as the anglophone reader’s awareness of foreign literatures shifts over time: new planets swim in and out of his ken in tandem with the vagaries of publishing, translation, literary honors, and the news. A map of inconstancy, then: like the stock exchange, like clouds. In his novel Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell has one character, the young composer Frobisher, deliver this arresting aphorism: “Faith, the least exclusive club on earth, has the craftiest doorman.”

The same could be said of that other broad church we call world literature — a wide-open door guarded by a strict gatekeeper, without whose help you have no hope of crossing the threshold. The gatekeepers here, of course, are translators. On our notional map, well-feted writers such as Orhan Pamuk and Alaa al-Aswany would certainly make the cut, but neither would enjoy such widespread popularity without the efforts and artistry of Maureen Freely or Humphrey Davies in adapting their works for the anglophone palate. And then there are writers who, like the modernist Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, are revered by their colinguals yet remain virtually unknown outside their own language for lack of decent translations.

Photo courtesy Mosaic Rooms, from Laâbi’s reading there.

Among the contemporary victims of our map, Abdellatif Laâbi would perhaps be the most glaring omission — an inexplicable blind spot on the English-speaking radar. On a recent evening in February, a small crowd gathered at the Free Word Centre in London to hear Laâbi read from a pamphlet of his poems compiled and translated by André Naffis-Sahely, a Venetian-Iranian who translates from the French and Italian and is a poet himself. The pamphlet was produced by the Poetry Translation Centre, itself the energetic brainchild of poet and translator Sarah Maguire, who introduced Laâbi that night. Focusing on contemporary poetry from Asia, Africa and Latin America, the Centre follows what might be called the Ted Hughes school of translation: working from cribs to establish the literal meaning of a poem, the translators – usually poets themselves – then re-shape these ‘raw’ texts into readable English verse. In this approach, mastery of the source language becomes optional: just as Hughes, who knew only French, produced English versions of Hungarian, Hebrew and Portuguese poetry, so Nick Laird, who is not known for his command of Dari, has ‘translated’ works by Reza Mohammadi, and Mark Ford, whose many talents do not include Arabic, has adapted poems by Al-Saddiq al-Raddi. This is not always the case: Naffis-Sahely, for example, translates directly from the French.

Undoubtedly, something is lost in this process – notably, a poem’s verbal texture: its meter, rhythm and rhyme. But with its emphasis on collaboration and on the literary quality of the final poem, the Centre has opened up exciting possibilities for translation, and its many happy outcomes are a testament to the method’s success.

Introducing her guest, Maguire was careful to emphasize Laâbi’s renown abroad, citing as evidence his many garlands of recognition, crowned by the Prix Goncourt in 2006. If his name was unfamiliar to the audience in London, it was perhaps, his translator suggested, because anglophone poetry tends to shy away from politics. Whether or not this is true, Laâbi certainly doesn’t: his work is unavoidably, unmistakably political. In Morocco, in 1966, he helped found the iconic magazine Souffles, an explosive blend of poetic experimentalism, political militancy and 1960s counterculture. In the prologue of its inaugural issue, Laâbi wrote that it would be ‘the organ of a new literary and poetic generation’. And so it was, but that breath was soon cut short: six years later the magazine was banned – these were the so-called ‘years of lead’ of Hassan II’s rule – and Laâbi arrested, beaten and sentenced to ten years in jail for ‘crimes of opinion’, a charge his translator described as ‘fabulously vague’. Released in 1980, he fled to France where he continues to live.

With its ten short poems, this chapbook is a regrettably modest sample of Laâbi’s expansive oeuvre. Still, these carefully chosen pieces offer a welcome glimpse into the kaleidoscope of his poetic sensibility, by turns savagely satirical (“The Wolves“), playfully allegorical (“The Poem Tree“), grimly funny (“Dish of the Day“), philosophical (“In Vain I Migrate“), sensual (“Burn the Midnight Oil“) and elegiac (“The Earth Opens and Welcomes You“). Beyond these deft shifts of register, however, the poems all share an essential preoccupation with language, its ambiguities and the possibility of its failure. More, they betray a paradoxical anxiety: beneath their lyrical, richly woven exterior, they are miniature meditations on the limits of poetic expression – indeed, on the ultimate poverty and helplessness of language itself.

“My Mother’s Language” begins with a distant memory (“It’s been twenty years since I last saw my mother”) and ends with the urgency of preserving a fragile legacy (“I am the last man/ who still speaks her language”). The poet becomes a conduit, a translator of sorts, giving voice to the “endangered species” of his mother’s words:

‘it’s as if she were using my mouth

to voice her profanities, curses and gibberish

the invisible litany of her nicknames…’

Here the translator has curiously elided the original metaphor of the rosary: “le chapelet introuvable de ses diminutifs.” It’s a lovely image – a harried, affectionate mother stringing pet names together like prayer beads – yet is blotted out in translation by the more abstract “litany.”

The poem pays bittersweet homage to a mother who “starved herself to death” while her son lay “in the cave/ where convicts read in the dark.”But it really mourns a greater loss, as the quiet filial lament gives way to something graver still: a requiem for a whole language – a way of seeing – threatened with extinction.

Even when they are grave, these poems tread lightly, weightlessly, haunted perhaps by the idea that language, poetic or otherwise, can obstruct as much as it elucidates, or can become a burden to those who receive it. This fear is touched on and allayed in “The Earth Opens and Welcomes You,” a poignant elegy to the Algerian poet Tahar Djaout, who was assassinated by Islamist guerrillas in 1993. One day, Laâbi promises the departed,

‘your children will grow

and read your poems unashamed’

(‘tes enfants grandiront

et liront sans gêne tes poèmes’)

The phrase “sans gêne” could mean several things here, but I’m not sure shame comes into it. It could mean “untroubled,” ”without fear” – that dream of a future relieved of politics – or it could mean “with ease” – that other, equally remote dream of a language universally, seamlessly understood. In reality it means both: the dream of a poetry delivered of its snags and of its liabilities. Like death, the poem promises a general unburdening. Its wild hope is the absolution of language from politics.

Political violence aside, language can also be “endangered” in more subtle ways: when it is corrupted or abused. In “The Manuscript,” an impish Satan hijacks and absconds with the manuscript of a work in progress. The poet complains that “whenever I wrote a word, he immediately added another – with what I must say seemed like a real sense of entitlement.” Here again the poem suffers in translation: “un sens réel de l’à-propos” does not mean “entitlement” at all; in fact, it means the same as “apropos” in English. The implication is that Satan’s poetic trouvailles are unexpectedly apt, promising, inspired. This is darkly funny – the devil is a poet, too! – and also troubling: if both are equally gifted in eloquence, how will we tell the poet’s word from the devil’s? In a scenario typical of Laâbi’s black humour, the poet competes with Satan for the last word and loses to the latter’s cunning. It is a fine poem, light-footed and faintly surreal, but much of the comedy and underlying unease are lost in the English version.

For all its universalizing breadth, Laâbi’s linguistic anxiety is no doubt rooted in the particular frustration of the colonized. In an early issue of Souffles, he lamented the “linguistic infirmity” of the post-independence writer, newly unchained from the language of his colonizers but not yet master of his own. No more anchored to the “endangered species” of his mother tongue than to his children’s easy fluency, he inhabits a painful in-between:

          ‘In my sleep I speak

a medley of languages

and animal calls’

(the latter phrase somewhat tamer than the original ‘crix d’animaux’).

And yet when, on that recent evening in London, Laabi was asked to explain himself for not writing in Arabic, he smiled patiently and sighed. “J’écris en français,” he simply said. “C’est une question d’histoire.” Similar questions followed, tiresome in their curiosity, their respectful bewilderment (but you are an Arab!), until Laâbi countered with dry panache: “You know, writing in another language is not a capital sin! To live in one culture, to speak only one language, is to live in a prison. And you may have guessed that I don’t much care for prisons.”

Having placated his faintly accusatory audience, Laâbi paid homage to his translator: how lucky he was, he said, to be translated not just by a poet but by one who is similarly many-voiced, bridging several languages and cultures. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Naffis-Sahely’s track record shows a predilection for the hybrid and the hyphenated: besides Laâbi, he has also translated two novels by the Haitian poet and painter Franketienne, who writes in both French and Creole. And at last summer’s Poetry Parnassus, a festival bringing together writers from every competing Olympic nation, he translated a poem by Ribka Sibhatu, who is from Eritrea and writes in Italian.

Naffis-Sahely is that rare thing: a polyglot poet, and undoubtedly a gifted translator. Yet there are moments, at least in this slim volume, where he seems to strip Laâbi’s poetry of its humor and occasionally, more egregiously, of its political bite. Above all, though, he has performed a great service in rendering this singular poet’s voice into English.

On the mappa mundi of world literature, then, Abdellatif Laâbi would not be one of those strange, half-sunken creatures lurking in exotic seas, but rather a terra incognita – a beautiful, undiscovered continent that had simply fallen off the edge.

Yasmine Seale is a writer and translator living in London.

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Editor’s clarification on an earlier version of this piece: Although this piece makes reference to translators who work from a “bridge” or “crib,” this is not true of Laâbi’s translator André Naffis-Sahely, who translates directly from the French.

CORRECTION: Three of the 5 originally noted were from last year’s fest. The remaining two are:

Qatari writer Abdul Aziz al Mahmoud, whose novel The Corsair has just come out in English from BQFP. Al-Mahmoud is one of relatively few Qatari novelists; he recently gave an interview about writing in Qatar to Just Now magazine. He’ll appear at the Oxford Lit Fest with historical novelist Harry Sidebottom. March 24, 10 a.m.

Moroccan novelist Mohammad Achaari, co-winner of the 2011 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, will talk about his novel The Arch and the Butterfly, which should be out in English this fall, also from BQFP. March 24, 2 p.m.

In the latest issue of Asymptote are three newly translated poems by Moroccan poet Mohammed Bennis (b. Fez, 1948), trans. Nashwa Nasreldin:

Nasreldin notes, in her MFA thesis — where she writes about translating Bennis:

I decided to translate poems from Bennis’ collection, Seven Birds, which is one of his most recent, published in 2011. I chose this collection in particular…because I felt very close to the abstract images and emotions expressed in the poems.  I felt I could enjoy the inherent beauty of language, its flexibility in form and meaning, without being distracted into thinking about the context a poem was written in, or that poet’s political intention.

The same things Nasreldin appreciated about Bennis’s work — the abstract, emotionally evocative images — were also a challenge. As Camilo Gomez-Rivas has put it, “Words one had thought to know well appear [in Bennis's poetry] dissociated from their common senses, taking on unexpected shades of meaning.” Nasreldin noted in her thesis that she wanted to maintain the strangeness, the openness of the words. From her beautiful translation of “lantern“:

soon they will carry the corpse
to the place where the prayers for the dead
repeat
to the cemetery
in a corner of rushed graves

there
as it is lowered into nothingness
everything makes audible repeating strokes
even silence

a woman
facing her death
sways the lantern

The poem is full of a new strangeness, and a re-seeing of movement — and who moves what. It is certainly not full of overt politics. Indeed, Bennis spoke of his movement away from the initial suffocations of Moroccan politics in an interview with Gomez-Rivas:

I went in [to the Moroccan Writers' Union in 1973] desiring to change ideas and create a new vision of cultural activity in Morocco and a free Moroccan culture in Arabic. But what I discovered when I joined was that I was with political, not cultural people. I didn’t understand this at first. I was an enthusiastic young man. But slowly, I began to understand that this institution which said about itself that it was a cultural one, was in fact an institution that existed to thwart culture.

Bennis withdrew from the union, and ”alone and in his house,” Gomez-Rivas writes, “he set out to write poetry that could reinvigorate the language.” However, while Bennis may write without a certain sort of politics, he does have a vision of poetry’s life- and language-affirming importance. He told Gomez Rivas that a language without poetry:

…would become a series of abbreviated sentences used in political discourse, in the stock market, and in commerce. All of these phrases would be accounted for. There would no longer be a space for the imagination. There would no longer be the possibility for personal experience. You would not be important to it; when you go into the supermarket you are not important to it. On the contrary, when you go into the supermarket today we don’t even need language.

The rest of this excellent interview with Bennis: 

On Banipal.

More of Bennis’s poetry in translation:

“Rose of Dust,” trans. Anton Shammas

“lantern,” “disappearance,” and “a blue hand,” trans. Nasreldin

Tens more poems in translation on Bennis’s official website

The official website:

http://mohammedbennis.com/

On video:

If you’re in England, Moroccan poet Rachida Madani and translator-poet Marilyn Hacker will be at several events for the launch of Madani’s collection Tales of a Severed Head:

I haven’t gotten a copy, but according to publisher Yale University Press:

In Tales of a Severed Head, Madani addresses present-day issues surrounding the role of women in society—issues not unlike those explored a thousand years ago in the enduring collection of Arab tales known as The Thousand and One Nights.

…Madani’s modern-day Scheherazade is fighting for her own life as well as the lives of her fellow sufferers. But in today’s world, the threat comes as much from poverty, official corruption, the abuse of human rights, and the lingering effects of colonialism as from the power wielded by individual men. Madani weaves a tale of contemporary resistance, and once again language provides a potent weapon.

Madani’s work is also featured in the recent Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of North African Literature, ed. Pierre Joris & Habib Tengour. They quote her as saying, on writing, “I love to savor my words, especially when I find the one I need in the place it needs to be” and “To shut up is not fair.”

Events:

Mosaic Rooms (London) April 22

University of Liverpool April 24

Liverpool Poetry Cafe April 25

Manchester Library April 27

Selected poems:

Jadaliyya: Five Poems from The First Tale

Asymptote: The Second Tale

Guernica: The Second Tale: XV

Words Without Borders: XXIII

Commentary and reviews:

The Paris Review: Robyn Creswell on Tales of a Severed Head

The YUP Blog: Rachida Madani’s Tales of a Severed Head

Moroccan author Mahi Binebine’s first novel translated into English (by Lulu Norman), Welcome to Paradise, appeared last year to some acclaim (as here, here). Now, Binebine is launching his second novel to be translated into English, also by Norman, Horses of God:

The novel is out this month in the US from Tin House Books and in the UK from Granta.

Later this month, Binebine — also a well-known painter whose works are, among other places, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York – will be discussing Horses of God in London and Oxford.

The French original of the novel, Les Etoiles de Sidi Moumen (2010) won the Prix du Roman Arabe as well as the inaugural Mamounia Literary Prize of Marrakech. Translator of Horses of God Lulu Norman is also acclaimed, having been awarded the 2013 English PEN Award for outstanding writing in translation.

Events include:

April 23, 5:15 p.m.: Binebine discusses ‘Horses of God’ at St Anne’s College, Oxford - http://www.englishpen.org/venue/st-annes-college-oxford/

April 24, 6:20 p.m.: Binebine discusses ‘Horses of God’ at the Institute Francais, London. This event will begin with a screening of Les Chevaux de Dieu, a film inspired by the book. - www.institut-francais.org.uk

April 25, 6 p.m.: Binebine discusses ‘Horses of God’ at the Royal African Society, London - www.royalafricansociety.org

More:

Portrait of Mahi Binebine on Qantara

Binebine’s official website

Moroccan author Fouad Laroui has won the 2013 Prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle*, one of France’s top literary prizes, for his story L’étrange affaire du pantalon de Dassoukine:

The Prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle, one of the Goncourt prizes, has been awarded since 1974 for the short story. According to Jeune Afrique, the tale follows a young Moroccan official (and his pants) who travels to Belgium to buy wheat for his country.

Laroui’s previous novel, Une année chez les Français (2010), also was longlisted for the Goncourt, but this is Laroui’s first win.

Laroui was born in Oudja, Morocco in 1960, has studied economics in the UK and settled in Amsterdam. He publishes creative work both in French and in Dutch.

Although Laroui is celebrated for his humor and insights, according to Moroccan novelist Laila Lalami, you shouldn’t bother looking for him in English. “As incredible as it sounds, Laroui has never been translated into English. (Don’t look at me. I tried to get several editors interested in him, even offering to translate him, but no one has shown any interest.)”

You can listen to one of Laroui’s short stories, “The Little Imposter,” translated for Radio Books by Michael O’Loughlin. A few of Laroui’s Dutch poems have appeared in Banipal, and translator Lydia Beyoud writes compellingly about why she enjoyed Fouad Laroui’s My Father’s Antenna.

Laroui has apparently said of why he writes: “”J’écris pour dénoncer des situations qui me choquent. Pour dénicher la bêtise sous toutes ses formes. La méchanceté, la cruauté, le fanatisme, la sottise me révulsent.”

Presumably this would be the moment for some English-language publisher to take Laila up on her offer.

*Previously (erroneously) reported as “Prix Goncourt.”

At the end of April, Moroccan poet Rachida Madani and poet-translator Marilyn Hacker traveled around the UK reading from Hacker’s translation of Madani’s Tales of a Severed Head. Here, Madani and Hacker read at Poets & Players:

I still don’t have a copy, but according to publisher Yale University Press:

In Tales of a Severed Head, Madani addresses present-day issues surrounding the role of women in society—issues not unlike those explored a thousand years ago in the enduring collection of Arab tales known as The Thousand and One Nights.

…Madani’s modern-day Scheherazade is fighting for her own life as well as the lives of her fellow sufferers. But in today’s world, the threat comes as much from poverty, official corruption, the abuse of human rights, and the lingering effects of colonialism as from the power wielded by individual men. Madani weaves a tale of contemporary resistance, and once again language provides a potent weapon.

Madani’s work is also featured in the recent Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of North African Literature, ed. Pierre Joris & Habib Tengour. They quote her as saying, on writing, “I love to savor my words, especially when I find the one I need in the place it needs to be” and “To shut up is not fair.”

Also read:

The Majalla: A Tale of Two Poets

Selected poems:

Jadaliyya: Five Poems from The First Tale

Asymptote: The Second Tale

Guernica: The Second Tale: XV

Words Without Borders: XXIII

Commentary and reviews:

The Paris Review: Robyn Creswell on Tales of a Severed Head

The YUP Blog: Rachida Madani’s Tales of a Severed Head

Last month in Casablanca, the largest and one of the most crowded cities in Morocco, L’école de literature hosted trilingual art and translation workshops under the umbrella of “MASNAA:  Literature in the Making.” Aya Nabih was there:

By Aya Nabih

Photo from one of the “Cartography of the Ecstatic” workshop sessions. Credit: Aya Nabih.

The MASNAA residency included a schedule full of various workshops on cinema, performance, and music — all in relation to writing. Among the workshops I attended were a comics and narrative figuration workshop, moderated by the painter and musician Mazen Kerbaj and “Cinematic Occupation,” run by the Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari, in which he introduced his upcoming projects and discussed some of his cinematic views.

“Cartography of the Ecstatic” was the title of another workshop about the intersection between music and poetry, where poetry was performed by the workshop participants mixed with music and sound effects. It was moderated by the musician Ambrose Bye with the American poet Eleni Sikélianòs and Khalid Moukdar. On the last day, they produced a musical poetry night for the audience.

A typical day started in the morning with two workshops in different sites around Casablanca, then, in the evening, we had some lectures on literature and cinema. One of them was mine, titled “The Fresh Voice of Experimental Arab Literature,” which suggested that there is no specific definition of an experimental literary text, as it cannot be confined to one description and that is exactly why it is experimental. It is free of all writing rules, so each text presents an experiment of the writer’s choosing.

It was unfamiliar not to understand Arabic speakers, as the Moroccan Arabic was a little difficult in the first few days, and we had sometimes to use English and French. But this is, I think, one of the most significant aspects of being in Casablanca; for the Arabic language to melt and merge, crossing the boundaries and getting to the point of mutual understanding.

Aya Nabih is a translator and Worldscribe country manager in Egypt. She has translated a number of documentaries and children’s TV series and her literary translations have appeared in Egyptian and British journals. She also has participated in poetry nights in Cairo and France, and some of her poems have been translated into French and English.

Yesterday, PEN American Center announced the shortlists and judges for the 2013 PEN Literary Awards:

On the shortlist for the poetry-in-translation category is Moroccan poet Rachida Madani’s Tales of a Severed Head, trans. Marilyn Hacker.

In the past, only PEN winners and runners-up have been announced. However, this year, PEN decided to release shortlists in ten different categories. Two are translation-focused: one for poetry and one for prose.

In a prepared release, PEN’s controversial executive director, Suzanne Nossel, explained that “This year we saw a record number of submissions from both traditional and independent publishers, including an impressive showing of emerging authors”[.] …. For this reason, we have decided to release the shortlists and to highlight the hard work of our dedicated judges, so that the recognition that accompanies PEN’s awards program can benefit as many writers as possible.”

There is only one judge listed for the poetry-in-translation category, Don Mee Choi, while all the other categories list three judges. In any case, the full poetry-in-translation shortlist is:

Tales of a Severed Head by Rachida Madani (Yale University Press), trans. Marilyn Hacker

Spit Temple by Cecilia Vicuña (Ugly Duckling Presse), trans. Rosa Alcalá

Diadem by Marosa di Giorgio (BOA Editions), trans. Adam Giannelli

The Smoke of Distant Fires by Eduardo Chirinos (Open Letter Books), trans. G. J. Racz

Almost 1 Book/Almost 1 Life by Elfriede Czurda (Burning Deck), trans. Rosmarie Waldrop

The Shock of the Lenders and Other Poems by Jorge Santiago Perednik (Action Books), Molly Weigel

Other than what I think is an unfortunate opening poem, Madani’s collection is rich in its connections and language. Review forthcoming.

The final PEN winners and runners-up will be announced later this summer and will be honored at the 2013 PEN Literary Awards Ceremony on Monday, October 21, 2013, at CUNY Graduate Center’s Proshansky Auditorium in New York City. All the shortlists can be seen here.

Also read:

The Majalla: A Tale of Two Poets

Selected poems from Madani’s collection:

Jadaliyya: Five Poems from The First Tale

Asymptote: The Second Tale

Guernica: The Second Tale: XV

Words Without Borders: XXIII

Video:

Here, Madani and Hacker read at Poets & Players:

I am not sure how, but I missed this wonderful interview Christopher Schaefer conducted with Abdellatif Laâbi when it came out on The Quarterly Conversation this June.  You should read it in its entirety, but I’ll just pull out Laâbi’s list of 10 under-translated Moroccan writers:

He says:

There is Driss Chraïbi, who hasn’t been translated very much, at least not enough. There are also French-language writers like Mahi Binebine, Fouad Laroui, Mohammed Leftah etc. Poets like Mostafa Nissaboury. Writers in Arabic like Mohamed Zefzaf, Driss Khoury, Mohamed Berrada, Mohamed Achaari, Mohamed Bennis, and Abdelkrim Tabbal, one of our great poets, and that’s all without speaking of Amazigh (Berber) writers or those who write in our dialect of Arabic. I compiled an anthology of Moroccan poetry about ten years ago that comprised texts by 50 Moroccan poets.

From the French:

Mahi Binebine: Binebine’s Horses of God has been translated into English by Lulu Norman, and it came out from Tin House and Granta this spring, although I haven’t seen a copy.

Fouad Laroui: This despite Laroui winning this year’s “Prix Goncourt de la Nouvelle” and being longlisted for the big Goncourt prize in 2010. This one’s hard to understand: Surely some publisher will pick up his witty, compelling work soon. (Laroui also writes poetry in Dutch.)

Mohammed Leftah: Died in 2008 having written many acclaimed novels; apparently he hasn’t been translated into Arabic, either. 

Driss Chraïbi: Iraqi writer Mahmoud Saeed, who at one point lived in Morocco, put Driss Chraibi’s Life Full of Holes on his list of “5 Books to Read Before You Die.” Laila Lalami translated an excerpt from his Le Passé Simple; as she notes, the book was translated, but has fallen out of print. It seems that Three Continents Press may have just brought out a translation of his Mother Comes of Age, although I see no more about it, beyong the Amazon listing.

Poets:

Mostafa Nissaboury: Along with Laâbi, one of the co-founders of the magazine Souffles. 

Abdelkrim Tabbal: You can find some of his work in translation; here, on Poetry International Web.

Mohamed Bennis: Some of Bennis’s work has been translated; see, for instance, his work in a recent Asymptote and more.

Of course, you will find many Moroccan poets in the Poems for the Millennium anthology of North African literature.

From the Arabic: 

Mohamed Zafzaf: As I posted over on the “Top 105″ books of the 20th century — as voted by the Arab Writers Union — “The Woman and the Rose…has been translated into Spanish, but” this big novel by “‘the godfather of Moroccan writers’ has not made its way into English. I did find one story of Zafzaf’s, “The Sacred Tree,” in English translation. It’s in Modern Arabic Short Stories, a Bilingual Reader, which was published by Saqi Books.”

Driss Khoury / Driss El Khoury: This celebrated Moroccan novelist has not, I don’t think, had any work translated into English.

Mohamed Berrada: Berrada has been translated into English, although without receiving due attention. Berrada’s The Game of Forgetting was published by Quartet Books in 1987, as translated by Issa Boullata. His Like a Summer Never to Be Repeated was published by AUC Press, trans. Christina Phillips.

Mohamed Achaari: I believe Achaari has been signed by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing; in any case, his International Prize for Arabic Fiction-winning The Arch and the Butterfly surely will be out in translation soon.

If you’re in London, Banipal will be launching issue 48, “Narrating Marrakech,” this Tuesday at the Kensington Central Library:

Issue 48

According to Banipal, the issue includes:

…enthralling voices from the “kingdom of the improbable, one where reality is creatively rewritten”, as Juan Goytisolo describes the city in his introduction to Marrakech: Open Secrets, the first text of the feature. We invite readers to partake in many sublime moments of the real and seemingly unreal through the writings of poets and authors from Marrakech: Yassin Adnan and Saad Sarhan, whose recent book Marrakech, Open Secrets, has been translated especially for this issue; the painter novelist Mahi Binebine, who never fails to captivate, and his new novel The Lord will reward you; Abu Youssef Taha brings a couple of black tales with a twist; Rajae Benchemsi writes of Bahia, the henna painter, and describes Marrakech as “a cosmic uterus”; Mohamed Nedali’s fascinating debut novel Prime Cuts: An Apprentice Butcher’s Life & Loves will at last be published in English; Anis Arafai gives readers three alternative short stories while Taha Adnan presents three scenarios on the lure of the East and “the winds of Westernization”.

The event will begin at 6:30 p.m. in the library’s Lecture Theatre, and is set to include readings and be followed by a reception.

The event, which is part of the Nour Festival of the Arts, is free, but attendees are encouraged to RSVP to nour@rbkc.gov.uk to ensure a place.

Yesterday, Moroccan poet Mohammed Bennis was awarded one of two Max Jacob prizes at a ceremony in Paris:

Photo credit: Olivia Snaije

Bennis receieved the prize, which is now in its 64th year, for his book Lieux Païens (or A Pagan Place, المكان الوثني), which was translated into the French by Bernard Noël in collaboration with the author.

The award, which goes to one work written in French and — since 2004 — to another in translation, also went to Éric Sarner’s Cœur Chronique.

At the ceremony, Bennis (pictured center), read one of his poems in Arabic, and Noël (left) read it in French.

Yesterday was also the 70th anniversary of poet Max Jacob’s death in the Drancy internment camp.

Previous winners of the Max Jacob ‘Étranger’ include Lebanese poet Wadih Saadeh (2011), American poet-translator Marilyn Hacker (2005), and the Syrian poet Adonis (2008). In the past decade, Bennis has won a number of other awards, including the Maghreb Culture Prize, the Primio Calopezzati, Le Prix Grand Atlas, the Owais Prize, and the Premio Letterario Internazionale Ceppo Pistoia.

Bennis is also one of the 11 Moroccan writers who Abdellatif Laâbi recently said should be translated into English.

One of the poems from A Pagan Place has been translated into English by Anton Shammas and published by Banipal. The poem, “Rose of Dust,” opens:

1
Shattered places
and the breeze
of dawn wakes up on me

2

My shoulder still in slumber
A cloud bowing
to the flicker of infinity

3

Is it that trees invent their echo
or
has the blind
just dipped his hand
in water

4

The poet closes
his eyes
on a rose
of
dust

Keep reading on Banipal

An excellent interview with Bennis: 

On Banipal.

More of Bennis’s poetry in translation:

“lantern,” “disappearance,” and “a blue hand,” trans. Nasreldin

Tens more poems in translation on Bennis’s official website

Other work by Bennis can be found in Poems for the Millennium, ed. Pierre Joris and Habib Tengour

The official website:

http://mohammedbennis.com/

On video:

Many thanks to Olivia Snaije.

Youssef Fadel’s A Rare Blue Bird That Flies with Me is on the six-strong shortlist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Cristina Dozio reviews it, and finds time runs, in this evocative novel, runs in many different sorts of ways:

By Cristina Dozio

“To the martyrs of the centres of detention and extermination in Tazmamart, Agdez, Kelaat Mgouna, Skoura, Moulay Chérif, Kourbis, The Complex, Dar Mokri — those of them who are alive and those who are dead.”

Opening the book with this dedication, Youssef Fadel cleary places his novel in the historical time frame of the so-called Years of Lead in Morocco. However, using an intimate and evocative style, the author is able to connect this piece of national history with universal themes such as love, hope, and the struggle for survival.

Fadel himself was imprisoned for eight months in Moulay Chérif prison (1974-75), in Casablanca, because of his politically engaged writings. His latest novel, A Rare Blue Bird that Flies with Me, shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, has recently won Le Prix du Maroc du Livre 2014. This is another important recognition for the Moroccan novelist and playwright after  his novel Hashish (2000) was awarded the Grand Atlas Prize.

In the novel, the pilot Aziz has been confined for eighteen years in a small, dark, dirty prison cell that used to be part of the kitchens in the Kasbah of the Pasha Glaoui, in Southern Morocco. Does anybody know he is there? Is anybody looking for him?

Yes, his young wife Zina, who was only sixteen when she married him and saw him disappear just the day after. From that very moment, she starts searching for her husband everywhere – at the air force base where he worked, in prisons, ministeries, and offices – sometimes with the help of her elder sister Khatima, and most of the time alone. It is a very hard task, because everything is covered by silence and hidden truths, and also a disappointing one when she is given false leads. Nonetheless, through this experience, Zina matures and becomes a strong woman.

The search is particularly intense in the first fourteen years and reaches its peak when she meets an important general and the king himself. Then it stops for four years, until a man enters the bar where Zina works and gives her new hope. This will actually be her last journey in search of Aziz, and it will bring unexpected consequences for both of them.

As we can see from the plot, time is a very important element in Fadel’s novel. Every chapter, alternatively recounted by one of the six narrators, carries a precise time stamp: the mysterious man in galabiya goes to Khatima and Zina’s bar on Monday the 21st of May 1990. Starting from that moment, the story lasts only twenty-four hours and meaningfully ends with an indefinite “Later on…”. In this very short period of time, every narrator opens windows on the past: Aziz goes back to his roots and points out how he was eager to learn; Zina’s family story, instead, is told by Khatima, who left home with her younger sister when the latter was only ten.

In A Rare Blue Bird that Flies with Me, time has a double meaning.

In A Rare Blue Bird that Flies with Me, time has a double meaning. First of all, there is the Time of History, as Aziz disappears on the 16th of August 1972, when King Hassan’s plane is attacked by the air force as part of the failed coup organised by General Oufkir. But time is also perceived subjectively: when in jail, the ex-pilot elaborates many ways to count the time passing. Whereas for his wife Zina, time essentially means waiting:

“I ran after him, I threw myself at him and kissed him. Then he said, I’ll kiss you back, tonight, when I come back.
And he did, he kissed me back, when he came back, after twenty-six years.”

The concept of time is strictly connected with the contrast between light and darkness, which the author renders in many poetic passages. Deep darkness, like the one inside a cell, stimulates the senses and enables visions. Both Aziz and Zina also express their memories and future hopes through dreams, part of which are about flying:

“And when I sleep I dream of flying. I spread my wings above the village and I fly above my uncle’s head who threatens me and orders me to descend, and I don’t.”

Aziz, Zina, Khatima, Baba Ali, Bengazi, Haneda the dog, and Aziz again… These are the story-tellers and the author is able to give each of them their own style and language. The pilot’s voice is probably the most complex and leaves much room for ambivalence. Then there are the short rhythmic sentences of the Kasbah’s “cook” Baba Ali, that are obsessively repeated when he starts questioning his job. The other guard, Bengazi, instead, shows extreme confidence and uses religious formulas that do not correspond to any true religious feeling. When reporting dialogues, the narrators include them directly in the text, without any graphic sign. However, it is easy to recognise and follow them because they are the only parts in Moroccan dialect.

Through the private stories of these characters, A Rare Blue Bird That Flies with Me depicts some aspects of Moroccan society over almost thirty years. It is a militarized society, the history of which is evoked by mentioning World War II and the conflicts in Indochina and Algeria. The French soldiers who were on the ground when Aziz was a child are replaced by a large number of Moroccan soldiers. Khatima often has to deal with them, at first when she works as a prostitute and then as the owner of The Storks Bar, that she inherites from a French lady. While the countryside suffers drought, moving to the capital Rabat seems to be the only way to improve one’s social condition.

In this context, family relations are compromised:

“I don’t have an uncle. Nor a mother. Nor a father. My sister Khadija is in the desert. Maybe she got married when she was ten or twelve. Maybe she died. Yes, she died so that I am sure I am a tree with no roots and no branches.”

This is what Aziz says, before finding a father in the friar of the mission where he receives his education and in the colonel who commands the air force base. It is this man that he follows, with the hope of giving power back to people and removing the parasites that exploit the country.

This novel can be read as the second chapter of a trilogy that includes Fadel’s previous book, A Beautiful White Cat that Walks with Me.

Animals play an extremely symbolic role in his writing and in A Rare Blue Bird that Flies with Me we can find a whole natural system acting in the story: the Kasbah’s dog is one of the narrators and shows deeper feelings and compassion than humans; the call of the owl announces a prisoner’s death; insects, rats and night animals populate the fortress; and finally, there are the storks. 

Animals play an extremely symbolic role in his writing and in A Rare Blue Bird that Flies with Me we can find a whole natural system acting in the story: the Kasbah’s dog is one of the narrators and shows deeper feelings and compassion than humans; the call of the owl announces a prisoner’s death; insects, rats and night animals populate the fortress; and finally, there are the storks.

“And he remembered The Storks Bar without remembering the address, but the storks eventually guided him. And mum said storks go back to the nests that they know.

Yes, said the man, they know their nests.”

Youssef Fadel does not show much violence directly, but he focuses on the deterioration it can cause on a human beings and the hopes that keep them alive.

When the system seems to have won the battle (as Bengazi says, prisoners “have been coming for twenty years and they will come for a hundred years more…”), there comes the liberation: Faraj, relief, which is the name of the rare blue bird of the title.

Trained as a translator, Cristina Dozio is currently doing her PhD about Egyptian satirical literature at the University of Milan. A passionate traveller, she is one of the co-founders of Samsara Viaggi for cultural tours in Morocco, Egypt and Jordan.

The work of Moroccan novelist Abdelrahim Lahbibi was little-known before his third novel, The Journeys of ’Abdi, Known as the Son of Hamriya, made it onto this year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) shortlist. Al-Mustafa Najjar talked to the author about his sudden shift into the spotlight:

By Al-Mustafa Najjar

Neither of Lahbibi’s first two novels – Bread, Hashish and Fish (2008), which realistically documents the historical and geographical milestones of the author’s hometown, or The Best of Luck (2010) – brought the 64-year-old novelist and Arabic literature teacher into the spotlight. Now, with his latest novel, things have changed.

Employing a familiar narrative technique, Journeys tells the story of a researcher stumbling upon a manuscript in one of the old markets of Lahbibi’s hometown — Safi — that recounts the journey of ’Abdi, a 19th-century Moroccan traveller who embarks on an odyssey from Morocco to Hijaz, in present-day Saudi Arabia. The discovery of this false document creates a meta-fictional narrative, blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality.

Najjar spoke with Lahbibi about his relationship with Safi, the narrative style of his third novel, and the impact being nominated for the IPAF will have on his career.

Al-Mustafa Najjar: What does it mean to you that your third novel, The Journeys of ‘Abdi, Known as Son of Hamriya, has made it onto this year’s shortlist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction?

Abdelrahim Lahbibi: Taking part in the IPAF is a special episode in the life of any novelist and constitutes a turning point towards the better for all entrants.

MN: Fiction from the Maghreb has been enjoying a great reception and readership in the Arab world, with many novelists, such as Waciny Laredj, Samir Kacimi and Mohammed Achaari, among others, establishing their reputations on the Arab literary scene. Do you have any comment on this, especially in light of the fact two Moroccan novelists have made it onto the IPAF shortlist this year?

AL: Maghrebi fiction today is in a better position [and] maintaining a higher level of performance thanks to the rich literary works being produced, in terms of both content and form. It constitutes, along with the fiction of the Mashreq, a varied and creative fictional space.

MN: Journeys uses the well-known “false document” narrative technique — in this case, a manuscript that recounts the journey of ’Abdi from Morocco to Hijaz in the 19th century. This technique results in a parallel setting (a historical moment in time and geographic location) as well as a pluralistic narrative discourse with different characters and themes. Could you tell us about this technique and the difference such a narrative game makes?

AL: This narrative game, the manuscript, constitutes the focal point of all the levels of the novel — narrative, language, description, characters, themes, and so on — bringing about a complete unity, a logical and organic sequence of events and a smooth and intriguing style, with the novel turning into a well-connected sequence of episodes. Even the denouement turns into a window open to interpretation and reflection about the potential fate of ’Abdi — it is a door to the unknown, or a reflection about another novel.

MN: In his search for knowledge across the Arab world, ’Abdi resuscitates some Arab historical figures, such as Ibn Khaldun, the 15th-century Arab Muslim historiographer and historian. Did you do much historical research while writing the novel? To what extent does the question of achieving a balance between the historical and the fictional preoccupy you?

 The encounter between the fictional and the historical raises reality to the level of fiction, and at the same time gives the illusion that fiction has turned into reality.

AL: Writing and editing a manuscript both historically and linguistically that belongs to the 19th century, taking the journey as its temporal and spatial trajectory, necessarily entails using references and sources. However, fictional editing is different from other editing in the sense that it turns the margins into another text, a meta-text, that merges with and complements the other while at the same time representing two different discourses narrated by different voices. The encounter between the fictional and the historical raises reality to the level of fiction, and at the same time gives the illusion that fiction has turned into reality.

MN: Dealing with the present through the past and the exploration of the depths of history is a common narrative method in Arabic and foreign fiction. What do you think of this kind of literary treatment? Do you think the Arab historical novel genre has matured?

AL: Journeys is not a historical novel. Its characters are fictional, and so are most of its events. What is realistic in the novel are the narrative tools that delude readers into believing that what they are reading is true and historically factual.

MN: In your previous novels, Bread, Hashish and Fish andThe Best of Luck, Safi — your hometown in Morocco — dominates the narrative space and the characters. In your recent novel, the narrator stumbles upon the manuscript that sets the novel into action in one of Safi’s markets. To what extent has Safi inspired your work? Will you possibly transcend Safi and write about other places?

For me, the novel is the city. Each novelist has their own favorite city. The novel, in this sense, is the place that embraces us and shapes our emotional, social and psychological identities.

AL: For me, the novel is the city. Each novelist has their own favorite city. The novel, in this sense, is the place that embraces us and shapes our emotional, social and psychological identities. We write about the city, whether in a positive or a negative way, out of love or hatred. We write about the city even when we are in the wilderness.

As for transcending Safi and moving on to other places and writing about them — that is contingent on the narrative necessities. However, the favorite place or city remains the essential core, dormant behind the words and lines.

In Bread, Hashish and Fish, Essaouira constituted a special place for a good deal of the novel. In The Best of Luck, Jeannette’s letters make reference to several places in France. As for Journeys, many places are described during the journey.

Q: How long did it take you to write Journeys?

It took almost four years.

Al-Mustafa Najjar is a Syrian journalist/translator at Asharq Al-Awsat. He holds a master’s degree in Post-1900 Literatures, Theories and Cultures from the the University of Manchester. He is based in London.

This interview was originally conducted in Arabic and appeared on al-Sharq al-Awsat.

In his latest book, A Rare Blue Bird that Flies with Me – shortlisted for this year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) – Moroccan writer Youssef Fadel takes the reader on a vividly imaginative odyssey through a dark period in Morocco’s history:

By Al-Mustafa Najjar

Fadel’s ninth novel is a fictional testament to the country’s “Years of Lead,” in the 1970s and 1980s, which saw unprecedented levels of government violence against the opposition in Morocco.

Fadel’s handling of this period, on which much ink has already been spilled, is novel in the sense that he employs elements of fantasy and the supernatural. While it is true that it sheds light on government violations in Morocco’s secret prisons, A Rare Blue Bird is awash with what Fadel calls “patriarchal violence”: the “ordinary injustice” practiced outside prison, on the streets, at schools and in families. For Fadel, systematic violence in prison is nothing but an “echo” of that which is perpetrated outside.

Considered by critics as a sequel to A Beautiful White Cat that Walks with Me — a claim Fadel disputes in this interview — Fadel’s most recent novel traces a complex narrative network consisting of six voices, each of which recounts a different side of the story of Aziz, a pilot whose passion for the open, blue sky lands him in an abysmal jail. Ignorant of Aziz’s whereabouts, his wife, Zina, embarks on an 18-year quest to find the husband she was separated from on her wedding day.

Al-Mustafa Najjar: A Rare Blue Bird that Flies with Me is a delicate title whose poetic aestheticism stands in stark contrast with the cruelty and brutality we see in the novel. What is the relationship between the title and the content of the novel?

Youssef Fadel: The relationship between the title and the novel is similar to that between the protagonist, his past, and his future: the pilot, the plane, and the bird. [The protagonist] plunges to the bottom, to the nadir of the inferno — the bottom that opens into space. One has no choice but to spread their wings and fly; whether in reality or fiction, it makes no difference.

MN: You had a personal experience in prison. Could you tell us about this experience and how it impacted your work as a novelist?

Later, within the extreme confines of the most barbaric manifestations of this human experience, you find out that you can get used to it, and this is the most terrible aspect of the experience.

YF: Imprisonment is always a tough experience, particularly at the beginning. Torture and interrogation could take place at any time, day or night. While your body refuses food, your inmate, who happens to come before you, devours your meal ravenously. You do not know where you are or how long you are going to stay, until one day you do not remember when you entered prison. You share with your jailor a mouthful of bread and some passing jokes.

Later, within the extreme confines of the most barbaric manifestations of this human experience, you find out that you can get used to it, and this is the most terrible aspect of the experience. Later on, following your release — having passed all this time — the experience would undoubtedly have an impact somehow. I have never wondered — nor do I find it necessary to wonder — about the way in which my experience in prison has infiltrated my literary career.

MN: A Rare Blue Bird is the second novel in the trilogy that deals with the Years of Lead, after A Beautiful White Cat that Walks with Me. Can you tell us about the difference between the two works, and also your forthcoming novel that deals with the same period?

YF: When I was writing A Beautiful White Cat that Walks with Me, I was not thinking about it as a part of a trilogy. I even find the term “trilogy” an exaggeration. What is common between these two works and the forthcoming one is that they all cover the same period, the 1980s. We might call it a trilogy figuratively, without necessarily having incidents or characters in common, as is the case with the previous works.

MN: What distinguishes your recent novel from the mainstream Arab prison literature is the element of fantasy. Instead of only portraying Aziz’s suffering in prison, you show him growing and spreading his wings before flying off, in an epic scene reminiscent of the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Can you tell us about your use of fantasy in A Rare Blue Bird?

The situation we were in was a pure fantasy, leaving one with no choice but to flee for their life.

YF: Personally speaking, I believe that the entire experience [of the protagonist] is a fantasy: For the protagonist to start in the sky and end up in hell, to kiss his wife after 26 years of marriage, to spend his days searching for a treasure in a cell that is 6 meters square, and for a woman to spend her life searching for her man. That the remaining elements identify with each other and melt into a one nightmarish atmosphere is no less normal. The situation we were in was a pure fantasy, leaving one with no choice but to flee for their life.

And [stylistic] matters are not a choice that the writer makes. They are forms that impose themselves and take shape in the characters’ behavior before [the writer’s] consciousness. For me, there is no other way of writing this novel. If one is to argue in different terms, one question arises: How is one to make of such events — which have been much discussed, heavily reported by newspapers, and elaborated on in the diaries of those who left prison alive and in their televised testimonies — a completely new novel?

MN: A Rare Blue Bird highlights dictatorship and violence outside prison by presenting a number of tyrannical figures, such as the pimp, Juju, the domineering father and the cruel uncle. Do you have anything to say to that?

…there are minor and major dictatorships with unknown victims falling and distorted histories being written. The writer attempts to throw light on the hidden aspects of ordinary injustice.

YF: What we see inside prison is nothing but an echo of what happens outside. We live in a society where patriarchal violence is committed excessively in the street, at school, and in the family. Whether in [one’s] behavior or education, consciously or unconsciously, there are minor and major dictatorships with unknown victims falling and distorted histories being written. The writer attempts to throw light on the hidden aspects of ordinary injustice.

MN: The use of spoken Moroccan dialect in the novel is remarkable. Don’t you think this risks distancing the book from your readers in the Mashreq?

YF: In these two novels in particular I only rarely used the spoken Moroccan dialect, preferring to limit the dialogue to a basic form and use the indirect style, which imparts a touch of dynamism to the novel. In addition, the spoken dialect is not so detached from classical Arabic — only in a few cases.

Other IPAF-shortlistee interviews by al-Mustafa Najjar:

Inaam Kachachi: ‘We Are Experiencing a True Upsurge in Iraqi Fiction’

IPAF-shortlisted Novelist Abdelrahim Lahbibi: ‘The Novel Is the City’

Syrian Novelist Khaled Khalifa: ‘What Is Left of the City After All That?’

Iraqi Author Ahmad Saadawi: ‘The Novel Implicitly Questions This Concept of Salvation’

Al-Mustafa Najjar is a Syrian journalist/translator at Asharq Al-Awsat. He holds a master’s degree in Post-1900 Literatures, Theories and Cultures from the the University of Manchester. He is based in London.

This interview was originally conducted in Arabic and appeared on al-Sharq al-Awsat.

Book activist Jamila Hassoune was at this year’s Abu Dhabi International Book Fair at an event with Italian writer and blogger Chiara Comito: 

By Chiara Comito 

Jamila Hassoune and books.

“If there have been the Arab springs in the Arab world it’s because there are people like Jamila,” said Moroccan sociologist and writer Fatema Mernissi to Santina Mobiglia, editor of The Bookseller of Marrakesh, published in 2012 by the Italian publishing house Mesogea. The book recounts the story of Jamila Hassoune, a Moroccan bookseller by profession and a nomadic bookseller and cultural activist by vocation, who has become famous in Morocco and in Europe as “the bookseller of Marrakech.”

It all started when Hassoune’s father opened the first family bookshop in 1994, in the center of the city of Marrakesh. The young Jamila grew up surrounded by books that allowed her a window to the outside world, from which she was excluded during her childhood. The oldest child in a large family, Jamila would spend her time taking care of her younger brothers and sisters, studying and reading the many books that filled the house. And she also fought to find more spaces of freedom outside her home.

When the time came to find a job, together with her siblings she decided to open a new bookshop: a move that at that time might have been hazardous but eventually gave her the chance to get in touch with the world of books—both readers and retailers. In her book, she writes that opening the bookshop “was a way of entering this profession, exploring its many different aspects and developing its cultural dimension, not just the commercial one, by keeping alive our role as readers before being booksellers.”

When the bookshop opened, readers were few and felt intimated by the many books displayed, since for many, books were more often seen as a sacred object and the act of reading was more duty than pleasure.

Hassoune soon realized that…the bookshop had to “open towards the outside” and that she had to have the books walk towards those who did not have the chance to meet them…

Hassoune soon realized that in Morocco, where spaces left for books and reading were few and scattered, the bookshop had to “open towards the outside” and that she had to have the books walk towards those who did not have the chance to meet them, like the people living in southern Morocco or in the villages of the High Atlas mountains, the rural areas where the majority of the university students in Marrakesh came from.

Thus, the Rural School Book Project was born in 1996: its main aim was to bring books to the High Atlas villages. The positive response soon convinced Hassoune that she was on the right path. In 1997 Hassoune met Fatema Mernissi and the two of them developed together the Civic Caravans project, aimed at connecting urban areas with the countryside. Through the caravans, representatives from Moroccan civil society could meet with local people and with those working for local and international aid associations based in the villages.

In 2006, the Civic Caravans turned into the Book Caravan: a week of meetings organized every year in a distant oasis or village where Jamila and her colleagues would take books and hold discussions and workshops involving writers and intellectuals. The activities were usually held in local schools, for the main aim was to spread and promote book culture in the schools, and to have the students become young ambassadors of the reading in their own communities.

Each trip was also an occasion to rediscover the local environment and its historic roots, and a way to think about how to best exploit the capacities that these forgotten places had to offer. International projects and local partnerships were born and Hassoune started travelling the world, bringing her experiences to Europe and the Arab world, including an invitation in 2005 to Bahrain.

The Bookseller of Marrakesh came about when Santina Mobiglia met Jamila during one of her Book Caravans, after which Mobiglia felt that Hassoune’s experience had to be turned into a book. The book also includes a personal tale of Hassoune’s first steps into becoming a nomad bookseller.

Through the dialogue between Hassoune and Mobiglia, the book developed into addressing changes that have taken place in Morocco. Hassoune is not reticent about discussing the so-called “Years of Lead” during the 70’s, and the many problems Morocco has yet to resolve, including the absence of public policies for the young. As she sees it, there are still too many young people who hope to cross the Strait of Gibraltar and reach Europe, although many die in the attempt.

A long section of the book is concerned with the issue of Moroccan women and their changing role in a changing society, where the approval in 2004 of the new family code, the Moudawana, introduced new rights and more spaces of freedom for women.

As Hassoune said during a conference held in Turin in 2012, if the women in a society do not get educated, how can a country think of having better citizens tomorrow?

Chiara Comito blogs at editoriaraba.wordpress.com.

Al-Mustafa Najjar and M. Lynx Qualey co-review Mohammed Achaari’s The Arch and the Butterfly, co-winner of the 2011 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), along with Raja Alem’s The Doves’ Necklace. While one trend among IPAF judges seems to reward “page-turner” novels, this is not among them.

By M. Lynx Qualey 

“Terrorism” is a trope that surfaces and resurfaces in Moroccan literature. Lalami’s Secret Son, Binebine’s Horses of God, others. When my co-reviewer Al-Mustafa Najjar read the opening to Mohammed Achaari’s The Arch and the Butterfly (trans. Aida Bamia), he reports being disappointed. I was not.

The premise engaged me, not because it had anything to do with “terrorism” — a word that should be broken apart, recycled, substitutes found — but because it has to do with parenthood. A child grows up so different from his father that this child’s life becomes a black stain on the father’s heart.

The novel opens sharply and clearly, with a letter, “its single line written in a nervous hand.” It contains a message to the secular leftist narrator, the father of Yacine. The letter says: “Rejoice, Abu Yacine. God has honoured you with your son’s martyrdom.”

This is the book’s last moment of total clarity. From this point, the book heads off in a dozen different directions, and its initial impetus is drowned out. There is the father-son relationship, which destroys the last shreds of the narrator’s marriage; there is the narrator’s relationship with his blind father; there is the blind father’s story; there are construction projects and architectural critiques; there’s corruption among Morocco’s real-estate brokers; there is a visit from Saramago (yes, that Saramago); there are the protagonist’s new relationships; a murder; more.

All these widely varied threads could surely make up the basis of a big castle of a novel. Unfortunately, they fail to come together.

Instead — to borrow the novel’s own architectural obsessions — the book feels like a half-built thing: As we walk through it, parts of scaffolding still seem to be tacked up. We trip on extra lumber or knock against sections that should’ve been cut, but weren’t. Certainly, we also stumble on beautiful stained-glass objects, turrets, lovely mosaics. But as we leave a well-crafted scene, we might trip on extra lumber.

Most of the characters are sharply done, but some are overbuilt as well: The narrator’s father, for instance, seems to contradict himself to such an extent that if feels as though he was re-invented part-way through the novel and the author failed to go back and re-invent the whole.

What is the book’s central focus? I couldn’t say.

What is the book’s central focus? I couldn’t say. The titular “arch” and “butterfly” are two different, contradictory architectural expressions, and architecture is very important to the novel. The “arch” is an idea that came from the narrator’s son before he went off to Afghanistan – a simple artistic structure to link Salé with Rabat. The second is an enormous, hideous-sounding luxury building where the interior décor consists of a “soaring butterfly,” which gets a surreal launch accompanied by, “Thousands of butterflies, guided by invisible threads, and thousands of multicolored birds,” which flutter through the Marrakesh sky. “Hundreds of guests were transported from their respective hotels to the Butterfly on the backs of white camels.” There is a philharmonic orchestra, and hundreds of men and women roam the city, offering dates and cups of milk in drinking glasses specially designed for the occasion.

But Achaari seems to feel a constant itch to tack on just one more room, just one more balcony.

Indeed, Achaari could’ve built a novel that focused on architecture: How do these structures reflect the character of Morocco’s cities? How do they relate to the corruption of brokers and contractors? What of aesthetics and history? But Achaari seems to feel a constant itch to tack on just one more room, just one more balcony. In the section where Jose Saramago pops into the novel, there is a short rant against the Sahrawi people that seems to exist as a message from the author to Saramago.

There has been some discussion that the International Prize for Arabic Fiction novels trend toward the popular, the page-turners, the “readable.” This is not among them.

Over to you, Al-Mustafa:

By Al-Mustafa Najjar

It is a rather disappointing beginning: the narrator, a middle-aged, Left-leaning Moroccan journalist, receives a one-line letter asking him to “rejoice, Abu Yacine. God has honored you with your son’s martyrdom” in Afghanistan. The frustration and shock emanating from the radicalization of one’s child is not the most unique fiction theme, nor does it necessarily promise very much in terms of form and style. But the 2011 International Prize for Arabic Fiction joint winner, The Arch and The Butterfly, quickly dissipates that initial skepticism by tackling a broad network of themes that keep building to a point where motifs of terrorism and trauma simply cannot hold on their own.

While it is tempting to portray Mohammed Achaari’s first novel as a family saga spanning three generations, narrated by Youssef — Mohamed Al-Firsiwi’s son and Yacine’s father — the book soon spirals beyond the perimeters of the genre.

While it is tempting to portray Mohammed Achaari’s first novel as a family saga spanning three generations, narrated by Youssef — Mohamed Al-Firsiwi’s son and Yacine’s father — the book soon spirals beyond the perimeters of the genre. Achaari’s novel is suffused with mundane characters and mythological figures — Bacchus, Medusa, Hercules and Orpheus — and is rife with references to cities from Rabat, Marrakesh and Casablanca to Havana and Madrid. In fact, readers will — like Youssef — find themselves “thinking about all that at once [while unable] to concentrate on one specific detail” and constantly “assailed by various details from contradictory topics.”

It is a difficult read—almost inaccessible to those not expecting a novel tackling an array of topics in a poetic, sometimes aphoristic, style.

The Arch and The Butterfly is — to the dismay of those seeking pure entertainment — a demanding book. It is a difficult read—almost inaccessible to those not expecting a novel tackling an array of topics in a poetic, sometimes aphoristic, style.

A wasteland

When he receives the tragic news of his son’s death in Afghanistan, Youssef’s perception of his physical environment changes almost immediately. He “steps for the first time into a wasteland,” so arid and “desolate” a place that he soon feels “no trace of pain or pleasure or beauty.” Youssef’s sensory impairment takes hold of him. His dilemma now lies in his failure “to make my inner self react.”

The news also takes its toll on his relationships. Youssef avoids making new acquaintances and limits himself to having only two friends. His marriage collapses. But the tragedy earns Youssef a new companion: his dead son’s ghost, “with whom I would share the details of my daily life . . . talking with him for hours” about everything from road works, demonstrations and beautiful women to “revolutions, betrayals and the death of illusions.” People in the street who see Youssef “caught up in conversation” with his new invisible friend soon spread rumors that the bereavement has driven him to the verge of madness.

In their first walk around Rabat, Yacine’s apparition complains to Youssef about the “huge cranes, bulldozers and cement mixers . . . blocking the street” and the capital’s rapidly changing landscape. Before his death in Afghanistan, Yacine “had dreamed of placing a giant steel arch across the [Bou Regreg] river,” an aesthetic architectural touch aimed at giving the impression that the river “ran through the fingers of [Salé and Rabat],” and thus connected the center of Morocco with the periphery.

Morocco’s fast-changing urban landscape dominates Achaari’s novel, and real-estate scandals in Marrakesh and Rabat are one of Youssef’s main concerns as a journalist.

Morocco’s fast-changing urban landscape dominates Achaari’s novel, and real-estate scandals in Marrakesh and Rabat are one of Youssef’s main concerns as a journalist. He feels betrayed by his friend, Ahmad Majd, a socialist turned tycoon who is involved in one of these scandals. Majd’s biggest project is a nine-floor butterfly-shaped building he believes will “free [Marrakesh] of the spirit of the distant past and bring a bit of frivolity into the city.”

But Majd’s ambitious and “provocative” architectural endeavor faces a legal snag: buildings in Marrakesh cannot be more than four stories high in order not to block the view of the High Atlas Mountains from the center. Of course, Majd manages to circumvent the law, arguing that “the city was a city and the mountain was a mountain,” unable to understand why anyone would “drink their coffee in the street as their sleepy eyes roamed over the High Atlas.”

It is the architectural audacity of the building and its contrast with the restive Marrakesh that Youssef has issue with: “People were struck by this building with its provocative shape, located in the heart of the Medina.” The Butterfly’s interior is more provocative — even “vulgar,” at least to Youssef and his friend Layla. It is an architectural pastiche of British and Asian sculptures, Byzantine mosaics, Persian miniatures, Turkish glassware and a kitsch statue of Bacchus, among others: it “felt like a museum.”

Compared to Yacine’s steel arch — an objet d’art linking Salé with Rabat — the butterfly-shaped building is not just a “vulgar” edifice erected in the middle of a city with a rich history; it blocks the view of the High Atlas, one of Marrakesh’s authentic landmarks. If similar buildings continued to sprout in the heart of the city, Marrakesh “would be like a tramp’s trousers, made up of different coloured patches from various times.”

Youssef’s attack on the transformation of Morocco’s urban identity can at times be overly direct. 

Youssef’s attack on the transformation of Morocco’s urban identity can at times be overly direct. He criticizes the “palaces’ mixed architectural styles,” concluding that “Marrakesh had, in fact, literally and figuratively lost its authenticity.”

In the novel’s last chapter — the most dramatic and most absorbing — Youssef roams the labyrinthine streets of the old city of Marrakesh, playing the role of the flaneur: “I stared at the faces of the passers-by, almost certain they could not see me, as if I had become a mere vision checking the conditions of the city.” Contrary to his expectations, in the old city Youssef “felt calm and free,” although he admits to being unable to take part in the “tenderness bursting from the sleeping city.”

In this chapter, Youssef’s integration with his surroundings increases and Yacine’s ghost vanishes. The son’s disappearance is contrasted with Youssef’s increasing interaction with passers-by and his physical surroundings. At the entrance of the old city, Youssef comes across two men having a petty argument over olives. Although “unnecessary and useless,” the conversation, Youssef says, “cheered me up . . . and the alley would have been desolate without it.”

Almost immediately a child approaches Youssef, asking him a random question to which he has no clue as to how to answer. Still, he says, he was “pleased by the child’s curiosity.”

A blind tour guide

But it is not only Youssef who has a troubled relationship with his environment: Mohammed Al-Firsiwi, Youssef’s father and Yacine’s grandfather, shares his son’s defective sensory perceptions. Redolent of the image of Tiresias of Thebes, Firsiwi is a blind tour guide and the clairvoyant prophet of the Roman city of Walili (Volubilis).

Firsiwi immerses himself in the history of the area and is often “seen constantly excavating the site for something, though no one knew what.” Firsiwi breaks off his contact with the present and instead “spends his days chasing Hercules, Antaeus, Bacchus, Orpheus, Hylas, Venus, Medusa, Ariadne, Juba and Ptolemy.”

For Firsiwi, the death of his grandson threatens to end the family line. He urges Youssef to have another child—a plea his son shrugs off. In one of his angry fits, Firsiwi castigates Youssef for being “unconcerned about what will happen in the centuries to come because he lives in the present, in restaurants, bars and airports . . . [and] works on fleeting stories and novels that wilt as soon as they are picked up.”

This blind grandfather stands apart from the rest of Achaari’s characters. He can be both mundane and otherworldly. His life remains shrouded in ambiguity. His words are inexplicable and his actions paradoxical and inconsistent.

Firsiwi is hard to work out. When asked by Youssef why he buried the statue of Bacchus in the courtyard of an obscure mosque, he simply answers: “I can just imagine the puzzlement of archaeologists in a few centuries’ time asking themselves what Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, was doing in the courtyard of the twenty-first century mosque.” This blind grandfather stands apart from the rest of Achaari’s characters. He can be both mundane and otherworldly. His life remains shrouded in ambiguity. His words are inexplicable and his actions paradoxical and inconsistent.

The Arch and The Butterfly is a reflection on place, identity, authenticity and loss. The protagonists find their habitat in the past: Youssef in the old town of Marrakesh, and Firsiwi in the Roman ruins. As for the present, they feel as out of place as a statue of Bacchus in a mosque.

Al-Mustafa Najjar’s portion of our co-review previously ran in Al-Sharq al-Awsat. Al-Mustafa Najjar is a Syrian journalist/translator at Asharq Al-Awsat. He holds a master’s degree in Post-1900 Literatures, Theories and Cultures from the the University of Manchester. He is based in London and we hope that some day he will take over editing ArabLit.